[MD] Static Patterns Rock!

[david buchanan]

"Quality is shapeless, formless, indescribable. To see shapes and forms is to intellectualize. Quality is independent of any such shapes and forms. The names, the shapes and forms we give Quality depend only partly on the Quality. They also depend partly on the a priori images we have accumulated in our memory. We constantly seek to find, in the Quality event, analogues to our previous experiences. If we didn't we'd be unable to act. We build up our language in terms of these analogues." -- Robert Pirsig


Marsha repeated Morey's mistake:


In mindful awareness one drops the narration (language) function for a more perceptual (immediate) experience, but there is still pattern identification in differentiating shapes, smells, sounds, tastes and touch.  The differentiating is there with perceiving too.  Sans language.  Undifferentiated, unpatterned Dynamic Quality is not this.  My experience trumps the explanation.



Andre replied:

... Northrop suggests that DQ is the 'undifferentiated aesthetic continuum'. Pirsig, James and the Buddhists use different terminology but all point to the same which is NOT a state, as you imply, but point to exactly what it is.   All your 'identification' in differentiation is a learned distinction. It is a social pattern of value. Please re-read LILA, especially when Pirsig talks about Descartes. And also when he says again and again, that any abstraction from DQ is sq.



dmb says:

There are countless ways to cultivate that of presence of mind and it's clear that Pirsig is recommending a Zen-like identification with the task at hand - but it's weird that Marsha thinks her experience "trumps the explanation". The most obvious reason why this can't be true is that there is no way for anyone to examine Marsha's experience. We can only examine her explanation of that experience. When that explanation is placed next to Pirsig's explanation it's quite easy to see that Marsha has a lot of explaining to do. (Don't hold your breath.)


For Pirsig, the Zen practice of "just sitting" is parallel to the art of "just fixing". This suggests an absorbed engagement with the situation, a kind of focused attention and identification with the task at hand. Even further, this lesson in motorcycle maintenance is "a miniature study in the art of rationality". Marsha's self-congratulatory assertions about her private zone-out sessions, which she uses as a trump card over rationality, violate the letter and the spirit of Pirsig's explanations. 

It doesn't sound like a big deal when Pirsig talks about identifying with the repair job but this  is greasy, blue-collar, Zen enlightenment. Before James the philosopher was talking about "pure experience", which Pirsig roughly equates with DQ,  James the psychologist was talking about "sciousness". These terms all point at the same immediacy of experience. As you may have noticed, a guy named Jonathan Bricklin wrote a book about James's "sciousness". You know, the word is like "consciousness" but without the "con". A quote from a review of Bricklin's book sums it up pretty well, I think.

"Bricklin explains in his introduction to the book that “James labeled consciousness-without-self ‘sciousness,’ and consciousness-with-self ‘con-sciousness.’” For those up to speed on their Eastern philosophy, “consciousness-without-self” (sciousness) is, of course, precisely how the Buddha defined nirvana, the traditional goal of spiritual seeking. Bricklin defines it as a “nondual” state of enlightened immediacy and wholeness in which the usual distinction between self and other, knower and known, is dissolved. Ordinary “con-sciousness,” on the contrary, would be considered dualistic, erroneously split down the middle between a perceiving subject and the world of objects being perceived."

In ZAMM, Pirsig describes enlightenment in terms that connect the mystic's notion of undividedness with the Sanskrit doctrine of "Tat Tvam Asi" or "Thou Art That":

"Thou art that, which asserts that everything you think you are (Subjective) and everything you think you perceive (Objective) are undivided. To fully realize this lack of division is to become enlightened.".


The various terms for DQ are all pointing at this lack of division. That is the sense in which Northrop's aesthetic continuum is "undifferentiated". It is experience prior to the differentiations of consciousness. That's the sense in which "pure experience" is pure; the flow of experience prior to those static and discontinuous concepts. That is what it means to say DQ is "unpatterned"; without static patterns. Pre-intellectual experience is another name that means "undivided". And of course that's WHY this immediate experience can never be defined, because definitions ARE conceptual divisions. 

But, alas, Marsha thinks DQ can't be the ever-changing flux of experience but DQ is nothing, so there is nothing to change - and, sadly, David Morey wants to change definition of DQ so it can be nailed down is a physics lab. 

Did somebody say something about the missing the point?