Hi Squad,

In my last post I out forward my view that the MOQ answer to the question of 
Nature/Nurture and Free Will/Determinsm (hereafter refered to as N/N/FW/D) 
would be 'Mu'. I didn't really explain myself properly and I'd like to try 
and give a better, clearer explanation.

The reason why I find these quesrions so interesting is that they seem to me 
to be so deeply enmeshed with SOM itself. If I think about N/N then the 
question basically is, 'Was I born and am I presdestined to be a certain way 
(subjective) or am I a result of external influences (objective) and the 
same with FW/D. I'm trying to think of a good analogy....

If we took an apple out of a beautiful orchard and asked ourselves, 'Why 
does this apple have quality? Was it predestined to be this way, or it a 
result of the beautiful orchard it grew in?' The question becomes a little 
more transparent - it's neither really, but because fail to see that the 
apple and it's orchard (and ourselves and our environment) aren't separate 
really, they're the same thing!'. What I'm trying to say is that a person 
and his environment grow towards quality or fall away from quality together. 
We are not separate from our environment so the two debates are esssentially 
meaningless!

Our own behavior (which is pure quality) is presumed to be caused from 
either ourselves or our environment but it's not so. What's happening is 
that the quality event (our own bahavior) causes awareness of subject and 
object which is then mistakenly thought to be the cause of quality itself. 
MOQ gives a 'Mu' answer to these two debates because MOQ is non-dualist and 
the concept of N/N and FW/D is firmly in the arena of static intellectual 
quality, specifically good old dualistic SOM. It's not right or wrong to 
debate these things as long as you know that that's the arena you're 
fighting inside.
It is however wrong to debate these things using Pirsig's levels because 
then you're just turning MOQ into SOM by thinking that the levels are 
actually 'real' entities in themselves, the same way SOM presumes that the 
separation between subject and object is 'real'.

Thanks,
Phil.



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