Chapter 3 is interesting because it presumably lays out what is going to be the theory of reality. I had difficulty interpreting this chapter, because there doesn’t appear to be much hidden. Let’s think about Zamm for a minute. Zamm is a lot of fingers pointing at the moon. While Pirsig spells things out in places, namely where he restructures his view of reality, and also Pheadrus’ detective work at getting to the core of the problem,

In many places in Lila, it’s as if Phaedrus is delivering a lecture on the metaphysics of Quality. In an interview shortly after Lila was published, he said he wrote Lila partly to explain in a more straightforward way what people said they could not understand even after multiple readings of Zamm. This frustrated him, because he says he wished people could just read Zamm once and get it. Which is funny.

The point is, chapter is not hard to understand, so I’m going to use a lot of quotes in this commentary edition, just to give a synopsis of what the chapter is about, with some interpretation, but not much, because it’s pretty straightforward and while it introduces important concepts, and ties in with ZAMM, it’s not really open to that much interpretation.

So about Dusenberry:

Academically he had long before been placed on the TOUGH pile of scholars whom the department would just as soon have gotten rid of. Tenure was all that saved him from the JUNK pile. He had little to do with the rest of the department socially. Other members seemed to be in various degrees of alienation from him.

Remember that Dusenberry was almost relegated to the junk pile in chapter 2. But now he emerges in full force.

…but when Phædrus had gotten to know him, Dusenberry was actually gabby in a high-spirited, gleeful, maiden-auntish sort of way. It was a slightly gay style; tart, and somewhat backbiting; and at first Phædrus thought this was why they were so down on him.

So the description of gay here is actually pretty apt, and if this was 1990 instead of 2020, I don’t think it would be met with offense. I went to art school in New York, and a lot of guys had this style, and they would have agreed with me and would have exaggerated it for laughs and as an art form. Nowadays of course, I feel trepidation saying that, for obvious reasons. But that’s not what bothered the staff at all, IT was Dusenberry’s overenthusiasm with the Indians

…particularly the Rocky Boy Indians, the Chippewa-Cree on the Canadian border about whom he was writing his Ph.D. thesis in anthropology.

Dusenberry had little interest in teaching English, but he immersed himself in the world of these Indians, becoming as much a part of their world as is possible. This of course made him an eccentric to his colleagues. But for Dusenberry, this was the only way to actually learn about the Indians. It was the only way to do anthropology. Certainly, sitting back, observing and taking notes was not doing anthropology.

The main part of his eccentricity seemed to be his refusal to accept objectivity as an anthropological criterion. He didn’t think objectivity had any place in the proper conduct of anthropological study…This is like saying the Pope has no place in the Catholic Church. In American anthropology that is the worst possible apostasy and Dusenberry was quickly informed of it.

This contrast in approaches will be an important element in this book

Subsequently, no University will take him for his phD. So he skirts around this by being admitted to Uppsala University in Sweden. But he fervently stands by his immersion approach:

The trouble with the objective approach, Dusenberry said, is that you don’t learn much that way… The only way to find out about Indians is to care for them and win their love and respect… then they’ll do almost anything for you… But if you don’t do that… He would shake his head and his thoughts would go trailing off.

I’ve seen these “objective” workers come on the reservations, he said, and get absolutely nowhere…

Remember in Zamm, there is a contrast between the ghost of the Indian and the ghost of the westerner – Newton. This gives some insight into an ongoing theme, which is the myth that the Western view of objectivity and rationality is somehow at the top of all knowledge and understanding and is the only true epistimology. Lately we’ve been talking about other ways of knowing, and these other ways fit in well with Pirsig. Dusenberry engages in participatory knowing.

There’s this pseudo-science myth that when you’re “objective” you just disappear from the face of the earth and see everything undistorted, as it really is, like God from heaven. But that’s rubbish. When a person’s objective his attitude is remote. He gets a sort of stony, distant look on his face.

Another observation is that objectivity can be a value trap. Sure, it’s necessary It can keep you from understanding and engaging with the values of the people you are studying – and since this way of seeing the world is based on Quality, on value, then it doesn’t make sense to try to be scientific about the ever-changing dynamics of a group of human beings and their particular social and cultural world. It’s respectful to engage with them this way. Dusenberry indicates that if you just sit back and study them, they don’t like it. Would you? So with the objective anthros, the Indians either dont’ tell them anything or tell the fairy tales.

…which of course a lot of the anthros believe at first because they got it “objectively”… Some of these anthropologists make big names for themselves in their departments, Dusenberry said, because they know all that jargon.

So that’s why I’m not objective about Indians, he said. I believe in them and they believe in me and that makes all the difference.

Then what are the implications of not being objective, of immersing yourself in a culture. Well, it probably means you need to act in a way which that culture can accept, which means you have to adopt their values, or at least follow the protocol that come from those values. Dusenberry becomes their mascot and an honorary Indian pretty much. Of course this means he has to keep some of their secrets and not use them in his work, but it’s worth it to him.

Dusenberry, the misfit at Bozeman connects with Phaedrus for obvious reasons:

Here to Dusenberry’s surprise was someone who seemed even more alienated than he was, someone who had done graduate work in Hindu philosophy at Benares, India, for God’s sake, and knew something about cultural differences. Most important, Phædrus seemed to have a very analytic mind.

