[MD] Thus spoke Lila

[david buchanan]

Horse said:
How do you do this then, [understanding the mystic reality] as all understanding is post-experience and intellectual? What is pre-logical, pre-conceptual is not knowledge, because knowledge (knowing) is post-experiential and intellectual.


dmb says:
That's right. The mystic reality is neither static nor intellectual. It can't be defined because it is prior to any conceptual understanding. That's why the MOQ's first distinction is the line drawn between DQ and sq, but we can already see this line in ZAMM, where Pirsig says:

"The mythos-over-logos argument points to the fact that each child is born as ignorant as any caveman. What keeps the world from reverting to the Neandertal with each generation is the continuing, ongoing mythos, transformed into logos but still mythos, the huge body of common knowledge that unites our minds as cells are united in the body of man. To feel that one is not so united, that one can accept or discard this mythos as one pleases, is not to understand what the mythos is.
"There is only one kind of person, Phædrus said, who accepts or rejects the mythos in which he lives. And the definition of that person, when he has rejected the mythos, Phædrus said, is "insane." To go outside the mythos is to become insane. — ... Insanity is the terra incognita surrounding the mythos. And he knew! He knew the Quality he talked about lay outside the mythos.
"Now it comes! Because Quality is the generator of the mythos. That's it. That's what he meant when he said, "Quality is the continuing stimulus which causes us to create the world in which we live. All of it. Every last bit of it."...The mythos is a building of analogues upon analogues upon analogues. These fill the collective consciousness of all communicating mankind. Every last bit of it. The Quality is the track that directs the train. What is outside the train, to either side...that is the terra incognita of the insane. He knew that to understand Quality he would have to leave the mythos. That's why he felt that slippage. He knew something was about to happen."

dmb continues:
It's important to see that this mystic reality or DQ, even though it is outside of definition and intellectually unknowable, is known directly in our lived experience. In these passages from ZAMM it is the "continuing stimulus", it is the "track that directs" the mythos, our collective consciousness and body of common knowledge. In Lila it is "the immediate flux of life" and "the cutting edge of scientific progress itself". In both books we get a picture of DQ and sq working simultaneously together. The whole train (mythos as logos) moves on the track of Quality. Dynamic Quality is "an integral part of science". It's what gets the mechanic unstuck. 

Remember the scene in ZAMM wherein Phaedrus clobbers the Chairman's "Truth" by pointing out that even Socrates thinks it's only an analogy. The analogy in question depicts the soul as two horses and their driver. One horse represents reason and the other stands for the passions. Reason would lead the driver upward and onward toward the truth, while the naughty, naughty passionate horse would lead the driver downward to ruin. The driver's task, in this analogy, is to rein in the passions and allow reason to guide their course. As I see it, the MOQ rejects this formulation and says instead that the two horses are DQ and sq and they should work together. And this is at the heart of the MOQ's expansion of rationality.

"In the past our common universe of reason has been in the process of escaping, rejecting the romantic, irrational world of prehistoric man. It's been necessary since before the time of Socrates to reject the passions, the emotions, in order to free the rational mind for an understanding of nature's order which was as yet unknown. Now it's time to further an understanding of nature's order by reassimilating those passions which were originally fled from. The passions, the emotions, the affective domain of man's consciousness, are a part of nature's order too. The central part." (ZAMM p. 294)

The idea is to improve our horsepower, to integrate all our faculties, to stop working against our own feelings and instincts so neurotically. It's about getting your heart and head together because things are much cooler and much smarter when groovy and square move together. It's about being more sensitive to the primary empirical reality, to direct everyday experience, to the immediate flux of life. Even though this isn't known intellectually, it is a felt and known in lived experience. It's not about thinking with your guts or giving in to our biological instincts and urges, although they're going to have a vote whether we like it or not and knowing yourself means, in part, knowing what they know and what they want. Interestingly Lila, the character, has or is Quality of two distinct kinds; biologically and Dynamically. Yea baby, she had quality all night long. It's interesting because one can easily be mistaken for the other. The hippies made that mistake collectively, Pirsig thinks. You know, pleasure is natural and therefor holy and right and good. Ooops, see you at re-hab or the clinic. A guy on talk radio said that Edison had an affair with one of his own light bulbs and he said Poincare once tried to make it with some surplus lab equipment. I don't believe any of it. But DQ is sort of sexy. It's an good analogy anyway, because desire comes in many, many forms and this leading on is always the call of Quality in some sense. That two-horse analogy can retain a bit of the original imperative to move upward. The MOQ hierarchy of levels tells us which way is up in that sense, I think.