dmb, It sounds like you are suggesting that when you drop concepts, the adjectives and nouns and prepositions and conjunctions, you get DQ? Is this correct? Is this what is being designated as direct experience? Where are percepts, the sensual stuff such as smell, taste, feel, sight, sound, in this explanation? These are experiences, are they not? What does James say about the sensual experiences?
Marsha On Jul 7, 2012, at 5:26 PM, david buchanan <[email protected]> wrote: > > 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." > > 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 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