We certainly know about Phaedrus’ great mind from Zamm, so no surprise there, but what’s amusing here is that both of these guys are misfits and they find each other. Right before Pheadrus is about to leave Bozeman for another job, Dusenberry suggests he come to a ceremony on the reservation.

You’re going to convert me? Phædrus said facetiously.

Maybe, Dusenberry said.

Dusenberry describes the ceremony which ends with a ceremonial meal. And there’s an amusing anecdote he shares about how he was expecting venison and blueberries at the meal and instead they whipped out a canopener and 3 cans of Del Monte.

“No! No! No! Not canned corn,” and they laughed at me. They said, “Just like a white man. Has to have everything just right.” Then after that, all night long they did everything the way I said and they thought that was an even bigger joke because now they weren’t only using white man’s corn they were having a white man run the ceremony. And they were all laughing at me. They’re always doing stuff like that. We just love each other. I just have the best time when I’m down there.

And what better anthroplogy could you do than becoming one of them, so to speak. Dusenberry informs him that staying up all night will involve seekign visions with a “scramental food’ called peyote. Now, Nobody really knows about peyote at the time, about 1960, except anthropologists.

Indians who used it regarded it as a quicker and surer way of arriving at the condition reached in the traditional vision quest where an Indian goes out into isolation and fasts and prays and meditates for days in the darkness of a sealed lodge until the Great Spirit reveals itself to him and takes over his life.

And an interesting observation about hallucinogens which certainly makes sense, and shows how in fact the experience is a hyper-reality. That your day to day states of mind is influenced by a variety of factors, but it is really amplified in the hallucinogenic experience

The experience is determined by the person’s mental state, the structure of his or her personality, the physical setting, and cultural influences.

As hallucinogens grew in popularity, they were deemed unsafe and steps were taken to make it an other hallucinogens illegal. Dusenberry had to testify locally at one point, and regretted being unable to defend the Indian practice. But his hands were tied by his bosses. The battle was framed as a public health issue, but it was really moral. It was also the persecution of a religious minority

The majority opposition to peyote reflected a cultural bias, the belief, unsupported by scientific or historical evidence, that hallucinatory experience is automatically bad. Since hallucinations are a form of insanity, the term hallucinogen is clearly pejorative. Like early descriptions of Buddhism as a heathen religion and Islam as barbaric, it begs some metaphysical questions.

What is insanity is another theme explored in both books. And it is telling how our society feels about being out of control in this sense, out of line, by engaging in this kind of “insanity”. It’s illegal. It’s interesting how we had to actually go through the whole clinical problem of PTSD to finally come to some kind of understanding as to the utility of these vision quests. These substances it turns out actualy help people with major trauma disorders. But it’s only through their therapeutic utility, which other cultures have known about for millenia, that we are even beginning to find them remotely acceptible. And only through the ojective study of science. Well, whatever it takes.

The Indians who use it as part of their ceremony might with equal accuracy call it a de-hallucinogen, since it’s their claim that it removes the hallucinations of contemporary life and reveals the reality buried beneath them.

There is actually some scientific support for this Indian point of view. Experiments have shown that spiders fed LSD do not wander around doing purposeless things as one might expect a hallucination would cause them to do, but instead spin an abnormally perfect, symmetrical web. That would support the de-hallucinogen thesis. But politics seldom depends on facts for its decisions.

In trauma, the de hallucinogen would be that your trauma is your identity. Also, it allows the patient to be able to face and process the trauma instead of it hiding in the background through dissociation and hijacking the patient out of the blue everytime there’s some unconcious trigger.

The physical distance to that teepee from the highway was about two-hundred yards, but culturally the distance bridged with Dusenberry that night was more like thousands of years. Phædrus couldn’t have gone that distance without the peyote. He would have just sat there observing all this objectively like a well-trained anthropology student. But the peyote prevented that. He didn’t observe, he participated, exactly as Dusenberry had intended he should do.

So what this substance does is remove objectivity and immerse Pheadrus in the culture, more than that, into something much deeper

Sometime after midnight, after he had listened to the singing and beating on the drum for hours and hours, something began to change. The exotic aspects began to fade. Instead of being an onlooker, feeling greater and greater distance from all this, his perceptions began to go in the opposite direction. He began to feel a warmth toward the songs. He murmured to John Wooden Leg, the Indian sitting next to him, John, that’s a great song! and he meant it. John looked at him with surprise.

Why should he feel at home? This was the last place on earth where he should feel that.

He really didn’t. Only a part of him felt at home. The other part still felt estranged and analytic and watchful. It seemed as though he was splitting into two people, one of whom wanted to stay there forever, and the other wanted to leave immediately. The latter one he understood, but who was this first person? This first person was a mystery.

Why does he feel at home? Stay tuned for a revelation. But let’s go through this ceremony a little more.

This wild side was saying for the first time, stop wandering, and these are your real people, and that was what he began to see there, listening to the songs and drums and staring into the fire. Something about these people seemed to say to this bad side of himself, We know exactly how you feel. We feel this way ourselves.

The other side, the good analytic side, just watched, and before long it slowly began to spin an enormous symmetrical intellectual web, larger and more perfect than any it had ever spun before.

The division here is exactly Phaedrus and Robert in Zamm but in an odd way it’s close. One is the objective observer, Robert, who keeps at a distance and observes and says the right thing and keeps Phaedrus, the insane side, at bay…then there’s Pheadrus who is a renegade, shaking things up, stating that our mythos which puts truth over value has been wrong all along. Pheadrus is at home with the Sophists, and one could argue, could be at home with the Indians and their values. But we will soon see what this division really is.

