[MD] Why are things called patterns?

[david buchanan]

"But although the four systems [ of static patterns] are exhaustive they are not exclusive. They all operate at the same time and in ways that are almost independent of each other. This classification of patterns is not very original, but the Metaphysics of Quality allows an assertion about them that is unusual. It says they are not continuous. They are discreet. They have very little to do with one another. Although each higher level is built on a lower one it is not an extension of that lower level. Quite the contrary. The higher level can often be seen to be in opposition to the lower level, dominating it, controlling it where possible for its own purposes. This observation is impossible in a substance-dominated metaphysics where everything has to be an extension of matter. But now atoms and molecules are just one of four levels of static patterns of quality and there is no intellectual requirement that any level dominate the other three." - From chapter12 of LILA

"A conventional subject-object metaphysics uses the same four static patterns as the Metaphysics of Quality, dividing them into two groups of two: inorganic-biological patterns called 'matter,' and social-intellectual patterns called 'mind.' But this division is the source of the problem. When a subject-object metaphysics regards matter and mind as eternally separate and eternally unalike, it creates a platypus bigger than the solar system.  ...Inorganic-biological patterns are composed of 'substance,' and are therefore 'objective.' Social-intellectual patterns are not composed of 'substance' and are therefore called 'subjective.' Then, having made this arbitrary division based on 'substance,' conventional metaphysics then asks, 'What is the relationship between mind and matter, between subject and object?' ...But if one asks what is this 'man' (which is not a body and not a mind) one doesn't come up with anything. There isn't any 'man' independent of the patterns. Man is the patterns." 

Why talk about quality in terms of patterns, static patterns? Why talk about stability and structure and order? 

"The physical order of the universe is also the moral order of the universe. RTA is both. This is exactly what the MOQ was claiming. It was not a new idea. It was the oldest idea known to man."

"Dharma, like rta, means 'what holds together.' It is the basis of all order. It equals righteousness. It is the ethical code. It is the stable condition which gives man perfect satisfaction. Dharma is duty. It is not external duty which is arbitrarily imposed by others. It is not any artificial set of conventions which can be amended or repealed by legislation. Neither is it internal duty which is arbitrarily decided by one's own conscience. Dharma is beyond all questions of what is internal and what is external. Dharma is Quality itself, the principle of 'rightness' which gives structure and purpose to the evolution of all life and to the evolving understanding of the universe which life has created."  From chapter 30 of LILA




> From: dmbuchanan at hotmail.com
> To: moq_discuss at moqtalk.org
> Date: Sat, 10 Mar 2012 10:31:32 -0700
> Subject: Re: [MD] Why are things called patterns?
> 
> 
> From chapter 9 of LILA:
> "...Since this whole metaphysics had started with an attempt to explain Indian mysticism Phaedrus finally abandoned his classic-romantic split as a choice for a primary division of the MOQ. The division he finally settled on was one he didn't really choose in any deliberate way. It was more as if it chose him. He'd been reading Ruth Benedict's Patterns of Culture without any particular search in mind, when a relatively minor anecdote stopped him. It stayed with him for weeks. He couldn't get it out of his mind.     The anecdote was a case-history in which there was a conflict of morality. It concerned a Pueblo Indian who lived in Zuni, New Mexico, in the nineteenth century. Like a Zen koan (which also originally meant 'case-history') the anecdote didn't have any single right answer but rather a number of possible meanings that kept drawing Phaedrus deeper and deeper into the moral situation that was involved.”
> 
> From the Wikipedia article on Ruth Benedict:
> "Benedict's 'Patterns of Culture' (1934) was translated into fourteen languages and was published in many editions as standard reading for anthropology courses in American universities for years.The essential idea in Patterns of Culture is, according to the foreword by Margaret Mead, "her view of human cultures as 'personality writ large.'" Each culture, Benedict explains, chooses from "the great arc of human potentialities" only a few characteristics which become the leading personality traits of the persons living in that culture. These traits comprise an interdependent constellation of aesthetics and values in each culture which together add up to a unique gestalt. For example she described the emphasis on restraint in Pueblo cultures of the American southwest, and the emphasis on abandon in the Native American cultures of the Great Plains. She used the Nietzschean opposites of "Apollonian" and "Dionysian" as the stimulus for her thought about these Native American cultures. She describes how in ancient Greece, the worshipers of Apollo emphasized order and calm in their celebrations. In contrast, the worshipers of Dionysus, the god of wine, emphasized wildness, abandon, letting go. And so it was among Native Americans. She described in detail the contrasts between rituals, beliefs, personal preferences amongst people of diverse cultures to show how each culture had a "personality" that was encouraged in each individual."
> 
> Pirsig later in chapter 9 of LILA:
> “Sometimes you can see your own society's issues more clearly when they are put in an exotic context like that of the brujo in Zuni. That is a huge reward from the study of anthropology. As Phaedrus thought about this context again and again it became apparent there were two kinds of good and evil involved.” [The two kinds are static and Dynamic, of course.]
> “To cling to Dynamic Quality alone apart from any static patterns is to cling to chaos. He saw that much can be learned about Dynamic Quality by studying what it is not rather than futilely trying to define what it is. Static quality patterns are dead when they are exclusive, when they demand blind obedience and suppress Dynamic change. But static patterns, nevertheless, provide a necessary stabilizing force to protect Dynamic progress from degeneration. Although Dynamic Quality, the Quality of freedom, creates this world in which we live, these patterns of static quality, the quality of order, preserve our world. Neither static nor Dynamic Quality can survive without the other."
> 
> 
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