DMB, All It is clear that "mystic"xxx" words and experiences are central to Pirsig's work. To that end I went ahead and isolated all those quotes in his two books for all that want them. (Copied below)
My question about mystical experiences centers around this quote from near the end of Lila. >[Lila-pg 186] > Strictly speaking, the creation of any metaphysics is an immoral act since > it's a lower form of evolution, intellect, trying to devour a higher mystic > one. It is common that talk about mystical experiences whether religious or not to claim that they are "higher", "transcendent", "enlarged" etc or as Aldous Huxley says in "Drugs That Shape Men's Minds": "The ordinary waking consciousness is very useful and, on most occasions, an indispensible state of mind; but it is by no means the only form of consciousness, nor in all circumstances the best. Insofar as he transcends his ordinary self and his ordinary mode of awareness, the mystic is able to enlarge his vision, to look more deeply into the unfathomable miracle of existence." But a couple of pages later he says: (in the 1950's context that maybe in the near future "powerful but nearly cost-less mind changers [drugs] " will be available.) "In the past, very few people have had spontaneous experiences of pre-mystical or fully mystical nature; still fewer have been willing to undergo the psychophysical disciplines which prepare an insulated individual for this kind of self-transcendence." If we accept that "natural" mysticism is accessible to all humans with sufficient practice or the right kind of drugs and reconfigure, somehow we're not really sure how, the chemical/neurological operations of the brain; How is it Pirsig can claim that it is "higher" than the intellect? Could it not be just as likely to be lower? Dave Mystic"xxx" 17 items inZaMM "Like into realms beyond reason. I think present-day reason is an analogue of the flat earth of the medieval period. If you go too far beyond it you¹re presumed to fall off, into insanity. And people are very much afraid of that. I think this fear of insanity is comparable to the fear people once had of falling off the edge of the world. Or the fear of heretics. There¹s a very close analogue there. "But what¹s happening is that each year our old flat earth of conventional reason becomes less and less adequate to handle the experiences we have and this is creating widespread feelings of topsy-turviness. As a result we¹re getting more and more people in irrational areas of thought...occultism, mysticism, drug changes and the like...because they feel the inadequacy of classical reason to handle what they know are real experiences." ZaMM 98 "The text started with the premise that if rhetoric is to be taught at all at a University level it should be taught as a branch of reason, not as a mystic art. Therefore it emphasized a mastery of the rational foundations of communication in order to understand rhetoric." ZaMM 104 Why he chose to disregard this advice and chose to respond to this dilemma logically and dialectically rather than take the easy escape of mysticism, I don¹t know. But I can guess. I think first of all that he felt the whole Church of Reason was irreversibly in the arena of logic, that when one put oneself outside logical disputation, one put oneself outside any academic consideration whatsoever."Philosophical mysticism, the idea that truth is indefinable and can be apprehended only by nonrational means, has been with us since the beginning of history. It¹s the basis of Zen practice." ZaMM 105 "But first, to give this other specter his walking papers, I should say the following: Perhaps he would have gone in the direction I¹m now about to go in if this second wave of crystallization, the metaphysical wave, had finally grounded out where I¹ll be grounding it out, that is, in the everyday world. I think metaphysics is good if it improves everyday life; otherwise forget it. But unfortunately for him it didn¹t ground out. It went into a third mystical wave of crystallization from which he never recovered" ZaMM 143 "Phædrus remembered Hegel had been regarded as a bridge between Western and Oriental philosophy. The Vedanta of the Hindus, the Way of the Taoists, even the Buddha had been described as an absolute monism similar to Hegel¹s philosophy. Phædrus doubted at the time, however, whether mystical Ones and metaphysical monisms were introconvertable since mystical Ones follow no rules and metaphysical monisms do. His Quality was a metaphysical entity, not a mystic one. Or was it? What was the difference? He answered himself that the difference was one of definition. Metaphysical entities are defined. Mystical Ones are not. That made Quality mystical. No. It was really both. Although he¹d thought of it purely in philosophical terms up to now as metaphysical, he had all along refused to define it. That made it mystic too. Its indefinability freed it from the rules of metaphysics" ZaMM 146 "Quality [romantic Quality] and its manifestations [classic Quality] are in their nature the same. It is given different names [subjects and objects] when it becomes classically manifest. Romantic quality and classic quality together may be called the "mystic." Reaching from mystery into deeper mystery ,it is the gate to the secret of all