The nucleus of this intellectual web was the observation that when the Indians entered the teepee, or went out, or added logs, or passed the ceremonial peyote, or pipe, or food, they just did these things. They didn’t go about doing them. They just did them. There was no waste motion.

There is a simplicity to this way, very much like Zen. Just drawing water and chopping wood.

They just said what they wanted to say. Then they stopped. It wasn’t just the way they pronounced the words. It was their attitude — plain-spoken, he thought…

Plains spoken. They were speaking in the language of the Plains…(both Indian and cowboy) laconic, understated, very little tonal change, no change of expression. Yet there was a warmth beneath the surface that you couldn’t point to the source of.

The web grew wider and wider. They were not imitating. If there’s one thing these people didn’t do it was imitate. Everything was coming straight from the heart. That seemed to be the whole idea — to get things down to a point where everything’s coming straight on, direct, no imitation. But if they weren’t imitating, why did they talk this way? Why were they imitating?

Then the huge peyote illumination came:

They’re the originators!

It expanded until he felt as though he had walked through the screen of a movie and for the first time watched the people who were projecting it from the other side.

Then what follows is a beautiful speech by a Comanche chief at a conference in Washinton in 1867, when the reservations were being set up that truly conveys this way of speaking and understanding. It is spare yet descriptive. What most people would regard as a speech of High Quality.

Any good thing you say to me shall not be forgotten. I shall carry it as near to my heart as my children and it shall be as often on my tongue as the name of the Great Spirit. I want no blood upon my land to stain the grass. I want it all clear and pure, and I wish it so, that all who go through among my people may find peace when they come in, and leave it when they go out.

 

…it was a damn sight better than cowboy speech — but it was still closer to the white Plains dialect than is the language of the European. Here were the straight, head-on, declarative sentences without stylistic ornamentation of any kind, but with a poetic force

It very much resembles the example of arete Zamm, from the Iliad.

Then you may live in Argos, and work at the loom in another woman’s house, or perhaps carry water for a woman of Messene or Hyperia, sore against your will: but hard compulsion will lie upon you. And then a man will say as he sees you weeping, ‘This was the wife of Hector, who was the noblest in battle of the horse-taming Trojans, when they were fighting around Ilion.’ This is what they will say: and it will be fresh grief for you, to fight against slavery bereft of a husband like that. But may I be dead, may the earth be heaped over my grave before I hear your cries, and of the violence done to you.”

From that original perception of the Indians as the originators of the American style of speech had come an expansion: the Indians were the originators of the American style of life. The American personality is a mixture of European and Indian values. When you see this you begin to see a lot of things that have never been explained before.

Then Pheadrus talks about this scene at the very beginning of the movie, which I wanted to show you but they took it down for copywright, but look at the opening scene of Butch Cassidy

The voice of an unseen gambler says, Well, it looks like you cleaned everybody out, fella. You haven’t lost a hand since you got the deal.

There is no change in the Kid’s expression.

What’s the secret of your success? the gambler’s voice continues. It is threatening. Ominous.

Sundance looks down for a while as if thinking about it, then looks up unemotionally. Prayer, he says.

He doesn’t mean it but he doesn’t say it sarcastically either. It’s a statement poised on a knife edge of ambiguity.

What Phædrus wanted to do now was use just that one scene as an opening illustration. To it he would add just one explanation which no one ever notices, but which he was sure was true. What you have just seen, he would explain, is a rendition of the cultural style of an American Indian.

the point of Phædrus’ thesis was that the reason it came naturally and that audiences responded to it naturally was that the film reached into a root source of American feelings for what is good. It is this source of what is good, this historic cultural system of American values, which is Indian.

He then points out that the white American is a combination of European and Indian, and proves this by pointing out how an Indian resembles a cowboy, and shares a description of the Cheyenne male, who could just as easily be the Sundance Kid.

In the great depression, people loved to go to Westerns, and spend the little money that had this way

They did so because those movies were a confirmation of the values they believed in. Those movies were rituals, almost religious rituals, for transmitting the cultural values of America to the young and reconfirming them in the old. It wasn’t a deliberate, conscious process; people were just doing what they liked. It is only when one analyzes what they liked that one sees the assimilation of Indian values.

And then he gives some examples of these values. During WWII:

European military commanders rated the stability of American troops under fire as high, and that is also an Indian characteristic.

Then there is our impatience with flowery, manipulative speech:

these well-mannered circumlocutions of aristocratic European speech are forked-tongue talk to the Indian and are infuriating. They violate his morality. He wants you to either speak from the heart or keep quiet. This has been a source of Indian-white conflict for centuries and, although the modern white American personality is a compromise of that conflict, the conflict still exists.

Also:

This anti-snobbery of all Americans, particularly Western Americans, is derived from this Indian attitude.

And our politics as well:

The American politics of isolationism, in its refusal to become entangled in the meshes of European polities comes from this root, Phædrus thought. Most of American isolationism has come from regions that are closest to the American Indian.

. It’s still with us, and accounts for much of the restlessness and dissatisfaction found in America today. Within each American these conflicting sets of values still clash.

So you could argue that part of the problem around the Meaning Crisis, from an American point of view is being still bound to stale Victorian values. Much of the discussion of the origin of the meaning crisis is in stale social values, and that there needs to be an updating of

So how is it that these Indian values entered the culture of the white pioneers?

The early frontiersmen such as the Mountain Men deliberately and enthusiastically imitated Indians. They were delighted to be told that they were indistinguishable from Indians. Settlers who came later copied the Mountain Men’s frontier style but didn’t see its source, or if they did, denied it and credited it to their own hard work and isolation.

And here is where we see the true division that Pheadrus experiences, perspectivaly, during the ceremony. There has been for the modern man a domicide. With the conquering of the Indians was also the conquering of nauture and of individual freedom that implies.

But the clash between European and Indian values still exists, and Phædrus felt he himself was one of those in whom the battle was taking place. That was why he had the feeling of coming home at that peyote meeting. The division he’d felt within himself and thought was something wrong with himself was not within himself at all. What he was seeing was a source of himself that had never been formally acknowledged. It was a division within the entire American culture that he had projected upon himself. It was in many others too.

When it’s pointed out to you, you see this obvious division in two young men who are archetypes of these 2 sides of the american personality. Tom Sawyer and Huck finn. Tom is New Englander, reasonably comfortable in polite society and prone to cleverness,

Huck was a Western person, closer to the Indians, forever restless, unattached, unbelieving in the pompousness of society, wanting more than anything else just to be free.

Freedom. That was the topic that would drive home this whole understanding of Indians. Of all the topics his slips on Indians covered, freedom was the most important. Of all the contributions America has made to the history of the world, the idea of freedom from a social hierarchy has been the greatest. It was fought for in the American Revolution and confirmed in the Civil War. To this day it’s still the most powerful, compelling ideal holding the whole nation together.

Jean Jacques Rouseau is sometimes credited with this idea of freedom, but he got it from America. And the speech by the Comanche chief, an elegy to their freedom, so well exemplifies this.

He got it from the impact of the New World upon Europe and from contemplation of one particular kind of individual who lived in the New World, the person he called the Noble Savage.

The idea that all men are created equal is a gift to the world from the American Indian.

And as Phædrus’ studies got deeper and deeper he saw that it was to this conflict between European and Indian values, between freedom and order, that his study should be directed.

So this division, not beetween classic and romantic as in Zamm, but between freedom and order is where Pheadrus’ studies will go. So I hope that made sense, and I will see you next time.

I want to talk about Paul VanderKlay readressing the JBP Sam Harris debates. So he’s looking at this after 2 years of thinking about it, and theres some really great stuff in this video. Naturally, I’m going to associate it with Pirsig, because he’s what I’ve been thinking about for 2 years or so

 

Common project

Jordan and Sam  start with the common project which Sam articulates:

SH – we are both concerned how to live lives worth living, know how to live, how can we make life worth leaving (or meaningful lives).

Now, I’m also going to argue that’s the same project of this corner of the internet. Very broad, but it’s the real question ultimately. And our philosophy is going to inform how we see the world. And in this corner, I think what’s happening is the development of a coherent new philsophy, or an ecology of philosophies lets say

SH – “wellbeing” – rational agents are a guide and can determine this

JP – meaningful life

Harris – we can pull everything out as propositional truths then rationally work on it (rationally manipulating actions and behaviors and then changing them) and that this will, as did the enlightenment, foster well-being (which is a rational concept – you can measure wellbeing with instruments like the quality of life test. Impulse control is behind this entire salvific narrative of rationality – waiting and testing my intuitions and using data. rationality is objective like with language – you can learn it rationally. Theory.

Peterson – Life is essentially difficult, and we have to prepare to accept this – this is in fact where therapy is useful. And by embracing this, we can weather the responsibility and sacrifice that makes life worth living. Also, and my favorite Petersonian concept, that aligning with truth as it presents itself to your consciousness is the way to create a solid foundation that also makes life worth living. Very much like manifesting Quality. So for Peterson, Knowledge is essentially subjective. To learn a language, you have to learn it by being immersed in it, by actually speaking it. Practice

So, if we’re talking about the philosophy that is in the midst of developing, it’s obviously much more along the JBP line. And these dialogs are in fact pretty much the beginning of the desire to articulate a philosophy for the present and future. A game B if you will that has been associated with the word sensemaking. To make sense of combinatorily explosive information that the internet has manifested and demonstrated as objects of information, you need to sense and underlying pattern to it. Weighing facts in a rational way is no longer that useful. We don’t have the time. We need to detect a way of sensemaking that transcends that. This would be a metaphysical structure to our thinking that is pragmatic, that is based on relevance realization rather than thruth, or the Quality as reality.

The common thread is that it is a theory that’s a meaning-based reality that is the metaphysical structure of game b. Not subjects and objects. This is Pirsig’s Quality project. A shift from SOM to MOQ where Quality is the true reality, not subjects and objects.

Metaphorical Truth

A belief that is one acts as though it’s true, they will outperform someone who acts as though it’s false, so that’s Bret so it’s evolutionary. the sense that

But let’s look at the example given:

Plate tectonics and ocean geography vs the spirit in water. In a particular case, the belief in the spirits of the water helped native residents better weather a tsunami.

Now one of my favorite sections from chapter 3 of Zamm where Robert says that the law of gravity is a ghost and demonstrates this by it’s non-existence, and that a ghost is a ghost:

“If that law of gravity existed,” I say, “I honestly don’t know what a thing has to do to be nonexistent. It seems to me that law of gravity has passed every test of nonexistence there is. You cannot think of a single attribute of nonexistence that that law of gravity didn’t have. Or a single scientific attribute of existence it did have. And yet it is still ‘common sense’ to believe that it existed.”

