[MD] Mind-body practice

[skutvik at online.no]

Dwai.

Long ago (2 January) you said:

> I am in agreement with this. If I understood Pirsig's thesis  
> correctly, social patterns will try to retain their configuration and 
> resist change. ie all static patterns will naturally try to resist change.
> Dynamic  quality will introduce entropy into the static system.
> Hmm...thermodynamics?
 
Bo now:
Entropy may be more appropriate term than "evolution", the latter 
conveys the idea that (for instance) the mammal organism is better 
biology than the amoeba. This isn't so rather more complex and 
thereby more unstable. This is necessary and good in the overall 
Quality context because for the next level to form its parent must 
spawn a pattern unstable or dynamic enough to break free.     

Bo before: 
> > The "greater reality" is of course the Quality Reality and it can't be
> > "known by intellectual means" (seen from the intellectual level) that's
> > the whole point. Intellect is a static level, blind  to the "greater
> > Quality Reality", this is what I have been banging on for years, but
> > most people insist on a "dynamic intellect" that can harbour all kinds
> > of ideas included the MOQ. The MOQ applies intelligent analysis, but no
> > longer in intellect's service. I don't know what meditation is exactly,
> > but I have spent a lot of "energy- work" on loosening intellect's ties..

Dwai:
> I would tend to agree with what you have articulated. But yet we try...
> Meditation is energy-work -- to break the knots that have formed in  our
> intellects.

Bo now: 
Intellect in a MOQ context is a static level and the "knots" are 
intellect's static value, not anything that can be loosened or mended 
and replaced with "better" knots. This is the mind-like intellectual level 
that has haunted the MOQ from its start.  

> In the Indian tradition (and I mean India-Indian), the mind is just 
> another sensory faculty and isn't put on as great a pedestal that it  is
> put in the West. And there is a lot more abstraction of the mind  (Manas,
> Chitta, Vivek, etc) there-in.

Even this "mind" seems to be the nesting-place of abstractions and I 
feel SOM's tug. Listen Dwai - you seem capable of the understanding. 
The MOQ rejects the SOM thus there is no fundamental subject/object 
split, no mind contrasted to matter, no inner world contrasted to an 
outer ...etc. Yet, this distinction is far too valuable to be thrown away, 
it's modernity, science, progress everything that has lifted existence 
out of a sea of superstition and poverty (this "sea" is the social level, 
that once lifted existence up from the biological dog-eat-dog jungle, so 
good at a lower level, but let that rest). As you possibly know Pirsig's 
way of integrating SOM is to call the two lower levels "concrete" (to 
stay with that dichotomy) and the two upper "abstract". This is 
cumbersome and not really credible (still, let that rest too) my SOL 
interpretation says that the intellectual level is the S/O distinction, all of 
it, every bit. Most people seem so stuck in SOM that the 4th. level as 
mind sticks like glue*). A world without a real S/O-like divide is simply 
inconceivable, the notion of the S/O only existing as a static good is 
equally inconceivable. My understanding of the Eastern tradition has 
always been (at least after the MOQ) that the mind/matter divide is 
regarded in a similar way, as a useful distinction yet without any 
deeper reality. Is this anything that jells with your understanding of the 
East- West chasm?       

The rest of what you wrote was higly interesting, but for now.

Bo