[MD] Re Proposed solution to SOL/Intellectual level

[Andre Broersen]

Khoo to All:
Bo concludes after commenting on the half-baked SOM of the Orient and the
woolly mess in its wake that:

The Western MOQ will be a better "Buddhism"!

Khoo:
I would certainly like to see this if it were to be so: }

Andre:
Great to see you contribute once in a while Khoo, your thoughts are
refershing and like koans.

Must take Northrop as the guide here. As he states in 'The Meeting of
East and West' we live in the 'real' conventional world and young
Phaedrus complied when the dropping of the atomic bombs were
considered an 'illusion' he left the classroom.

I think what Khoo says is very important: that different cultures have
developed different paths toward the good, and we judge them from our
Western cultured glasses. 'Half-baked SOM' sounds like 'you better get
your arses up in the intellectual level' and until you do so your
ideals, your path to the 'good' is 'wooly-headed' , stupid, socially
based and not 'evolved' properly so we do not take you seriously.

Perhaps I am too harsh in this.

Northrop, after analysing the Western and Eastern ideologies has the
following to say (a la Marsha):
'The Orient, for the most part, has investigated things in their
aesthetic component; the West has investigated things in their
theoretic component'...The East and the West, when analysed to
determine their basic scientific and philosophical foundations are
found to be saying...two different yet complementary things'.

For a possible 'meeting' between these two to take place there are two
requisites:

'First, the specific relation between the aesthetic and theoretic
components must be determined (something Khoo hinted at) and second,
the aesthetic component and the specific character of the Oriental
culture which is based upon it must be must be fully understood'.

This must be attempted without prejudice, without judgement as to
whether 'they' have made it into the intellectual level yet ( as such
defined by...) . As krisnamurti said: Truth is a pathless land.

Pirsig, in LILA (Ch 8) ' The culture in which we live hands us a set
of intellectual glasses to interpret experience with, and the concept
of the primacy of subjects and objects is built right into these
glasses.
Of course he is referring to Western culture.

The Orient designates the Tao, Nirvana, Brahman or Chit to be
something which is not given through the specific senses but which is
immediately experienced as opposed to the Western mind-set which means
that it is 'a speculatively postulated, syntactically designated, and
only indirectly and experimentally verified entity...' (Northrop
p377).

(This is why I was getting so cranky about how to 'view' my girlfriend!)

You see, there are already many MoQ's. ...by other names...in other
cultures. Pirsig named his: 'Quality/ Value/ Morals' because it would
be socially acceptable in the West... and because the West has lost
all sense of Quality! All sense of Value/ Morals (bar the religious
interpretation perhaps).

'All I am good for is theory, Phaedrus thought'.

It is in this sense we may understand the difference between East and
West when Pirsig writes about Descartes'  proclamation and the way it
would have been received in China of the seventeenth Century. Or the
way ZMM was received in Japan... 'so whats new?" was the response.

The meeting of the East and the West lies perhaps in fusing the
aesthetic and theoretic components as they appear to be complementary.
Both 'sides' have made tremendous, albeit different investigations
into the static and dynamic parts of the undifferentiated aesthetic
continuum.

To suggest that the one is 'wooly' and the West's is 'solid'? is a
value judgement that needs to be backed up by hard evidence!!

The MoQ may be seen as an attempt at such an undertaking and we should
not lose sight of differences: there are many interpretations of what
is 'good' .

The West is so easily judgemental about this. Freedom as 'good' so
easily defined as having a trillion choices. Yea, choice MEANS
freedom!
This is an obvious reference to the choice of the 'free-market' an
economic choice but I thought we are a little more than just economic
units.

It is easy to get 'lost' in the idea of Quality in a static way...too easily.

Thanks Khoo, for having pressed on my 'refresh page' button.
Andre