[MD] Step One

[david buchanan]

Dan said:
... I recall Mary getting upset that he would have an affair with a bar lady while he was still married. And yet he told me himself that he was Lila, and the boat, and the rest of the story as well. That's what I am driving at. You are the story. How does your life pertain the MOQ. You. Not the people or places in your life. Do you see what I mean? I know I am explaining myself poorly but it is a difficult subject.


dmb says:

The same principle applies in dreams and fiction. Everyone in your dreams is you and everyone in the movie is an aspect of the hero. 


Lila's breakdown is very much like Pirsig's. In those final scenes, after Lila slashes Jamie across the face with a knife and they have to make a quick escape before the police arrive, he was telling us what what "insanity" is like from the inside. It's not just autobiographical, of course, because "Lila's battle is everybody's battle" and her status serves as the book's central koan. 


These final chapters are also where we find the discussion of William James, beginning with the question about that squirrel. His discussion of plural truths and pragmatic truths is intertwined with his discussions about the relation between insanity and truth and the similarities between insanity and mysticism. And he brings all of this together to answer the riddle of Lila. 


"What he thought was, that in addition to the usual solutions to insanity - stay locked up or learn to conform - there is a third one, to reject ALL movies, private and cultural, and head for Dynamic Quality itself, which is no movie at all.   ...evolution doesn't take place only within societies, it takes place within individuals too." (Lila, p. 360)


"Just as mystics traditionally seek monasteries and ashrams and hermitages as retreats into isolation and silence, so are the insane treated by isolation in places of relative calm and austerity and silence. Sometimes, as a result of this monastic retreat into silence and isolation the patient arrives at a stat Karl Menninger has described as 'better than cured.' He is actually in better condition than he was before the insanity started. Phaedrus guessed that in many of the 'accidental' cases, the patient had learned by himself not to cling to any static patterns of ideas - cultural, private or other." (Lila, p 375)


"That's what Lila's involved in now, a huge VACATION, an emptying out of the junk of her life. She's clinging to some new pattern because she thinks it holds back the old pattern. But what she has to do is take a vacation from ALL patterns, old and new, and just settle into a kind of emptiness for a while. And if she does, the culture has a moral obligation not to bother her. The most moral activity of all is the creation of space for life to move onward." (Lila, p 376)



Her also talks about the Dharmakaya light all through these last chapters and he remarks that he'd seen that light around Lila, way back in the beginning. The "quality" he saw was her dynamic nature, she was already beginning to break up, the static patterns of her life were already beginning to unravel. At the end of such a process one can come out the other side better than before. Or you can remain a culture of one and be locked up forever, like common criminal without the respect. Regenerate or degenerate. It goes both ways. 


Or you can go with Rigel and become a church lady.