[MD] Chance v. Dynamic Quality

[Arlo Bensinger]

[Andre]
Thanks Arlo. I have just finished my response to Platt. I would also 
value your comments if I have strayed anywhere.

[Arlo]
I'll try to keep this focused on one of your final thoughts. "Some 
profound/ religious/ mystical experiences do not occur every day." 
You say this in support or agreement with Platt's notion that "DQ is 
not everyday experience".

What's important to remind yourself is that those experiences COULD 
occur at any point, at any time, from sitting on a train commuting, 
to working in your garden, to just laying in your bed in the dark. It 
is NOT that "DQ is not present", DQ is ALWAYS present, because, as 
you cite Ant earlier.... "Dq 'is a referring term for immediate experience'".

This is where I think we may be parting ways, if you don't fully 
accept this. DQ IS immediate experience, it is the ALWAYS PRESENT 
NOW. It is not that some experiences are "DQ and others are not, it 
is that ALL experience is the moment of DQ. Every moment of every 
mundane day contains the seed, the probability, that you will respond 
unpredictably, unprecedentedly, to some abstract sense of 
"betterness" in that moment. You may have analogue upon analogue upon 
analogue, and you may have a very, very, very high probability for 
responding using one of these analogues, but those analogues are 
merely "patterns of preferred responses".

What I am getting at, and what I believe is the core point of value 
in the MOQ's philosophy, is that Quality IS experience. Experience is 
not a response to some external Quality,  experience IS Quality, it 
IS the Quality moment of zero time. And this moment is always and 
forever DQ. Our analogues are outgrowths of this, patterns of 
response we have found valuable, and so they attain greater and 
greater probabilities.

No, many days profound experiences do not occur. But they could, at 
any point, in any situation, from repairing a motorcycle to building 
a rotisserie. THAT was the point of ZMM. Quality is not some external 
"God" as Platt would have it, nor is it some "outside force" we 
merely respond to. Quality IS the moment of everyday lived experience.

Dynamic Quality is the undefined, the uncertainty of the moment. It 
is dynamic quality that keeps the universe "alive", as without 
uncertainty everything would be a robotic, static, unchanging stasis. 
It is not some rareity that magically appears to some people some of 
the time under some situations. It permeates the cosmos as the 
zero-point, the "moment of immediate experience", and despite the 
patterning of responses to this experience is always there providing 
some uncertainty, some indefinable, some probability that something 
unexpected, new, outrageous, different, thing MAY happen.

Dynamic Quality is immediate experience. Ant is fully correct in 
saying this. And it is the profound core of the MOQ. And if you 
accept that, then you will see that "immediate experience", the 
zero-moment, is "always" not "sometimes". Every moment of every day 
is a zero-moment. And despite your analogues, despite years and years 
of responding in one very probable way, without warning at any point 
that moment CAN produce "profound/ religious/ mystical experiences". 
To increase the probability of this, Pirsig suggests ways we can 
overcome our analogues, ways we can increase the probability that in 
that zero-moment we will see something we have never seen.

If you side with Platt that DQ is some external, intermittently 
applicable, force we merely "respond to" sometimes when it graces us 
with its presence, then you are heading down a path of inconsistency 
and illogic that holds no water.

In LILA Pirsig continues the hot stove analogy. "When the person who 
sits on the stove first discovers his low-Quality situation, the 
front edge of his experience is Dynamic. He does not think, "This 
stove is hot," and then make a rational decision to get off. A "dim 
perception of he knows not what" gets him off Dynamically. Later he 
generates static patterns of thought to explain the situation." (LILA)

"The front edge of his experience is dynamic". This is not unique to 
sitting on a hot stove. This is true for all time. The front edge of 
experience is dynamic. This is precisely what Ant is saying, 
correctly, and it is THE power of the MOQ.

Right after this Pirsig writes, "But mystic learning goes in the 
opposite direction and tries to hold to the ongoing Dynamic edge of 
all experience". Right there Platt should get on his knees and 
apologize to all the angels whose wings fell off because of his last 
post. I'm going to highlight this.

"The ongoing dynamic edge of ALL experience". Not "some". Not "rare 
occasions". Not "here and there". ALL. Period.

In ZMM, Pirsig came very close to static/dynamic spit that would be 
LILA when he wrote about classic/romantic quality using a train 
analogy. I'm going to take bits from this passage, and point to where 
in LILA he says the same thing. I'll use the whole passage later.

