Hi Dan, >> Right - so our ideas are based in our culture and a simple change of mind >> will clearly not change our reality? >> > > Hi David > > The discussion is becoming too unwieldy for me to continue, plus you seem > to be making a lot of erroneous assumptions about who I am and what I am > saying. Although I have repeated myself many times, you do not seem to be > grasping my words. The above reply is an example. > > You continue to insist on 'simple' when nothing is simple. Later, you > introduce the notion of experience as a third category in the MOQ when I > have repeatedly offered you the quote from Lila's Child about experience > and Dynamic Quality becoming synonymous. How on earth can experience be a > third category when it becomes synonymous with experience?
Dan wrote previously: "Also, I do not believe I ever said experience is DQ. That is something you said I said. No, I said in the MOQ, Dynamic Quality and experience become synonymous. There is a difference and this might be the block over which you are stumbling. Or not." If something is going to make sense intellectually - it has to be consistent. The MOQ divides our reality up into the two categories of DQ and sq. To be logically consistent experience must be either DQ or sq or as I argue - both and the same thing as 'reality'. You argue that it is neither DQ or sq. If it is neither then it doesn't fit into the two *fundamental* divisions of the MOQ and must therefore be in a third category which we haven't discussed. In the MOQ reality = experience = Quality. There is no more to reality than this. This Quality/experience/reality is broken up into the two categories of DQ and sq… This is why what we call DQ and sq are *both* a part of reality/experience/Quality. But as soon as we say that DQ is this or DQ is that then it isn't DQ and is thus static quality. Any real talk about what DQ is - is fruitless.. It's easier to talk about what it is not than what it is… So all these 'Terms' about reality are really just sq but what they describe in each instance is different. > > You insist that according to the MOQ we experience static quality. You've > lifted quotes from Lila to bolster that opinion and yet you fail to see > where such a notion leads: right back to subjects observing objects as > primary values. I think a clear distinction needs to be made here between my saying that *we* experience static quality and my statement that static quality is a part of experience… In the first instance, this is a subject observing some other static quality.. It presumes a pre-existing static quality subject experiencing some other static quality.. In the second instance however, I'm merely stating that static quality exists - for that which isn't experienced doesn't exist. And given that we both know that the MOQ includes static quality - static quality experience is very much a part of the MOQ. In fact RMP even uses the term 'static experience' in Lila's Child. "Static experience and static awareness are easily separated. Dynamic anything is not." - LC > This latest refusal to understand what I am saying leads me to believe I am > wasting my time here. I've spent many hours working on my replies to you > and yet you do not seem to read them and/or comprehend what I am saying. I could so easily say the same thing Dan. I spend days composing responses to your writing. I think about what you write and carefully craft a response.. The reason why I don't complain that you don't understand me is because I'm grateful that we are able to discuss the MOQ to begin with. Despite the plethora of discussions on this board I don't think I've ever seen true agreement between folks who initially disagreed. I mean, that's the whole point of discussing is it not? I'm very curious to see if two people who approach this discussion honestly can ever find agreement. I'm also open to your ideas being better than mine. I'm continually asking you questions to try and understand where you're coming from so that I can find some coherence and beauty and potentially something better. I'm also continually telling you how I see things so that you can do the same.. But unfortunately as this above statement of yours shows.. You don't seem too interested in what I'm saying.. It's all about my inability to read or comprehend what *you're* saying.. I'm asking questions Dan. I'm trying.. Can't you do the same? Can't we just accept that we're both trying to understand one another and as a result our ideas will improve? This reminds me of a German fable I heard retold recently… It's about a dying peasant who told his sons that he has buried a treasure in the fields: "After the old man's death the sons dig everywhere in order to discover the treasure. They do not find it. But their indefatigable labor improves the soil and secures for them a comparative well-being." > You feel that if we could wish the world into being what we want it to be, > the world would be a far different place. What you fail to realize is that > we are doing just that every moment of our lives. What we wish, however, > has been beaten into us from the very beginning. The static quality > patterns of our lives are constrained into being what we know them to be. > It is all but impossible to break free of that knowing, especially if one > is blind. > > The first step is to wake up, to open one's eyes and see that the world is > not separate and apart from us. We create the world and then tell > ourselves it is separate and apart from us and we have no influence upon > it. We know for a fact the world exists independently of us and has done so > way before we were born and will continue to do so long after we pass away. > > Even when someone comes along to tell us this isn't so, we fight it. > Consider of all the books that have been written on this very subject: > Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor > Frankl, How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie, The Book > of Wisdom by the Dalai Lama, Anthony Robbins' Personal Classic, and on and > on and on. I don't deny, aside from the one Mystic you mentioned, that there are those who seek to profit off the idea that everything is an idea and that all you need to do to change your reality is