[MD] Insanity

[118]

Hi Carl,
My take is pretty similar to yours about Phaedrus and Lila.  What I
present below is my opinion, and does not reflect the opinion of MoQ
discuss as a whole.  Nor is it intended to insult anyone.  Please
excuse the rhetoric.

It appears that often many of the important writings on a "lasting new
interpretation" of reality comes from the protagonist having gone
through a serious "break" in what he "knows".  The results from such a
break can either lead to total dissolution of such person, or
sometimes in a person "coming back" and trying to make sense of what
happened.  The latter can then sometimes result in a "new" way (or
rejuvenation of andold way) of presenting reality such that it can be
helpful to many.  This "breakdown" of reality can be akin to the "Dark
night of the Soul".

Your mention of a friend really strikes home with me.   I had a friend
taken away in the '70s, and even to this day he is so drugged up that
he is a shadow of the high intellect he once was.  I could have gotten
to the point of needing such a trip but for the grace of God, and
friends.  Two extremes can happen when suddenly all meaning, in the
conventional rational manner in which we place ourselves, is put to
the test.  One can suddenly bask in the "extreme meaning of all", or,
one can exist in fear.  Ask yourself why, as is written in Lila, was
he taken by a police man for treatment.  Phaedrus was not extremely
unusual in what happened.  Why, as is written in Lila, was Pirsig
taken for treatment by a police man?

Phaedrus was not extremely unusual in what happened. In the end what
matters is what one does with the experience, and that is what
differentiates staying in insanity, and transforming the experience
into a spiritual awakening.  For this I greatly admire Pirsig.

I have no problem with Pirsig being treated as a Buddha of sorts, and
his words continually being parsed for meaning.  But this form of
objective analysis is lacking in a fundamental understanding of what
vision he is trying to convey.  Can you imagine sitting on the floor
somewhat catatonic since all meaning is being reformulated?  It is so
very real that it denies any pre-existing understanding that one was
so comfortable with. This is not some trivial metaphysical exercise
that is all fun and games, by any means!  It is much more than trying
to find some continuity in philosophers that existed recently and
drawing connections.  This is a very personal story for me.

We can sit around a camp fire and come up with the "best" way to
construct MoQ, but in the end all this semantics is trivial.  What
needs to happen is for us to "feel" Quality, in both its rapture and
its horror.  Believe me, they are both there lurking in the
subconscious.

In his books, Pirsig is trying to come to terms with what happened to
him, and it appears that he has to do this "as a different person".  I
am not sure how much one's personality is changed through ECT, but
Pirsig went from a fiery antagonist in Chicago, to a writer of
technical manuals.  Then he wrote ZAMM and in a way came to terms with
what happened.  He felt that his experience was important enough to
tell in several books, and he even tries to create a rational
construct based on allegories and metaphors which provide some kind of
"sane" foundation to the whole deal.

Again, Pirsig is not alone in this, and his MoQ is very similar to
other constructs based on the same principles.  We exist in a
comfortable little bubble where everything makes sense and we simply
flesh out some of the details, but sometimes comes this "Crack in the
Cosmic Egg" which leaves us standing on an empty plain wondering what
happened.  By performing a form of comparative study between Lila and
other books which have the same intent, one can find some fundamental
similarities.  It is these similarities that are of importance to me,
whether they come from 5,000 years ago, or from "One Flew Over the
Cuckoo's Nest", or in a brief soliloque by Kurtz in "Apocalypse Now".
I will leave the filling in of the gaps to the academic side of this
forum, and go for some things I find to be bigger.

In this day and age, there are so many books that explore this
"insane" side of reality, that it gives the appearance that something
is happening to the human race.  Perhaps the time of sitting snuggly
(and smugly) in reality is over.  Catch the train, hop on, it is quite
a ride!

Cheers,
Mark

On Tue, Mar 27, 2012 at 11:11 PM, Carl Thames <cthames at centurytel.net> wrote:
>
> Mark:
>>
>> I found that a while back as well, and based a number of my posts on that
>> collection.  I would be interested to get your take on the relationship
>> between the insanity of Phaedrus and that of Lila.
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Sent laboriously from an iPhone,
>> Mark
>>
>> On Mar 27, 2012, at 7:50 PM, "Carl Thames" <cthames at centurytel.net> wrote:
>>
>>> It's been a while since I read Lila, so I didn't grasp the term
>>> "Cleveland Harbor Effect" when you used it.  I did a search on it, and came
>>> up with:
>>>
>>> http://www.quantonics.com/Pirsigs_Lila_Quotes_on_Insanity.html
>>>
>>> This essay addresses many parts of this message.  I'm going to have to
>>> read it a couple of times to come to some kind of understanding about it,
>>> but I think it's well worth the effort.
>>>
>>> Carl
>
>
> In both cases, in this exerpt, both Phaedrus and Lila were caught up in a
> delusion.  The main difference was that Phaedrus had worked through his,
> whereas Lila was in the middle of her experience.  He did comment that it
> was a toss-up whether or not she would come through it, and from what I
> remember of the book, he didn't know what happened.  Wasn't she removed from
> the boat by a friend of hers?
>
> The significant part for me was the discussion of the insanity itself.  In
> both of their cases, they had left what we consider conscensual reality
> behind and confused the heck out of their friends and family.  The
> discussion calls into question the whole function of what we call society,
> IMHO.  We insist that everyone agree with our perspective, however static it
> may be, and if we stray from that, we're going to pay a price.  I had a
> friend who did a couple of involuntary committments, and he said basically
> the same thing Phaedrus says in this essay; you act as normal as possible,
> because that's the only way you're getting out of there.  The real problem
> he had was deciding what normal was.  Essentially, he agreed with what
> Phaedrus said; you accept the "normal" defined by the people in charge.
>
> Phaedrus arrives at the point that he works through the static expectations
> AND his own desire for the reality he had arrived at by himself.  He stated
> that he had left ALL patterns behind, although that is suspect, otherwise he
> wouldn't have been able to function.  When I read that I thought about what
> you had said before, about not being on either side of the coin, but by
> being in the middle.  Clearly, if we try to live in a state of Dynamic
> Quality, we're going to get put somewhere we don't want to be.  IMHO, the
> world isn't set up for people who live in that state.  That's just my
> opinion, though. YMMV
>
> Carl
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