[MD] pure experience (DQ)

[david buchanan]

Joe asked DMB:

Would you mind telling me your reaction to the words capitalized?  Is there any hidden meaning?


dmb says:
My reaction? You must mean to ask about my INTENTIONS, which were to highlight the meaning of the quotes. It was intended to emphasize THE SENSE in which Quality is undivided or undifferentiated. As you can plainly see, I hope, Quality is undifferentiated IN THE SENSE that there are not yet any INTELLECTUAL divisions or differences, the moment of VISION before these abstractions or definitions are added.

"Any INTELLECTUALLY CONCEIVED object is always in the past and therefore unreal. REALITY is always the MOMENT OF VISION BEFORE the intellectualization takes place. There is no other reality. This PRE-INTELLECTUAL REALITY is what Phædrus felt he had properly identified as Quality. Since all intellectually identifiable things must emerge from this pre-intellectual reality, Quality is the parent, the source of all subjects and objects." --Pirsig in ZAMM

"The central reality of mysticism, the reality that Phaedrus had called 'Quality' in his first book, is not a metaphysical chess piece. Quality doesn't have to be defined. You understand it without definition, ahead of definition. Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to INTELLECTUAL ABSTRACTIONS.  Quality is indivisible, undefinable and unknowable IN THE SENSE that there is a KNOWER AND A KNOWN [because knowers or subjects and knowns or objects are intellectual concepts too], but a metaphysics can be none of these things. A metaphysics [including the metaphysics of Quality, of course] must be divisible, definable, and knowable, or there isn't any metaphysics."  --Pirsig in LILA