[MD] Awareness and consciousness in the MOQ

[david buchanan]

Marsha said to dmb:
Your definition of 'intellectual quality' was nowhere to be found, either above or below.  It's a question you've long been ignoring?  It's also amusing to accuse me of denigrating intellectual quality when you cannot provide a definition for such quality.  Please share your definition of the Intellectual Level?  Otherwise your complaint is meaningless. 


dmb says:
So now you're going to pretend that conceptual clarity and logical coherence are mysterious ideas. Now you're going to pretend that it all hinges on MY definition of intellect? Are you going to pretend that the words of the Buddha, the Dali Lama, Traleg Rompoche, and Robert Pirsig are meaningless. Are you going to pretend that you don't understand what these guys are saying? These guys are condemning poor intellectual quality as taboo, as not only incorrect but also immoral. To be vague and incoherent is a certain kind of naughtiness, a shameful thing. I honestly don't see how it can work to be an anti-intellectual Buddhist or philosopher. It's like being depressed and angry clown. It's absurd. It's so perfectly wrong that it's kinda funny.

Pirsig says in chapter 8:
"The tests of truth are logical consistency, agreement with experience, and economy of explanation. The MOQ satisfies these." 

At the end of chapter 29 he says:
"The MOQ also says that DQ - the value-force that chooses an elegant mathematical solution to a laborious one, or a brilliant experiment of a confusing, inconclusive one - is another matter altogether. ...Dynamic value is an integral part of science. It is the cutting edge of scientific progress itself." 


the Buddha said:
"Just as the wise accept gold after testing it by heating, cutting and rubbing it, so are my words to be accepted after examining them, but not out of respect for me."
And, similarly, the Dali Lama said:
"A general stance of Buddhism is that it is inappropriate to hold a view that is logically inconsistent. This is taboo. But even more taboo than holding a view that is logically inconsistent is holding a view that goes against direct experience."


Traleg Rinpoche:"In the Buddha's early discourses on the Four Noble Truths, the Noble Eightfold Path begins with the cultivation of the correct view...Without a conceptual framework, meditative experiences would be totally incomprehensible. What we experience in meditation has to be properly interpreted, and its significance-or lack thereof-has to be understood. This interpretive act requires appropriate conceptual categories and the correct use of those categories... .While we are often told that meditation is about emptying the mind, that it is the discursive, agitated thoughts of our mind that keeps us trapped in false appearances, meditative experiences are in fact impossible without the use of conceptual formulations... ."


As the Kagyu master Jamgon Kongtrul Lodro Thaye sang:"The one who meditates without the view  Is like a blind man wandering the plains...".

...The Metaphysics of Quality provides a better set of coordinates with which to interpret the world than does subject-object metaphysics because it is more inclusive. It explains more of the world and it explains it better. The Metaphysics of Quality can explain subject-object relationships beautifully but, as Phaedrus had seen in anthropology, a subject-object metaphysics can't explain values worth a damn. It has always been a mess of unconvincing psychological gibberish when it tries to explain values."