[MD] Chance v. Dynamic Quality

[MarshaV]

Hi Arlo,

Another great post!!!  Andre's too!  I will be surprised if he 
doesn't agree with you.


Marsha




At 02:13 PM 3/20/2009, you wrote:
>[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".
>
>
>
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