life" ZaMM 147 "Sylvia knew what she was talking about the first day when she noticed all those people coming the other way. What did she call it? A "funeral procession." The task now is to get back down to that procession with a wider kind of understanding than exists there now. First of all I should say that I don¹t know whether Phædrus¹ claim that Quality is the Tao is true. I don¹t know of any way of testing it for truth, since all he did was simply compare his understanding of one mystic entity with another. He certainly thought they were the same, but he may not have completely understood what Quality was. Or, more likely, he may not have understood the Tao. He certainly was no sage. And there¹s plenty of advice for sages in that book he would have done well to heed." ZaMM 149 "This inner peace of mind occurs on three levels of understanding. Physical quietness seems the easiest to achieve, although there are levels and levels of this too, as attested by the ability of Hindu mystics to live buried alive for many days. Mental quietness, in which one has no wandering thoughts at all, seems more difficult, but can be achieved. But value quietness, in which one has no wandering desires at all but simply performs the acts of his life without desire, that seems the hardest." ZaMM 173 "It was apparent that the term "Quality" was not within any one discipline unless that discipline was philosophy. And he knew from his experience with philosophy that further study there was unlikely to uncover anything concerning an apparently mystic term in English composition. He became more and more aware of the possibility that there was no program available where he might study Quality in terms resembling those in which he understood it. Quality lay not only outside any academic discipline, it lay outside the grasp of the methods of the entire Church of Reason. It would take quite a University to accept a doctoral thesis in which the candidate refused to define his central term. He looked through the catalogs for a long time before he discovered what he hoped he was looking for. There was one University, the University of Chicago, where there existed an interdisciplinary program in "Analysis of Ideas and Study of Methods." The examining committee included a professor of English, a professor of philosophy, a professor of Chinese, and the Chairman, who was a professor of ancient Greek! That one rang bells" ZaMM 196 "He admitted the claim was grandiose and that value judgments were actually impossible for him to make since no person could be an impartial judge of his own cause. But if someone else were to produce a thesis which purported to be a major breakthrough between Eastern and Western philosophy, between religious mysticism and scientific positivism, he would think it of major historic importance, a thesis which would place the University miles ahead. In any event, he said, no one was really accepted in Chicago until he¹d rubbed someone out. It was time Aristotle got his."ZaMM 202 Mystic"xxx" 62 items in Lila a description by the anthropologist, E. A. Hoebel, of a Cheyenne Indian male: "His thinking is rationalistic to a high degree and yet colored with mysticism. His ego is strong and not easily threatened. His superego, as manifest in the strong social conscience and mastery of his basic impulses, is powerful and dominating. He is 'mature,' serene and composed, secure in his social position, capable of warm social relations. He has powerful anxieties but these are channelized into institutionalized modes of collective expression with satisfactory results. He exhibits few neurotic tendencies." pg 24 Now if that isn't a description of William S. Boyd playing Hopalong Cassidy in twenty-three or fifty or however many films, there never was one. With the single exception of the Indian 'mysticism' the characterization is perfect. Pg 24 It has two kinds of opponents. The first are the philosophers of science, most particularly the group known as logical positivists, who say -that only the natural sciences can legitimately investigate the nature of reality, and that metaphysics is simply a collection of unprovable assertions that are unnecessary to the scientific observation of reality. For a true understanding of reality, metaphysics is too 'mystical.' This is clearly the group with which Franz Boas, and because of him modern American anthropology, belongs. The second group of opponents are the mystics. The term mystic is sometimes confused with 'occult' or 'supernatural' and with magic and witchcraft but in philosophy it has a different meaning. Some of the most honored philosophers in history have been mystics: Plotinus, Swedenborg, Loyola, Shankaracharya and many others. They share a common belief that the fundamental nature of reality is outside language; that language splits things up into parts while the true nature of reality is undivided. Zen, which is a mystic religion, argues that the illusion of dividedness can be overcome by meditation. The Native American Church argues that peyote can force-feed a mystic understanding upon those who were normally resistant to it, an understanding that Indians had been deriving through Vision Quests in the past. This mysticism, Dusenberry thought, is the absolute center of traditional Indian life, and as Boas had made clear, it is absolutely outside the domain of positivistic science and any anthropology that adheres to it. Historically mystics have claimed that for a true understanding of reality metaphysics is too 'scientific.' Metaphysics is not reality. Metaphysics is names about reality. Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty-thousand page menu and no food. Phasdrus thought it portended very well for his Metaphysics of Quality that both mysticism and science reject metaphysics for completely opposite reasons. It suggested that if there is a bridge between the two, between the understanding of the Indians and the understanding of the anthropologists, metaphysics is where that bridge is located. Of the two kinds of hostility to metaphysics he considered the mystics' hostility the more formidable. Mystics will tell you that once you've opened the door to metaphysics you can say goodbye to any genuine understanding of reality. Thought is not a path to reality. It sets obstacles in that path because when you try to use thought to approach something that is prior to thought your thinking does not carry you toward that something. It carries you away from it. To define something is to subordinate it to a tangle of intellectual relationships. And when you do that you destroy real understanding. The central reality of mysticism, the reality that Phaedrus had called 'Quality' in his first book, is not a metaphysical chess piece. Quality doesn't have to be defined. You understand it without definition, ahead of definition. Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions. Pg 32- 33 The Metaphysics of Quality subscribes to what is called empiricism. It claims that all legitimate human knowledge arises from the senses or by thinking about what the senses provide. Most empiricists deny the validity of any knowledge gained through imagination, authority, tradition, or purely theoretical reasoning. They regard fields such as art, morality, religion, and metaphysics as unverifiable. The Metaphysics of Quality varies from this by saying that the values of art and morality and even religious mysticism are verifiable, and that in the past they have been excluded for metaphysical reasons, not empirical reasons. They have been excluded because of the metaphysical assumption that all the universe is composed of subjects and objects and anything that can't be classified as a subject or an object isn't real. There is no empirical evidence for this assumption at all. It is just an assumption Pg 49 By even using the term 'Quality' he had already violated the nothingness of mystic reality. The use of the term 'Quality' sets up a pile of questions of its own that have nothing to do with mystic reality and walks away leaving them unanswered. Even the name, 'Quality,' was a kind of definition since it tended to associate mystic reality with certain fixed and limited understandings. Already he was in trouble. Was the mystic reality of the universe really more immanent in the higher-priced cuts of meat in the butcher shop? These were 'Quality' meats, weren't they? Was the butcher using the term incorrectly? Phaedrus had no answers Pg 53 Phsdrus had spent an enormous amount of time following what turned out to be lousy openings. A particularly large amount of this time had been spent trying to lay down a first line of division between the classic and romantic aspects of the universe he'd emphasized in his first book. In that book his purpose had been to show how Quality could unite the two. But the fact that Quality was the best way of uniting the two was no guarantee that the reverse was true - that the classic-romantic split was the best way of dividing Quality. It wasn't. For example, American Indian mysticism is the same platypus in a world divided primarily into classic and romantic patterns as under a subject-object division. When an American Indian goes into isolation and fasts in order to achieve a vision, the vision he seeks is not a romantic understanding of the surface beauty of the world. Neither is it a vision of the world's classic intellectual form. It is something else. Since this whole metaphysics had started with an attempt to explain Indian mysticism Phaedrus finally abandoned this classic-romantic split as a choice for a primary division of the Metaphysics of Quality. The division he finally settled on was one he didn't really choose in any deliberative way. It was more as if it chose him. He'd been reading Ruth Benedict's Patterns of Culture without any particular search in mind, when a relatively minor anecdote stopped him. It stayed with him for weeks. He couldn't get it out of his mind. Pg 53-54 A subject-object metaphysics presumes that this kind of Dynamic action without thought is rare and ignores it when possible. But mystic learning goes in the opposite direction and tries to hold to the ongoing Dynamic edge of all experience, both positive and negative, even the Dynamic ongoing edge of thought itself. Phaedrus thought that of the two kinds of students, those who study only subject-object science and those who study only meditative mysticism, it would be the mystic students who would get off the stove first. The purpose of mystic meditation is not to remove oneself from experience but to bring one's self closer