The Evil of Good and the Good of Evil, Part 3
‘How could it be that something compounded does not pass away?’§
For The Pali Canon complete text of Gautama Buddha’s last days see Mahaparinibbana Sutta Part 3 ‘Relinquishing the Will to Live’ — Ananda’s Appeal Par 58
§Subtitle Quotation from Confession Of A Buddhist Atheist by Stephen Batchelor, pg223, slightly edited with referenced to books extra. 🤨
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For other, not exhaustive, translations of the Tao Te Ching go to Green Way Research
Enough Already! Still, Sitting and Wondering and Looking for More Words
I’ve been sitting here for a couple of days, now, flipping back and forth in my mind as well as looking for and at extracts from the words of others to assist me in formulating my own words here. Would this not be a very clear definition of a fool’s errand? Of not knowing enough to know to stop the search for words, especially those of others? And yet somehow I know that with that search I am formulating my own words, versions of language somehow precise to my unique learning and cant, and perhaps expressing my own eccentricity appropriately.
When I closed part 2 of ‘The Evil of Good’ I had thought I would quickly go into the positive ‘power’ of words after a short extension of the so-called ‘bad’ stuff. Oddly enough with the peculiar magic of synchronicity I was quickly redirected back towards the inherent trouble or even danger of words despite the clear and obvious vitality and beauty with which words often imbue us. And I love words! If you hadn’t noticed, I love words for their gymnastic-like danceability, their power to evoke ambiguity, their equanimous plays between the ugly and the beautiful, the profane and the pure, the true and the false.
Ahhhhh, those sweet moments when words with seeming magic and effortlessness liberated me, liberated us, from conceptual ignorance masked as knowledge. Yes, those mostly inexplicable, often indescribable and wordless singular ahas. Those flash-epiphanies that piloerected our hairs and breathed into us enough life to enable us to stumble, hop, skip, jump or even leap from the backs of the very words that once had trapped us in rules of logic, reason and apparent truth. Now we rise up into some kind of empowered transcendence, gleeful in our word mastery! I see that it was words that lifted us from the immediate suffering that we had erroneously correlated to the ‘natural’ distresses of our personal, mortal, existence. That we had with the finest nuances categorised their traces in our minds. Words, to be or not to be such sweet sorrow and release.
Words are Spells (I)
I had several wonderful synchronicities elucidating that very thing in the recent ‘Surviving Narcissistic Abuse’ on-line summit I attended last week. Many of the guests described their own ‘aha-singularities ‘ when they discovered that they had been the target of narcissistic malicious manipulations and multi-faceted mind-control techniques. ‘I finally had a language, the words that gave me liberation from the craziness I had been immersed in! I started to see the truth! And with that I was able to begin my journey into freedom!’ At one point Pi Winslow, the organiser of the summit, said ‘Words are spells’ in describing the power of the narcissist’s use of language to blind their targets from seeing what is true. (And ‘words are spells’ became in the following day, the seed of another synchronicity — see the Peterson and Nawaz interview, with a ‘muchas gracias’ to Tereza Coraggio (TC) who directed my attention to this fascinating discussion on words and language and their role in extending violence and their potential role of ending it: ‘In Response to Netanyahu | Maajid Nawaz | EP 337’. I’ll look at this interview in part here in part in a future essay, perhaps the next one.)
For these survivors of narcissistic malicious manipulation the relief of at least being able to see the language of truth rising out from the morass and stench of the narcissist’s ‘truthiness' was tangible and powerful. They all described the role language had given them to find the trailheads of their pathway into new life, one comprised of expanding personal agency and empowerment. And for these amazing people that path brought them to a summit. There they energetically shared their words of hope and healing that occurred after they had eliminated the gap between true somatic experiences of life and the delusional experiences that the narcissist’s words and unspoken energy had been able to create as a mirage of life in their minds. These people expressed their personalised language-discoveries as the means to assist us attendees in our own liberation path from traumatising narcissistic abuse. Narcissistic trauma has its own characteristics, of course, and yet in the end it is still the trauma of being split, often in several or even many ways, that creates the multifaceted gaps between being fully alive in this now and being deludedly ‘alive’ within the cognitions and rumination of ideas of life past or not yet extant. (I discuss the splitting aspect of trauma in some detail in.)
And here-in lies a real danger, which is the experience of a word-truth freedom that often comes with a quiet truth-trap that we either close our eyes to or are oblivious of: we look to fix the truth of that karmic moment as if it is permanent. These flashes of truth-epiphanies are often the epitome of joy and the joy-seeker inside of us will want to grip that joy as if it can be held it in stasis. Patañjali and Gautama both caution that clinging to pleasure is one of the more difficult sources of suffering with which life engages us. This is well documented by the so-called ‘bottoms’ often required by addicts to stop seeking pleasure in that behaviour which, in the beginning, had provided them with some kind of life-affirming relief or joy or calmness. For me, the addiction was words and when I was about twenty-five I had a kind of word-bottom ‘epiphany’ when I realised that I would die before reading the important words, lost as I was in the cartoonishly caricatured models of stoic masculine hero-romance in mysteries, science fiction, and life-and death adventures against mostly human-made evils.
Schopenhauer describes this in a slightly different way. And itself is an interesting kind of trap of language because he assumes that the individual reading has enough agency to see their own thoughts and that they are not actually a victim of their own habits of mind, ie of yogic samskaras. In the expanded essay Schopenhauer describes the difference between people enslaved by verbal knowledge or who use verbal knowledge to freely explore their own minds, as if the mind was something tangible to be explored rather than an etherial subjectivity that is exploiting us. That sounds remarkably yogic or Buddhist, and is an attitude of Self that most people do not seem to be aware of.
Reading is nothing more than a substitute for thought of one's own. It means putting the mind into leading-strings. The multitude of books serves only to show how many false paths there are, and how widely astray a man may wander if he follows any of them. But he who is guided by his [eccentric] genius, he who thinks for himself, who thinks spontaneously and exactly, possesses the only compass by which he can steer aright. A man is wise to read only when his own thoughts stagnate at their source, which will happen often enough even with the best of minds. On the other hand, to take up a book for the purpose of scaring away one's own original thoughts is sin against the Holy Spirit. It is like running away from Nature to look at a museum of dried plants or gaze at a landscape in copperplate. — Schopenhauer, ‘The Essays of Schopenhauer’ pg 35, slightly edited my emphasis. A PDF of complete essays can be found here.
In an odd synchronicity I came to this quotation ‘by accident’ while looking for something else. As I was writing this out, I realised that Schopenhauer was one of two ‘real’ philosophers that the contemporary Irish philosopher Uberboyo described as being fully willing to look at the brutality of life as it really is. The other was Gautama Buddha. And Uberboyo commented that there were occasions when some of Schopenhauer’s readers who ‘couldn’t handle the truth’ in his time committed suicide. (See ‘Exploring Nietzsche's BRUTAL Criticism of Christianity’ passim and in ‘The Evil of Good Part 2’.)
Speaking of Brutality, Here’s A Koan: If You Meet The Buddha On The Road, Kill Him!
I encountered these words as the title of a book by American psychologist Sheldon Kopp, If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him: The Pilgrimage Of Psychotherapy Patients. At the time, now many years ago, I had no idea that that was an old Chinese Chan (Zen) koan or if Kopp discussed that, what a koan actually is. Likely I had the hubris to dismiss my mis-understanding as deep intellectual awareness! That book at that time was an incredibly helpful word collection for me because it confirmed that the healing process I had begun before then was to come from within my Self and was not to be sourced to something outside myself. A nice ‘truth-trap’ that directed me towards the agency of me, even if I had no power at the time to be my own agent. Yup, Life does have a wicked sense of humour! And is patient because it is now that I am in my early 60s, that I am finding with unbooked help my own voice, my own strength, as I expand yogic integrity of body, mind, breath and spirit.
And that same basic directive, albeit in different guises, magically came from all the books that I had heard call my name and that I had read, up to that time, and continued to read for many years subsequently. And somehow they managed to not be my ‘Buddhas’ on my path. I wasn’t sinning, by Schopenhauer’s standards because I managed to maintain an inward focus and did not lose my Self in their wonderfully freeing words.
Of course I was totally lost in the throes of extreme co-dependency with a narcissist partner who had reluctantly helped me escape from the devouring narcissistic mother. I stayed loyal to my rescuer as little more than a unwanted overgrown lap dog who did the dishes, cooked the meals, did the shopping for the last ten years or so of the thirty-seven years we were together.
And so it came to pass that, even though I had been perniciously giving away my self to another, these ‘non-Buddha-books’, to a greater or lesser extent, guided clumsy and stumble-bum me towards the freedom of my bearing personal responsibility for my life as it presents itself to me, and for the power of agency within the experience of my existence within life.
Koan Elaboration: Don’t Waste A Good Koan Opportunity!
“If you meet the Buddha, kill him,” … is attributed to Linji Yixuan (also spelled Lin-chi I-hsuan, d. 866), one of the most prominent masters of Chan (Zen).
In Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind: Informal Talks on Zen Meditation and Practice (Read here.) by Shunryu Suzuki, he said:
"Zen master will say, 'Kill the Buddha!' Kill the Buddha if the Buddha exists somewhere else. Kill the Buddha, because you [are to] resume your own Buddha nature" [slightly edited my emphasis].
If you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha. In other words, if you encounter a "Buddha" separate from yourself, you are deluded (my emphasis).
… any conceptual understanding of "killing the Buddha" is going to fall short of what Linji was saying. To conceptualise non-duality or Buddha Nature is not the same as realisation. As a Zen base guideline, if you can grasp it intellectually, you aren't there yet. (Barbara O'Brien. "Kill the Buddha." ‘Learn Religions’, Aug. 25, 2020 slightly edited.)
And by ‘conceptualise’ and ‘grasp it intellectually’ that means grasping it with words. And when we consider that we have fully grasped a concept, fully understood, we have with great eagerness and even joy, perhaps, managed to blindly put into our path the next big truth-trap: intellectual understanding at the expense of not-knowing the extent of our ignorance. If we aren’t careful, we will have turned the spontaneous aliveness of a symbol into the stiff inert deadness of a sign.
OMG! Q: What Are Words If Not Buddhas Outside Of Ourselves? A: Spellbinding Buddhas!
Relax! Relax! Take a breath and marvel, now, at the miracle of language! The ease and grace and… Well, that was a very poor joke, of course, because living in the time of convidiana has made clear that the ‘official’ language, or perhaps more specifically the directed malevolent purpose of our propagandised language, has been to transform words into a conferred token pass to enable us to unthinkingly shop for everything so long as we don’t have to actually experience anything. And, of course, that we live much less than fifteen minutes away from it.
And to increase the effectiveness of words as propagandised tools/weapons of delusion, the word-wielders look to ‘kill’ words, to fix them as signs and not symbols in the manner CG Jung eloquently describes in Man and His Symbols. Once a word becomes a sign, then the meaning can be more easily repurposed than if the word retains its vital connection to what is not known in either the form of something which is not yet known, or perhaps as something that cannot be known.
In her comment to ‘The Evil of Good Part 2’, Tereza Coraggio (TC) comes valiantly to the defence of a word’s authority of meaning arising ‘naturally’ from the author/creator of the word or phrase.
You interpret Confucius' use of 'fix' or 'correct' as meaning set by an arbitrary authority. I think the natural authority is the author who coined the word, which is why etymology matters to me. Hence, my pushing back against those who took my term 'tonic masculinity' and gave it a meaning I'd define as its opposite, toxic and superior.
I don’t see that the creator/creatrix can naturally be the or even an effective authority. The author of a ‘new’ word or phrase, such as TC’s great repartee ’tonic masculinity’ or me with ‘misopaedia’ or ‘misopaed’ have given birth to somethings that, if, and it’s a very big ‘if’, they survive their verbal natal experience, will morph like the living thing that a word most powerfully is. A kind of child that has a ‘mind’ of its own. Thus we get the ‘bizarre’ word ‘cleave’ meaning to stick together and to split apart at the same time. And the delightful word ‘fadge’ as having no relevance anywhere except in my and Viola-Cesario’s heart.
The human language heart is not an authoritarian police state: it wants to play and dance with words, create them and throw them away as children will do with dolls, blocks, sticks and stones. And perhaps the word-play games, of which we humans have many, can be epitomised in some ways by the child’s and adult’s delight in puns old and new. We play with words because to play is to be eccentric, to be alive. Alas, how often we stop playing and begin to put away our childish spirit and thus we fall prey to what is false.
TC comments on Nawaz’s frequent emphasis that he was not a Luddite. She and I both know the ‘true’ economic etymology of the Luddites, of which the obviously well-educated and well-read Nawaz is not. The Luddites intelligently questioned how technology would impact the farming/crofter communities economically, socially, and humanly. They weren’t against technology, per se. They were against the possibility of a dehumanised enslavement to that technology which they could see would primarily benefit the owners of the technology because it would be the communities that fed the technology. They were, therefore, wise questioners looking out for the best for humanity. The word ‘Luddite’ has become ‘fixed’ in such a way that Nawaz’s use of it was as it being a sign of stupidity and ignorance, no more, no less and is thus easily made a weapon. I suspect that much like how the phrase ‘conspiracy theorist’ has been used to kill conversation, the development and exploitation of the word ‘Luddite’ was managed by the language police to ensure a dead story was perpetuated. This leads me to ask has the word ‘woke’ fallen into being a sign, ie a weapon? Or are the woke themselves the weapon and the word ‘woke’ is actually a sign of the deaf and dumb rigidity that constitutes wokeness?
Fixing Edward de Vere (aka Shakespeare) Past and Present
The language police have been around for a long time. An example I like is that of the mostly unknown history of the centuries of language police castigations and corrections of the ‘could-have-been-better-than-it-was’ writing of Edward de Vere (aka Shakespeare). De Vere has had a huge impact on the vitality of the English language, despite a few centuries of censure and ‘improvements’ made by language police such as Samuel Coleridge and Alexander Pope who took it upon themselves, along with other intellectually astute collegians, to ‘fix’ de Vere by removing the ‘coarse’ and unseemly puns, bawdy humour, females as real people, and by removing ambiguity and symbolism. (Details of these actions were from university days and I don’t have access to the research anymore. These improvements are not cited in the sources I’ve linked, although they are hinted at.) We have been blessed in this time with a kind of renaissance of de Vere’s writing, which has gone back to the original texts with that vitality of symbol and humour, pathos and despair that embodies with the unspoken the totality of human experiences in both sexes that is mostly outside of ‘just’ words. And de Vere’s language of words and constructs is alive because it is pointing to the unknown potentialities good and bad of humanity. And it is with that that de Vere’s writing lives in the karmic present: we the audience are alive to the symbols, the unspoken truths that tickle our hearts and flutter our stomachs with the depths of wordless human fear and hope, joy or and misery. It is testament to the power of de Vere’s living language that the official ‘canonical’ writers were unable to kill his opus despite all their efforts over about two and half centuries of a form of allopathic word medicine.
And it would seem by the internet search that de Vere’s language is still in need of repair.
A Dip Into Dreck: Dry Dryden’s Deftless Death and Destruction of Antony and Cleopatra
Have you heard of the play “All for Love; or, the World Well Lost” by John Dryden? When it was performed in 1677 Dryden received high praise from the language police for having successfully created a ‘clean and proper’ retelling of Antony and Cleopatra in the idealised ‘neo-classical’ style that adhered rigidly to the purported Ancient Greek theatre’s ideas restricting a play to unities of place, time and action. It is as dead a piece of writing as I have ever encountered. And unless you are an English major who spent time with 17th Century English it is unlikely that you will have heard of this play. You may have heard of Dryden, although likely without a clear awareness of why. He has officially received high praise for his prose and criticism from his peers only. In a bit of masochistic curiosity, I thought his writing I had been exposed to was so bad that I extended my Dryden reading beyond the minimum into his prose to see if it redeemed his blank verse. Nope. Thus his plays and other writing exist mostly in university libraries, I imagine, generally collecting dust until another moribund three hundred level English paper is being pushed for a hit of grade.
Words are Karma
Words are actually karma, where karma means the expression of our life in this moment as the sum of all of life, including ourselves. This is really Gautama’s foundational concept of conditioned arising, which is a much more sophisticated version of ‘quantum mechanics’ than the ‘science’ of quantum mechanics. With a lot less mathematics. Synchronicity is the actual manifestation of karma’s expression in this moment and is the epitome of appropriate eccentric action. Words express that. And what our cognitive rationalising minds do not want to accept is that karma means there is no predictable future. Our actions, including our words, are the creation from and into the infinite. Even with our own words we have no authority! They are like seeds from a dandelion, floating to who knows where and who knows if they will become an expensive healthy cleansing food somewhere. And most of us have likely done our best to build armies and fortresses around ourselves to keep spontaneity, conditioned arising, and the possibility of the infinite as freedom as far from us as we can manage.
Wallace Stevens, p16 The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play by Wallace Stevens Holly Stevens (Editor)
Guy Duperreault 2012 (To hear it read on Soundcloud.)
How is it we can communicate at all?
Did you catch the joke? (Was that a joke?) With hindsight I know that for most of my life real communication has been near zero to negligible. I simply was not here to be able to communicate anything from me. I am a part of a society, as are you, that has become increasingly isolating embracers of the fools-gold tech-things that have, because of our inattention and distractive practices, engineered barriers of mind, body and spirit between us and all those others except as digitally deconstructed and reconstructed simulacrums. Now we can connect to strangers around the world and despite the obvious tech-stuff I just alluded to, I know that this has assisted in making my life more intimate and powerful in ways that wouldn’t have happened, and didn’t happen, when I was putting pen to paper and stamp to envelope. And so we have this bizarre human-only(?) dichotomy of being able to be disconnected and connected regardless the barriers of space time and reconstructed imagery that technology as it exist today provides.
And yet. And yet. In my yoga-meditation world, everyone seems surprised that we can make Zoom work as if it is the same as sharing our food, our drink, our breath our wordless structures of body, smell, mind and spirit. And that is, of course, a kind of joke, too. We are under the reign of dissociating platitudes and ‘for your own good’ fear mongering that is guided with openly expressed vigour by authoritarian forces using the mask of reasoned words and cutely packaged cudgels that have been taken from the propaganda playbooks and increasingly refined over the last one hundred plus years.
And Yet We Do Communicate!
And with or without barriers and/or opportunities of technology, often we are kind of bumbling around in darkness wearing dark glasses trying to avoid being stepped on by elephants wearing invisible cloaks. And yet… wow! There is that something inside us, Chomsky’s ‘language box’ maybe, which has this amazing power to create the full range of language from meaningful to meaningless, and at the same time, a body that knows with which words the truth lies. If that is ‘true’ how come so many people, even the smart ones like Chomsky, Peterson, Klein, and all the others, were bamboozled by a very elaborate scam that didn’t fool everybody? Were the non-scammed more trusting of a deeper bodily awareness about what might be false in the plandemic’s sales pitch and the uniformity required of single vision and Newton’s sleep? Or simply completely distrusting of all things authoritarian and government? And the whole range in between.
Gautama’s Hesitation to Communicate His Experience Under the Tree as Being Gibberish
It has been in the last two or three years that my deep awareness of what Gautama expressed after his enlightenment about going against the societal and religious stream may have been about. He considered keeping silent about his ‘discovery’ of ‘truth’ because he thought that no one would get it. I am open to being wrong about what I am experiencing now. And likely my continued practices may bring about a change of my current awareness. What Gautama discovered is that the ‘against the stream’ consciousness is that the truth of my mind and spirit comes when I actually embody the wordless thing that is typing out these words: this body. This body doesn’t lie and isn’t fooled because it is the energy of conditioned arising, a compounded creation within the interdependent fractal-like matrix of Life that has only singularity with existence. When I was completely disembodied, split into many pieces, I thought I was communicating. And while it is true that I was ingesting and digesting and egesting ‘words’, the communication wasn’t really in the present, really in the body. It was floating around, kind of like an abandoned chocolate bar in an overly chlorinated pool.
Words are Spells (II): Peterson and Nawaz Talk Dirty: Spirit, Word-Technology Ills and Duality
Nawaz:
“And when we cast our spells we create feelings in the people that receive those words.”
Basho:
The trouble with most poetry is that it is either subjective or objective. — News of the Universe: Poems of Two-Fold Consciousness, ed. Robert Bly. p. 209.
The banked fire. The shadow of the guest Is on the wall. —Basho
I really enjoyed the Peterson Nawaz discussion because at its core they strove to see what is true, deeply enough to perhaps find a way to peace beginning, in this case, with the Middle East. Both men are looking to heal the rift that has been manufactured by malevolent self-serving human energies to perpetuate the war machine. Both see it as fundamentally a ‘spiritual/religious’ issue mired down in Nietzsche’s idea of enervation by wordification.
Both see language as big, although in this instance I think Nawaz to a much higher degree than Peterson. It was Nawaz who said ‘Words are spells’ that affect the other and that language inherently expresses power inequality and/or equality. A key element in his argument was that the powerful are often bullies who are either oblivious of their bully language or are deliberately flexing their bully stance. (That is my paraphrase.) Noam Chomsky has, of course made similar arguments.
Nawaz takes this in two interesting directions for me. The first is his argument that the invention of writing was a key element, perhaps even the central wedge, that created the initial rift between people. How? He argues that by necessity of its existence the written word created the subject-object split that will naturally squeeze out the middle, which is where spirit or God or wholeness resides.
I think that this is fundamentally incorrect. It is not a requirement for the invention of the written word to create such a split. Words, as I’ve inferred or argued in the last three essays especially, express who we collectively are. If words are expressing an exclusionary subject-object dichotomy, that rift existed before the written words did. I’ll include, a bit later, Robert Pirsig’s interesting alternative to Nawaz’s premise. And Pirsig provided the solution that Nawaz did not have in response to the imminent ’threat’ he sees with the further denigration of words with newer communication tools expanding their destruction and the amplification of separation and tribalism. With duality of subject and object, Nawaz argues, the end result of that split in a materialist system means that everything is for sale. And now everything openly includes children and their brutalisation, mutilation and death. This is a good example, and subtle, of the ‘post hoc ergo propter hoc’ logical fallacy.
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And I would like to elaborate on this from a ‘dialogue’ recorded more than 2000 years ago. It somewhat supports Nawaz’s point, without nailing down words as the creators of the subject-object split that has excluded the possible of the tertium quid between the two extremes. Socrates claims that the written word will create forgetfulness and hollow empty people.
In Plato's Phaedrus Socrates reports a conversation between The Egyptian god Thoth, the inventor of letters, and the god Amon. Amon says:
This discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth but only the semblance of truth; they will be bearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.
Socrates continues:
I cannot help feeling, Phaedrus, that writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question, they preserve a solemn silence, and the same may be said of speeches. You would imagine that they had intelligence, but if you want to know anything and put a question to one of them, the speaker always gives one unvarying answer.
Plato. Phaedrus. Toronto: Penguin, 1973,p. 84. Cited in Mass Communication in Canada, 3rd Ed. by Lorimer and McNulty, Don Mills: Oxford University Press, 1996, p. 20.
And I don’t actually agree fully this argument either. The findings of people like Walter Ong, who have examined literate and oral cultures, suggests that this thesis is untenable because the oral culture have a fluidity to their memory that puts ‘memory’ into almost the immediate present at all time. See Ong’s fascinating Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. Click here for a summary of it. And the focused rote learning of The Pali Canon has as a requirement the removal of thinking about what is being memorised.
The second interesting argument of Nawaz surprised me. It will take time and it requires a change of human consciousness to stop war, the collective change in human attitude and behaviour with a focus on consciousnesses raising spiritual practices. With that I agree 100% and I also make that argument here and in comments around the substack world and elsewhere.
To support that last suggestion, here is another synchronicity set that occurred while I was poking around this topic and listening to narcissistic trauma recovery:
We Inter-Are For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. —Mark Chmiel
Our physical structure is about 1% actual matter, the rest being energy in motion.
My paraphrase of Annie Boerner’s statement of what the science of quantum mechanics says about matter and energy.
The Greeks Took the Wrong Path and We’ve Been Lost Ever Since
Here I will chose to include an extended citation form Robert Pirsig’s introduction to a metaphysics of quality that suggests something upon which we can tangibly meditate on or pray for, to change our consciousness into one that does not exclude spirt and drops the language requirement for the pernicious subject-object split. Pirsig’s argument is well structured and goes so against the stream of our collective consciousness that my attempted efforts to make it shorter for this essay only detracted from his excellent argument. From Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values and Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals.
