[MD] Pantheism as Seen by the MOQ

[plattholden at gmail.com]

Hi All, 

Worshippers of Mother Nature in the church of environmentalism would 
do well to ponder the following passage from Pirsig's MOQ:

"Everyone seemed to be guided by an "objective," "scientific" view of 
life that told each person that his essential self is his evolved material 
body. Ideas and societies are a component of brains, not the other way 
around. No two brains can merge physically, and therefore no two 
people can ever really communicate except in the mode of ship's radio 
operators sending messages back and forth in the night. A scientific, 
intellectual culture had become a culture of millions of isolated people 
living and dying in little cells of psychic solitary confinement, unable to 
talk to one another, really, and unable to judge one another because 
scientifically speaking it is impossible to do so. Each individual in his cell 
of isolation was told that no matter how hard he tried, no matter how 
hard he worked, his whole life is that of an animal that lives and thinks 
like any other animal. He could invent moral goals for himself, but they 
are just artificial inventions. Scientifically speaking he has no goals.
Sometime after the twenties a secret loneliness, so penetrating and so 
encompassing that we are only beginning to realize the extent of it, 
descended upon the land. This scientific, psychiatric isolation and futility 
had become a far worse prison of the spirit than the old Victorian 
"virtue" ever was." (Lila, 22)

Regards,
Platt