[MD] Good Faith ?

[Arlo Bensinger]

Steve, Ian, all...

Good discussion. My quick two cents is that underlying all this talk 
about "faith" is Pirsig's seminal point from ZMM, "All this is just 
an analogy". And when you start with that simple observation, you can 
see that the problems with "faith" occur as one tries to solidify or 
literalize the metaphor. Yes, at the root of our experience is an 
inescapable black hole of Godelian incompleteness. We must accept 
that the deeper and deeper we dig into the layers of language and 
symbolic representae we build to describe the world, the closer and 
closer we come to the inexpressable, unknowable, indescribable abyss. 
Towards this, yes, we cannot escape "faith" in that this core is 
always beyond our intellection, never capturable in symbolic language.

But as we move farther and farther from this one simple premise, we 
must remember that the symbolic edifice we construct in attempts to 
understand this abyssal core are always metaphoric. We can cast this 
core as "God", and write anthropomorphic stories in an attempt to 
paint aspects of this "God" into understandable symbolic code. These 
"myths" are always and everywhere undertaken out of a desire to, like 
art, approach the indescribable by creating symbolic markers in the 
hopes that these markers will serve to point people towards the 
moment of enlightenment, what Pirsig calls "pre-intellectual awareness".

In this way, "myths" are like "paintings" or "symphonies" or 
"sculpture". They are textual-artistic creations made in the hope of 
capturing, in the fleetingest of moments, a glimpse into that which 
can never be approached directly, that which can only be approached 
tangentally, that which can only ever be seen out of the corner of 
our eyes. And like visual or aural art, textual art serves a grand 
purpose of giving us the only means we have to see the "Godhead", 
"Quality", "the Tao".  Often this is expressed as "esoteric versus 
exoteric meaning". We know what the stories say, for example, but 
what do they mean? A literal read, an exoteric read, misses the art, 
misses the metaphor, and instead replaces the path to enlightenment 
with the path to power. No longer are "myths" textual paths to the 
undefinable core but instead paths for human power, control and the 
manipulation of others. We replace the fundamental, indefinable point 
of similarity with a hierarchy of supremacy.

We would think it idiotic to proclaim any painting, no matter how 
artful, to be "the One True Painting", and banish and burn all other 
paintings as wrong or evil. We would no more think to elevate Bach's 
"Die Kunst der Fuge" as "The One True Music" and wage a campaign to 
ridicule, ban and dismiss "infidels" and "barbarians" who dare listen 
to Beethoven, than we would lift ZMM up as "The One True Book" and 
look down at those who read Yoshikawa or Dostoevsky as inferior 
heathens. And yet this is precisely what occurs when exoteric, 
literal readings of "myth" trump a deeper exoteric, metaphoric read. 
Instead of facing the mono-myth with philosophic curiosity, we create 
hierarchical walls of power and supremacy (and ultimately alientation).

We can never escape the incompleteness, and we must have faith 
ultimately in the power of our metaphors to point as best as possible 
towards this void, but while faith built upon this recognition will 
produce ever-better artful glances into the face of god, faith built 
upon the literalization of any one given metaphor will only lead to 
power, hierarchies, and a hindering of human enlightenment.

To this end, I have no problem describing the "Theory of Gravity" as 
a work of art, any more than I have of describing the Occidental 
texts or Lakota stories as works of art. When seen from a metaphoric, 
esoteric perspective, it is like traversing a large museum, with 
different representations undertaken to point towards that which 
ultimately can never be seen. And while one must, ultimately, have 
faith in the process of art, placing one's faith fully in one 
particular work of art moves one away from the Godhead, the Void, the 
Abyss, Quality, the Tao rather than towards it.

My two cents, anyways...

Arlo