to it by eliminating stale, confusing, static, intellectual attachments of the past. Pg 57 Soon after that Phaedrus ran across another example that concerned neither art nor morality but referred indirectly to mystic reality itself. It was in an essay by Walker Percy called 'The Delta Factor.' It asked, .... Phaedrus saw that not only a man recovering from a heart attack but also a baby gazes at his hand with mystic wonder and delight. He remembered the child Poincare referred to who could not understand the reality of objective science at all but was able to understand the reality of value perfectly. When this reality of value is divided into static and Dynamic areas a lot can be explained about that baby's growth that is not well explained otherwise. Pg 58 This, Phaedrus thought, was why little children are usually quicker to perceive Dynamic Quality than old people, why beginners are usually quicker than experts, why primitive people are sometimes quicker than those of 'advanced' cultures. American Indians are exceptionally skilled at holding to the ever-changing center of things. That is the real reason they speak and act without ornamentation. It violates their mystic unity. This moving and acting and talking in accord with the Great Spirit and almost nothing else has been the ancient center of their lives. Their term manito is often used interchangeably with 'God' by whites who usually think all religion is theistic and by Indians themselves who don't make a big deal out of any verbal distinctions. But as David Mandelbaum noted in his book The Plains Cree, 'The term manito primarily referred to the Supreme Being but also had many other usages. It was applied to manifestations of skill, fortune, blessing, luck, to any wondrous occurrence. It connoted any phenomenon that transcended the run of everyday experience.' In other words, 'Dynamic Quality.' With the identification of static and Dynamic Quality as the fundamental division of the world, Phaedrus felt that some kind of goal had been reached. This first division of the Metaphysics of Quality now covered the spectrum of experience from primitive mysticism to quantum mechanics. What remained for Phaedrus to do next was fill in the gaps as carefully and methodically as he could. Pg 59 In other cultures, or in the religious literature of our past, where the immune system of 'objectivity' is weak or non-existent, reference to this light is everywhere, from the Protestant hymn, 'Lead Kindly Light,' to the halos of the saints. The central terms of Western mysticism, 'enlightenment,' and 'illumination' refer to it directly. Darsana, a fundamental Hindu form of religious instruction, means 'giving of light.' Descriptions of Zen sartori mention it. It is referred to extensively in The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Aldous Huxley referred to it as part of the mescaline experience. Phaedrus remembered it from the time with Dusenberry at the peyote meeting, although he had assumed that it was just an optical illusion produced by the drug and not of any great importance. Pg 158 In other cultures, or in the religious literature of our past, where the immune system of 'objectivity' is weak or non-existent, reference to this light is everywhere, from the Protestant hymn, 'Lead Kindly Light,' to the halos of the saints. The central terms of Western mysticism, 'enlightenment,' and 'illumination' refer to it directly. Darsana, a fundamental Hindu form of religious instruction, means 'giving of light.' Descriptions of Zen sartori mention it. It is referred to extensively in The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Aldous Huxley referred to it as part of the mescaline experience. Phaedrus remembered it from the time with Dusenberry at the peyote meeting, although he had assumed that it was just an optical illusion produced by the drug and not of any great importance........... In other cultures, or in the religious literature of our past, where the immune system of 'objectivity' is weak or non-existent, reference to this light is everywhere, from the Protestant hymn, 'Lead Kindly Light,' to the halos of the saints. The central terms of Western mysticism, 'enlightenment,' and 'illumination' refer to it directly. Darsana, a fundamental Hindu form of religious instruction, means 'giving of light.' Descriptions of Zen sartori mention it. It is referred to extensively in The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Aldous Huxley referred to it as part of the mescaline experience. Phaedrus remembered it from the time with Dusenberry at the peyote meeting, although he had assumed that it was just an optical illusion produced by the drug and not of any great importance. Pg 174 The Metaphysics of Quality says that what sometimes accidentally occurs in an insane asylum but occurs deliberately in a mystic retreat is a natural human process called dhyana in Sanskrit. In our culture dhyana is ambiguously called 'meditation.' Just as mystics traditionally seek monasteries and ashrams and hermitages as retreats into isolation and silence, so are the insane treated by isolation in places of relative calm and austerity and silence. Sometimes, as a result of this monastic retreat into silence and isolation the patient arrives at a state Karl Menninger has described