[MD] The SOM-MOQ relationship.

[skutvik at online.no]

Hi Anthony

On 10 Dec. you wrote:

> Bo stated December 9th:
> >Ian's "let's keep quiet please"  will not make it go away. The MOQ is
> >supposed to be understood by a child, not something that requires
> >"enlightenment".
 
> Ant McWatt comments:
> Isn't Quality (which is loosely "immediate non-SOM experience")
> supposed to be something even understood by a child (or a pet
> bear/rabbit/cat/amoeba) while understanding the MOQ (which *IS* an
> intellectual pattern) an entirely different matter where
> "enlightenment" (if that's understood as seeing the many in the One
> and the One in the many i.e. an interconnected "Nagarjuna/non-Platt"
> universe) would certainly be very helpful?

Well, Quality=Reality so that's "understood" by the said items, but 
Pirsig's point in the "infant" passage below is that by intellect's  
reasoning there is no higher view than its S/O one.     

    By this criterion shouldn't all but a handful of the world's 
    most advanced physicists be locked up for life?  Who is 
    crazy here and who is sane? In a value-centered 
    Metaphysics of Quality this "scientific reality" platypus 
    vanishes.  Reality, which is value, is understood by every 
    infant. It is a universal starting place of experience that 
    everyone is confronted with all the time.  Within a 
    Metaphysics of Quality, science is a set of static 
    intellectual patterns describing this reality, but the 
    patterns are not the reality they describe. 


Look to something Mike wrote in his message of 8 December.

Mike:
> Hence the obsession of the more turgid Western philosophers withning
> "sense deception", not realising that the senses never decieve - it is the
> interpretation that can be erroneous. For example, Descartes' senses do
> not lie when he sees a stick half-submerged in water. Data are data. 

To intellect (or SOM) sense-experience is notoriously deceptive 
(read: subjective) but on the other hand senses are the only  
means of perception so in no way can intellect solve this riddle, 
only the MOQ can because intellect's S/O is a (mere) static level 
of its own. 

In the "infant" quote science - more specific physics - is the SOM 
representative(as usual) not intellect, for the reason that the 
mind-definition of intellect was current when writing LILA and it 
seems indelible regardless of Pirsig's later rejecting it. The 
intellectual level is still is the realm of ideas  ..among you 
orthodox ;-).

However, that of intellect being the S/O divide is now established 
I dare say and if so the Quality Reality is regarded as what 
encapsulate it all, included intellect, and wherein experience of 
quality begins with inorganic quality. The intellectual framework 
of the MOQ however requires some somish understanding   ...but 
not PhDs ;-)             

Bo