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 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.
Thus, in cultures whose ancestry includes ancient Greece, one invariably finds a strong subject-object differentiation because the grammar of the old Greek mythos presumed a sharp natural division of subjects and predicates. In cultures such as the Chinese, where subject-predicate relationships are not frigidly defined by grammar, one finds a corresponding absence of rigid subject-object philosophy. One finds that in the Judaeo-Christian culture, in which the Old Testament "Word" had an intrinsic sacredness of its own, men are willing to sacrifice and live by and die for words. In this culture, a court of law can ask a witness to tell "the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me God," and expect the truth to be told. But one can transport this court to India, as did the British, with no real success on the matter of perjury because the Indian mythos is different and this sacredness of words is not felt in the same way. Similar problems have occurred in this country among minority groups with different cultural backgrounds. There are endless examples of how mythos differences direct behaviour differences and they're all fascinating.
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, 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.
There is only one kind of person, Phaedrus said, who accepts or rejects the mythos in which he lives. And the definition of that person, when he has rejected the mythos, Phaedrus said, is "insane." To go outside the mythos is to become insane.... (p 315-6 Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig. Toronto: Bantam Books, 1984.
[Phaedrus had] been speculating about the relationship of Quality to mind and matter and had identified Quality as the parent of mind and matter, that event which gives birth to mind and matter. This Copernican inversion of the relationship of Quality to the objective world could sound mysterious if not carefully explained, but he didn't mean it to be mysterious. He simply meant that at the cutting edge of time, before an object can be distinguished, there must be a kind of nonintellectual awareness, which he called awareness of Quality. You can't be aware that you've seen a tree until after you've seen the tree, and between the instant of vision and instant of awareness there must be a time lag. We sometimes think of that time lag as unimportant. But there is no justification for thinking that the time lag is unimportant – none whatsoever.
The past exists only in our memories, the future only in our plans. The present is our only reality. The tree that you are aware of intellectually, because of that small time lag, is always in the past and therefore is always unreal. Any intellectually conceived object is always in the past and therefore unreal. Reality is always the moment of vision before the intellectualization takes place. There is no other reality. This pre-intellectual reality is what Phaedrus felt he had properly identified as Quality. Since all intellectually identifiable things must emerge from this pre-intellectual reality, Quality is the parent, the source of all subjects and objects.
He felt that intellectuals usually have the greatest trouble seeing this Quality, precisely because they are so swift and absolute about snapping everything into intellectual form. The ones who have the easiest time seeing this Quality are small children, uneducated people and culturally "deprived" people. These have the least predisposition toward intellectuality from cultural sources and have the least formal training to instill it further into them. That, he felt, is why squareness is such a uniquely intellectual disease. He felt he'd been accidentally immunized from it, or at least to some extent broken from the habit by his failure from school. After that he felt no compulsive identification with intellectuality and could examine anti-intellectual doctrines with sympathy.
Squares, he said, because of their prejudices toward intellectuality usually regard Quality, the pre-intellectual reality, as unimportant, a mere uneventful transition period between objective reality and subjective perception of it. Because they have preconceived ideas of its unimportance the don't seek to find out if it's in any way different from their intellectual conception of it.
It is different, he said. Once you begin to hear the sound of that Quality, see that Korean wall, that nonintellectual reality in its pure form, you want to forget all that word stuff, which you finally begin to see is always somewhere else.
Now, armed with his new time-interrelated metaphysical trinity, he had that romantic-classic Quality split, the one which had threatened to ruin him, completely stopped. They couldn't cut up Quality now. He could sit there and at his leisure cut them up. Romantic Quality always correlated with instantaneous impressions. Square Quality always involved multiple considerations that extended over a period of time. Romantic Quality was the present, the here and now of things. Classic Quality was always concerned with more than just the present. The relation of the present to the past and future was always considered. If you conceived the past and future to be all contained in the present, why, that was groovy, the present was what you lived for. And if your motorcycle is working, why worry about it? But if you consider the present to be merely an instant between the past and the future, just a passing moment, then to neglect the past and future for the moment is bad Quality indeed. The motorcycle may be working now, but when was the oil level last checked? Fussbudgetry from the romantic view, but good common sense from the classic.
Now we had two different kinds of Quality but they no longer split Quality itself. They were just two different time aspects of Quality, short and long. What had previously been asked for was a metaphysical hierarchy that looked like this:
What he gave them in return was a metaphysical hierarchy that looked like
The quality he was teaching was not just a part of reality, it was the whole thing.
He then proceeded in terms of the trinity to answer the question, Why does everybody see Quality differently? This was the question he had always had to answer speciously before. Now he said "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 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. We build up our whole culture in terms of these analogues" (p221-224 Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Toronto: Bantam Books, 1984).