as 'better than cured.' He is actually in better condition than he was before the insanity started. Phaedrus guessed that in many of these 'accidental' cases, the patient had learned by himself not to cling to any static patterns of ideas cultural, private or any other. In the insane asylum this dhyana is underrated and often undermined because there is no metaphysical basis for understanding it scientifically. But among religious mystics, particularly Oriental mystics, dhyana has been one of the most intensely studied practices of all. This Western treatment of dhyana is a beautiful example of how the static patterns of a culture can make something not exist, even when it does exist. People in this culture are hypnotized into thinking they do not meditate when in fact they do....... The Metaphysics of Quality associates religious mysticism with Dynamic Quality but it would certainly be a mistake to think that the Metaphysics of Quality endorses the static beliefs of any particular religious sect. Phaedrus thought sectarian religion was a static social fallout from Dynamic Quality and that while some sects had fallen less than others, none of them told the whole truth. His favorite Christian mystic was Johannes Eckhart, who said, 'Wouldst thou be perfect, do not yelp about God.' Eckhart was pointing to a profound mystic truth, but you can guess what a hand of applause it got from the static authorities of the Church. 'Ill-sounding, rash, and probably heretical,' was the general verdict. >From what Phaedrus had been able to observe, mystics and priests tend to have a cat-and-dog-like coexistence within almost every religious organization. Both groups need each other but neither group likes the other at all. Pg 175 He thought some more about Lila's insanity and how it was related to religious mysticism and how both were integrated into reason by the Metaphysics of Quality. He thought about how once this integration occurs and Dynamic Quality is identified with religious mysticism it produces an avalanche of information as to what Dynamic Quality is. A lot of this religious mysticism is just low-grade 'yelping about God' of course, but if you search for the sources of it and don't take the yelps too literally a lot of interesting things turn up. Pg 176 Within the Hindu tradition dharma is relative and dependent on the conditions of society. It always has a social implication. It is the bond which holds society together. This is fitting to the ancient origins of the term. But within modern Buddhist thought dharma becomes the phenomenal world - the object of perception, thought or understanding. A chair, for example, is not composed of atoms of substance, it is composed of dharmas. This statement is absolute jabberwocky to a conventional subject-object metaphysics. How can a chair be composed of individual little moral orders? But if one applies the Metaphysics of Quality and sees that a chair is an inorganic static pattern and sees that all static patterns are composed of value and that value is synonymous with morality then it all begins to make sense. It occurred to Phaedrus that this was one answer, perhaps the basic answer, to why workmen in Japan and Taiwan and other areas in the Far East are able to maintain quality levels that compare so favorably to those in the West. In the past the mystics' traditional low regard for inorganic static patterns, 'laws of nature' has kept the scientifically derived technology of these cultures poor, but since Orientals have learned to overcome that prejudice times have changed. If one comes from a cultural tradition where an electronic assembly is primarily a moral order rather than just a neutral pile of substance, it is easier to feel an ethical responsibility for doing good work on it pg 179 A wave of very un-mystic anxiety came over him. Pg 180 Strictly speaking, the creation of any metaphysics is an immoral act since it's a lower form of evolution, intellect, trying to devour a higher mystic one. The same thing that's wrong with philosophology when it tries to control and devour philosophy is wrong with metaphysics when it tries to devour the world intellectually. It attempts to capture the Dynamic within a static pattern. But it never does. You never get it right. So why try? Pg 186 The experience of William James Sidis had shown that you can't just tell people about Indians and expect them to listen. They already know about Indians. Their cup of tea is full. The cultural immune system will keep them from hearing anything else. Phaedrus hoped this Quality metaphysics was something that would get past the immune system and show that American Indian mysticism is not something alien from American culture. It's a deep submerged hidden root of it. Americans don't have to go to the Orient to learn what this mysticism stuff is about. It's been right here in America all along. In the Orient they dress it up with rituals and incense and pagodas and chants and, of course, huge organizational enterprises that bring in the equivalent of millions of dollars every year. American Indians haven't done this. Their way is not to be organized at all. They don't charge anything, they don't make a big fuss, and that's what makes people underrate them Pg 190 Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
