[MD] The MoQ.org STRANGLES Creativity

[Heather Perella]

Platt, Case, Craig, Ham, Steve, Arlo, and others,

>      Platt said to Ham:  "Gee Ham, if you aren't
> convinced that you are better off today than the
> caveman there's nothing I can say that will change
> your mind. I mean aren't you glad you live in the
21st
> century and not the 10,000 B.C.?"
> 
>      Platt you really don't know if they had it
better
> or we have it better or an Amazonian villager,
> presently, has it better than U.S. culture or not. 

     Platt said:  "Try having an operation without
anesthesia."

     Try using coco leaves.  And since not everybody
has excess to anesthesia in the world today, it is
easy noticing that not everybody has excess to coco
leaves.  I don't know what other regional herbs exist
around the world, but this is one example from a large
continent south of us.


> There are those in the world that think the U.S. is
> the Great Satan remember.

     Platt:  "Well, it seems there's little doubt
where your political sympathies lie."

     Politics have been around for a long, long, long
time Platt.  They haven't changed much over the years.
 A culture might think that they are dominant and the
only ones worth the value of being called a
civilization and they perceive other cultures as
barbarians.  This idea of the Great Satan fits into
this kind of old perception.  This is the view of many
egotistical personnel within many cultures throughout
time.  China (Mongols were barbarians), Romans (all
others were barbarians), Greeks (all others were
barbarians), India (Brahmins and the caste system were
the best), Germans (the pure race), United States
(trade and follow a money system or else we blast you;
that's how the navy started, the guns pointed in the
Japanese harbor, a good Indian is a dead Indian,
McDonald's must be there or else civilization hasn't
yet reached them, etc...), Iroquois (you were either
with them or an enemy to be killed by them), Islamic
(Mohammad decided by the sword), etc... all had this
archetypal personality that motivated and embodied
their cultural quest at one time or another.  

     Craig said:  "An investment banker was
vacationing at a Mexican seaside village. One morning
he went out on a fishing trip & it was the best time
he'd ever had. He asked the fisherman, "What's your
day like?" The fisherman answered, "Every morning I
fish until noon, followed by a siesta in the
afternoon, in the evening I have a fiesta with my
family & friends, then I go home & make love to my
wife."
     The banker said, "But you have a gold mine here
with these fishing trips. I can set you up with a
whole fleet of fishing boats." So he did.
The fisherman ended up sitting in an office all day &
into the night managing the fleet of fishing boats.
Eventually, he became so successful, he was able to
sell the company, pay off the boats & retire on the
profit.  Shortly thereafter, the banker went back down
to visit him & asked how his life was going. 
"Great!", said the fisherman. "Every morning I fish
until noon, followed by a siesta in the afternoon, in
the evening I have a fiesta with my family & friends,
then I go home & make love to my wife."

     Yeap, retirement, vacation, and a day-off is what
we think it is, yet, others call it everyday life.

     Steve said:  ""Phædrus went a different path
from the idea of individual, personal Quality
decisions. I think it was a wrong one, but perhaps if
I were in his circumstances I would go his way too. He
felt that the solution started with a new philosophy,
or he saw it as even broader than that...a new
spiritual rationality...in which the ugliness and the
loneliness and the spiritual blankness of dualistic
technological reason would become illogical. Reason
was no longer to be ``value free.'' Reason was to be
subordinate, logically, to Quality, and he was sure he
would find the cause of its not being so back among
the ancient Greeks, whose mythos had endowed our
culture with the tendency underlying all the evil of
our technology, the tendency to do what is
`reasonable'' even when it isn't any good. That was
the root of the whole thing. Right there. I said a
long time ago that he was in pursuit of the ghost of
reason. This is what I meant. Reason and Quality had
become separated and in conflict with each other and
Quality had been forced under and reason made supreme
somewhere back then.'
     Any thoughts on the spiritual blankness,
loneliness, and ugliness of modernity?"

     Quality suppressed by reason.  The warning by
Einstein to not test the atomic bomb.  The waking up
and being with loved ones consistently.  The
motivation of not for $ and the need not the consume
products for the 'good' of the U.S. culture.  The
work, work, work, somewhere out in the field, away
from the home, on a locked schedule dictated by others
stripping the freedom of what we can do with our time.
 Many know where I come from on this, and I know what
others may say about this.  Vacations, holidays,
working around the house, helping out the neighbor
consistently and on our own time, this freedom is
gone, and the quality time to dictate our own lives,
locally, is almost totally gone.  Now somebody, and
one of those somebodies is me, has to clean up the
mess and enact damage control on the children of this
culture.  Iran wants that bomb, too.  Would they
listen to Einstein?  Probably not as well.

     David Beck (I believe) said:  "Master Joshu, Does
modern life have more quality then primitive life?
"MU".

     Hit or miss: MU, and I also say hit and miss,
just depends on how the arrow shoots.

     Ham quoted Benedict:  "Whereas, Sartre argues,
consciousness can seize itself as conscious of
something, it cannot seize itself as conscious
exclusively of itself, without being grounded in some
material object of which it is conscious."

     Ham, this is probably why Pirsig liked your
thesis.  If this is not involved in Pirsig's liking,
then I must say this is something that I like about
the 'intellectual lineage' of your thesis.  This is
exactly my point indeed when I say hit or miss, which
as I have stated above commenting on David Beck, this
hit or miss, easily can be stated hit and miss. 
Where's the target I'm shooting at?  When I shoot the
arrow it is all one, and distance means nothing when
it comes to the Zen involved in the practice.  Yet,
distance means everything, too.  It is everything
involved that means something, yet, it is not
everything involved that I can put my finger on and
say, 'that's it!'.

     Arlo quotes Pirsig:  "...but which had
inadvertently shut them out from direct experience of
life itself-and from each other."

     Since the individual is to be highly prized, as
Platt would say, a common ground for all of us on this
merger of understanding quoted above, is the
individual is not dictating his/her own life anymore. 
We try and we like to think we are, yet, the
population expansion needs more emphasis placed on
order and organization.  Imagine if we all stayed
home.  Worked around the house.  Talked with our
neighbors.  Called work and said we'll be in later.  
     Many, even myself, would say nothing would get
finished by society at large, $ would not be earned,
this culture would come to a halt (labour, the engine
would stop), and how would we all get our food.  So I
wake up in the morning, go to work cleaning up a mess
this culture has made with individuals, get the most
important 'thing' that allows everything to run
smoothly - $ -, and onward we go.  This is the cling,
the trap, and the attachment that I cannot let go of. 

     The archetypal personality of the U.S. culture is
probably the business person.  It's all just business,
nothing personal.  That seems to capture the SOM
paradigm of reason over quality in this U.S. culture. 
I know troubled youth attach to this slogan, too.  I
have sadly used this slogan before myself.  I have
said to a troubled resident at work that it was
nothing personal I'm just trying to enforce the rules.
 As long as the rules are followed then I will not
have to be handing out consequences and everything
will run more smoothly on the unit.  Nothing personal,
just follow the rules.  Nothing personal, just
business.  The vacuum projected and the skipping of
the spirit for business and rules.  It was my
approach.  It is not that I advocate a dismissal of
rules or business.  It is the 'nothing personal'
approach where I point to as hollow reason over
quality methods.    


SA

P.S. I can't deny myself from modern communication on
this rainy day off from work.  

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