[MD] What is SOM?

[david buchanan]

Krimel said to dmb:
All I keep asking you to do is state honestly what you think mystical experiences can tell us about our place in the world. ...The point I have repeatedly asked you to address is what does your "enlightened" view of mystical experience tell you? How does it build upon or supplant the insights derived from a scientific understanding.

dmb says:
Well, you've mocked and challenged the idea of mysticism. Its romanticism, it resorts to the supernatural, its new age nonsense, its a misreading of James, it can't offer insights into physics (huh?) and probably some other stuff I don't recall at the moment. I guess you could call them questions, but I still don't think you're sincerely interested in learning anything. You're just trying to stump me, probably because you'd like to change the subject. That's okay, I'll just pretend you're sincerely interested. Feel free to change the thread name to "What is Mysticism" when you reply with eager comments and further questions, oh great seeker.

If the Buddhist are right enlightenment extinguishes a certain kind of suffering, the end of clinging and grasping and striving and the opening of a more spontaneous way of being. I think they have a point and you can see this in the MOQ too. The code of Art, the emphasis on dynamic quality and the analogy where the dirty old sock gets turned inside out. But I guess your questions are more specific than than. You want to know what we can learn from it, what it can tell us about ourselves and how that relates to our scientific understanding of the world. Is that about right?

I'll start with the science, specifically the difference between the traditional empiricism of SOM and the expanded empiricism of the MOQ. Here you'll see that Pirsig subscribes to the traditional form but then he also goes further. This does not supplant the insights dervied from science. It supplants the limits which had been placed on empirical science, thereby expanding the range of possibility for further scientific insights. This would obviously be a case of building upon what has already been achieved. 

"The MOQ subscribes to what is called empiricism. It claims that all legitimate human knowledge arises from the senses or by thinking about what the sense provide. Most empiricists deny the validity of any knowledge gained through imagination, authority, tradition, or purely theoretical reasoning. They regard fields such as art, morality, religion, and metaphysics as unverifiable. The MOQ varies from this by saying that the values of art and morality and even religious mysticism are verifiable, and that in the past they have been excluded for metaphysical reasons, not empirical reasons."

As you know, later in the book he adopts James's Radical Empiricism. There we see him supplant the same limits of sensory empiricism by saying that experience of every kind has to be accounted for in a legitimate philosophical account of the world. Conversely, we can make no claims about anything that is beyond or outside of experience. In fact, he says, nearly all the fake problems and metaphysical fictions in philosophy are the result of ignoring certain kinds of experience. And this is not just about their expanded empiricism and its relation to science, what it would mean for science. James's "pure experience" is very similar to Pirsig's "primary empirical reality" and they both talk about this undifferentiated awareness in terms of being prior to the distinction between subjects and objects. And there are many kinds of mystical, but Oneness, unity, identity, unification, wholeness and words like that are a recurring theme in the accounts from far and wide. The terms that these pragmatists use, such as pure, undivided, immediate and undifferentiated, also announce this theme. You know, the Buddha walked up to a hot dog stand and said, "make me one with everything".

When the mystical reality is the primary empirical reality, you have an empirically based mysticism that simply doesn't need anything supernatural. This has a way of uniting science and mysticism. They explore different areas of experience, both they're both based in empirical reality. The problem of the scientific verification of mysticism, the disciplined study of mystical experience is difficult. If the professor in my department are right, those projects require interdisciplinary methodologies, team work across disciplines and interpretive rather than observational skills. You also need people who can have a mystical experience, who have some actual experience and training. This is a tall order and its not a simple matter. But its simple in principle. 

And what does this undivided experience tell us? Well, this experience is characterized as pre-intellectual, pre-conceptual so it does not impart intellectual truths or cognitive meaning. Its characterized as a state of consciousness that is free of these things. Although I think the general idea is that mystical experience puts such "truth" into perspective. It has a way of knocking the naive realism out of a guy. It doesn't have to be a full blown Buddha-like experience. Many lesser altered states of perception have a way of knocking loose the static patterns through which we normally see the world too. Hurricanes, art and LSD, for example. Its always good to look around at other ways of being and otherwise try to overcome one's own provincialisms, right? Well this is just like that, only more so. 

You could say that Modern Western scientific worldview is one big collective tight-ass control-freak ego-maniac (No, Ian this is not about you). And mysticism teaches us to lighten up, to loosen up and get groovy. I mean, on some level I really think its about making our world less stuffy, less square and more beautiful. The pragmatist thinks philosophy has to make a difference in actual experience or it ain't worth much. And opening up this realm of experience, and the re-examination of the assumptions that prohibited it, would alter the culture in all kinds of ways. Heidegger and Pirsig and others make a case that SOM has been a disaster for the culture. They both make a case that it narrows our way of seeing the world in such a way that the most delicious stuff is rarely tasted or even closed off altogether. They talk about alienation from nature and each other, about the pointless, frantic, fuck-you world of consumer culture. Apparently, there is an entire sub-field in Heidegger studies that examines the link between this alienation and environmental degradation. I'd imagine there are any number of ways this view could be applied to real world problems.

How many people in the united states take medicine for anxiety? How many people medicate themselves for it? How many addicts, including alcoholics? How many murders and suicides were there last year? Why can millions and millions believe that Jesus is coming back to see us and that evolution is a hoax? Ever see "Koyaanisqatsi"? The content of the film largely consists of scenes from ordinary American life in the city in time lapse photography. The title of the film is a word that means, "the wrong way to live". I mean, there seems to be quite a lot of crazy bullshit and misery DESPITE all the comfort that technology and science provide. I love my car, furnace and water heater but then again they say we're presently experiencing the largest extinction event since the dinosaurs died out. I'm not saying that there is a magic bullet, cure-all but I think a lot of the problem come out of the suffering that the Buddhists are talking about. Chasing mechanical rabbits is just the most banal and mundane form of this insanity.

Personally, I really like the way it unifies things, the way all my interests sort of feed into mysticism or grow out of it. The way radical empiricism expands the range of science and includes mystical experience at the same time, as explained above, is one example. Last semester I took the philosophy of art and the philosophy of religion, to take another example, and both courses assigned Plato's Ion for the first reading. We used it in art to see the way Plato's demand for intelligibility puts a certain spin on what art is, to demote art. We used it in religion to see the way he does the same to religion. This is the same thing he does to the sophists, the mystics. Basically, that's where the dynamic got knocked out of everything and "truth" became a fixed and eternal thing. So I'm interested to ask the question, what do these things look like when you undo Plato and put the dynamic back. 

And even more personally, I've had some experiences that could probably go in that category. I guess they feel like some kind of growth spurt. Insights and epiphanies powerful enough to shake things up and re-arrange the attitude, a new gestalt. Feels like an avalanche, like weight shifting of its own accord. Once it felt like I heard the killer joke. Anyone who heard that laughter must have thought I was insane. I think this sort of thing happens to people all the time. Its completely natural and there's no good reason to dismiss it. It sort of happens in the center of your being. It can change the way you feel about everything. Sadly, we hardly know what to do with these experiences or even how to talk about them. And again, I what do these things look like when you undo Plato and put the dynamic back into human development. What if our religions were all about cultivating the mystical experience, creativity and a more spontaneous life.

Wouldn't that just beat the shit out of Pat Robertson's religion?

 



 
_________________________________________________________________
Get ideas on sharing photos from people like you.  Find new ways to share.
http://www.windowslive.com/explore/photogallery/posts?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_Photo_Gallery_082008