"Romantic reality is the cutting edge of experience.... Value, the 
leading edge of reality, is no longer an irrelevant offshoot of 
structure. Value is the predecessor of structure. It's the 
preintellectual awareness that gives rise to it." (ZMM)

Here Pirsig switches from "romantic reality" to "value" as the 
leading edge of the train. Its not an unimportant switch, as it 
precursors exactly the way the analogy becomes LILA's central metaphor.

Romantic quality.. value... is "pre-intellectual awareness". In LILA, 
he calls this "pre-intellectual awareness" Dynamic Quality.

"Dynamic Quality is the pre-intellectual cutting edge of reality, the 
source of all things, completely simple and always new." (LILA)

Now go back to the ZMM passage and substitute in DQ for "romantic 
quality" and SQ "classic knowledge", and you'll see the clearest 
point where Pirsig pre-establishes the MOQ in ZMM.

One more small point before the entire passage. In ZMM, in talking 
about this cutting edge of reality, Pirsig says, "The leading edge 
contains all the infinite possibilities of the future. It contains 
all the history of the past. Where else could they be contained?"

He mirrors this sentiment exactly in LILA. "Dynamic Quality, the 
source of all things, the pre-intellectual cutting edge of reality, 
always appears as "spur of the moment." Where else could it appear?" (LILA)

It is no coincidence. The train analogy works for RQ/CQ, but it is a 
more apt analogy for DQ/SQ, and I think Pirsig sensed this early on.

So here is the passage, with terminology updates, with some points in 
brackets and some words emphasized.

In terms of the analogy, static quality, the knowledge taught by the 
Church of Reason, is the engine and all the boxcars. All of them and 
everything that's in them. If you subdivide the train into parts you 
will find no Dynamic Quality anywhere. And unless you're careful it's 
easy to make the presumption that's all the train there is. This 
isn't because Dynamic Quality is nonexistent or even unimportant. 
It's just that so far the definition of the train is STATIC [he even 
uses the term here!] and purposeless. This was what I was trying to 
get at back in South Dakota when I talked about two whole dimensions 
of existence. It's two whole ways of looking at the train.

Dynamic Quality, in terms of this analogy, isn't any "part" of the 
train. It's the leading edge of the engine ["Dynamic Quality is the 
pre-intellectual cutting edge of reality" (LILA)], a two-dimensional 
surface of no real significance unless you understand that the train 
isn't a STATIC entity at all. A train really isn't a train if it 
can't go anywhere. In the process of examining the train and 
subdividing it into parts we've inadvertently stopped it, so that it 
really isn't a train we are examining. That's why we get stuck.

The real train of knowledge isn't a static entity that can be stopped 
and subdivided. It's always going somewhere. On a track called 
Quality. And that engine and all those 120 boxcars are never going 
anywhere except where the track of Quality takes them; and Dynamic 
Quality, the leading edge of the engine, takes them along that track.

Dynamic Quality is the cutting edge of experience. It's the leading 
edge of the train of knowledge that keeps the whole train on the 
track. Static quality is only the collective memory of where that 
leading edge has been. At the leading edge there are no subjects, no 
objects, only the track of Quality ahead, and if you have no formal 
way of evaluating, no way of acknowledging this Quality, then the 
entire train has no way of knowing where to go. You don't have pure 
reason...you have pure confusion. The leading edge is where 
absolutely all the action is. The leading edge contains all the 
infinite POSSIBILITIES of the future. It contains all the history of 
the past. Where else could they be contained?

The past cannot remember the past. The future can't generate the 
future. The cutting edge of this instant right here and now is always 
nothing less than the totality of everything there is.

Value, the leading edge of reality, is no longer an irrelevant 
offshoot of structure. Value is the predecessor of structure. It's 
the preintellectual awareness that gives rise to it. Our structured 
reality is preselected on the basis of value, and really to 
understand structured reality requires an understanding of the value 
source from which it's derived." (ZMM)

End passage.

You can see by the end of this passage one doesn't even need to 
substitute LILA terms for ZMM terms. It is evident that in this 
analogy Pirsig is pointing ahead to LILA, to a split that transcends 
RQ/CQ, and gives an analogy that maps BETTER to his latter terms than 
his immediate ones. We also see him adopting the term "static" in 
this analogy to refer to the boxcars. And, as I've shown, the key 
descriptors for RQ in this analogy map directly and verbatim to the 
key descriptors he gives for DQ in LILA.

This passage also demonstrates two key points. One, "DQ is immediate 
experience". Two, it contains "all the infinite POSSIBILITIES of the future".