[MD] The Quality of Free Will

[Ham Priday]

Hey, Marsha --

> No, I have not adopted a theory.  More like I'm looking for a way
> to make sense and explain of my experience.  On investigation I can
> find no autonomous self.  I experience only a broken stream of pattern
> pieces.  My 'sense of self' seems but a pattern too, not real.  But what
> of this awareness. This is a little more tricky. -  The book is difficult,
> and I will need to give it a second reading to make better sense of it
> and how it might fit within the MoQ.

What is it that you find "unreal" or "tricky" about your sense of self?  And 
why is the concept of subjective awareness so difficult for you to accept?

You respond personally to this "stream of pattern pieces," do you not?  You 
are involved emotionally and intellectually with your experiences and act in 
accordance with the values they represent to you.  How you judge those 
values and respond to them is your individual choice.  No one else shares 
your proprietary experience or controls the way you respond.  Do you not see 
this as constituting your conscious life as an autonomous agent of an 
objective reality?

Your reality relates to you as its sole observer and intrepreter.  The fact 
that experience is a series of events made aware to you over time does not 
reduce your life to "pattern pieces".  Indeed, I'd be surprised if the word 
"pattern" would even have occurred to you were it not for your reading of 
Pirsig.

You gain nothing philosophically or spiritually by refusing to acknowledge 
the duality of existence.  I realize that 'subject/object reality' is 
anathema to Buddhist monks and mystical philosophers.  But the world we live 
in is a world of appearances.  And there is no way an appearance can exist 
and be made sensible without a conscious self to experience it.  Pirsig's 
mistake, in my opinion, was to posit Quality (Value) as the primary reality. 
What is primary to existence is sensible Awareness.  It is the conscious 
Self which brings Value into being.

Ponder on that, Marsha.  It may yet lead you out of your quandary.

Valuistically speaking,
Ham