Hello All,
Nick: Thanks to Horse for the link to Pirsig's letter to Turner > The 'Letter to Paul Turner' from Robert Pirsig can be found at: <http://www.moq.org/forum/Pirsig/LetterFromRMPSept2003.html> http://www.moq.org/forum/Pirsig/LetterFromRMPSept2003.html >Tuukka: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_truths_doctrine> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_truths_doctrine) Nick: Thanks, Tuukka. I found this very interesting because it helped with some MOQ ideas that I am working on. > Craig: ...nor do I know what scrambled eggs taste like to anyone else but me. But this doesn't prevent me from knowing all sorts of things about other living things' experience. For instance, I know an amoeba doesn't value acid, because I see it back away. Nick: I imagine Craig is speaking of the knowing/assuming that comes from "intuition". Question: Is not "Intuition" part of our intellect and don't we use intuition and imagination to bring us towards Quality when we interact with the inscrutable external? >Dan: And yes so then in our quest for knowledge, in any search for knowing, we are using our senses to make sense of the often-times inscrutable. Yet that doesn't mean we give up. We simply need to recognize, to realize, that we are inherently limited in our outlooks upon the world that we imagine is out there separate and apart from us and yet in a real way is inside us all, a shared dream, if you will, or nightmare, depending upon of course our imagination, or lack of it. >Dan: But anyhow, so far as resolving issues, no, I doubt that's even possible. Instead, what we ought to be doing, what the MOQ seeks, is to expand our reach into the unknown, to continue the journey even while knowing there is no end to the search. That no matter how smart we are or become, what we know is but a grain of sand upon an endless beach of unknowns. Rumi: "I have one small drop of knowing in my soul. Let it dissolve in your ocean." Nick: The Toa, Zen, Rumi, Joseph Campbell, and even some of the Christian philosophers...I cannot help but feel that Quality and the Sacred (Religion) are interconnected when I read Pirsig and these others. Pirsig ZMM: "No, he (Pheadrus) did nothing for Quality or the Tao. What benefited was reason. He showed a way by which reason may be expanded to include elements that have previously been inassimilable and thus have been considered irrational. I think it's the overwhelming presence of these irrational elements crying for assimilation that creates the present bad quality, the chaotic, disconnected spirit of the twentieth century. I want to go at these now in as orderly a manner as possible." "The first step down from Phædrus' statement that ``Quality is the Buddha'' is a statement that such an assertion, if true, provides a rational basis for a unification of three areas of human experience which are now disunified. These three areas are Religion, Art and Science. If it can be shown that Quality is the central term of all three, and that this Quality is not of many kinds but of one kind only, then it follows that the three disunified areas have a basis for introconversion." Question: Did Pirsig want interconversion rather than to use introconversion. I think, yes. Nick: I realize after finding the above sections (Again, thank you Dan) that Pirsig introduces parts of Quality through Phaedrus, a person suffering from irrationality/insanity...(mystical enlightenment?). Previously, I had not thought about how Pirsig couches Quality in this way: that which Phaedrus discovered and that which the author picks up and validates. The un-definable and unknowable parts of Quality...those identities that some readers intuit between Quality, The Toa, and The Sacred, I think, we get these from Phaedrus, the crazy guy... do we not? I wonder if Pirsig does this in order to better accomplish his task of creating MOQ. He has connected the Sacred with the Mundane for us...something that Science and Technology had killed, something that organized religions had polluted. Perhaps, this is the "intro-conversion" / interconversion that Pirsig speaks of (imho). 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
