[MD] Step One

[118]

Hi dmb,

Perhaps you can answer this question I have been wondering about.  Does the
use of the name Lila have anything to do with the sanskrit Lila?  This would
be like the playground, or even Reality.  Sometimes I have likened Lila to
Maya in a general way.  I tried reading the book once with that in mind, but
perhaps I am on the wrong track and over reading.

I will not dispute or follow up on any answer you give, I am just really
interested in your input on this.  You may have answered this in the past.

Thanks,
Mark

On Sun, Oct 17, 2010 at 2:55 PM, david buchanan <dmbuchanan at hotmail.com>wrote:

>
> 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.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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