[MD] In and out of intellect.

[Christoffer Ivarsson]

Everything is Quality. SOM is Quality, and it didn't destroy anything.
They thing it allegedly destroyed was never there, because if it was there 
it wouldn't be it!





Yes, Andre - Hi! Here is my thoughs on your post - or really on the sophists 
and everythign in general

[Andre]
> Hi Chris and Ron and All
>
> Just thought I'd jump in because this is interesting and intriguing.
> Just a thought: according to Pirsig, and loads of historians, the Sophists
> did teach arete which Pirsig equals with Quality.
> It sounds Chris,(and correct me if I misinterpret your meaning) that,
> because this arete was valued by the social level it is to be seen as
> something less valued?? Is this what you mean?
>
> This teaching (and understanding/experience of Quality at that time) took
> place (more or less over a period of time before a 'proper' intellectual
> level had emerged from the social level) in a way , I would want to call 
> it,
> uncontaminated-by-intellect.It was not defined because there were no
> subjects and objects, no mind or matter. It was pure Quality, unmediated,
> un-dissected by intellect.

[Chris]
 I don't agree really. First of I don't think the teaching was free from 
intellectual values, and by intellectual values I mean valuing Truth. Only, 
by this time, Truth wasn't defined, encapsulated, as it would later be by 
many philosophers and made into a paradigm by Aristotle above all others. 
Thus the exploration of things/the world/man7language etc that may have been 
partly motivated by unrealized intellectual level would have been dominated 
by social level values. To clarify: the ventures into expanding human 
knowledge was governed mainly by what was socially Good, since intellectual 
Good had not yet been properly defined, as it would later be in the word 
"Truth" and the way this would come to be looked at in the tradition that 
later developed.

[Andre]
> This whole notion of 'truth' was undefined and I hope to think at that 
> time
> at least on equal par with Good.
> I think that is why Pirsig compared it to the Tao. It was 'intellect' as
> Bodvar suggests that fucked it all up...later. And then it needed to be
> retrieved intellectualy, which is an impossibility...it is direct
> experience, from the pre-intellectual 'era'. That's why we must kill all
> intellectual patterns to get a glimps of it.

[Chris]
Even though I don't agree with Bodvar on the point of SOM being synonymous 
with the intellectual level, I do share his view that looking at SOM (and 
for that matter all philosophy and subsequent science that developed in the 
western world) as something that usurped and suppressed a Quality 
Understanding  - is wrong. We mustn't nurture some unrealistic view that 
before SOM people saw things undivided and pure - the Quest for 
Understanding is apparently present as far back as we have historical 
testimony, but what we CAN see (at least a MOQist) is that this quest was 
heavily - if not totally - dominated by social level values. Only when Truth 
can stand by itself, as a Value in it self - is the intellectual level 
realized.

We may also examine the eastern schools of Buddhist and Taoist philosophy 
and see that in a way they are also motivated by the intellectual level  - 
though not using SOM thinking the same way we do.  I believe the reason 
people turn to any philosophy (that may or may not be SOM and may or may not 
be turned into a religion) is because they are motivated by the Need For 
Understanding  - The core of the intellectual level.

We may say that the above mentioned schools brings the practitioner closer 
to a Quality understanding than SOM-schools of thought, but that would be 
wrong to say really. Perhaps we could say that these schools brings one 
closer to DQ, but since we cannot know anything about DQ and since - just 
like with the Tao -there can be no "understanding" in the manner we mean it 
really isn't meaningful to say this. It is different schools of thought, 
motivated by the same value, and the only difference is that within the one 
tradition we believe that Truth can be expressed and found, in the other we 
say that this is not so "be silent".


Everything is Quality. SOM is Quality, and it didn't destroy anything. They 
thing it allegedly destroyed was never there, because if it was there it 
wouldn't be it!

(by the way Andre, I read your "Instant karma" post - I liked it, and I will 
write a reply soon I think - so much to do, so little time!)


Friendly
Chris