[MD] What is SOM?

[Joseph Maurer]

On Friday 22 August 11:36 AM dmb writes to Bo:

dmb said to Bo:
It seems to me that you must be suffering from a very odd definition of
"metaphysics" and "intellect". You seem to think the MOQ is reality itself
rather than words about reality and so you are altering the MOQ so that it
is construed as essentialism rather than philosophical mysticism, which is a
vigorous form of anti-essentialism.

Bo replied:
Yes if that is essentialism I'm very much so, but because DQ is part and
parcel of the MOQ I wonder how you avoid being a Quality essentialist too
...  without resorting to the Quality//DQ/SQ variety that even Pirsig
finally had to abandon.

dmb says:
Pirsig's Quality is opposed to Plato's Quality precisely because it is not
an essence. We can find this anti-essentialist move in what I take to be the
philosophical and dramatic climaxes of ZAMM....

<snip>

Hi Bo and David,

I found this passage from Maurice Nicoll Interesting in this context.  I do
not think mystical is the total answer to Persig's anguish as he leaves his
wife and children and himself, in these certainly tearing and haunting
passages from ZAMM.  He accepts Chris back on the motorcycle ride.  IMO
Dynamic Quality is not perceived reality but an order in existence.  The MOQ
is an evolution of S only to enlightenment to a level above the intellectual
level and indefinable.

Joe

PSYCHOLOGOCAL SPACE:

(In the following quote from Maurice Nicoll I translate  "mind" as
CONSCIOUSNESS at the social level and as DIFERENCE IN CONSCIOUSNESS  at the
intellectual level.)

[Nicoll]
Man is both in time and out of time.  Now the sensual mind is based on time
and space, but not the psychological mind.  We can say that only partial
truth is accessible to the sensual mind (the social level). Truth is
comparable to an inexhaustible sack of silver from which a few coins have
escaped while the rest is guarded.  As we shall see, this is only another
way of saying that the sensual thinking cannot grasp what only the
psychological thinking can (intellectual level).  The more a man¹s thought
can expand beyond the senses and their evidence, the more truth he gets from
the sack.  Now a word as to truth whose quality is intimately connected with
the good in a man.  We can change good, such as charity, into truth‹that is,
esoterically expressed, gold into silver‹so Good Householder is the
necessary starting point for the Work.  We cannot change evil, such as
hatred, into truth.  It breeds lies onlyŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ(note the parentheses are
mine, Joe)

[Nicoll]
There is a psychological and there is a sensual truth.  They overlap but are
not one and the same.  We shall have to discuss these elsewhere but it can
be said here that it is psychological truth chiefly that can change our
being and not sensual truth.  Sensual truth is conceived in terms of time
and three-dimensional space, because the senses only register in the present
moment of time and space. I cannot see you yesterday in your room.  I can
only remember only a little.  I cannot hear what you said upstairs a little
while ago.  I can only remember a little.  I cannot touch you a moment ago
when you were sitting in that chair, for you have gone out now.  I can touch
the chair, which is still in the present moment of space for me but not for
you.  Both time and space separate us.  When I go out the street is now in
the present moment of space and I see you again.  We are now in another part
of space  and in another part of time.  Thus do my external senses
work‹always in the flitting present moment of time and in
three-dimensional-space, common to all.  All this requires thinking about
often, for it is very strange, although people do not notice it.  Now since
I love you, you are always near or present to me‹yes, but in some other
world, some other space, not common to us all, quite distinct from the
common external world registered by sense, but somehow quite or even more
real.  Now in which, or in what, dimension does this other world lie, in
which you continue to exist ³psychologically² for me, so that I seem
sometimes even to be able to speak to you?  Or how is it that I can dream
quite clearly that we are walking or speaking together in the morning on the
hillside?  In what time and in what space does this happen?  Certainly not
in the time and space on which our outer senses open.

