[MD] static patterns of value

[david buchanan]

Marsha asked dmb:

Where did you get the idea you could apply the concept of 'change' to Dynamic Quality when RMP insists it should remain concept-free?



dmb says:
Again, the idea that DQ is the "ever-changing" flux of experience is well supported by the evidence. And like said, that description is applied precisely to keep the concepts out of DQ.
There are only two terms to understand here, static and Dynamic. When will you stop using Pirsig's descriptions of DQ to define static patterns? It's obviously wrong and awful. Let it go. Jeez. 

"The Good was not a FORM of reality. It was reality itself, EVER-CHANGING, ultimately unknowable in any sort of fixed, rigid way."



McWatt uses the phrase "continually changing flux" to describe this same "immediate reality". 

"Dynamic Quality is the term given by Pirsig to the CONTINUALLY CHANGING FLUX of immediate reality while static quality refers to any concept abstracted from this flux." (McWatt)Paul Williams, a Buddhist scholar quoted by McWatt uses the term "ever-changing" to describe "the flow of perceptions" in an ongoing "series of experiences" and he contrasts this with "the conceptualized aspect".


"In order to understand what is being said here, one should try and imagine all things, objects of experience and oneself, the one who is experiencing, as just a flow of perceptions. We do not know that there is something "out there". We have only experiences of colours, shapes, tactile data, and so on. We also don't know that we ourselves are anything than a further series of experiences. Taken together, there is only an EVER-CHANGING FLOW of perceptions (vijnaptimatra)... Due to our beginningless ignorance we construct these perceptions into enduring subjects and objects confronting each other. This is irrational, things are not really like that, and it leads to suffering and frustration. The constructed objects are the conceptualised aspect. The flow of perceptions which forms the basis for our mistaken constructions is the dependent aspect." (Paul Williams, "Mahayana Buddhism", Routledge, 1989, p.83/84).We hear the same language from Pirsig and James in Lila, where DQ is described as "the immediate flux of life," as "this basic flux of experience," and as "dynamic and flowing" reality. 


"Subjects and objects are secondary. They are concepts derived from something more fundamental which [James] described as 'THE IMMEDIATE FLUX OF LIFE which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its CONCEPTUAL CATEGORIES.' In this basic FLUX OF EXPERIENCE, the distinctions of reflective thought, such as those between consciousness and content, subject and object, mind and matter, have not yet emerged in the forms which we make them." (Pirsig in Lila)


"There must always be a discrepancy between concepts and reality, because the former are static and discontinuous while the latter is DYNAMIC AND FLOWING." (Pirsig in Lila)


Reality is an ever-changing process but concepts are not reality. Static patterns are not reality. The same evidence (above) that shows "ever-changing" is the term used for DQ also shows over and over that static patterns are "concepts abstracted" from ever-changing reality, they are "the conceptualized aspect", they are "concepts derived from" this flux, and these "conceptual categories" include change and time, subjects and objects, mind and matter.  The whole static world is the conceptualized aspect, every last bit of it.


There are only two terms to understand here, static and Dynamic. When will you stop using Pirsig's descriptions of DQ to define static patterns? It's obviously wrong and awful. Let it go. Jeez.