[MD] Platt's Individual Level

[Case]

[Case]
> I ask because I think for example that reason plays almost no role in
> determining Truth. Reason is a process for checking your work. It does
> not lead one to the truth it just verifies that the path taken has
> validity.

[Platt]
First, I agree with your second paragraph about reason. Second, 
spiritual to me means what the mystics say about reality, i.e., it's  
beyond words. Pirsig put it this way: "They (mystics) share a common 
belief that the fundamental nature of reality is outside language; that 
language splits things up into parts while the true nature of reality 
is undivided." Another way to say the same thing is that "the only 
valid thing in art is the one thing that cannot be explained." So I 
can't weight it, describe it or think about it in any way. Like 
experience itself, spirit is just there, a value that is "immediate, 
intuitive, undeliberate and involuntary, leaving no room for conscious 
application of standards, criteria, rules or precepts." 

Hope this helps.

[Case]
See if this matches what you are describing as spiritual then: 

While mystical experience may stand outside of language, even the Buddhists
have used language to direct the mind toward mystical realization. Pirsig
gives an account of his own rather mystical experience of insight into
Quality in ZMM when he talks about the seed crystal:

"The one sentence "I hope you are teaching Quality to your students" was
said to him, and within a matter of a few months, growing so fast you could
almost see it grow, came an enormous, intricate, highly structured mass of
thought, formed as if by magic."

This notion of a structure of thought gelling into an organized pattern
seems to speak to the structure of thought processes in the brain. All ideas
and experiences enter through the sense and are stored or rejected on the
basis of their fit or lack of fit with previous experience. Ideas and
concepts are connected by association into patterns. Taken as a whole we all
have patterns of thought and we accept or reject new ideas of the basis of
their fit with existing patterns. 

What I am getting at is that we accept or reject new ideas and experiences
based on this perception of fit and we patch that up with logic after the
fact. Insight is this perception of fit. When new thought crystals come
together, or when new connections between previously unrelated ideas happen
or when the whole structure of thought shakes a bit and is reorganized into
a different form.

I suggest that this feeling of the rightness or wrongness is spiritual. It's
power is a measure of the impact on the overall structure and all subsequent
verbalization is our attempt to make a purely subjective feeling into
something intersubjective that can be shared with others.