[MD] The relativity of the MoQ

[Arlo Bensinger]

[Arlo]
This combines my resposes to Marsha and John.

[Marsha]
I figure you're about the age of my kids..

[Arlo]
I am 41.

[Marsha]
I still have no idea where Andre's "slightly worried" is directed, 
especially as it was in response to a post I sent.  Do you have any 
idea?  180-degree Zen and 360-degree Zen seems to be some kind of 
abstract, symbolic Zen language.

[Arlo]
I think (and this is just a guess) Andre's worriedness stems from 
thinking that if understanding LILA requires "enlightenment", then we 
can pretty much forget about it ever being popularly understood. I 
think historically many have seen "enlightenment" as something that 
happens to only a few, with the rest of the "flock" depending on the 
more "understandable" words the enlightened is able to describe for 
us. I see this differently. I see "enlightenment" as something 
readily accessible to all, with the main hinderance being the very 
*idea* that it is something left for the rare, gifted, superior 
"prophet". In other words, like Pirsig desribes allegorically in ZMM, 
"enlightenment knocks and we say, 'go away, we are awaiting the words 
of someone who is enlightened'".

I am not that familiar with all Zen terminology. Ant may be better 
(for one) to address the specific meanings of X-degree Zen. I think 
Pirsig is using this to refer to (1) people who take enlightenment 
and go sit a cave as a hermit (180-degree) and (2) people who come 
back to the social world and try to share what it is they feel they 
have found (360-degree). In this case, Pirsig was already at 
360-degree Zen the moment he decided to pen ZMM. But the narrative 
contains describe a man who finds enlightenment in ZMM (180), and who 
proposes a better way to view the world in LILA (360).

[Marsha]
Do you think one needs to join a Zen community, to 'get it'?  I might 
have thought so at one time, but I do not anymore.

[Arlo]
No, I don't either. Zen is a path, but it is not the only way. Pirsig 
has demonstrated his particular involvement in opening a Zen Center. 
But I think while such a place can be very helpful in achieving 
vision, thinking of it as a necessity is wrong. What I do think is if 
we look cross-culturally at all the variety of traditions that 
peoples have used to scaffold "enlightenment", we can distill certain 
similarities that I'd argue would be things we should consider as 
worthy in promoting enlightenment. While no one "thing" is 
in-themself mandatory, overall I'd say they suggest a pretty strong path.

[John]
And I don't see "enlightenment" as any real big deal with people 
learning how to levitate or break boards with their heads, but the 
simple state of realization of one's social/intellectual conditioning 
and freedom from SOM.

[Arlo]
I agree. It is the paradox of Magritte's False Mirror.

[John]
My main point these days, community process, is that this goal is 
more easily reached through a collaborative and communal process of specific
structure, rather than on an individual, good luck to ya, hope you're 
brilliant, catch as catch can, trust in individual efforts.

[Arlo]
Agree. I think if we look to the various traditions that people have 
historically and globally used to scaffold enlightenment, we see that 
it is always a socially-embedded and supportive process. Even the 
solitary Vision Quest comes after a long enculturation and social 
preparing for the event, and often begins and ends with a social ritual.

[John]
Is there a functional difference between "reificiation" and 
"objectification"?  I'm still slowly working my way through my final 
vocabulary.

[Arlo]
Probably not. I use reification because I see the process as ongoing 
and active, but I suspect you mean something similar. The analogy I 
always use are two religions killing each over whose God said "thou 
shall not kill". I also consider this to be around the fault line of 
"esoteric/exoteric" understanding of what will always be "analogies". 
And I think that a good argument can be made regarding 
"enlightenment" and having an esoteric rather than exoteric 
understanding of (what would be recognized as) the metaphors and 
analogies of one's enculturation.

[John]
But that thing you are talking about, I'm used to thinking of as 
"idolatry" or "mistaking the map for the territory".  And it seems to 
me that it's prevalence in society and on this list is a result of an 
educational system that teaches information rather than skills.

[Arlo]
Well, I'd agree, but I'd change the wording. Bloom's taxonomy lists 
six hierarchical skills from the base "knowledge" (roughly I'd 
associate this with "information retrieval") to the pinnacle 
"evaluation" (roughly I'd call this "critical thinking"). We most 
certainly suffer from a system that focuses on lower-level cognitive 
skills, and I suspect this is largely due to the "ease of assessment" 
of these. Bush's "No Child" pandered to these low-level skills, and 
pushed a system that taught kids to memorize but do little more.

[John]
Well best of all is to not get shot in the first place!  Grab 'em young, I say.


[Arlo]
Sure... think outside the box and break my little analogy. :-)