Hello everyone On Sat, Aug 13, 2011 at 12:41 AM, Ham Priday <[email protected]> wrote: > > Hi Dan (Joe and Marsha mentioned) -- > > > On Fri, Aug 12, 2011 at 12:11 PM, Joseph Maurer <[email protected]> wrote: > >> Hi Dan, >> >> IMHO the metaphysical division of DQ/SQ defined, undefined, leaves one >> in a quandary. When I realize the quandary as the description of knowing I >> realize some things are indefinable. How can I know the indefinable. Wrong >> conclusions do not force the attention to the indefinable, rather to the >> process which is a roundabout way of bringing metaphysics in by the back >> door instead of starting with indefinable as part of reality. > > You responded:: > >> We define the undefined all the time. We could say the process of >> awareness is that process of defining. When we discover we've failed >> to define some thing properly (a wrong conclusion) we're momentarily >> at a loss. That sense of loss is the beginning response to Dynamic >> Quality that leads to greater knowledge. >> >> In "echoing" John you are echoing a wrong conclusion. Perhaps it is an >> opportunity for you both to learn from it... or not. > >Ham: > If the Church of Reason signifies our guide to clear thinking and (possible) > wisdom, the "Evil" must be in not following it . . .or, in the confusion > that may result from trying to follow it..
Dan: Let's make sure we both have a clear understanding of what RMP means by "The Church of Reason." It doesn't signify a guide to clear thinking and wisdom although it is easy to see why someone would think so. "The school was what could euphemistically be called a "teaching college." At a teaching college you teach and you teach and you teach with no time for research, no time for contemplation, no time for participation in outside affairs. Just teach and teach and teach until your mind grows dull and your creativity vanishes and you become an automaton saying the same dull things over and over to endless waves of innocent students who cannot understand why you are so dull, lose respect and fan this disrespect out into the community. The reason you teach and you teach and you teach is that this is a very clever way of running a college on the cheap while giving a false appearance of genuine education. "Yet despite this he called the school by a name that didn't make much sense, in fact sounded a little ludicrous in view of its actual nature. But the name had great meaning to him, and he stuck to it and he felt, before he left, that he had rammed it into a few minds sufficiently hard to make it stick. He called it a "Church of Reason," and much of the puzzlement people had about him could have ended if they'd understood what he meant by this." [ZMM] Dan comments: The evil in the Church of Reason is the insistence that students imitate their professors in order to obtain passing grades. A person could just as easily turn RMP's equation around and say a teaching college is a place you learn and learn and learn with no time for participation in outside affairs. Just learn and learn and learn until your mind grows dull and your creativity vanishes. That is the evil in the Church of Reason. >Ham: > Joe used the word "undefined" in stating his quandary. Pirsig; however, > used the term "indefinable" consistently when describing DQ. There is a > significant difference in meaning between these two words. What is > "indefinable" can NEVER be defined, whereas something that is "undefined" > today may be defined tomorrow. So your example of awareness as "the process > of defining" does not address his problem which is: "How can I know the > indefinable?" Dan: I would beg to differ and say in fact my answer does address Joe's problem. We define undefinable Dynamic Quality all the time and the definition never ends. How can you know the indefinable? By defining it. And once defined, "it" is no longer Dynamic Quality. It is static quality. Dynamic Quality is inexhaustible... it can never be fully defined. >Ham: > I, too, have a problem with DQ as posited by Mr. Pirsig. > > In a note to Joe under another thread, Marsha said this about DQ:: > >> Mr. Pirsig stated it was unknowable, as well as indivisible and >> undefinable. That would be no-thing to know and no one to >> know it. As Dan said, it is best explained as what it is not. > > If, indeed, DQ is both indivisible and undefinable, as well as unknowable, > how can it be divided into definable patterns of static quality? Dan: To answer this, allow me to quote a section from LILA: "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. "Quality is indivisible, undefinable and unknowable in the sense that there is a knower and a known, but a metaphysics can be none of these things. A metaphysics must be divisible, definable, and know able, or there isn't any metaphysics. Since a metaphysics is essentially a kind of dialectical definition and since Quality is essentially outside definition, this means that a "Metaphysics of Quality" is essentially a contradiction in terms, a logical absurdity. "It would be almost like a mathematical definition of randomness. The more you try to say what randomness is the less random it becomes. Or "zero," or "space" for that matter. Today these terms have almost nothing to do with "nothing." "Zero" and "space" are complex relationships of "somethingness." If he said anything about the scientific nature of mystic understanding, science might benefit but the actual mystic understanding would, if anything, be injured. If he really wanted to do Quality a favor he should just leave it alone. "What made all this so formidable to Phaedrus was that he himself had insisted in his book that Quality cannot be defined. Yet here he was about to define it. Was this some kind of a sell-out? His mind went over this many times. "A part of it said, "Don't do it. You'll get into nothing but trouble. You're just going to start up a thousand dumb arguments about something that was perfectly clear until you came along. You're going to make ten thousand opponents and zero friends because the moment you open your mouth to say one thing about the nature of reality you automatically have a whole set of enemies who've already said reality is something else." "The trouble was, this was only one part of himself talking. There was another part that kept saying, "Ahh, do it anyway. It's interesting." This was the intellectual part that didn't like undefined things, and telling it not to define Quality was like telling a fat man to stay out of the refrigerator, or an alcoholic to stay out of bars. To the intellect the process of defining Quality has a compulsive quality of its own. It produces a certain excitement even though it leaves a hangover afterward, like too many cigarettes, or a party that has lasted too long. Or Lila last night. It isn't anything of lasting beauty; no joy forever. What would you call it? Degeneracy, he guessed. Writing a metaphysics is, in the strictest mystic sense, a degenerate activity. "But the answer to all this, he thought, was that a ruthless, doctrinaire avoidance of degeneracy is a degeneracy of another sort. That's the degeneracy fanatics are made of. Purity, identified, ceases to be purity. Objections to pollution are a form of pollution. The only person who doesn't pollute the mystic reality of the world with fixed metaphysical meanings is a person who hasn't yet been born-and to whose birth no thought has been given. The rest of us have to settle for being something less pure. Getting drunk and picking up bar-ladies and writing metaphysics is a part of life." Dan comments: In order to organize reality, its purity must be broken down into pieces we can define. Intellectually, we dislike undefined things. That's why puzzles are so popular. Our mind seeks to organize the disorganized. The intellect sees the avoidance of defining Quality as a degenerate activity.Quality can be divided and defined by organizing it into a metaphysics. Such an activity is a degeneracy from pure undivided Quality but that is what we have to settle for. Ham: >And how > can our response to Dynamic Quality lead, as you say, "to greater > knowledge"? Dan: By seeking that which is better. >Ham: > Surely you must see that there is a lack of clarity in the meaning and usage > of these "quality" terms. Dan: I don't think so. If something is unclear, please let me know. I appreciate your input. Ham: I look to you as an authority on the MoQ -- > possibly the High Priest of the Church of Reason. Dan: I am honored, thank you. >Ham: > Can you provide a simple, logical answer to my questions, Dan? Dan: Hopefully, I have done as you ask. If not, please let me know where I have failed and I will attempt to do better. Ham: Or are such > answers presumed to be forever hidden in the mystical nature of Quality > itself? Dan: No. The answers are there for those who seek them out. Thank you, Dan 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
