[MD] quotation from *Zen*

[Arlo Bensinger]

[LM]
In it, Professor Pirsig explains the easy/easier 
way of motorcycle maintenance:  don't try to 
impose your terms or experience from another 
situation/time - get in "touch" with the 
motorcycle and its workings *on its own terms* 
(i.e. don't try to treat a motorcycle like a bicycle or a car).

[Arlo]
Off hand, this sounds like the part on the 
internal gumption trap he calls "value rigidity". 
Here is a passage, is this what you are referring to?

"Of the value traps, the most widespread and 
pernicious is value rigidity. This is an 
inability to revalue what one sees because of 
commitment to previous values. In motorcycle 
maintenance, you must rediscover what you do as 
you go. Rigid values make this impossible.

The typical situation is that the motorcycle 
doesn't work. The facts are there but you don't 
see them. You're looking right at them, but they 
don't yet have enough value. This is what Phædrus 
was talking about. Quality, value, creates the 
subjects and objects of the world. The facts do 
not exist until value has created them. If your 
values are rigid you can't really learn new facts.

This often shows up in premature diagnosis, when 
you're sure you know what the trouble is, and 
then when it isn't, you're stuck. Then you've got 
to find some new clues, but before you can find 
them you've got to clear your head of old 
opinions. If you're plagued with value rigidity 
you can fail to see the real answer even when 
it's staring you right in the face because you 
can't see the new answer's importance.

The birth of a new fact is always a wonderful 
thing to experience. It's dualistically called a 
"discovery" because of the presumption that it 
has an existence independent of anyone's 
awareness of it. When it comes along, it always 
has, at first, a low value. Then, depending on 
the value-looseness of the observer and the 
potential quality of the fact, its value 
increases, either slowly or rapidly, or the value 
wanes and the fact disappears.

The overwhelming majority of facts, the sights 
and sounds that are around us every second and 
the relationships among them and everything in 
our memory...these have no Quality, in fact have 
a negative quality. If they were all present at 
once our consciousness would be so jammed with 
meaningless data we couldn't think or act. So we 
preselect on the basis of Quality, or, to put it 
Phædrus' way, the track of Quality preselects 
what data we're going to be conscious of, and it 
makes this selection in such a way as to best 
harmonize what we are with what we are becoming." (Pirsig)