[MD] Un-Pure Experience

[david buchanan]

D. Thomas said:

"All genuine knowledge originates in direct experience. ...All knowledge originates in perception of the objective external world through man's physical sense organs." [Mao tse-tung from On Practice (1937)]
Despite being firmly under the sway of SOM this snippet pretty clearly describes the nature of direct and indirect experiences with the only possible quibbles being about "correct" way of interpreting those experiences. 

dmb says:
Red-baiting? Really? You're like the Joseph McCarthy of mysticism here, bud. It's ugly, low and it's also a very bad reading of the content. He's obviously declaring his loyalty to SOM and it's quite clear that the "direct experience" he's talking about is just the common sense notion of first-hand experience, as opposed to second-hand news. For both reasons, leaving aside the silly McCarthyism, the quote is in no way relevant to Pirsig's DQ or James's pure experience. 




Dave Thomas said:
James', Jung's, and modern science's psychological take on "abstraction", while differing in the details, in general follow Jung. Pirsig says all "thinking" does not rise to the intellectual level. From that can we concluded that the only type of "abstraction" that is excluded from the direct experience of Dynamic Quality is the single type, "intellectual thinking or abstraction?"

dmb says:
I think you are comparing apples and oranges here. I mean, these takes on "abstraction" are very different from each other and it seems unfair to hang this jumble on Pirsig. Mostly, I'd object to your conclusion: "that the only type of "abstraction" that is excluded from the direct experience of Dynamic Quality is the single type, "intellectual thinking or abstraction". Pirsig makes it pretty clear, I think, that all static patterns are excluded from DQ. In fact, "unpatterned experience" is another name for DQ. The entire mythos is excluded from DQ. In that sense, even to see shapes and colors is to intellectualize. Sure, "Red" communism is a far more complex and abstract idea than a simple thing like the color "red" but they're both static patterns in the mythos. The four levels of static patterns are just a way to sort the mythos, right? All of that sits in contrast to DQ, the generator of the mythos.


D. Thomas said:
...As we read down this all kind of feels like what Pirsig is saying about Quality until we read, "there appears no universal element of which all things are made." Whoops, Pirsig names this univeral element "Quality." And it is a mystical undefined entity. This is just what James is trying to avoid! 


dmb says:
That's quite a stretch. You've selected a fragment of a sentence from James and used it to oppose Pirsig BUT the fragment also opposes James's opening thesis! "My thesis is that if we start with the supposition that there is only one primal stuff or material in the world, a stuff of which everything is composed, and if we call that stuff 'pure experience,' then knowing can easily explained..."  James says pure experience is the stuff of which everything is composed and Pirsig says DQ is the source and substance of everything. as a particular sort of relation towards one another intowhich portions of pure experience may enter.
And how, you ask, does James idea of "pure experience" square with Pirsig's idea?

"Dynamic Quality is the pre-intellectual cutting edge of reality, the source of all things, completely simple and always new." Lila pg. 133

Beyond the source/stuff of all things already mentioned, I see other parallels right there in the quotes you provided. Where Pirsig has a "pre-intellectual cutting edge", James has his "instant field of the present". Where Pirsig has it as "completely simple", James says pure experience "is plain, unqualified actuality, or existence, a simple that". When compare apples to apples properly, there is no problem.