[MD] Un-Pure Experience

[david buchanan]

David Thomas "interpreted" Pirsig:
"[Dynamic] Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions."
Pirsig claims that James "pure experience" is analogous to this and you [dmb] agree. Here is what Pirsig's statement really means: Mystic experience is direct (intuitive) experience of Dynamic Quality, reality as is really is.


dmb  says:
Well, no. Pirsig says Dynamic Quality IS a direct experience and it IS the mystic reality. It not a direct experience OF the mystic reality. These are just different terms for the same kind of experience. It is also called undivided, unpatterned, non-dual, undifferentiated, and pre-intellectual experience, among other names. And all of these terms hint at the same basic idea: the immediate now as an undivided whole. These are all just different descriptive labels for DQ. But you also don't want to say experience OF anything because that defies this main idea: that this experience is undivided and non-dual. 
"Suzuki, for his part, immediately saw the connection between James’s pure ex- perience and Zen, and introduced James’s writings to his teacher Kitaro Nishida. Nishida not only directly appropriated James’s analysis, but also his expression ‘‘pure experience’’ in seeking to translate the direct-experience satori upon which Zen is based. Suzuki, too, appropriated the phrase ‘‘pure experience’’ to define ‘‘this most fundamental experience . . . beyond differentiation’.Non-dualism was well established in the two strands that wove into Zen: Buddhism and Taoism."



David Thomas "interpreted" Pirsig:


"Pure experience cannot be called either physical or psychical: it logically precedes this distinction". Lila pg 170


"The Metaphysics of Quality says pure experience is value. Experience which is not valued is not experienced." Lila pg 170


James says NO. Experience is not value. Experience is purely experience, nothing more, nothing less. Everything else is discriminated, deduced, and described after pure experience, including quality, value, and morals.



dmb says:

Apples and oranges again. Pirsig agrees with James but he does so elsewhere, and it's all right next to the first quote. In that first quote - "neither physical nor psychical" - Pirsig is merely explaining a James quote that's contained in the same paragraph! Even further, his denial of the physical and the psychical is just an alternative way to deny objects and subjects! Again, they are both talking about non-dual experience, as opposed to the dualistic experience of SOM. And the value of direct experience is also non-dual and undefined, as in the not stove example. The static values that allow us to describe it afterward are derived from that primary experience but now you're conceptual realm, where what was whole now has parts. 

Sorry, but I think this is just a fine example of what I was complaining about. You've only demonstrated confusion about the difference between SOM the MOQ and confusion about the MOQ's key terms. 

I think it would be far more reasonable to suppose that these guys know what they are saying, that Pirsig is right about his sympatico with James and otherwise assume that you are responsible for any confusion about this. They're not above criticism, of course, but criticisms based on misconceptions can never be valid. Obviously.