[MD] Quality and Hemptiness

[david buchanan]

Mark said to Marsha:

By saying that Quality and Emptiness are synonymous, what else is there to say?  There is plenty of literature, ritual, and lifestyle based on Emptiness.  So, I don't think you can get away with an RMP statement that easily.  If we are talking Buddhism, then you have finished your quest.  Me, I will continue building some strange structure.

dmb says:

As you might have noticed, I think Marsha is confused about the fundamental ideas and key terms in the MOQ. So, if I may butt in with an explanation....

As I understand it, Quality is what you experience before you have a chance to think about it. It's the cutting edge of experience, the moment of awareness before it is conceptualized. That's the idea behind the alternative labels for Quality, names like "pre-intellectual experience" or "primary empirical reality" or "pre-verbal awareness". William James calls it "pure experience" and Northrop (Pirsig's main inspiration) called it the "undifferentiated aesthetic continuum". All these terms express the same basic idea, the idea shared by all philosophical mystics: "the fundamental nature of reality is outside language; that language splits things up into parts while the true nature of reality is undivided". (Lila, p.63) 

You see, thought and language splits things up but Quality is direct experience prior to these conceptual differentiations. That why Northrop calls it "UNdifferentiated" experience and that's why Pirsig calls it "PRE-intellectual" experience. This is also the sense in which James's immediate experience is "pure". Now, if conceptual and verbal understandings involve distinguishing one thing from another, then the direct experience of reality can be described by contrast as no-thing-ness. It's not that pre-intellectual experience is like the cold, black void of space. It's a rich and wild and overflowing stream of sensations and feelings. That's why Northrop calls it an "aesthetic continuum". It's a continuum because it's undivided. But there are no "things" as such because things are a product of thought and language. Things ARE the differentiations of thought and language. In that sense Quality is synonymous with nothingness, with no-things.

So really, this is just a bunch of different ways to say the same thing. The One is the One because it's undivided. The many are the many because they have been divided. That's the MOQ's central distinction in a nutshell.