[MD] What's missing

[Case]

Bo,

Your assumption seems to be that without the levels the MoQ is impotent.

When you say "...the MOQ rests on its level system..."

I say, "I think not."

Recently I was looking through some dusty files and ran across a collection
of articles and graphic layouts I did for a college town entertainment
magazine. One piece in particular jumped out of the crumbling pile of
newsprint. It was a book review for ZMM I had written in 1975.

I have no recollection of writing the review but I do remember reading ZMM
suspended in a Mayan hammock on a screen porch shaded by live oaks. There
has Lynard Skynard blowing over from the house next door and I would have
had a cold one and a box of Marlboro Reds close at hand.

The last sentence of the review went like this:

"His explanations are in great detail, the symbolism and imagery of the
journey used so well, that by the end of the book it has fallen together
with such clarity that one feels as though Pirsig has indeed passed on a
glimpse of the undefined Absolute Quality."

(Editor's Note to MoQers: You will never know how hard it was not to fix
that sentence.)

I understood ZMM as a version of Taoist metaphysics a long time ago. I first
encountered the Tao in a survey of religions course about a year before
reading ZMM. I had a long time to stew on it. The Lila levels did not arrive
for nearly 20 years. I still regard ZMM as the more profound work. 

Even so, as a novel Lila is structurally Yin and Yang. Dropping the first
person completely, Pirsig encounters a feminine archetype while floating
through one of the great fractal geological systems in North America. Along
the way he discusses a "metaphysics of randomness". What's not to like?

In my view the first cut of the Tao into Yin and Yang is a metaphysical
distinction worthy of G. Spencer Browne. Form and formless can be classified
on the basis of their active and passive Qualities. 

A metaphysics is a bit like Vonnegut described stacking cannon balls in
Cat's Cradle. The first layer you put down determines the shape of the pile.

The purpose of a metaphysics is to provide a coherent structure for
integrating sensory input into memory. What we attended to and how we
apportion value; what to leave in and what to leave out. Your first
metaphysical cut establishes the fundamental structure of your system of
thought. 

It just seems to me that everywhere I look I see things in terms of what it
moving and what is still, background and foreground, sunlight and shade;
what is the same and what is different. I see opposites converging and
merging into awareness. Dynamic quality is motion and change. Static Quality
is what survives in its wake.

Beyond this any system of you try to impose degenerates quickly into
legalism. 

"Thus it was that when the Tao was lost, 
Its attributes appeared; 
When its attributes were lost, 
Benevolence appeared; 
When benevolence was lost, 
The proprieties appeared.
 
Now propriety is the attenuated form 
of legal-heartedness and good faith, 
and is also the commencement of disorder; 
swift apprehension is (only) a flower of the Tao, 
and is the beginning of stupidity.
-Lao Tsu


I think all the bickering over the levels reduces them to frills on a
headboat. The lesson I took from Lila was; this is "how" the MoQ can be
used, not this is how it "must" be used.

This is not a widely held view I suppose and I do actively discuss the
levels at times. After all the system Pirsig used obviously has value. But I
do not think MoQ rests on it's levels so much as it needs to be wrested from
them.

Case