[MD] Food for Thought

[david buchanan]

Case, Dr. Antonio Dell'Utri and all MOQers:

Case said to dmb:
It is a mistake on your part to read James as a simply a philosopher. He 
does write philosophy but many would argue the James is primarily a 
psychologist, among the first of the breed. James is trying to understand 
the nature of experience as a psychological not a metaphysical matter. He 
does not deny TITs rather he is seeking to describe how we know them 
psychologically.

dmb says:
William James was a lot of things. But so what? I mean, it makes perfect 
sense to treat his Essays on Radical Empiricism as a philosophical work. It 
is empiricism, after all. I would argue that these postumously collected and 
published volume is the culmination of his thought and that there is no good 
reason to suppose that his psychology was at odds with his empiricism 
anyway. In any case, I certainly don't think its a mistake to read empiricsm 
as philosophy. I think it would be a mistake not to.

Case said:
..It is hard to pinpoint just what brand of Philosophical mysticism you 
espouse, Dave, but it I do not know of many forms of mysticism that do not 
refer to some form of transcendent consciousness. I don't think you are 
going to find James a friend in this regard. ...While Pragmatism may be 
regarded as philosophy, Radical Empiricism, on the other hand is philosophy 
rooted in James' psychology. But in it I think one will find scant support 
for mysticism.

dmb says:
Hmmm. Guess its time to lay out some fundamental ideas about philosophical 
mysticism. Elsewhere you have complained that its not different from theism 
and now you are saying that you see no connection between mysticism and 
radical empiricism. It seems like you don't really even get the gist of what 
I'm saying so let me nix all the other issues and focus on that. I even went 
so far as to dig up some quotes on the topic from years past. I preform this 
unpaid chore for your convenience, dear darling Case, and for the ease of 
all interested MOQers.

Lila, page 63...
"Some of the most honored philosophers in histroy have been mystics: 
Plotinus, Swedenborg, Loyola, Shankaracharya and may others. They share a 
common belief that the fundamental nature of reality is outside language; 
that language splits things into parts while the true nature of reality is 
undivided."

ZAMM, page 126...
"In all of the Oriental religions great value is placed on the Sanskrit 
doctrine of Tat tvam asi, "Thou art that", which asserts that everything you 
think you are and everything you think you perceive are undivided. To 
realize fully this lack of division is to become enlightened."

Pirsig's Annotations on Idealism:
"Bradley's fundamental assertion is that the reality of the world is 
intelllectually unknowable, and that defines him as a mystic. ..Both he and 
the MOQ are expressing what Aldous Huxley called 'The Perennial Philosophy', 
which is perennial, I believe, because it happens to be true."

Ken Wilber...
"The Perennial Philosophy (the term was made famous by Huxley but coined by 
Leibniz) - the transcendental essence of the great religions - has as its 
core the notion of 'nonduality', which means that reality is neither one nor 
many, neither permanent nor dynamic, neither seperate nor unified, neither 
pluralistic nor holistic. It is entirely and radically above and prior to 
ANY form of conceptual elaboration."

Lila. pages 364-5...
"...James...RADICALEMPIRICISM.. meant that subjects and objects were not the 
staring point of esperience. Subjects and objects are secondary. They are 
concepts derived from something more fundamental which he described as ' the 
immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection 
with its conceptual categories'. In this basic flux of experience, the 
distinctions of reflecive thought, such as those between consciousness and 
content, subject and object, mind and matter, have not yet emerged in the 
forms which we make them. Pure experience cannot be either physical or 
psychical: It logically precedes the distinction."

James Essay, page 23...
"The instant field of the present is at all times what I call the 'pure 
experience'. It is only virtually or potentially either a subject or an 
object as yet."

Ron DiSanto in the Guidebook to ZAMM. page 23...
"In the spiritual traditions of both the East and the West - I am thinking 
not about any particular religion, but about the mystical element to be 
found in them all - we find the claim that eventually one must let go of the 
activities of thought and imagination in order to enter regions of 
consciousness that such symbolic activity cannot reach."

It might seem like I'm mixing in too many elements but I want you to notice 
a theme here. These quotes all make reference, in one way or another, to the 
notion that reality is fundamentally undivided. This is not only presented 
as the realization of enlightenment, as the core truth of the world's great 
religions and it is also presented as the starting point of the MOQ's 
radical empiricism. There are lots of names for this undivided experience. 
Pirsig calls this the primary empirical reality, James calls it pure 
experience or the immediate flux of life, Northrop call it the 
undifferentiated aesthetic continuum. And we see another theme here too. The 
guidebook says that this reality can be known only if we let go of thought, 
Lila says it is outside language, James says its prior to our conceptual 
categories, Wilber says its prior to and above any conceptual elaborations 
and in the annotations Pirsig says its intellectually unknowable. They all 
make reference, on way or another, to the notion that it can only be known 
directly and immediately, through a non-rational experience.

