[Case]
He says Indians have it and that whites borrowed some from them but
the connection between them and the MoQ remains understated. Do you agree?
[Arlo]
I'd agree. You know much more about Indian history and religion than
I do, so I am unable to really argue with what you've said. I also,
typically, do not like a "monolithic" approach to discussing Indians,
but I tend to do this as well, mostly to save time and in cases where
nuance or particularities are not critical. (I usually read Pirsig's
"Indian" as "Plains Indian" ("These included the Blackfoot, Arapaho,
Assiniboine, Cheyenne, Comanche, Crow, Gros Ventre, Kiowa, Lakota,
Lipan, Plains Apache (or Kiowa Apache), Plains Cree, Sarsi, Shoshone,
and Tonkawa." - Wikipedia).)
I think Pirsig's points about the Indians can be summarized as such
(add any you feel I missed).
American culture is a synthesis of European and Indian values.
Peyote, like the hippie LSD or Zen's meditation, is a
de-hallucinogenic which opens the mind to DQ.
Indians, like Zen, consider the "true nature of reality to be undivided".
Indian "engagement" parallels Rte, ritual, where subject and object
are not apart, this extends to speaking as well as acting.
The most important idea of the Indians was "freedom from a social hierarchy".
A crisis of modern American is the tension between "freedom" (Indian)
and "order" (European).
I'm not sure how many of these necessitate each other. Do you think
Pirsig got any of them right?
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