Excerpts From The book Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals, By Robert Pirsig The Mythis The logical order of things that the philosopher study is derived from the Mythis. The Mythis is the social culture and the rhetoric that the culture must invent before philosophy becomes possible. In the Hindu tradition, Dharma is relative and dependent on the condition of society. It always has a social implication. It is the bond that holds society together. But within modern Buddhist thought, Dharma becomes the phenomenal world. The object of perception thought or understanding. A chair for example is not composed of atoms of substance, it is composed of Dharmas. This statement is absolute Jabberwocky to a conventional subject-object metaphysics: How can a chair be composed of individual little moral orders. But if one applies the metaphysics of quality and sees that a chair is an inorganic static pattern, and sees that all static patters are composed of value, and that value is synonymous with morality, then it all begins to make sense. This is may be why workers in Japan and other parts of the Far East are able to maintain levels of quality that compare so favorably to those in the West. In the past, the mystics low regard for inorganic static patterns, for laws of nature, has kept the scientifically derived technology of this cultures poor. But since Orientals have learned to overcome that prejudice, times have changed. When one comes from a cultural tradition where an electronic assembly is primarily a moral order rather than just a neutral pile of substance, it is easier to feel an ethical responsibility for doing good work on it. Oriental social cohesiveness and ability to work long hours without complaint, was not a genetic characteristic, but a cultural one. It resulted for the working out , centuries ago, of the problem of Dharma, and the way in which it combines freedom and ritual. In the West progress seems to proceed by a series of spasms of alternating freedom and ritual. A revolution of freedom against old rituals produces a new order. Which soon becomes another old ritual for the next generation to revolt against, and on and on. In the Orient, there are plenty of conflicts, but historically, this particular kind of conflict has not been as dominant. Phoedrus thought that may it is because Dharma includes both static and dynamic quality without contradiction. Zen and Ritual From the literature on Zen and its insistence on discovering the unwritten Dharma, that it will be intensely anti-ritualistic, since ritual is the written Dharma. But isn't the case. Zen monks' daily life is nothing but on ritual after another. Hour after hour, day after day, all his life. They don't tell him to shatter those static patterns to discover the unwritten Dharma, they want him to get those patterns perfect. The explanation for this contradiction is the belief that you don't free yourself from static patterns by fighting them with other contrary static patterns, that is called bad Karma chasing its tail. You free yourself from static patterns by putting them to sleep. That is you master them with such proficiency, that they become an unconscious part of your nature. You get so used to them you completely forget them and they are gone. There at the center of the most monotonous boredom of static ritualistic patterns, the dynamic freedom is found. There is nothing wrong with ritualistic religion as long as the rituals are seen as merely a static portrayal of dynamic quality, a sign post which allows socially patterned dominated people to see dynamic quality. The danger has always been that the rituals, the static patterns, are mistaken for what they merely represent, and are allowed to destroy the dynamic quality that they were originally intended to preserve. There are rituals that fight dynamic quality, and there are rituals that embody it. