Excerpts From The book Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals, By Robert Pirsig Dharma and the Light: There is nothing immoral in a culture not being ready to accept something dynamic. Static latching is necessary to sustain the gains the culture has made in the past . The solution is not to condemn the culture, but to look for keys to make the new information acceptable. In 20th century America the cultural; definition of what is real and what is unreal filters out the Dharmic ya -light. Our culture immunizes us against giving much importance to this light , because it has no objective reality. In the metaphysics of quality this light however is important, because it often appears associated with undefined auspiciousness, that is, with dynamic quality. It signals a dynamic intrusion upon a static situation. When there is a letting go of static patterns, the light occurs. It is often accompanied by a feeling of relaxation because static patterns have been jarred loose. The Evolutionary Battle: We are complex ecology of patters moving toward dynamic quality. We, all individually, are in a evolutionary battle against the static patterns of our own lives. If you eliminate suffering form this life you eliminate life. There's no evolution. Suffering is the negative face of the quality that drives the whole process. All these battles between pattern of evolution go on within suffering individuals like Lila. Sometimes the insane and the contrarians and the ones who closest to suicide are the most valuable people society has. They may precursor of social change. They have taken the burden of culture into themselves. And in their struggle to solve their own problems, they are solving culture's problems as well. We just can than by some miracle of understanding, we can avoid all the patterns, our own and the culture's, see the dynamic quality we are working toward, and then come back and handle all the mess without being destroyed by it. The question is if whether we are going to work through whatever it is that makes the defense necessary, or whether we are going to work around it. If we work through it, we will come out at a dynamic solution. If we work around it we just head back to the old karmic cycles of pain and temporary relief. William James' Pragmatism and Radical Empricism William James had two main systems of philosophy : pragmatism and radical empiricism. Pragmatism: The test of truth is its practicality or usefulness. Truth is one species of good and not a category distinct from good and coordinate with it. The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of believed. Truth is a species of good. Truth is a static intellectual pattern within a larger entity called quality. The good to which truth is subordinate is dynamic quality not practicality. The misunderstanding of James occurred because there was no clear intellectual framework for distinguishing social quality from dynamic quality. Practicality is only a social pattern of good. It is immoral for truth to be subordinated to social value since that is a lower form of evolution devouring a higher one. The idea that satisfaction alone is the test of anything is very dangerous according the metaphysics of quality . There are different kinds of satisfaction and some of them are moral nightmares. The holocaust produced satisfaction among the Nazis, that was quality for them. They considered to be practical. But it was a quality dictated by low level static social and biological patterns whose overall purpose was to retard the evolution of truth and dynamic quality. Radical empiricism: Subject and objects are not the starting points of experience. Subjects and objects are secondary. They are concepts derived from something more fundamental which he described as the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection. In this basic flux of experience the distinctions of reflective thought, consciousness and content, subject and object, mind and matter have not yet emerged in the forms which we make them. Pure experience cannot be called either physical or psychical. It logically proceeds this distinction. There will always be a discrepancy between concepts and reality, because the former are static and discontinuous, while the latter is dynamic and flowing. What the metaphysics of quality adds to James' pragmatism and radical empiricism is the idea that the primal reality from which objects and subjects spring is value. By doing so it unites pragmatism and radical empiricism into a single fabric. Value, the pragmatic test of truth, is also the primary empirical experience. The metaphysics of quality says pure experience is value. Value is at the very front of the empirical procession. The metaphysics of quality is a continuation of the mainstream of 20th century American philosophy. It is a form of pragmatism, of instrumentalism that says that the test of the true is the good. It adds that this good is not a social code or some intellectualized Hegellian absolute. It is direct everyday experience. Through this identification of pure value with pure experience, the metaphysics of quality paves the way for an enlarged way of looking at experience which can resolve all sorts of anomalies that traditional empiricism has not been able to cope with. What is wrong with insanity is that the insane is outside any culture. The insane is a culture of one. It has its own reality that no other culture is able to see. The problem of curing an insane person is like the problem of curing a Moslem, or curing a communist, or curing a republican or democrat. You are not going to make much progress by telling how wrong they are. The important thing is to support her delusions and then slowly wean her away from them rather than fight them . The catch here is the word delusion. It is always the other person who is deluded, or ourselves in the past. Delusions can be held by whole groups of people as long as we are not part of that group. If we are a member then the delusions becomes a minority opinion. An insane delusions can't be held by a group at all. A person isn't believe insane if there is a group of people who believe the same way. Insanity isn't supposed to be a communicable disease. If another person starts to believe him, then two or three, then it becomes a religion. Thus with grown man in Italy and Spain carry crosses and statues of Christ through the streets, that is not an insane delusions, that's a meaningful religious activity, because there is so many of them. But if Lila carries a rubber statue of a child , that is an insane delusions because there is only one of her. It sounds quite blasphemous to put religion and insanity on an equal footing for comparison. But his point was not to undercut religion, but to illuminate insanity. He thought the intellectual separation of the topic of sanity from the topic of religion has weakened our understanding of both. The current subject-object point of view of religion conventionally muted so as not to stir up the fanatics, is that religious mysticism and insanity are the same. Religious mysticism is intellectual garbage, it is a vestige of the old superstitious dark ages when no body knew anything and the whole was sunk in filth and disease and poverty and ignorance. It is one of those delusions which is not called insane only because there is so many people involved. Until quite recently oriental religions and oriental cultures have been similarly grouped as backward suffering from ignorance, poverty and disease, because they were sunk into a demented mysticism. If it weren't for the phenomenon of Japan suddenly leaving the subject-object culture, looking a little backward, the cultural immune system surrounding this view would be impregnable. The metaphysics of quality identifies religious mysticism with dynamic quality . It says the subject-object people are almost right when they identify religious mysticism with insanity. The two are almost the same. Both lunatics and mystics have freed themselves from the conventional static intellectual patterns of their culture. The only difference is that the lunatic has shifted over to a private static pattern of his own. Where the mystic has abandoned all static patterns in favor of pure dynamic quality. The metaphysics of quality suggests accordingly that in addition to the customary solutions to insanity, conform to cultural patterns, or stay locked up, there is another one. This solution is to dissolve all static patterns, both sane and insane, and find the base of reality, dynamic quality, that is independent of all of them. The metaphysics of quality says that it is immoral for sane people to force cultural conformity by suppressing the dynamic drives that produce insanity. Such suppression is a lower form of evolution trying to devour a higher one. Static, social and intellectual patterns are only an intermediate level of evolution. They a good servants of the process of life. But if allowed to turn into masters, they destroy it. Once this theoretical structure is available, it offers solutions to some mysteries into the present treatment of the insane. For example doctors know that shock treatment works, but are found of saying that no one knows why. The MOQ offers an explanation. The value of shock treatment is not that it returns a lunatic to normal cultural patterns, its value is that it destroys all patterns, both cultural and private, and leaves the patient temporarily in a dynamic state that the psychiatrists, of course don't know what to do with. In this state, and in a moment of Zen wisdom, the patient though, will sometimes see the superficiality of both his own contrary patterns, and the cultural patterns. See that the one gets him electrically clubbed, and the other sets him free from the institution. And thereupon makes a wise mystic decision to get the hell out of there by whatever avenue is available. Continue