[MD] Quantum Physics, Amerindians, Zen, the woods, beyond SOM

[Arlo Bensinger]

[Platt]
It's one small step from ghosts to gods, one giant step from ghosts to morals.

[Arlo again cites ZMM]
What had to be seen was that the Chris I missed so badly was not an object 
but a pattern, and that although the pattern included the flesh and blood 
of Chris, that was not all there was to it. The pattern was larger than 
Chris and myself, and related us in ways that neither of us understood 
completely and neither of us was in complete control of.

Now Chris's body, which was a part of that larger pattern, was gone. But 
the larger pattern remained. A huge hole had been torn out of the center of 
it, and that was what caused all the heartache. The pattern was looking for 
something to attach to and couldn't find anything. That's probably why 
grieving people feel such attachment to cemetery headstones and any 
material property or representation of the deceased. The pattern is trying 
to hang on to its own existence by finding some new material thing to 
center itself upon.

Some time later it became clearer that these thoughts were something very 
close to statements found in many "primitive" cultures. If you take that 
part of the pattern that is not the flesh and bones of Chris and call it 
the "spirit" of Chris or the "ghost" of Chris, then you can say without 
further translation that the spirit or ghost of Chris is looking for a new 
body to enter. When we hear accounts of "primitives" talking this way, we 
dismiss them as superstition because we interpret ghost or spirit as some 
sort of material ectoplasm, when in fact they may not mean any such thing 
at all.

[Arlo adds]
My point is that your reduction of what SA had said was quite unfair. If 
one reads ZMM, the "path to enlightenment" as Pirsig calls it, one sees no 
discrepancy in what SA has written and Pirsig's writings. Do you? Indeed, 
if I dismiss ZMM entirely, I find nothing there that contradicts the MOQ, 
rather I think it evidences nicely his correction of Descartes, and his 
writings on language and culture. Furthermore, it seems to point directly 
to "something" (superposition?) that brings subjects and objects into 
mutual existence, rather than subjects working on objects. So, what is in 
his post you find the MOQ in disagreement to?