Pirisg's assertion that the Metaphysics of Quality is a contradiction in 
terms is predictated on the notion the the mystical reality (DQ) can't be 
captured by metaphysical concepts (sq). When he says that Quality can't be 
defined, its not because its outside of experience but because it is an 
experience prior to any such conceptualizations. Notice also that this sort 
of mysticism is not based on any kind of belief or doctrine, but upon a 
certain kind of experience. One known regardless of culture...

Wilber...
"The perennial philosophy is the world view that has been embraced by the 
vast majority of the world's greatest spiritual teachers, philosophers, 
thinkers, and even scientists. Its called 'perennial' or 'universal' because 
it shows up in virtually all cultures across the glove and across the ages. 
And wherever we find it, it has essentially similar features, it is in 
essential agreement the world over. We moderns, who can harld ageee on 
anything, find this rather remarkable."

DiSanto, page 27
"Whatever nuance the language of union is given, if there is to be talk of 
mysticism, some sort of deep union must be involved. It perhaps cannot be 
emphasized enough that to speak of mysticism is speak of an EXPERIENCE of 
union and not merely speculations about union."

This comes back to the start, where Pirsig describes enlightenment as fully 
realizing the "lack of division". When we think of this in terms of "Thou 
art that", this lack of division cancells out even the distinction between 
experiencer and experienced, or subject and object. This is why mystical 
experience is so often described in terms of unity, union, being at One with 
the Universe, at-One-ment instead of Atone ment, you know? This is why its 
described in terms of identity, not just in the sense of who and what you 
really are, but that to which you are identical.

Joseph Campbell
"...Tat tvam asi, 'Thou art that', or 'you yourself are it!'. The final 
sense of a religion such as Hinduism or Buddhism is to bring about in the 
individual an experience, one way or another, of his own identity with that 
mystery that is the mystery of all being. ..it is the mystery also of many 
or our own Occidental mystics: and many of these have been burned for having 
said as much. Westward of Iran, in all three of the great traditons that 
hove come to us from the Nar Eastern sone, namely Judaism, Christianity, and 
Islan, such concepts are untingable and sherr heresy. God created the 
world,Creator and crature connot be the same, since, as Aristotle tells us, 
A is not-A. Our theology, therefore, begins from the point of view of waking 
consciousness and Aristotelean logic; whereas, on antoher level of 
consciousness - and this, the level to which all religions must finally 
refer - the ultimate mystery transcends the laws of dualistic logic, 
causality and space-time. Anyone who says, as Jesus is reported to have said 
(John 10:30), 'I and the Father are One', is declared in our tradition to 
have blasphemed ..We in our tradition do not recognize the possibility of 
such an experience of identity with the ground of one's own being."

Gerhard Wher:
"...esoteric spirituality that is worthy of the name is primarly concerned 
wtih the development of personal inwardnees, with one's own experience and 
with transformation. A tehology without experience is hardly in a postion to 
mediate that spiritual knowledge and spiritual deirection which is nowadays 
sought more that ever."

Carl Jung:
"The arch sin of faith, it seemed to me, was that it forestalled 
experience".

Matthew Fox:
The Christian West was too alienated from its own mystical tradition to 
resist this secular effort to eliminate a living cosmology,"

Pirsig in the annotations:
"The MOQ does not rest on faith. In the MOQ faith is very low quality stuff, 
a willingness to believe falsehoods."
"When you hear the words "spirit" and "faith" always look for a traditional 
religionsit trying to sneak his goods in the back door. ..like the 
positivisits, the MOQ drops spirit and faith cold."

Wilber:
The enlightenment pointed out - quite rightly - that religious claims hiding 
from evidence are not the voice of God or Goddess, but merely the voice of 
men or women, who usually come with big guns and bigger egos. Power, not 
truth, drives claims that hide from evidence."

Okay, that's plenty. Now maybe you can disagree with this better now that 
I've laid it all out. The perennial philosophy also says that manifest or 
static reality is divided into levels of being and so Pirsig's system 
reflects that part of it too. There are also some interesting things to be 
said about why the West became alienated from its mystical self. Psychology 
is no stranger to this topic either, but I wanted to answer your basic 
question. What brand of mysticism am I talking about? Its a version of the 
perennial philosophy, its compatible with the esoteric core of all the 
religions and with a number of philosophers. If the doors of perception were 
cleansed, everything would appear as it truley is; infinite. Just ask 
William Blake or Aldous Huxley. Channel the spirit of Jim Morrison. He'll 
tell you too, if he's not too stoned.

Thanks
dmb

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