The Metaphysics of Quality subscribes to what is called empiricism. It claims that all legitimate human knowledge arises from the senses or by thinking about what the senses provide. Most empiricists deny the validity of any knowledge gained through imagination, authority, tradition, or purely theoretical reasoning. They regard fields such as art, morality, religion, and metaphysics as unverifiable. The Metaphysics of Quality varies from this by saying that the values of art and morality and even religious mysticism are verifiable, and that in the past they have been excluded for metaphysical reasons, not empirical reasons. They have been excluded because of the metaphysical assumption that all the universe is composed of subjects and objects and anything that can't be classified as a subject or an object isn't real. There is no empirical evidence for this assumption at all. It is just an assumption.
It is an assumption that flies outrageously in the face of common experience. The low value that can be derived from sitting on a hot stove is obviously an experience even though it is not an object and even though it is not subjective. The low value comes first, then the subjective thoughts that include such things as stove and heat and pain come second. The value is the reality that brings the thoughts to mind.
There's a principle in physics that if a thing can't be distinguished from anything else it doesn't exist. To this the Metaphysics of Quality adds a second principle: if a thing has no value it isn't distinguished from anything else. Then, putting the two together, a thing that has no value does not exist. The thing has not created the value. The value has created the thing. When it is seen that value is the front edge of experience, there is no problem for empiricists here. It simply restates the empiricists' belief that experience is the starting point of all reality. The only problem is for a subject-object metaphysics that calls itself empiricism.
This may sound as though a purpose of the Metaphysics of Quality is to trash all subject-object thought but that's not true. Unlike subject-object metaphysics the Metaphysics of Quality does not insist on a single exclusive truth. If subjects and objects are held to be the ultimate reality then we're permitted only one construction of things – that which corresponds to the "objective" world – and all other constructions are unreal. But if Quality or excellence is seen as the ultimate reality then it becomes possible for more than one set of truths to exist. Then one doesn't seek the absolute "Truth." One seeks instead the highest quality intellectual explanation of things with the knowledge that if the past is any guide to the future this explanation must be taken provisionally; as useful until something better comes along. One can then examine intellectual realities the same way he examines paintings in an art gallery, not with an effort to find out which one is the "real" painting, but simply to enjoy and keep those that are of value. There are many sets of intellectual reality in existence and we can perceive some to have more quality than others, but that we do so is, in part, the result of our history and current patterns of values.
Or, using another analogy, saying that a Metaphysics of Quality is false and a subject-object metaphysics is true is like saying that rectangular co-ordinates are true and polar co-ordinates are false. A map with the North Pole at the centre is confusing at first, but it's every bit as correct as a Mercator map. In the Arctic it's the only map to have. Both are simply intellectual patterns for interpreting reality and one can only say that in some circumstances rectangular co-ordinates provide a better, simpler interpretation.
The Metaphysics of Quality provides a better set of co-ordinates with which to interpret the world than does subject-object metaphysics because it is more inclusive. It explains more of the world and it explains it better. The Metaphysics of Quality can explain subject-object relationships beautifully but, as Phaedrus had seen in anthropology, a subject-object metaphysics can't explain values worth a damn. It has always been a mess of unconvincing psychological gibberish when it tries to explain values.
For years we have read about how values are supposed to emanate from some location in the "lower" centres of the brain. This location has never been clearly identified. The mechanism for holding these values is completely unknown. No one has ever been able to add to a person's values by inserting one at this location, or observed any changes at this location as a result of a change of values. No evidence has been presented that if this portion of the brain is anaesthetized or even lobotomized the patient will make a better scientist as a result because all his decisions will then be "value-free." Yet we're told values must reside here, if they exist at all, because where else could they be?
Persons who know the history of science will recognize the sweet smell of phlogiston here and the warm glow of the luminiferous ether, two other scientific entities which were arrived at deductively and which never showed up under the microscope or anywhere else. When deduced entities are around for years and nobody finds them it is a sign that the deductions have been made from which the deductions are made is wrong at some fundamental level. This is the real reason values have been avoided by empiricists in the past, not because values aren't experienced, but because when you try to fit them into this absurd brain location you get a sinking feeling that tells you that somewhere back down the line you have gone way off the track and you just want to drop the whole subject and think about something else that has more of a future to it.
This problem of trying to describe value in terms of substance has been the problem of a smaller container trying to contain a larger one. Value is not a subspecies of substance. When you reverse the containment process and define substance in terms of value the mystery disappears: substance is a "stable pattern of inorganic values." The problem then disappears. The world of objects and the world of values is unified.
This inability of conventional subject-object metaphysics to clarify values is an example of what Phaedrus called a "platypus." Early zoologists classified as mammals those that suckle their young and as reptiles those that lay eggs. Then a duck-billed platypus was discovered in Australia laying eggs like a perfect reptile and then, when they hatched, suckling the infant platypi like a perfect mammal.
The discovery created quite a sensation. What an enigma! it was exclaimed. What a mystery! What a marvel of nature! When the first stuffed specimens reached England from Australia around the end of the eighteenth century they were thought to be fakes made by sticking together bits of different animals. Even today you still see occasional articles in nature magazines asking, "Why does this paradox of nature exist?"
