dmb said to Steve:
...if one is making statements (crazy sounding or not), one is no longer 
working without the glasses. As soon as you start talking, you are interpreting 
and you've got some glasses on. Your question asks for an uninterpreted 
interpretation. You question is nonsense...


Steve replied:
...The people with the glasses on are hearing what the person without glasses 
on is saying, and they think he sounds crazy.  ...I am perfectly fine with 
taking that fragment about seemingly but not actually crazy things said by 
someone with the glasses off as an offhand remark that shouldn't be taken too 
seriously.



dmb says:

You are repeating the same nonsense. Saying things and having the glasses off 
are two different things. You keep asking about the "crazy things said by 
someone with the glasses off" and I keep telling you that saying things means 
you don't have the glasses off anymore. As soon as you start talking you've got 
the glasses on. 

Taking the glasses off is one of many analogies for DQ, which is distinguished 
from static intellectual interpretations. We can see this in the other terms 
used for DQ; Pirsig's "pre-intellectual experience", James's "pure experience" 
or "immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection 
with its conceptual categories" or the Zen Buddhist's "natural 
pre-conceptualising, pre-discriminatory setting" or Dewey's "infinitely complex 
situational whole" or David Granger's "unanalyzed totality of experience" or 
Northrop's "undifferentiated aesthetic continuum". 

All these various ways of referring to Dynamic Quality are not just arbitrary 
labels, of course, they are descriptive terms. In each case we see that these 
descriptive terms are negative. They tell us what DQ is NOT and what it's not 
is verbal, conceptual, intellectual or interpretive. In other words, if you're 
talking then you're wearing glasses.


The difference between wearing SOM glasses and wearing MOQ glasses is that the 
latter admits that the glasses aren't reality, that you can't see reality 
through the glasses because reality is what you experience prior to 
interpretations. As Pirsig explains it, mystics "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." Notice the 
similarities between terms like "undivided," "undifferentiated," "unanalyzed," 
"pre-discriminatory" and "uninterpreted"? In other words, if you're talking 
then you're wearing glasses.


"Dewey's conception of experience is directly contingent upon the idea of 
quality. In Experience and Nature, he tells us that 'quality' constitutes the 
'brute and unconditioned isness' of empirical events. As Pirsig likewise 
suggests, qualities are much more that mere states of conscousness. Rather, the 
establish the primary field and horizons of everyday experience, the immediate, 
concrete conditions of human life and activity. Immediate sense qualities are 
what we live in and for. 'The world in which we immediately live, that in which 
we strive, succeed, and are defeated,' Dewey argues, 'is preeminently a 
qualitative world'. This means that 'all direct experience is qualitative, and 
qualities are what make life-experience itself directly precious." (David 
Granger 27)




                                          
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