[MD] Taking off the glasses?

[david buchanan]

Steve said to dmb:
I am asking for YOUR reasoning or your understanding of Pirsig's reasoning for how it could be possible to be out of touch with DQ.



dmb says:
I're been making a case that being out of touch is a result of the concepts we've inherited, an effect of the interpretive glasses handed to us by the culture. Here are some more pieces of supporting evidence for that case:

"The current subject-object point of view of religion, conventionally muted so as not to stir up the fanatics, is that religious mysticism and insanity are the same. Religious mysticism is intellectual garbage. It's a vestige of the old superstitious Dark Ages when nobody knew anything and the whole world was sinking deeper and deeper into filth and disease and poverty and ignorance. It is one of those delusions that isn't called insane only because there are so many people involved.

"Until quite recently Oriental religions and Oriental cultures have been similarly grouped as "backward," suffering from disease and poverty and ignorance because they were sunk into a demented mysticism. If it were not for the phenomenon of Japan suddenly leaving the subject-object cultures looking a little backward, the cultural immune system surrounding this view would be impregnable.

"The Metaphysics of Quality identifies religious mysticism with Dynamic Quality. It says the subject-object people are almost right when they identify religious mysticism with insanity. The two are almost the same. Both lunatics and mystics have freed themselves from the conventional static intellectual patterns of their culture. [They've both taken the glasses off.] The only difference is that the lunatic has shifted over to a private static pattern of his own, whereas the mystic has abandoned all static patterns in favor of pure Dynamic Quality.

"The Metaphysics of Quality suggests that in addition to the customary solutions to insanity—conform to cultural patterns or stay locked up—there is another one. This solution is to dissolve all static patterns [take all glasses off], both sane and insane, and find the base of reality, Dynamic Quality, that is independent of all of them." 

"The value of shock treatment is not that it returns a lunatic to normal cultural patterns. It certainly does not do that. Its value is that it destroys all patterns, both cultural and private, and leaves the patient temporarily in a Dynamic state. [Knocks the glasses off by force, so to speak.] All the shock does is duplicate the effects of hitting the patient over the head with a baseball bat. It simply knocks him senseless." 

"But what goes unrecognized in a subject-object theoretical structure is the fact that this senseless unpatterned state [without glasses] is a valuable state of existence. Once the patient is in this state the psychiatrists of course don't know what to do with it, and so the patient often slips back into lunacy [private glasses] and has to be knocked senseless again and again. But sometimes the patient, in a moment of Zen wisdom, sees the superficiality of both his own contrary patterns and the cultural patterns, sees that the one gets him electrically clubbed day after day and the other sets him free from the institution, and thereupon makes a wise mystic decision to get the hell out of there by whatever avenue is available.