The answer is: it doesn't. The platypus isn't doing anything paradoxical at all. It isn't having any problems. Platypi have been laying eggs and suckling their young for millions of years before there were any zoologists to come along an declare it illegal. The real mystery, the real enigma, is how mature, objective, trained scientific observers can blame their own goof on a poor innocent platypus.
Zoologists, to cover up their problem, had to invent a patch. They created a new order, monotremata, that includes the platypus, the spiny anteater, and that's it. This is like a nation consisting of two people.
In a subject-object classification of the world, Quality is in the same situation as that platypus. Because they can't classify it the experts have claimed there is something wrong with it. And Quality isn't the only such platypus. Subject-object metaphysics is characterized by herds of huge, dominating, monster platypi. The problems of free will versus determinism, of the relation of the mind matter, of the discontinuity of matter at the subatomic level, of the apparent purposelessness of the universe and subject-object metaphysics. Where it is centred around the subject-object metaphysics, Western philosophy can almost be defined as a "platypus anatomy." These creatures that seem like such a permanent part of the philosophical landscape magically disappear when a good Metaphysics of Quality is applied. (p113-7 Lila: An Inquiry into Morals by Robert M Pirsig. Bantam Books, 1991.)
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Whoa Guy!
Even with several readings, my boundaries are stretched to their limits, and sometimes punctured. But I just had to say thanks for those reference to Pirsig's classic. Just seeing the book cover brought me close to tears. I brought the paperback with me to Japan some 40 years ago, and it still sits in a prominent position among a host of others.
Synchronicity? I mentioned Schopenhauer earlier today (or was it yesterday?) in a comment suggesting his "World as Will" might be a great theme song for psychopaths, though after reading your more nuanced reference, now feel a bit embarrassed.
But for a parallel, though shorter dive into the double-edged sword of logic and language ... I thought you might appreciate a comment I wrote earlier today. Again, last night? My, how 'time' flits and flies as well. 😅
https://roundingtheearth.substack.com/p/the-fake-antivaxxer-victory-part/comment/42352821?r=d530j
Cheers Guy!
Looking forward to a slower, more leisurely read of your post.
steve
I'm loving our long-form conversation, Guy, and I'm glad to have waited until I had the time to read this slowly and digest. And perhaps that's my first response here to your love-hate relationship with words. I used to have a consumer relationship to words, a voracious appetite, doing more and more research, but I'd wait to write the paper until the night before it was due. I didn't digest and expel, making up my own good shit, as I was going.
Then I went the opposite direction and decided that hanging onto books was a form of constipation. I allowed myself one bookshelf and had to give away what I had before I could get more. That was okay because it was all fiction, maybe like you in that phase.
Then when I started researching for myself, not for a class, I couldn't do that anymore. I turned the breakfast nook in my house into a library, now double-stacked. I think it's time for me to do a Guy purge if I could find an appropriate receptacle ;-)
You seem like you have a very healthy relationship to words at this point in your life. You take them in, only in appropriate amounts, digest them, and produce some really great shit! I don't see you needing to change your relationship to words, and your love affair with them. But then I'm benefiting from the fine manure so that's just me.
I don't think you were reading me when I posted the prelude to my book: https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/in-the-beginning-was-the-purpose. In it, I write this: "Many disagreements come from words being used with different meanings for the speaker and listener. Each chapter has its own lexicon to clarify how I’m using a word. If it has too much baggage, feel free to apply a different word or phrase that better describes the concept and substitute that word or phrase throughout the book. What matters is that we have a way of talking about and thinking about concepts when the words to describe them have been corrupted and often turned into their opposites, not by accident."
The word "Word" is defined as purpose, intent, from its etymology, as economist Susan George explains. Eco- logos means the purpose of the ecos and eco-nomos means the rules that govern it. She says that the purpose should come first. I think the same that's true for an economy is true for words, technology and everything else. What's the end that it's a means for? If the end is malevolent or egocentric, then that will control and pervert the means. But the same means can be used for a beneficial and benevolent end, we don't need to throw the use of water out just because it can be used to drown the baby.
If words have no author, doesn't that make the user into an arbitrary authority: "the question is who is to be master, that's all!" If we are to communicate, we need to understand what that person means by the word they use. To explain that we need to use other words, and then explain what we mean using other words. It seems an endless loop without a touchstone.
In one of my comments to the "Tonic 7" I used the example of 'regenerative' being taken by Monsanto. And then it happened! Talk about casting spells. And I think this does relate to Israel/ Palestine. Does ownership of the word 'belong' to whoever has possession of it at the time? And if I take it from you, as soon as I have it, you have no further right to it? I'm going to do something on that later today.
Last, there's a woman whose name escapes me but Russell interviewed her. She talks about anything that was done in the past, no matter how recent, as being done to someone else, someone who no longer exists in the present, and done BY someone else, who no longer exists. And that fear only comes from projecting a past that doesn't exist onto a future that also doesn't exist. We don't respond to other people as they are now, only someone they once were.
It was one of the most radical things I'd ever heard. I'll look for her name if it's interesting to you. Thanks again for your thoughtful reflections. Happy to be part of your reflection pool ;-)