[MD] Taking off the glasses?

[david buchanan]

Andre quoted Huang Po, Yung-Chia, Ma-Tsu, Hakuin, Robert Pirsig, T.D.Suzuki and William James:

"To know immediately, then, or intuitively, is for mental content and object to be identical." 

Andre said to Steve and dmb:

All of these quotes are suggesting that we need to suspend (at least temporarily) our dualistic mode of conceptual thinking. All of these quotes point to a non-dual awareness. This can be grasped intellectually but its full impact and significance can only be realized through experience. Hence Pirsig's reluctance and apprehensions to write a metaphysics of Quality in the first place. The Buddha simply said that he was 'awake'. How many of us are awake? Who is not already enlightened? How many of us are in touch with DQ?   I'll speak for myself: I am 99.9 per cent in touch with sq. It's honest and as simple as that. If it was the other way around (99.9 per cent DQ) I would not be wasting my time here!


dmb says:
Yep. If this place is a refrigerator full of food, I'm a fat dude who cannot keep his hands out of it. Burp.

I think it's interesting that everyone talking about immediate experience, as opposed to conceptual thought, is Asian, except for James and Pirsig. I mean, this very much suggests that the problem of being out of touch with DQ is a cultural problem and specifically a problem of over-emphasis on conceptual thought. This is what James meant by "vicious intellectualism" or "vicious abstractionism". This is very much related to the problem of reification. Making abstract concepts more real than the empirical reality from which they were generalized in the place is just one of worst ways to over-inflate and thereby distort the importance and meaning of concepts. That's what our set of cultural eye glasses tend to do and the concepts themselves are unfriendly to DQ, as we see in the culture's demonization of Dionysus along with the scientific rationalization of everything.

"Some of the most honored philosophers in history have been mystics: Plotinus, Swedenborg, Loyola, Shankaracharya and many others. They share a common belief that the fundamental nature of reality is outside language; that language splits things up into parts while the true nature of reality is undivided. Zen, which is a mystic religion, argues that the illusion of dividedness can be overcome by meditation. The Native American Church argues that peyote can force-feed a mystic understanding upon those who were normally resistant to it,..." (LILA, ch 5)

"Quality is indivisible, undefinable and unknowable in the sense that there is a knower and known, but a metaphysics can be none of these things. A metaphysics must be divisible, definable, and knowable, or there isn't any metaphysics. Since a metaphysics is essentially a kind of dialectical definition and since Quality is essentially outside definition, this means that a 'MoQ' is essentially a contradiction in terms." (LILA, ch 5)


In ZAMM, Pirsig describes enlightenment in terms that connect the mystic's notion of undividedness with the Sanskrit doctrine of "Tat Tvam Asi" or "Thou Art That":
"Thou art that, which asserts that everything you think you are (Subjective) and everything you think you perceive (Objective) are undivided. To fully realize this lack of division is to become enlightened."

My favorite mythologist sees the same problem in Western religions:

"Already in the 8th century B.C., in the Chhandogya Upanisad, the key word to such a meditation is announced; TAT TVAM ASI, "Thou art That", or "You yourself are It!". The final sense of a religion such as Hinduism or Buddhism is to bring about in the individual an experience, one way or another, of his own IDENTITY with that mystery that is the mystery of all being. ...it is the mystery also of many of our own Occidental mystics; and many of these have been burned for having said as much. Westward of Iran, in all three of the great traditions that have come to us from the Near Eastern zone, namely Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, such concepts are unthinkable and sheer heresy. God created the world. Creator and creature cannot be the same, since, as Aristotle tells us, A is not-A. Our theology, therefore, begins from the point of view of waking consciousness and Aristotelian logic; whereas, on another level of consciousness - and this, the level to which all religions must finally refer - the ultimate mystery transcends the laws of dualistic logic, causality and space-time. Anyone who says, as Jesus is reported to have said (John 10:30), 'I and the Father are One', is declared in our tradition to have blasphemed." (Joseph Campbell)