[MD] The Quest for Quality

[Ham Priday]

[Marsha]:
> My beef is your insinuation that Quality, which is beyond
> definition, needs to be associated with words like:  primary,
> first, or purpose.  To call Quality the primary source is an
> attempt to make it static, turn it into a static pattern of value.
> You go too far.

Ah, yes.  The infamous and ill-conceived "static/dynamic" split.
(I might as well get this off my chest as well.)  Patterns, like movement 
and change, are differentiated events which only occur in a relational 
system.  Relation is the nature of physical reality which is secondary to 
the primary source.

I never understood why the Pirsigians insist that their fundamental reality 
must be dynamic, while its derived patterns are static.  This seems 
illogical to me.  Even in the mysticism of the Orientals, what is absolute 
and whole is unchanging, whereas the mind interprets it as a flow of 
pluralistic events.

You see, Marsha, for the essentialist Essence is static and immutable, 
impervious to the conditions of finitude.  It is existence which is 
differentiated and transient.  And this is because the locus of subjective 
experience -- individuated awareness -- is detached from the essential 
source, thus limited in its perspective.  In biblical terms, we "see through 
a glass, darkly."  What we see is a finitely differentiated "reduction" of 
the absolute source.

Tell me, Marsha: Does Pirsig acknowledge DQ as the primary source?  IS there 
a primary source in the MoQ?  If you can't answer this  affirmatively, then 
I would submit to you that the Quality hierarchy has no fundamental reality 
and is merely a paradigm for experiential existence.

--Ham