[Nicoll]
Now let us shift the line of argument.  I will ask you in what dimension is
your memory?  Again I will ask how many dimensions has your thought. Has it
length, breadth and height? Can you speak of a long thought or a broad one
or a high one?  Is it three-dimensional as your body is and the chair you
are sitting on? Yet your thought is real to you. You may be plunged in
thought without being aware of either time or space.  Where are you then?
Your consciousness is undoubtedly somewhere.  Certainly your body remains in
the dimension of time and space common to us all.  It is visible and
tangible to sense.  But your thought is invisible and intangible to sense
and yet it exists and is real.  We conclude therefore that dimensions exist
and are open to us inwardly apart from the dimensions on which our senses
open outwardly and in which our bodies and the world exist.  Each person has
a private space.  Now in this inner or private space, which each person has,
thought and feeling and not muscles bring about movement.  For example,
affection brings about presence or nearness in this inner space.  Dislike
will do the reverse.  Affection is a state.  Love is a state.  Dislike is a
state.  Hate is a state.  To feel affection or to love is to be in a
particular state and the particular state you are in will be in this inner
or private space of yours, and not in outer or public space.  That is why I
said above that valuation and affection make the Work present. Indifference
or dislike removes it to a distance. Yes‹but to a distance in this inner
private space of yours, not in external space, for you may be sitting at a
meeting, disliking it all and yet present in space.  Now as long as I feel
affection for a person I am in a certain state that continues and the person
is present or near in inner space. Externally to my senses, the person may
be present at one time and absent at another time, but not so internally.
It would seem therefore, that in this inner space that is private to me,
there is no time as we understand it sensually.  In place of ever-changing
and ever-passing time there is state. We get, therefore a glimpse of
something in us that is outside time‹namely state and inner space. That is
why it was said at the beginning of the paper that we are both in time and
out of time.  If nothing is transformed beyond the sense-based level, we are
mainly in time.  How much of us is outside time will depend how much we are
governed by outer time and space and the external senses and sensual mind,
and how much we can enter and organize inner space by good states and keep
and feel this place separate and distinct from the jarring of everyday
things.  I will only add here that this inner, private space is sometimes
represented by a room that we never discovered or knew to exist.  We have,
therefore, to distinguish by observation, thought, feeling, and inner taste,
the two spaces.

PP 1577-1578 PSYCHOLOGICAL COMMENTARIES on the Teaching of G.I. GURDJIEFF
and P. D. OUSPENSKY by Maurice Nicoll 1968



On 8/22/08 11:36 AM, "david buchanan" <dmbuchanan at hotmail.com> wrote:

