> [David previously] > So I see Lila's trajectory different than the Hippies because while both > value DQ and biological quality - Lila(unlike the Hippies) is going crazy. > > [Arlo] > If I understand you, the difference is (more or less) that Lila, being pushed > toward a mental breakdown, has an unknown future, where the hippies' future > was more predictable. Is that about right? Do you think all mental illness, > then, is a measure of 'someone pursuing Dynamic Quality'?
[djh] Mental illness is when someone rejects the reality created by the values of a culture in favour of their own and not simply pursuing Dynamic Quality.. "The Metaphysics of Quality identifies religious mysticism with Dynamic Quality. It says the subject-object people are almost right when they identify religious mysticism with insanity. The two are *almost* the same. Both lunatics and mystics have freed themselves from the conventional static intellectual patterns of their culture. The only difference is that the lunatic has shifted over to a private static pattern of his own, whereas the mystic has abandoned all static patterns in favour of pure Dynamic Quality." To speak specifically of Lila however (here's some quotes) .. "Lila's problem wasn't that she was suffering from lack of Dynamic freedom. It's hard to see how she could possibly have any more freedom. What she needed now were stable patterns to encase that freedom. She needed some way of being reintegrated into the rituals of everyday living." "That's what Lila's involved in now, a huge vacation, an emptying out of the junk of her life. She's clinging to some new pattern because she thinks it holds back the old pattern. But what she has to do is take a vacation from all patterns, old and new, and just settle into a kind of emptiness for a while. And if she does, the culture has a moral obligation not to bother her. The most moral activity of all is the creation of space for life to move onward." As RMP explains - Lila ran away from the cultures patterns (and towards DQ) as a way of emptying out the junk of her life.. That's okay. That movement was moral. But the problem was that she settled into some new patterns that were in conflict with the patterns of the culture and this is what made her insane. > [Arlo] > Lila's mental breakdown in LILA is certainly supposed to be juxtaposed to > Phaedrus' mental breakdown in ZMM. But do you think both of their 'breaks' > are the same? Or same enough? As Ron pointed out, where Pirsig's break occurs > because of his understanding of Quality, Lila's break occurs primarily > because she is attached to the death of her child. I had a friend point out > to me a while back that Pirsig's break was one of dissolution, whereas Lila's > break seemed to be one of destruction. Would you agree? Do you think their > breaks are the same, or enough so that they would both be evidence of > following Dynamic Quality? [djh] They are different breaks I think. As far as it is explained in ZMM RMP's break was more of a mystic one as he appeared to settle less into an alternative reality like Lila and more into an all out rejection of *all* patterns.. (once again apologies for mega text dump)…. "He stares at the wall in a cross-legged position upon a quilted blanket on the floor of a bedless bedroom. All bridges have been burned. There is no way back. And now there is no way forward either. For three days and three nights, Phædrus stares at the wall of the bedroom, his thoughts moving neither forward nor backward, staying only at the instant. His wife asks if he is sick, and he does not answer. His wife becomes angry, but Phædrus listens without responding. He is aware of what she says but is no longer able to feel any urgency about it. Not only are his thoughts slowing down, but his desires too. And they slow and slow, as if gaining an imponderable mass. So heavy, so tired, but no sleep comes. He feels like a giant, a million miles tall. He feels himself extending into the universe with no limit. He begins to discard things, encumbrances that he has carried with him all his life. He tells his wife to leave with the children, to consider themselves separated. Fear of loathsomeness and shame disappear when his urine flows not deliberately but naturally on the floor of the room. Fear of pain, the pain of the martyrs is overcome when cigarettes burn not deliberately but naturally down into his fingers until they are extinguished by blisters formed by their own heat. His wife sees his injured hands and the urine on the floor and calls for help.. But before help comes, slowly, imperceptibly at first, the entire consciousness of Phædrus begins to come apart -- to dissolve and fade away. Then gradually he no longer wonders what will happen next. He knows what will happen next, and tears flow for his family and for himself and for this world. A fragment comes and lingers from an old Christian hymn, "You've got to cross that lonesome valley." It carries him forward. "You've got to cross it by yourself." It seems a Western hymn that belongs out in Montana. "No one else can cross it for you," it says. It seems to suggest something beyond. "You've got to cross it by yourself." He crosses a lonesome valley, out of the mythos, and emerges as if from a dream, seeing that his whole consciousness, the mythos, has been a dream and no one's dream but his own, a dream he must now sustain of his own efforts. Then even "he" disappears and only the dream of himself remains with himself in it. And the Quality, the areté he has fought so hard for, has sacrificed for, has never betrayed, but in all that time has never once understood, now makes itself clear to him and his soul is at rest." This behaviour gets him locked up.. And it gets him locked up because even a mystic who rejects patterns cannot avoid that they create patterns by their outright objections to pattern creation.. "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." > [Arlo] > And this leads me to an odd question. Given your comments that this > 'insanity' is the DQ defining characteristic of Lila that makes her > trajectory distinct from the flawed Hippie trajectory, do you think pushing > people towards mental breakdowns is something we should encourage? If not, > why? The hippies problem was that they confused biological quality with Dynamic Quality - I don't really see Lila doing that but she did indeed have biological quality. Enlightenment could be called something of a 'mental breakdown' but it would be a stretch. If we think of enlightenment as an empty tea cup - then a mental breakdown would be an overflowing teacup which could then force someone to empty their teacup or go off into their own reality.. > [Arlo] > Side note: Pirsig mentions in LILA the use of peyote to, perhaps, step > outside the Mythos in a temporary and controlled context. I think the > original Hippies (first-wave Hippies) tended to do just this, but it was > subsequent waves that mistook their euphoria for the vision quest. Maybe this > path is a preferable alternative to experiencing mental breakdowns? :-) Yeah, some drugs can be a good way of experiencing Dynamic Quality in a controlled setting. > [David previously] > It's hard to say that Lila confuses biological quality with DQ... In my > reading - Lila appears to be driven mostly by Dynamic Quality... > > [Arlo] > Lila suffers a mental breakdown, as you said, but apart from this, can you > give me some examples to support "driven mostly by Dynamic Quality"? Marsha > mentions one insight Lila has (about "I am whatever you say I am") that may > be something creative (my word)? Or would you say that "going insane" and > "driven mostly by Dynamic Quality" are synonymous? Hopefully I have already made this distinction clear above but Lila is "driven mostly by Dynamic Quality" because she wants to escape the pain of the patterns of the culture with which she is in. Ron explains she has lost a child and dealing with this within the culture is very painful so she runs away. That movement away from static patterns is a moral movement but the problem is that to relieve the pain she settles into crazy patterns which are in stark juxtaposition with the patterns of the culture. This is obviously not so good. The moral thing to do would be to reject both the patterns of the culture and her own crazy patterns and painfully work towards Dynamic Quality. "So the third possibility that Phaedrus was hoping for was that by some miracle of understanding Lila could avoid all the patterns, her own and the culture's, see the Dynamic Quality she's working toward and then come back and handle all this mess without being destroyed by it. The question is whether she's going to work through whatever it is that makes the defence necessary or whether she is going to work around it. If she works through it she'll come out at a Dynamic solution. If she works around it she'll just head back to the old karmic cycles of pain and temporary relief." 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
