[MD] Through a glass darkly

[david buchanan]

Mary said:
...I think Pirsig says mainly that there is a great deal more to reality than we can define or differentiate.  Another way to put that might be to say that we create our reality from our experiences.  We see through the glass darkly and are unable to experience the entirety of all possible realities.  DMB says we dip our ladle into the stream of Quality and what we come back with we call reality.

dmb says:
It might interest you to know that the line "through a glass darkly" was delivered by Socrates in Plato's "Phaedrus". 
In ZAMM there is an analogy wherein reality as we know it conceptually is just a handful of sand taken from the surrounding landscape of awareness. As he explain it, there is no way we could ever notice more than a small part of that landscape. I think this is parallel to James's analogy wherein buckets full of water are taken from the ongoing stream of experience. In both cases the idea is that our conceptualizations exist in relation to a much larger field of consciousness and we notice the part that we do because of our culture and personal history.