John says, “I guess I’d have to think about it.”

“Well, I predict that if you think about it long enough you will find yourself going round and round and round and round until you finally reach only one possible, rational, intelligent conclusion. The law of gravity and gravity itself did not exist before Isaac Newton. No other conclusion makes sense.

“And what that means,” I say before he can interrupt, “and what that means is that that law of gravity exists nowhere except in people’s heads! It’s a ghost! We are all of us very arrogant and conceited about running down other people’s ghosts but just as ignorant and barbaric and superstitious about our own.”

So until Newton, gravity is another inorganic force that can be defined by any descriptor that emerges from the mythos. So like PVK just said, all our truths are metaphorical including the law of gravity. Why are plate tectonics any worse than describing that particular force than are the water spirits?

Encoded information

I want to bring up the evolutionary structure of the MOQ. What Paul addresses here in terms of MOQ is the interaction between the biological and social level, and some intellectual.

Pauls shows a clip of Bret Weinsten in which he says: human beings are on 2 tracks of inherited information. We inherit more information than we are consciously aware of (therapy explores this). So much is encoded and action and behaviors and are processed by intuition and feeling.

(we are filled with ghosts, biological, social and intellectual)

Humans are not strictly the product of evolution. There is inherited (dna) and cultural information (mythos). There’s a back and forth between our hardware and our software – hardware is biology and software is social, cultural, experiential. Even Robert Sapolsky’s Behave notices this…in fact, in reading this book that is what really stands out is how dynamic the interaction between biology and the natural and cultural environments truly are. 

Now, here’s Pirsig’s description of how we offload information from that same mythos/logos section, which is in chapter 28 of Zamm

The mythos-over-logos argument points to the fact that each child is born as ignorant as any caveman. What keeps the world from reverting to the Neanderthal with each generation is the continuing, ongoing mythos, transformed into logos but still mythos, the huge body of common knowledge that unites our minds as cells are united in the body of man. To feel that one is not so united, that one can accept or discard this mythos as one pleases, is not to understand what the mythos is.

Culture is stored in history, and it’s stored in us. Most of this isn’t conscious. Most of it will never be. The threads of the levels are woven into us. That biology is influenced by the social levels and vice versa.

It also internalizes as the other 3 Ps (besides propositional) of John Vervaeke’s ways of knowing: procedural, participatory, and perspectival.  You react and you don’t know why. You can never ever propositionally know your unconscious. So much is encoded into us. Also, you can’t differentiate between how biology and or culture is manifest.

Because you have so much unconscious material, Multiple values compete , and this is true because according to the MOQ, each level has its values. Remember in Lila biology and intellect cards.

How do we deal with multiple values? MOQ will let us know as we go through Lila. 

Great compression schemes

Great compression schemes that take world and boil it down to stories and systems that we can actually work on. World too big, compressed (religion is the jpeg of a too large world)

God is the compression we need in order to live well in the universe

God is the arena who writes himself into the story – can Frodo find Tolkein in middle earth?

So then Paul mentions something we talked about in our conversation. Which is that I have found that people who are really stuck, who can’t get ahold of something transcendent, they will have a difficult time overcoming that stuckness, because they are going to be trying to solve the problem on the same level it was created. And very typically, that will mean that they can’t really see a way out unless the world lines up in the way they think they want it to, or that they can force themselves not to care, which is of course that rational impulse control that SH thinks is possible. That’s so funny. Either way doesn’t work, because the actual transformation occurs by getting in touch with the noetic dimension, or what PVK calls the theological dimension, or the great compression

People can’t change until they get to the theological level. The theological is the level at which the compression schemes get so tight and boiled down. The data sets are small enough that we can work on them and they are tied all the way out.

PVK Philosophy is similar. So that’s where MOQ comes in, in the sense that it’s metaphysical, meaning it’s what I think is the philosophical parallel of the theological in the sense that it’s at the bottom, it is the most compressed. So whether it’s God, or Quality, or Vervaeke’s real world, I think we are all in agreement that true transformation can’t occur until you can really see the big picture. And the big picture has to be compressed because it’s combinatorily explosive.

And this compression is my favorite aspect of Paul’s revisiting these dialogs.

Values

In terms of God and Quality, I think they are so intermingled. Because the universe is oriented towards the Good, toward evolution, towards improvement, toward what’s better, that orientation towards the Good can be conceptualized in something that God has bestowed upon the universe and the manifestation of God in everything. Any pattern that becomes stable and becomes static is a pattern in which it is valuable enough to stick around. So value, or the good, is inherent within it and it’s created by value.

Fact/value

values have been colonizing facts for a long time, yes, because they create facts. The logos is embedded in the mythos

The term logos, the root word of “logic,” refers to the sum total of our rational understanding of the world. Mythos is the sum total of the early historic and prehistoric myths which preceded the logos.

The mythos includes not only the Greek myths but the Old Testament, the Vedic Hymns and the early legends of all cultures which have contributed to our present world understanding. The mythos-over-logos argument states that our rationality is shaped by these legends, that our knowledge today is in relation to these legends as a tree is in relation to the little shrub it once was. One can gain great insights into the complex overall structure of the tree by studying the much simpler shape of the shrub. There’s no difference in kind or even difference in identity, only a difference in size.

