[MD] Platt's Individual Level

[pholden at davtv.com]

Quoting Case <Case at iSpots.com>:

> 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."

I don't call this spiritual. 

> 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. 

Agree. 

> 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.

Agree.

> 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.

I don't call this spiritual. For me, spirit has nothing to do with machinations of
the mind. To experience spirit, my advice is look up at the stars. 

Platt






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