Dr. Alvord commenting on Ant's PhD thesis:
In the same paragraph, you make a good point with the quotation from DiSanto and Steele that the ‘enlightenment experience doesn’t depend upon words and concepts for its flowering.’ I tend to be ‘head-centered.’ Quotations like this help the reader to escape the confinement of intellectual static patterns. >From your discussion of how enigmatic Zen appears to Westerners, I am reminded >of Pirsig’s statement in LILA: Of the two kinds of hostility to metaphysics he [Phædrus] 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. (1991, p.66) Page 52, Pirsig’s 2000e e-mail to Anthony: ‘For scientists, the mind of the Buddha and the Mind of God are usually the same, even though the Buddha was an atheist. I think it is extremely important to emphasize that the MOQ is pure empiricism. There is nothing supernatural in it.’ Compare this, later in the thesis, with Northrop’s ‘concepts by intuition’. ___ 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
