Hello Gents:
John M said:
I think there is a tendency for people with an agenda to hijack religion for
their economic or political or ideological purposes. What David may not
realize is that what’s wrong with fundamentalism in general is that it’s locked
into a pattern of reducing spiritual insights to intellectual assertions. It’s
not the religion that opposes intellect; it’s religion reduced to conflicting
intellect that opposes intellect.
dmb says: I dished up the following quotes more than ten years ago, when making
a case that DQ is "associated with" and "indentified with" religious mysticism.
If we qualify the meaning of "God" to reflect the mystical rather than any
static representations, then (and only then) we can safely say that God and DQ
are terms that both refer to the same thing. To put it in negative, this is a
case against theism precisely because it's a static representation of DQ, a
definition of DQ.
I hope this case is relevant to your assertion, John, although the meaning of
your assertion is not clear to me. "It’s not the religion that opposes
intellect; it’s religion reduced to conflicting intellect that opposes
intellect." This statement focuses exclusively on intellect and thereby fails
to include two crucial elements or factors, namely social quality and Dynamic
Quality. Intellect is a distant third, I think, because religion is primarily
social while mysticism is primarily Dynamic. We can get theologians and
philosophers to make an intellectual case for their respective sides but the
theologian will be using intellect to defend social values and the philosophers
(like Pirsig) will be using intellect to make a case for mysticism, the
ineffable, the pre-conceptual.
Please notice that Pirsig (in LILA) repeatedly refers to religion as social, as
"static social fallout of DQ" and as "a sign-post which allows
socially-pattern-dominated people to see Dynamic Quality."
"The MOQ associates religious mysticism with Dynamic Quality but it would
certainly be a mistake to think that the MOQ endorses the static beliefs of any
particular religious sect. Phaedrus thought sectarian religion was a static
social fallout of DQ and that while some sects had fallen less than others,
none of them told the whole truth."
"Phaedrus saw nothing wrong with this ritualistic religion as long as the
rituals are seen as merely a static portrayal of Dynamic Quality, a sign-post
which allows socially pattern-dominated people to see Dynamic Quality. The
danger has always been that the rituals, the static patterns, are mistaken for
what they merely represent and are allowed to destroy the Dynamic Quality they
were originally intended to preserve."
"In all religions bishops tend to gild Dynamic Quality with all sorts of static
interpretations because their cultures require it. But these interpretations
become like golden vines that cling to a tree, shut out its sunlight and
eventually strangle it."
Please notice the distinctions Pirsig is making between DQ and the static
fallout, the static interpretations, the strangling vines, etc.. That's why
neither intellectual speculations nor theological dogmas can be adequate
substitutes for the actual experience. I mean, theism is prohibited for exactly
the same reason that intellectual definitions of DQ are prohibited. In both
cases, DQ is converted into static forms, which is exactly what DQ is NOT. And
of course the traditional social static patterns of religion bring along
centuries of baggage and so the discussion invariably gets very messy right
away. In any case, the idea is to refrain from chopping it up no matter what
kind of chopper you're using. The analytic knives get put away in favor of
experience as such.
"Some of the most honored philosophers in history have been mystics: Plotinus,
Swedenborg, Loyola, Shankaracharya and many others. They 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. Zen,
which is a mystic religion, argues that the illusion of dividedness can be
overcome by meditation. The Native American Church argues that peyote can
force-feed a mystic understanding upon those who were normally resistant to
it,..." LILA (ch 5)
"He thought about how once this integration occurs and DQ is identified with
religious mysticism it produces an avalanche of information as to what Dynamic
Quality is. A lot of this religious mysticism is just low-grade 'yelping about
God' of course, but if you search for the sources of it and don't take the
yelps too literally a lot of interesting things turn up." (LILA)
"Whatever nuance the language of union is given, if there is to be talk of
mysticism, some sort of deep union must be involved. It perhaps cannot be
emphasized enough that to speak of mysticism is to speak of an EXPERIENCE of
union and not merely speculations about union." (Guidebook to ZAMM P27)
>From C.G. Jung's MEMORIES, DREAMS, REFLECTIONS: "I was equally sure that none
>of the theologians I knew had ever seen "the light that shineth in the
>darkness" with his own eyes, for if they had they would not have been able to
>teach a "theological religion," which seemed quite inadequate to me, since
>there was nothing to do with it but believe it without hope. This is what my
>father (a Reformed pastor) had tried valiantly to do and had run aground. .. I
>recognized that this celebrated faith of his had played a deadly trick on him,
>and not only on him but on most of the cultivated and serious people I knew.
>The arch sin of faith, it seemed to me, was that it forestalled experience."
Contrary to common misconceptions, mysticism is separate from theism and even
from religion. As I read it, the MOQ is a form of philosophical mysticism, a
non-theistic mysticism like certain kinds of Buddhism. And one of the main
reasons that Pirsig (and Jung) thinks "faith" is low-grade stuff is that his
brand of philosophical mysticism takes experience as such to be the primary
reality. This brand of mysticism is radically empirical so that, as William
James put it, experience and reality amount to the same thing. The radical
empiricist, James says, must include every kind of experience in her account of
reality and exclude everything that can't be known in experience. This is one
good way to think of DQ as "the source and substance of everything," as the
primary empirical reality from which all our static patterns are derived and
thus all of static reality.
In ZAMM this world of static patterns is portrayed as a world of analogies upon
analogies (every last bit of it). But LILA makes this static world far more
explicit, makes our cultural evolution more explicit in MOQ terms. This is
where he draws the line between social quality and intellectual quality. It's
based on history, basically. We can be fairly certain that myth and ritual is
much older than philosophy and science, for example. We can trace the expansion
of literacy and the development of advanced learning. It's rich and complex but
the line is drawn by putting the birth of the intellectual level around 25
centuries ago and it's elevation to a leadership role in the culture about one
century ago. One could dispute the exact location of the line between social
and intellectual quality but that seems unnecessary to me. And this is
primarily a political struggle, a war within the culture, within our own heads
and hearts. Mysticism doesn't play much of a role in the conflict between
social values and intellectual values, not least of all because it's a war of
words.
One good way to think of the difference, although it might be TOO simple, is to
suppose that social values hold a society together while intellectual values
protect the integrity of concept, theories, and the process of inquiry,
truth-making, etc.. These two levels don't hate each other or anything but they
are separate moral empires, so to speak, and there are conflicts. It's easy to
see how freedom of religion and freedom of speech would step on the toes of
social tradition and social authority. The conflict between these levels
happens in the courts and in the streets and we presently have something like
45 million fundamentalist helping to perpetuate a larger reactionary movement,
one that's about guns and money as much as bibles. I mean, the conflict between
social and intellectual values is NOT some hypothetical abstraction but rather
an ongoing current event. Both sides feel they are under siege and that's not
exactly wrong.
I think the mysticism is the best part but down here in the static world, in
the culture, I'm definitely taking sides and I fail to understand how anyone
can read Pirsig and still be on the social side of this war. That just kills me.
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