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

[ARLO J BENSINGER JR]

[Arlo]
I take it we did go the route of dismissing ZMM entirely once again.

[Platt]
No more than you dismiss Lila.

[Arlo]
Misrepresentation, Platt. I quote and refer to the concepts of LILA frequently.

[Platt]
This is Pirsig in his hippie days which he later apologized for because the
hippie movement ended up at the moral level of biological patterns.

[Arlo]
What source do you have where Pirsig apologizes for ZMM? In the recent interview
he states quite clearly that ZMM is "the path to enlightenment", while LILA is
"the voyage home"

""As I see these two books," Pirsig says, drawing an oval on a notepad, "there
is a Zen circle. You start here with Zen," he says, marking an X, "and then you
go here to enlightenment, that's what’s called 180 Zen.

"Then you go back to where you started from — that's 360 Zen — and the world
is exactly as it was when you left it." Pirsig sits back and lets that sink in,
then adds: "Well, I felt that Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was the
journey out, and Lila was this trip back.""

Hardly "an apology". 

[Platt] 
I think it's important to emphasize Pirsig's atheism rather than hint he might
be receptive to the idea of the Great Spirit. But, I could be wrong.

[Arlo]
I have no problem with that, I just don't think that what SA was "hinting". I
think you're reacting to his inclusion of Indians and Zen.

[Platt]
I see good old relativism, the bogus idea that other cultures are just as
knowledgeable as our own. 

[Arlo]
Ah, I see, is this a call for some cheerleading? Should I say, "Why Platt, far
be it from me to suggest that our culture is anything but the zenith culture,
the most great and glorious the world, nay TIME itself, has ever known"?

As Pirsig cites Kluckhohn in LILA, "Any language is more than an instrument of
conveying ideas, more even than an instrument for working upon the feelings of
others and for self-expression. Every language is also a means of categorizing
experience. The events of the "rear world are never felt or reported as a
machine would do it. There is a selection process and an interpretation in the
very act of response. Some features of the external situation are highlighted,
others are ignored or not fully discriminated.

Every people has its own characteristic class in which individuals pigeonhole
their experiences. The language says, as it were, "notice this," "always
consider this separate from that," "such and such things always belong
together.  " Since persons are trained from infancy to respond in these ways
they take such discriminations for granted as part of the inescapable stuff of
life."

So when SA had quoted "we don't blend with the atomic structure of the earth in
the way they do", methinks you reacted to some imagined slight of American
Culture (how dare SA imply validity to another cultural perspective!), rather
than to the similarity between this and what Pirsig describes in LILA (not to
mention ZMM in the "sand sorting" analogy).