just change your mind. They're not wrong - everything they have ever heard - or I have ever heard is an idea This can indeed be a very liberating thought. Especially if you have lived your whole life thinking that there is a reality 'out there' that exists beyond our thoughts about it and that no matter what you think that 'reality' cannot change. This is a very depressing thought and many folks to this day are stuck with it.. To think that you aren't a figment of my imagination or to think that the room I sit in now is not just a figment of my imagination isn't an incorrect thought. It can't be any other way. But have you ever heard of the Anthony Robbins firewalking incident? http://www.mercurynews.com/crime-courts/ci_21125630/san-jose-21-people-treated-burns-after-firewalk While idealists like to think that such 'fire walking' demonstrates the power of a change in mind - it really just shows the power(or lack thereof) of conductive science… That's why - the MOQ adds - it is a *good* idea to think that the hot coals under your feet do indeed exist before you think about them… Especially if there's a queue on the hot coals and you're stuck there for more than a few seconds... So because of the social and intellectual quality of the idea that matter and people exist before we think about them - I operate under this assumption.. But there are times I don't as well - Quantum physics for example - that's a good start - and in a discussion like the one we are having now about what's more fundamental - matter or ideas - these are times when I don't operate under the quality assumption that matter exists before we think about it... > You are saying all these thinkers are wrong. Robert Pirsig is wrong. I don't think that Robert Pirsig is wrong.. However you appear to disagree with his statement in the Copleston annotations: "Since Bradley was always classified as an idealist, it did not seem important to investigate him thoroughly because the MOQ rejects the metaphysical assertion that the fundamental reality of the world is idea." > And > yet any one of these books, if read and put into practice, would totally > transform one's life. But more, one would come to realize that no book is > necessary. One would see that we create our own reality: whatever we think > it is, or wish it to be, it becomes. There is no separation between the > world and us. > > This is exactly what Robert Pirsig is on about in both his books and all > his subsequent writings. If you take that one little sentence about the > world existing within the human imagination AND UNDERSTAND IT, it would be > one of those rare 'ah ha!' moments that come along once or twice in a > lifetime. The first time I understood idealism it was indeed one of those rare 'ah ha!' moments.. But it never 100% jibed with me because I had always thought the idea that I could simply change my mind and objective reality would change with it seemed(and still does seem) counter-intuitive.. The MOQ provides a broader perspective which includes Quality. The MOQ encapsulates the materialism/idealism debate within a larger context of Quality. The MOQ says that ultimately the idealists are right - no 'matter' exists before we think about it. *But* adds the MOQ - it is sometimes a *good* idea that matter exists before we think about it so it's *good* to operate under that assumption sometimes instead as well.. " I think it is best to understand both systems, and shift from one to another as it becomes valuable to do so." - RMP > Yet: what are you doing? Fighting it. Telling me that that cannot possibly > be so. Going on and on about how something so 'simple' is completely wrong: > that you know this for a fact, and anything I say is going to fall upon > deaf ears. Hardly deaf ears Dan - I'm hearing you loud and clear. I agree with you - all ideas you or I have ever heard or ever will hear are human specific and are a result of the human intellect. But are you hearing me? Traditional idealism leaves Quality out in the cold.. What about the quality of the idea that matter or society exists before we think about it? Ideas don't exist in a void on their own.. They are encapsulated within a larger concept called static quality of which intellectual patterns of quality are but one part.. "The mind-matter paradoxes seem to exist because the connecting links between these two levels of value patterns have been disregarded. Two terms are missing: biology and society. Mental patterns do not originate out of inorganic nature. They originate out of society, which originates out of biology which originates out of inorganic nature. And, as anthropologists know so well, what a mind thinks is as dominated by social patterns as social patterns are dominated by biological patterns and as biological patterns are dominated by inorganic patterns. There is no direct scientific connection between mind and matter. As the atomic physicist, Niels Bohr, said, 'We are suspended in language.' Our intellectual description of nature is always culturally derived. The intellectual level of patterns, in the historic process of freeing itself from its parent social level, namely the church, has tended to invent a myth of independence from the social level for its own benefit. Science and reason, this myth goes, come only from the objective world, never from the social world. The world of objects imposes itself upon the mind with no social mediation whatsoever. It is easy to see the historic reasons for this myth of independence. Science might never have survived without it. But a close examination shows it isn't so." - Lila > It is your loss that you refuse to even consider such a possibility, not > mine. I suppose it's at this point we start to wonder about whether we fear that in others that which we fear most in ourselves.. > > Anyway, the rest of the discussion pales in comparison to this disagreement > and so I am deleting it from this post. If you have some burning questions, > feel free to address them. > > Thank you, > > Dan Okay - Even though I would consider my last post amongst my best - I hope that we can continue this discussion. The quality improvement continues… A wholehearted thank-you Dan, -David. 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