A couple more points –

Stalking the Good vs assuming the Good

Why is Love at the top of the hierarchy – Because Jesus put it there. The agapic love that we were finally able to afford. We no longer needed the punitive God of the old testament. Our mythos had offloaded enough to ensure our survival. So we received a message of the loving God of the new testament. Our technology and our consciousness had evolved to the point where we could afford to embrace this message. And now that is the highest Quality aspect of being human.

So Is it natural to know what the good is?

And this is a very good question. Pirisg would say it is, as demonstrated by his experiment with the essays. Students always agreed on the highest Quality essays. But you have to remove the barriers or traps to detecting that Quality. Thus, that chapter 26 I keep referring to (the Gumption Chautauqua). And Christianity gives us some excellent static patterns of value, shortcuts if you will to the Good. Is it better to go deeper and be able to detect Quality independently of any religion? Of course, but the Christian project is to make you that kind of person who can do that.

 

This is my 2d entry into the “Lila Project”, which will include a full reading of Robert Pirsig’s second novel, as well as my own commentary based on following the work of Robert Pirsig for a couple of years now, since I fell in love with Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and began incorporating elements of the philosophy into my psychotherapy practice, and into my own psychological/spiritual/philosophical development. This project will include a reading and commentary, each approximately every other week, until the book is concluded.

On my channel, you will find my layman’s exploration of ZaMM.

Reading:

Commentary:

When Phædrus awoke he saw through the hatch that the sky had become less black. Dawn was coming.

Then he realized he wasn’t alone. In fact he was blocked physically from getting out of the bunk by a body between him and the boat’s passage way. This was Lila, he remembered.

So Pheadrus’ task is not to wake her up. And what is described here is how you have to maneuver your body on a boat. There are all sorts of limitations on a boat, such as the fact its usually moving, and it’s very cramped. It requires real finesse to negotiate.

It was a grace he’d acquired the hard way. When he first got the boat he walked around like it was a house, slipped on some diesel oil, plunged head-first down the companionway ladder, and broke a collar bone. Now he’d learned to move like a spider monkey, particularly in storms when the whole boat rose and pitched and rolled like a flying trapeze.

So think about that grace and how it works with the real experience of being on a boat. It’s interesting that his human body becomes like that of his ancestor who was so much part of nature. The boat, while being a technological apparatus, is subject to a natural force which it flows through and flows through it. So much like the motorcycle and the road, the boat is in relationship with the water. So you can’t just walk around on it like the bow is a flat surface. You have to move in harmony with the water. With nature. Just like a monkey. Phaedrus had to come in contact with that force in order to align with it. The result of that alignment is a Quality relationship between him and the water…coming out in the form of an animal precursor to a human.

It felt good not to be related to this harbor in any way. He didn’t know what was above the banks of the river or behind the harbor buildings or where the roads led to or who the houses belonged to or what people would appear here today or what people they would meet. It was like a picture-book and he was a child, watching it, waiting for a page to be turned.

So this describes a freeing of a bond with the harbor. Remember he was in the locks and he was stuck there going down the Hudson towards the harbor, and now, he’s away from that binding harbor and out in the open. From this free vantage point, he can disengage from it and he’s able to observe the world go by without being attached to anything. Is that metaphorical?

He needs to heat the place up, and on a boat, this is a bit of a procedure involving alcohol and charcoal and a little stove. Meanwhile, the rest of us sit in perfect comfort on the shore, barely realizing that our comfort is manufactured…we just forget. It takes actually pulling out of that, like camping, to remember.

On the picture-book shore out there everything was done by magic. They got their heat and electricity without even thinking about it. But in this little floating world, whatever you needed you had to get for yourself.

So by being disengaged from the harbor, you see it as a totality. The harbor world and its automatic comforts. Viewing it like a picture book, you can see it in a different way, like you know where the old buildings are, where the gentrification is. Pheadrus notes a pseudo-Victorian flavor to the gentrification. Certainly this phenomenon hit most waterfronts along the East coast really hard in the past couple decades. Could anyone imagine for example what would end up happening to the Baltimore harbor?

As the alcohol fog lifts, and the cold orients him back into the reality of this morning, he finds a large suitcase on his deck.

He saw that her suitcase had shoved all his trays of slips over to one side of the pilot berth. They were for a book he was working on and one of the four long card-catalog-type trays was by an edge where it could fall off. That’s all he needed, he thought, about three thousand four-by-six slips of note pad paper all over the floor.

So here’s where we are going to get some fascinating insight into Pirsig’s actual writing organizational method. He writes on 4×6 pieces of notepaper rather than on pads or in book. And now, as this scene unfolds, he says he’s been working on these for 4 years and that there are 11thousand of them.

Their overall subject he called a Metaphysics of Quality, or sometimes a Metaphysics of Value, or sometimes just MOQ to save time.

The buildings out there on shore were in one world and these slips were in another. This slip-world was quite a world and he’d almost lost it once because he hadn’t written any of it down and incidents came along that had destroyed his memory of it.

So, from ZaMM we know what these incidents were. For those of you who haven’t, It was about 30 sessions of electroshock therapy for his delusions. A lot of severe mental illness was handled with that or lobotomy a the time. The latter was something that almost happened to him. But now that he is Pheadrus again and is back on track with his Quality project, the ideas just keep coming in to the point they are unmanageable unless they can be offloaded.

Now the main purpose of the slips was not to help him remember anything. It was to help him to forget it.