> 
> dmb said to Bo:
> It seems to me that you must be suffering from a very odd definition of
> "metaphysics" and "intellect". You seem to think the MOQ is reality itself
> rather than words about reality and so you are altering the MOQ so that it is
> construed as essentialism rather than philosophical mysticism, which is a
> vigorous form of anti-essentialism.
> 
> Bo replied:
> Yes if that is essentialism I'm very much so, but because DQ is part and
> parcel of the MOQ I wonder how you avoid being a Quality essentialist too ...
> without resorting to the Quality//DQ/SQ variety that even Pirsig finally had
> to abandon. 
> 
> dmb says:
> Pirsig's Quality is opposed to Plato's Quality precisely because it is not an
> essence. We can find this anti-essentialist move in what I take to be the
> philosophical and dramatic climaxes of ZAMM....
> 
> But why? Phædrus wondered. Why destroy areté? And no sooner had he asked the
> question than the answer came to him. Plato hadn't tried to destroy areté. He
> had encapsulated it; made a permanent, fixed Idea out of it; had converted it
> to a rigid, immobile Immortal Truth. He made areté the Good, the highest form,
> the highest Idea of all. It was subordinate only to Truth itself, in a
> synthesis of all that had gone before.
> 
> That was why the Quality that Phædrus had arrived at in the classroom had
> seemed so close to Plato's Good. Plato's Good was taken from the rhetoricians.
> Phædrus searched, but could find no previous cosmologists who had talked about
> the Good. That was from the Sophists. The difference was that Plato's Good was
> a fixed and eternal and unmoving Idea, whereas for the rhetoricians it was not
> an Idea at all. The Good was not a form of reality. It was reality itself,
> ever changing, ultimately unknowable in any kind of fixed, rigid way.
> 
> .....................
> 
> 
> What is good, Phædrus, and what is not good...need we ask anyone to tell us
> these things?
> 
> It is what he was saying months before in the classroom in Montana, a message
> Plato and every dialectician since him had missed, since they all sought to
> define the Good in its intellectual relation to things. But what he sees now
> is how far he has come from that. He is doing the same bad things himself. His
> original goal was to keep Quality undefined, but in the process of battling
> against the dialecticians he has made statements, and each statement has been
> a brick in a wall of definition he himself has been building around Quality.
> Any attempt to develop an organized reason around an undefined quality defeats
> its own purpose. The organization of the reason itself defeats the quality.
> Everything he has been doing has been a fool's mission to begin with.
> 
> On the third day he turns a corner at an intersection of unknown streets and
> his vision blanks out. When it returns he is lying on the sidewalk, people
> moving around him as if he were not there. He gets up wearily and mercilessly
> drives his thoughts to remember the way back to the apartment. They are
> slowing down. Slowing down. This is about the time he and Chris try to find
> the sellers of bunk beds for the children to sleep in. After that he does not
> leave the apartment.
> 
> He stares at the wall in a cross-legged position upon a quilted blanket on the
> floor of a bedless bedroom. All bridges have been burned. There is no way
> back. And now there is no way forward either.
> 
> For three days and three nights, Phædrus stares at the wall of the bedroom,
> his thoughts moving neither forward nor backward, staying only at the instant.
> His wife asks if he is sick, and he does not answer. His wife becomes angry,
> but Phædrus listens without responding. He is aware of what she says but is no
> longer able to feel any urgency about it. Not only are his thoughts slowing
> down, but his desires too. And they slow and slow, as if gaining an
> imponderable mass. So heavy, so tired, but no sleep comes. He feels like a
> giant, a million miles tall. He feels himself extending into the universe with
> no limit.
> 
> He begins to discard things, encumbrances that he has carried with him all his
> life. He tells his wife to leave with the children, to consider themselves
> separated. Fear of loathsomeness and shame disappear when his urine flows not
> deliberately but naturally on the floor of the room. Fear of pain, the pain of
> the martyrs is overcome when cigarettes burn not deliberately but naturally
> down into his fingers until they are extinguished by blisters formed by their
> own heat. His wife sees his injured hands and the urine on the floor and calls
> for help.
> 
> But before help comes, slowly, imperceptibly at first, the entire
> consciousness of Phædrus begins to come apart -- to dissolve and fade away.
> Then gradually he no longer wonders what will happen next. He knows what will
> happen next, and tears flow for his family and for himself and for this world.
> A fragment comes and lingers from an old Christian hymn, "You've got to cross
> that lonesome valley." It carries him forward. "You've got to cross it by
> yourself." It seems a Western hymn that belongs out in Montana.
> 
> "No one else can cross it for you," it says. It seems to suggest something
> beyond. "You've got to cross it by yourself."
> 
> He crosses a lonesome valley, out of the mythos, and emerges as if from a
> dream, seeing that his whole consciousness, the mythos, has been a dream and
> no one's dream but his own, a dream he must now sustain of his own efforts.
> Then even "he" disappears and only the dream of himself remains with himself
> in it.
> 
> And the Quality, the areté he has fought so hard for, has sacrificed for, has
> never betrayed, but in all that time has never once understood, now makes
> itself clear to him and his soul is at rest.
> 
> dmb continues:
> We see this same paradox in LILA, where Pirsig says that philosophical mystics
> have historically shared, "a common belief that the fundamental nature of
> reality is outside of language; that language splits things up into parts
> while the true nature of reality is undivided". He says, "Historically mystics
> have claimed that for a true understanding of reality metaphysics is too
> 'scientific'. Metaphysics is not reality. Metaphysics is NAMES about reality."
> He says, "The central reality of mysticism, the reality that Phaedrus had
> called 'Quality' in his first book, is not a metaphysical chess piece. Quality
> doesn't have to be defined. You understand it without definition, ahead of
> definition. Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to
> intellectual abstractions".
> 
> Let me put it this way, old friend. Dynamic Quality itself is reality but the
> MOQ is not reality. It is names about reality, a set of intellectual static
> patterns that describe reality with definitions and concepts. Like its rival,
> the MOQ is a product of that analytic knife. In other words, the
> deconstructive anti-essentialist moves against SOM have to be applied to the
> MOQ too. Its categories and concepts are not to be confused with the primary
> empirical reality from which they are derived any more than SOM's categories
> and concepts. I mean, Pirsig is consistently anti-essentialist even with
> respect to his own metaphysical system. Otherwise, the MOQ would be exempted
> from the art gallery analogy and the whole thing would otherwise be full of
> holes.
> 
> I think this is what gives rise to your SOLAQI. You're trying to solve
> problems that don't really exist in the MOQ. The problems are a product of
> your essentialist misinterpretation of the MOQ. Get rid of the essentialism
> and the problems will evaporate.
> 
> 
> 
> 
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