Marsha asked:
Direct experience of what?
dmb says:
Like the man said, "experience pure in the literal sense ...is NOT YET ANY
DEFINITE WHAT, tho ready to be ALL SORTS of WHATs". There can be no WHATs
because whats are all secondary products of thought and not the starting points
of reality. There are not yet any whats because this immediate FLUX of
experience is dynamic is always "changing throughout" such that "no points,
either of distinction or of identity, can be caught.". To have the whats, you
need to have distinctions and identities, which are static and secondary
products of reflection - as opposed to undivided experience.
As Pirsig and James both say together, "there must always be a discrepancy
between concepts and reality" because concepts "are static and discontinuous"
while the immediate flux of life is a "dynamic and flowing" continuum. To put
it another way, there will always be a discrepancy between static concepts and
dynamic reality, because static patterns are stable and ordered but the ongoing
flux of experience is ever-changing and free of patterned habits or ordered
structures.
--------------------------------------------------------------
On Jul 7, 2012, at 3:43 PM, david buchanan wrote:
“When Zen teachers introduce students to nirvana (which the MOQ translates as
the world of pure undifferentiated value) they do not do so with books and
thesis. They sit the students in a room until their clutter of intellectual
knowledge is abandoned (especially values judgments!) and the pure vision of
the newborn infant is regained” (McWatt 2004, 83).
"Only new-born babes, or men in semi-coma from sleep, drugs, illnesses, or
blows, may be assumed to have an experience pure in the literal sense of that
which is not yet any definite what, tho ready to be all sorts of whats; full
both of oneness and of manyness, but in respects that don't appear; changing
throughout, yet so confusedly that its phases interpenetrate and no points,
either of distinction or ofidentity, can be caught. Pure experience in this
state is but another name for feeling or sensation. But the flux of it no
sooner comes than it tends to fill itself with emphases, and these salient
parts become identified and fixed and abstracted; so that experience now flows
as if shot through with adjectives and nouns and prepositions and conjunctions.
Its purity is only a relative term, meaning the proportional amount of
unverbalized sensation which it still embodies." - William James - Essays in
Radical Empiricism.
" 'There must always be a discrepancy between concepts and reality, because the
former are static and discontinuous while the latter is dynamic and flowing.'
Here James had chosen exactly the same words Phaedrus had used for the basic
subdivision of the Metaphysics of Quality."
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