One thing you probably noticed in ZaMM and that you will see here in Lila is that many of the statements Pirsig makes are analogies to describe the underlying principles of his philosophy. This is one of them

There’s an old analogy to a cup of tea. If you want to drink new tea you have to get rid of the old tea that’s in your cup, otherwise your cup just overflows and you get a wet mess. Your head is like that cup. It has a limited capacity and if you want to learn something about the world you should keep your head empty in order to learn it. It’s very easy to spend your whole life swishing old tea around in your cup thinking it’s great stuff because you’ve never really tried anything new, because you could never get it in, because the old stuff prevented its entry because you were so sure the old stuff was so good, because you never really tried anything new… on and on in an endless circular pattern.

The concept of offloading becomes really important here, because you really need to let things go in order to grow. Remember some of the gumption traps? Being stuck in an old value system that you were reluctant to discard is rather described by this tea cup analogy. A value trap. And remember that this is the most problematic barrier to accessing Quality

Here is the whole paragraph describing his system.

The reason Phædrus used slips rather than full-sized sheets of paper is that a card-catalog tray full of slips provides a more random access. When information is organized in small chunks that can be accessed and sequenced at random it becomes much more valuable than when you have to take it in serial form. It’s better, for example, to run a post office where the patrons have numbered boxes and can come in to access these boxes any time they please. It’s worse to have them all come in at a certain time, stand in a queue and get their mail from Joe, who has to sort through everything alphabetically each time and who has rheumatism, is going to retire in a few years, and who doesn’t care whether they like waiting or not. When any distribution is locked into a rigid sequential format it develops Joes that dictate what new changes will be allowed and what will not, and that rigidity is deadly.

So of course Joe is the symbol for that rigid way of thinking that prevents any kind of update to the system. Remember all those rhetoric teachers in ZaMM who were stuck in the Aristotelian mode of enforcing a so called Quality from the top down in the form of rules and regulations concering writing, rather than the bottom up method of allowing Quality to guide the writing. Joes rules

Random access is likely the first actual term that we will be able to identify as a the philosophy that has now been named — the Metaphysics of Quality

Some of the slips were actually about this topic: random access and Quality. The two are closely related. Random access is at the essence of organic growth, in which cells, like post-office boxes, are relatively independent. Cities are based on random access. Democracies are founded on it. The free market system, free speech, and the growth of science are all based on it. A library is one of civilization’s most powerful tools precisely because of its card-catalog trays. Without the Dewey Decimal System allowing the number of cards in the main catalog to grow or shrink at any point the whole library would soon grow stale and useless and die.

His system allows for any idea to be considered, and we shall soon see, there is a place for all ideas. The important aspect of this system is it dispenses with any preconceived notions of what is the Metaphysics of Quality. Just like the Dewey Decimal system accommodates the books that come in rather than only allowing certain books to be placed in the library based on the categories that are already in place.

There were no ideological Joes to kill an idea because it didn’t fit into what he was already thinking…Because he didn’t pre-judge the fittingness of new ideas or try to put them in order but just let them flow in, these ideas sometimes came in so fast he couldn’t write them down quickly enough.

But obviously there’s a downside

There’d been times when an urge surfaced to take the slips, pile by pile, and file them into the door of the coal stove on top of the glowing charcoal briquets and then close the door and listen to the cricking of the metal as they turned into smoke. Then it would all be gone and he would be really free again.

Except that he wouldn’t be free. It would still be there in his mind to do.

And remember in ZaMM what was said about the church or the university. That even when the building is gone, the spirit of the institution still stands. When a revolution tears down an established government, the paradigm doesn’t get torn down, it just gets repopulated with a new hierarchy. Like the Czar is replaced with Stalin and people at the bottom still suffer.

Much of this section deals with the specifics of working with this system, and some of these challenges anyone who has any kind of system will recognize. And this section mirrors a little the frustrations of Gumption Chautauqua. Things that flatten you mostly because you have to start all over again.

One interesting aspect of this is how his being able to articulate and write about this new Metaphysics (a very difficult topic) emerges from this dynamic system of organization. For example, when he’s organizing these cards, and this illustrates the brilliance of this system, he will look at the cards and say “which comes first” Then the next, until you have the cards organized in sequence. Imagine doing that with a bunch of pages or even cutting and pasting on the computer. This is actually more useful than the computer. Even now.

Then what he notices is topics start emerging on their own. Then he can section off the cards with little tabs each for the topic. So instead of making topics and filling them, the topics emerge naturally. This alone illustrates the benefit of this system.

Because his topic is so vast — a new metaphysics, it’s nearly impossible to organize from the top down.

It was fascinating to watch this thing grow. No one that he knew had ever written a whole metaphysics before and there were no rules for doing it and no way of predicting how it would progress.

So yes, it is an entirely new thing, and so this method almost was necessary. But he didn’t have to do it this way, he could have just made a lot of categories he thought would comprise a metaphysics of Quality and filled them in. But he didn’t do that.

So besides the categories that emerge, there are 5 other categories, and we will talk about them, because they are what allows this system to take in any and all ideas

The first was UNASSIMILATED.

These are ideas that come in at the wrong time, when you’re not working or doing something else. Normally your mind says to these ideas, Go away, I’m busy, but that attitude is deadly to Quality.

Now this really hits hard, because just think of all the great ideas you’ve lost because you were to lazy or busy to record them. So already aren’t you beginning to get sold on his system?

