[MD] How to Be Rid of SOM, Forever

[MarshaV]

Wonderful John!  

One July I spent two sunny weeks (business trip) in Oregon, and it was very
beautiful.  I spent one of the weekend days driving down the coast and back.
Gorgeous coastline!     

I have just one question. Do you need to turn over all those arising
thoughts to awareness?  Of course thoughts like "Bear!!!" will be insistent,
but most are not worthy of center stage.  Imho.   


Marsha




-----Original Message-----
From: moq_discuss-bounces at lists.moqtalk.org
[mailto:moq_discuss-bounces at lists.moqtalk.org] On Behalf Of John Carl
Sent: Saturday, July 18, 2009 5:42 AM
To: moq_discuss at moqtalk.org
Subject: [MD] How to Be Rid of SOM, Forever

"And Lila's battle is everybody's battle, you know?  Sometimes the insane
and the contrarians and the ones who are closest to suicide are the most
valuable people society has.  They may be precursors of social change.
They've taken the burdens of the culture onto themselves, and in solving
their own problems, they're solving the culture's problems as well."


John Carl sat on a rock in the stream.  It was a very hot day but the water
was cool and the trees and covered bridge of Oregon Creek State Park
provided plenty of shade.   He'd go back to work later when it wasn't so
flippin' hot.  For now, he had nothing to do but sit and try to figure out
if he could experience some pre-intellectual experience.
He wasn't having much luck.  Thoughts arose, thoughts fled away.  Birds sang
and flitted close to him, he was sitting so quietly.  He noticed something
very beautiful happening, right under his feet.  Water spiders in the
stream, close to the edge of the shore, mainly visible through the dimples
of light their feet made in the water and the reflection of the sun
filtering through the leaves of the trees.  They were performing in a sort
of insectian line-dance, evenly spaced and darting forward suddenly, one
chasing another, trying different positions in the line waiting for some
nutritive speck to come floating by and investigating every promising speck
within their range.  Coordinated poetry in motion.  All the while, the
shimmering leaves cast patterns of shadow on the surface where they lived
and had their being.  The whole thing was so beautiful and fine.  He thought
to himself, "Why should I kill all my intellectual patterns?  I like
intellectual patterns.  It makes sense to kill the ones that have got me
statically bound to a dead end philosophy, but it doesn't really make sense
to kill my perfectly good intellect any more than it makes sense to kill my
biology."

His wife had ordered a couple of books from e-bay, ZAMM and Lila.  Books
he'd read before but lost in lending and destroyed by time. His oldest
daughter was reading ZAMM, really just starting to get into it and full of
question.  He was glad and proud.  He'd flipped open Lila and it fell open
near the end, Chapter 29 - Phaedrus dealing with Lila's arising from
catatonic numbness and discussing how her problems could be solved by a
metaphysics which recognized Value.  Something fell into place as he read
the words.  The problem with SOM is there's no place for Value.  Subjects
and Objects and Intellect are not the problem.  Lack of Value is the
problem.  SOM isn't a problem, Valueless Metaphysics is the problem.  He
thought to himself some more.  It's all so negative, this constant arguing
on the right way to think, what should be the focus is a good way to think.
 Using the tools of intellect in a positive way, Pirsig, like Royce was
portraying a positive orientation by showing how to bring the Good back to
life, not this intellectual critique of intellectual critiquing.  That was
the key.   Stop saying "SOM".  Just ignore the phrase.  Let IT die a natural
death and if it refused, then kill it.  Here was an intellectual pattern
that kept reasserting itself simply because so much discussion about how
wrong it is keeps giving it energy to live.

He remembered in ZAMM how relieved he'd felt when the author turned from the
intellectual critique, and toward the positive goal of how to live a good
life.  He'd felt an emotional boost in that passage.  A sense of having
arrived at a hard won destination.
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