[MD] ] Dewey's Zen & Buddhist traps

[X Acto]

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dmb quotes Pirsig:
"A subject-object metaphysics presumes that this kind of Dynamic action without thought is rare and ignores when possible. [jumping off the hot stove.] But mystic learning goes in the opposite direction and tries to hold on to the ongoing Dynamic edge of all experience, both positive and negative, EVEN THE ONGOING DYNAMIC EDGE OF THOUGHT ITSELF. Phaedrus thought that of the two kinds of students, those who study only subject-object science and those who study only meditative mysticism, it would be the mystic students who would get off the stove first. The purpose of mystic meditation is not to remove oneself from experience but to bring one's self closer to it by eliminating stale, confusing, static, intellectual attachments of the past." (LILA 116)


 Rons 2 cents (and some pocket lint):
I believe this, if anything, is the great trap of the buddhist denial of selfhood, that one rests on the removal
of experience as achievment of the enlightened state of be-ing. The aim being that if one elimenates value
one elimenates suffering. But if value IS experience then the aim must be the achievement of a harmony
of value and a kind of re-construction of a will to act at the face of value. In effect polishing value and
placing it above all else not a detachment from it. If value IS experience then the craft of that value,
our reflection and reasons for those values must be the highest order of "Good" in that experience, not
the elimenation of them.

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