Hey, Marsha --
No, I have not adopted a theory. More like I'm looking for a way to make sense and explain of my experience. On investigation I can find no autonomous self. I experience only a broken stream of pattern pieces. My 'sense of self' seems but a pattern too, not real. But what of this awareness. This is a little more tricky. - The book is difficult, and I will need to give it a second reading to make better sense of it and how it might fit within the MoQ.
What is it that you find "unreal" or "tricky" about your sense of self? And why is the concept of subjective awareness so difficult for you to accept?
You respond personally to this "stream of pattern pieces," do you not? You are involved emotionally and intellectually with your experiences and act in accordance with the values they represent to you. How you judge those values and respond to them is your individual choice. No one else shares your proprietary experience or controls the way you respond. Do you not see this as constituting your conscious life as an autonomous agent of an objective reality?
Your reality relates to you as its sole observer and intrepreter. The fact that experience is a series of events made aware to you over time does not reduce your life to "pattern pieces". Indeed, I'd be surprised if the word "pattern" would even have occurred to you were it not for your reading of Pirsig.
You gain nothing philosophically or spiritually by refusing to acknowledge the duality of existence. I realize that 'subject/object reality' is anathema to Buddhist monks and mystical philosophers. But the world we live in is a world of appearances. And there is no way an appearance can exist and be made sensible without a conscious self to experience it. Pirsig's mistake, in my opinion, was to posit Quality (Value) as the primary reality. What is primary to existence is sensible Awareness. It is the conscious Self which brings Value into being.
Ponder on that, Marsha. It may yet lead you out of your quandary. Valuistically speaking, Ham 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
