Platt sent sail this Dynamic paragraph:
>Lewis writes:
>
>"It was like having had a cataract taken off my brain, letting me
>experience the world and myself properly for the first time--for that
>lovely dark radiance seemed to reveal the essence of everything as holy. I
>felt like exclaiming, 'Of course! That's absolutely right!' and applauding
>every single thing with tears of gratitude--not just . . . the small jar of
>flowers the nurse had place by (my) bedside, but also the ominous stains on
>the bed sheets, the ancient paint peeling off the walls, the far from
>hygienic smell of the toilet, the coughs and groans of the other patients,
>and even the traumatized condition of my body. From the recesses of my
>memory
emerged that statement at the beginning of the book of Genesis about
God observing everything 'he' had made and finding it very good. In the past
I'd treated these words as mere romantic poetry, referring only to
conventionally grand things like sunsets and conveniently ignoring what
ordinary human consciousness calls illness or ugliness. Now all the
judgement of goodness or badness which the human mind necessarily has to
make in its activities along the line of time were contextualized in the
perspective of that other dimension I can only call eternity, which loves
all the productions of time regardless."
This description of an experience shares, I think, an identical essence
with those Phaedrus gives in Lila of: The heart attack survivor, the infant
child, the tornado "victim" (eh? -is Dynamic always Good? ..."far from
hygienic smell of the toilet"), the Manhattan sunbather, the whirling
dervish, the Acid Tests, the night on Mt. Carmel, the Passion, the bo-tree
(?), and on, and on...
Without yet postulating the 'substance' of these experiences, we might
rightly say that they share the common essence of being Dynamic - as opposed
to Static - we all recognize boredom, repetition, etc...
With Phaedrus, we may say that ultimately, everything is either Quality,
Mind (soc and int patterns of value) or Matter (ino and bio patterns of
value). And then proceed to say that no, everything is just Quality. "...all
of it, every last bit of it". Could we allude to the Trinity?
We must also say with Pirsig that every "thing" (including "thoughts") is
static Quality. In the encyclopedia, that is. There also exists something we
can have only dim apprehensions of, here termed Dynamic Quality. Though
undefinable, it is so _nicely_ defined as the "undifferentiated aesthetic
continuum". Justice seems served well also by Holy Spirit, Shiva, Manito,
Yin, etc...
And that all Quality is Experience, we are told. That which has no value
doesn't exist. That which isn't experienced doesn't exist. That is why
"moral judgements are the fundamental groundstuff of the world..." because
Quality comes before, but At the point where subject judges object. I like
to think of "subjects" as this Dynamic, preintellectual Quality -- The
Freely-Willing Self -- and of "objects" as those static (read:
spatiotemporal) pattern - determined bodies and thoughts we call "the self -
"me" - physique and personality.
Now Phaedrigus makes it clear that you don't experience Quality, it
experiences "you". By "you" I now take to mean those finite patterns of
I,B,S & I value which are named "Jack or Jill". But, by "You", the "Self" I
look to that exact same Quality-Experience which experiences "you". We are
all exactly the same in the sense that Quality is Consciousness - which
appears as graded - from un to pre to sub to con to super to omni... Which,
if Huang-Po is "right", are all illusorily - non-illusory.
Better run.
rich
"--Riddle me, rattle me, roddle me do,
Do you have Quality, or does it have you?
Is the bird in the sky
Or the sky in the bird?
--The wings are those of value"
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