[MD] Thus spoke Lila

[David Thomas]

[Horse said to Platt]
> Knowledge of, knowledge about or knowledge that etc. X refers to
> something that can be known. The whole point of DQ/Mysticism in the MoQ
> sense is that it can only be experienced and not known.
> Or perhaps I've got it wrong. Anyone else agree or disagree?

[Dave]
A while back I snipped out 9 pages of quotes from ZaMM and Lila containing
"mystic" quotes. It's clear that Pirsig understood the ramifications of
coming down on the side of "mystic reality" as the dynamic source, highest
moral order, and the ultimate "good" (DQ). Here are three that stick out for
me:

[Pirsig]
ZaMM 105
"I think first of all that he felt the whole Church of Reason was
irreversibly in the arena of logic, that when one put oneself outside
logical disputation, one put oneself outside any academic consideration
whatsoever. "Philosophical mysticism, the idea that truth is indefinable and
can be apprehended only by nonrational means, has been with us since the
beginning of history. It¹s the basis of Zen practice."

ZaMM 202
"But if someone else were to produce a thesis which purported to be a major
breakthrough between Eastern and Western philosophy, between religious
mysticism and scientific positivism, he would think it of major historic
importance, a thesis which would place the University miles ahead. In any
event, he said, no one was really accepted in Chicago until he¹d rubbed
someone out. It was time Aristotle got his."

Pg 32- 33 Lila
"The second group of opponents are the mystics. The term mystic is sometimes
confused with 'occult' or 'supernatural' and with magic and witchcraft but
in philosophy it has a different meaning. Some of the most honored
philosophers in history have been mystics: Plotinus, Swedenborg, Loyola,
Shankaracharya and many others. They share a common belief that the
fundamental nature of reality is outside language; that language splits
things up into parts while the true nature of reality is undivided. Zen,
which is a mystic religion, argues that the illusion of dividedness can be
overcome by meditation. The Native American Church argues that peyote can
force-feed a mystic understanding upon those who were normally resistant to
it, an understanding that Indians had been deriving through Vision Quests in
the past. This mysticism, Dusenberry thought, is the absolute center of
traditional Indian life, and as Boas had made clear, it is absolutely
outside the domain of positivistic science and any anthropology that adheres
to it.
Historically mystics have claimed that for a true understanding of reality
metaphysics is too 'scientific.' Metaphysics is not reality. Metaphysics is
names about reality. Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a
thirty-thousand page menu and no food.
Phasdrus thought it portended very well for his Metaphysics of Quality that
both mysticism and science reject metaphysics for completely opposite
reasons. It suggested that if there is a bridge between the two, between the
understanding of the Indians and the
understanding of the anthropologists, metaphysics is where that bridge is
located.
Of the two kinds of hostility to metaphysics he considered the mystics'
hostility the more formidable. Mystics will tell you that once you've opened
the door to metaphysics you can say goodbye to any genuine understanding of
reality. Thought is not a path to reality. It sets obstacles in that path
because when you try to use thought to approach something that is prior to
thought your thinking does not carry you toward that something. It carries
you away from it. To define something is to subordinate it to a tangle of
intellectual relationships. And when you do that you destroy real
understanding.
The central reality of mysticism, the reality that Phaedrus had called
'Quality' in his first book, is not a metaphysical chess piece. Quality
doesn't have to be defined. You understand it without definition, ahead of
definition. Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to
intellectual abstractions."

[Dave]
In some cases he refers to "mysticism" as "philosophical mysticism" in
others "religious mysticism", Is he referring to the same phenomena? I'm not
sure but surely it must have something to do with "mystic experiences" of
real people and how they explain and integrate these experiences into their
"real life." Whether this is "knowledge" or not, I'll leave up to you.

I recently found this interesting book: http://mystrokeofinsight.com/ by
Jill Bolte Taylor on the publisher remainder (cheap) table, bought, and read
it. At 37 she was a PhD brain researcher on the fast track when she suffered
a massive stroke in her left side of the brain. She maintained consciousness
through the whole process while the left side nearly completely shut down
leaving her almost paralyzed on the right side, no speech or language skills
and many other problems. After brain surgery it took her nearly eight years
to retrain the left side of her brain to near normal functioning.

But what is relevant to mysticism is her account of her experiences living
with primarily only the right side of her brain functioning. She likened it
to the account of Nirvana in Buddhism. During her recovery she had to
actively fight against this feeling because trying to regain use of the left
side of her brain was so difficult and tiring that dropping back permanently
into a "la la land" right brain state was always a very real option.

Look at her TED talk for synopsis of the book and then re-ask your self: If
mystic reality is Dynamic Quality, the highest good, is that where you
really want to be?

Dave