[MD] extricating MOQ from SOM

[Arlo Bensinger]

[Ron]
Being "Native" I greatly appreciate your discussion.

[Arlo]
Allow me to also convey welcomes, Ron. If you search the archives, you'll 
see many of us have long argued for and appreciated Pirsig's illuminations 
on (and from!) Native American understandings. That he chose to end Lila 
with a reference to Native American culture emphasizes the value we can 
attain from revisiting the worldview of the "Indian". Similarly, he writes 
in a letter to Ant, " A famous Japanese Zen Master [Dainin Kategiri Roshi] 
who read ZMM told me he thought it was a nice book but he didn't see 
anything unusual in it. He was quite puzzled at its success. Another 
Japanese tourist to America said, 'This book is not interesting to Japanese 
people because we already know all of this.'" There are some that not  only 
seek to silence, but ridicule, the Tao/Zen/Indian centrality to the MOQ. 
But know that this is only a few. Most appreciate, and I for one advance 
that the only way forward is through this core. The best summation of 
Western, SOMist culture was given in ZMM, "[man] had built empires of 
scientific capability to manipulate the phenomena of nature into enormous 
manifestations of his own dreams of power and wealth...but for this he had 
exchanged an empire of understanding of equal magnitude: an understanding 
of what it is to be a part of the world, and not an enemy of it." If that 
describes an SOMist culture, then the path away from SOM must be to move 
towards "being part of the world", something the Taoists, Zenists (Zenites? 
Zennies?), and Native Americans understood all along.