Hello to all,
I just wanted to say how awesome it is to finally find this website and how thankful I
am that it exists. As a fan (really a zealot) of ZMM and Lila for many years, it is so
refreshing to find others who feel passionately enough about the MOQ to join this
group and grapple with the questions it attempts to answer. And does quite well, I
might add.
My fianc�e, family and close friends humor me. Some have read ZMM and less have read
Lila but usually I find myself holding back in most philosophical discussions because
I start to say, "Yes, but, Pirsig says in Lila..." and then I realize they either:
a) haven't read it,
b) read it but weren't impressed (a phenomenon I'm just starting to understand) or
c) probably won't read it and are getting tired of me bringing it up... again!
So, to those of you who might relate, I'll share my journey of discovering the MOQ:
I read ZMM in the mid-eighties and was completely blown away with its depth. I found
Pirsig's willingness to speak his truth incredibly refreshing... and about such
important topics in such an intellectually vulnerable way! I really respect the fact
that he presents his ideas as chautauquas emanating from the mind of a fallible,
fractured human being rather than as "Absolute Truth".
Then, as I read Lila in the mid-nineties, I felt a kind of culmination... a profound
sense of enthusiasm from his presentation of the MOQ. Having found myself slowly
sinking into the quicksand of information-overload and post-modernism in the early
nineties, his willingness to present the "Best" argument he was capable of at the
time- while still remembering that its all just words. Wow... what can I say? It
really IS a better map of reality as far as I can tell.
But even Pirsig admits that, "To the intellect, the process of defining Quality has a
compulsive quality of its own. It produces a certain excitement- even though it leaves
a hangover afterward... Writing a metaphysics is, in the strictest mystic sense, a
degenerate activity." (Ch.5, page 74)
Pirsig is a true educator who honors the reader's ability to find Quality from within
and on his/her own terms... possibly because he knows that was how Pheadrus discovered
it in the first place.
So, again, thank you all. I've felt so alone at times. I've wondered why everyone
doesn't have the same "Ah hah!" experience from Lila that I had. I've wondered why
people look at me like I'm "crazy" when I share these ideas. I can really relate with
the "Captain" as I navigate my sailboat on a seemingly infinite sea of Subject/Object
thinking- with only the kindred spirit of Robert Pirsig to remind me that insanity
isn't so bad after all. It might even lead somewhere "better".
And so, instead of "falling off the edge of the earth", I've finally spotted land.
Land Ho! (I hope the natives are friendly.)
David Sater
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