All > Dave T said: > ...The MoQ is Zen in a Pendleton blanket. > > dmb says: > Zen in a Pendleton. That's pretty good. Wish I'd thought of that. Dave Does have a catchy ring to it, but in retrospect it is probably pretty obscure for most people. My family moved from New York to the Crow Reservation in Montana in 1949. (about 50 miles east of Busby where RMP participated in Cheyenne peyote ceremony) So all my growing up experience from five until I graduated from high school was on the res. At that time there were still many "blanket" Indian women. Rather than wear a coat many "traditional" older women always wore a blanket as their outer layer of clothing, winter or summer. Light weight in the summer, heavy in the winter The primary "trading post" for the reservation was Hardin, Montana and it had a saddle shop that was also the biggest Pendleton outlet in the state. I still remember the smell of leather tack coupled with a huge number of colorful Pendleton blankets lining the walls at the ceiling. But what was strange is that colorful ones on the wall were primarily for display because the Montana Indian women only wore solid or lightly patterned ones in dark muted colors. It's kind of ironic that Pendleton was an early supplier of the military for blankets that were handed out to the Indian tribes. They later did some market research and designed blankets that the Indians really wanted. Particularly ones without the smallpox! http://www.pendleton-usa.com/custserv/custserv.jsp?pageName=IndianTrading&pa rentName=Heritage So yeah, the image does wrap up the whole East/West Indian thingy nicely.
> Northrop's fusion of East and West is the main inspiration for ZAMM. In fact, > Pirsig said ZAMM is a kind of popularization of Northrop's thick and difficult > book. And then the title is a reference to "Zen in the Art of Archery", which > Pirsig and his pal John Sutherland had both read back in the road tripping > days. And then of course there was some graduate school. He studied Eastern > Philosophy at Benares University in India. All this was before he wrote his > first book, which, he openly admits, doesn't really have much to say about Zen > or motorcycles. Dave My point was that other than intellectual pursuits Pirsig's experience with Eastern cultures in general is limited to a brief military tour in Korea and the short time in Benares. And until ZaMM was written he had little or no direct experience with Zen. But Buddhism in general and Zen even more so claims that no understanding of it's principles can be achieved without directly experiencing it. And his little forward to ZaMM was to some degree was ass covering for both books as they walk (Lila more than ZaMM) the very fine line between fiction and memoir. Think of that author the Oprah ripped a new one when he published his fictionalized life story as a memoir. Primarily it later turns out at the insistence of his publisher. > > Not only is it compatible with the MOQ, at least one scholar thinks that > Buddha was a pragmatist and a radical empiricist. James was getting it from > Emerson and he used to bring Buddhists in from abroad to lecture at Harvard. > After one such lecturer give his talk, James not only thanked and praised the > man, he said something like, "You sir, are a much better psychologist than I > will ever be." At the time, James had just written a 1200 page text book on > psychology and with it he had practically invented the discipline. Yea, I > exaggerate things sometimes, but it really is 1200 pages. Dave As a page-master yourself, I can see your inherent attraction to James quantity. But James point is a good one. There is no doubt Buddhism is good at psychology and Zen practices, particularly for highly intelligent people with debilitating cases of "monkey mind," is effective if one has or develops the discipline to follow them. > > And then there is the perennial philosophy and philosophical mysticism. Both > of these stances make the MOQ compatible with mystic philosophies, as well as > mystic religions like Taoism and Buddhism. Jan-Anders posted a quote from one > of Pirsig's letters to McWatt and it not only gets at one of the differences > between the MOQ and Buddhism, it also seems to shed light on this free will > debate. Dave Your advisor's "Guidebook to Zen.." unpacks the changes resident in Zen from it's 1000 year evolution from India to Japan but what concerns me is not the difference but that under both Zen and the MoQ, in the end they both claim that mystic experience trumps all. It is as close anyone can get to experiencing reality as it "really" is. As I read your recent posting on mysticism I noted your quote's from Stanford's SEP neglected this first section: > 1.1 The Wide Sense of Mystical Experience¹ > > In the wide sense, let us say that a mystical experience,¹ is: > > A (purportedly) super sense-perceptual or sub sense-perceptual experience > granting acquaintance of realities or states of affairs that are of a kind not > accessible by way of sense perception, somatosensory modalities, or standard > introspection. > We can further define the terms used in the definition, as follows: > > The inclusion of purportedly¹ is to allow the definition to be accepted > without acknowledging that mystics ever really do experience realities or > states of affairs in the way described. > > A super sense-perceptual experience¹ includes perception-like content of a > kind not appropriate to sense perception, somatosensory modalities (including > the means for sensing pain and body temperature, and internally sensing body, > limb, organ, and visceral positions and states), or standard introspection. > Some mystics have referred to a ³spiritual² sense, corresponding to the > perceptual senses, appropriate to a non-physical realm. A super > sense-perceptual mode of experience may accompany sense perception (see on > ³extrovertive² experience, Section 2.1). For example, a person can have a > super sense-perceptual experience while watching a setting sun. The inclusion > of the supersensory mode is what makes the experience mystical. > > A sub sense-perceptual experience¹ is either devoid of phenomenological > content altogether, or nearly so (see the notion of ³pure conscious events,² > in Sections 5 and 6), or consists of phenomenological content appropriate to > sense perception, but lacking in the conceptualization typical of attentive > sense perception (see below on ³unconstructed experiences²). > > Acquaintance¹ of realities means the subject is aware of the presence of (one > or more) realities. > > States of affairs¹ includes, for example, the impermanence of all reality and > that God is the ground of the self. Acquaintance¹ of states of affairs can > come in two forms. In one, a subject is aware of the presence of (one or more) > realities on which (one or more) states of affairs supervene. An example would > be an awareness of God (a reality) affording an awareness of one's utter > dependence on God (a state of affairs). In its second form, acquaintance¹ of > states of affairs involves an insight directly, without supervening on > acquaintance, of any reality. An example would be coming to ³see² the > impermanence of all that exists following an experience that eliminates all > phenomenological content. > > It is not part of the definition that necessarily at the time of the > experience the subject could tell herself, as it were, what realities or state > of affairs were then being disclosed to her. The realization may arise > following the experience. Dave Whether you're a plain vanilla or a radical empiricist, the source of mysticism must be traced to mystical experience. And my concern is not with this: > The inclusion of purportedly¹ is to allow the definition to be accepted > without acknowledging that mystics ever really do experience realities or > states of affairs in the way described. I'll accept that "altered state" experiences do occur, that insights into normal reality may even result from these experience but to claim that mystic experience is the penultimate experience of reality, particularly under MoQ's hierarchy of moral dominance with mystical DQ on top, I just can't buy. In a "hot stove" experiment between the Dai Lama and a 23 year old fighter pilot, I'll always pick the pilot. Hell I'd even take the Chinese National table tennis champ. Keep on slamm'n Dave 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