PROGRAM slips were instructions for what to do with the rest of the slips…

What made them so powerful was that they too were on slips, one slip for each instruction. This meant the PROGRAM slips were random access too and could be changed and resequenced as the need arose without any difficulty. He remembered reading that John Von Neumann, an inventor of the computer, had said the single thing that makes a computer so powerful is that the program is data and can be treated like any other data. That seemed a little obscure when Phædrus had read it but now it was making sense.

So you can actually restructure your entire system as you are working and the fact you can do this keeps your system open to change, and that’s not going to negate anything you’ve already done, because the categories have emerged independently of the program. If you made the program rigid, you’d be commiting the same mistake. You’d have a bunch of mailboxes that you can acess anytime, but the ones used the most might be stuck in the back of the room. So maybe sometimes you need to change where the boxes are.

The next slips were the CRIT slips.

This is the Festivus pole of the system. These are for airing grievances when the author is in a bad mood. It substitutes for throwing things away. Like when you throw away all your exes clothing, but you realize later that you really liked wearing that one shirt to be, and another thing you threw away was a brand new pair of designer jeans that you could get $120 on Ebay.

The next to the last group was the TOUGH category. This contained slips that seemed to say something of importance but didn’t fit into any topic he could think of. It prevented getting stuck on some slip whose place might become obvious later on.

The final category was JUNK. These were slips that seemed of high value when he wrote them down but which now seemed awful.

The JUNK and TOUGH, end up being the ones that bother him, for obvious reasons and his impulse is to shove them under the rug.

These were the underdogs, the outsiders, the pariahs, the sinners of his system. But the reason he was so concerned about them was that he felt the quality and strength of his entire system of organization depended on how he treated them. If he treated the pariahs well he would have a good system. If he treated them badly he would have a weak one.

So this is an example of the shadow of the system, and we already know that if you don‘t address the entirety of anything, you will lose what could be an important route to the thing you need. So even if these things that look on the surface rationally to be things to throw away, you may need them later.

The hundreds of topics had organized themselves into larger sections, the sections into chapters, and chapters into parts; so that what the slips had organized themselves into finally was the contents of a book; but it was a book whose organization was from the bottom up rather than from the top down. He hadn’t started with a master idea and then selected in joe-fashion only those slips that would fit. In this case, Joe, the organizing principle, had been democratically elected by the slips themselves.

And as we saw, Joe can be voted out if need be.

The JUNK and TOUGH slips didn’t participate in this election, and that created an underlying dissatisfaction. But he felt that you can’t expect a perfect system of organization of anything. He’d kept the JUNK pile as small as possible without deliberately suppressing it and that was the most anyone could ask.

You always have to deal with your shadow. I think this concept drives people crazy who are trying to find spiritual peace. You will always have to deal with a little bit of the devil. AS Alan watts said, the element of irreducible rascality. So as simple as the system sounds, it often caused him a lot of problems. Like a slip fitting into a lot of categories, or slips so odd they fit nowhere. Sometimes the negative piles get too large, meaning the program Joe needs to be re-elected. Etc. on down the line. Nothing worth doing is easy. This book took 19 years to write. But one thing about Pirsig’s writing is that everything ties together. There is not one wasted line. I think this system is partially responsible.

During this sort of review of his system, Phaedrus picks up a tray.

This tray was the oldest one. It had slips he hadn’t looked at for more than a year now.

He brought it over to the table with him.

The first topic, at the very front of the tray, was DUSENBERRY. He looked at it nostalgically. At one time he had thought DUSENBERRY was going to be at the center of the whole book.

And we will read about Dusenberry in Chapter 3. This is one of the real elements, one of the autobiographical elements in this novel. Dusenberry was real. You can look up Verne Dusenberry right now on google.

After a while he took a blank pad from the back of the tray and wrote on the top slip, PROGRAM, and then under it, Hang up everything until Lila gone.

Probably a good idea. Lila has already demonstrated that she’s a big presence on a small boat.

 

I think the MOQ is a philosophy whose time has come. I will reiterate why it’s time to take this seriously. We need a way of seeing things that tap into the eternal pattern of the universe. This may sound airy-fairy but it’s is far from that in my opinion. In fact, two very functional philosophies, Zen Buddhism and James’ pragmatism can marry up to be so useful as a way to operate in the world as in the metaphysics of Quality.

In Zamm, Phaedrus realizes that hypotheses are pretty much infinite. So how do you figure what’s right? What’s best? That was the catalyst for finding the Ghost of Reason (that said there was a Good that could be arrived at dialectically), and thrashing it good. Phaedrus knew a new metaphysics was in order. One that could discern the best facts. So, we need a new way of conceptualizing what’s best, otherwise, we’re stuck relying on reason for this job, and as we see nowadays, from the same facts you get both Yanni and Laurel.

So you see why it is being said facts don’t matter? Because information has become so complex that our old Subject/Object metaphysics (SOM) can’t handle it anymore. Remember that in The Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, once language became sufficiently metaphor-rich, people became able to hold abstractions in mind, and they didn’t need the Gods anymore. Now we don’t need the Ghost of Reason as we once did.

                                                          *

I want to see if anyone is interested in reading ZAMM with me. I’ve read it and listened to it a few times, but now I want to go back and read it more carefully with special emphasis on tracing the evolution of the MOQ, I think.

So my question is to you all, is should we do some kind of book club? Maybe have a dialog in the comment sections. OR even if Anyone who is interested, we could do some split screen discussions which I can post. Let’s get this show on the road!