All I'll focus on the metaphorically obvious. Life is a trip. Reality is a journey. The metaphor of ZaMM: life is a motorcycle road trip, in Lila, sailing around the world. The appeal is that both are "dreamed of" experiences for many. Some of the general qualities of trips that capture the essense of the MoQ are: Even though on both trips, other characters are involved, it almost feels like they are each by themselves and, in the end, life or reality are solo trips each personally and individually unique. Puttering down a blue highway in the bright sunshine or pushing into a sweeping left hander at a 100 miles per hour, your perceptions of a continous flow of pure experience is the basis of your reality. All of that continuous flow of experience will compete for your attention but only a small part (blackbirds on the cattails, the meaning of life, the rattle of a chain needing tightening, your bladder) will succeed in catching it. Those qualities that succeed will be named, catagorized, maybe thought about and later recalled as your "experience" of the trip. But they were not the trip. In Zen we find that attending predominantly to static qualities like the intellect can lead insanity, in Lila, that attending just to dynamic quality can too. Coming in to that sweeping left hander (or life or reality) at a 100 miles per hour it's better that your attention not be on lilt of the blackbird, metaphysics, or even the physics of motorcycles, but rather on the oneness of you, the bike, and the road. Or to turn a borrowed phrase, the road smay kill the metaphor. "Trip" implies movement, action. The act of sailing,the act of motorcycling, reality is principly actions or events, a continous dynamic stream of them. The snap shots, journals, cheap postcards, the dent in the rear fender, and the bullshit you pass out in the bar about them, are the static qualities of the trip. It's reasonable that I should doubt the veracity of your trip stories, and you, mine. But with a couple more beers we should be able to come to some agreement on who's the better liar. 3WD MOQ.org - http://www.moq.org
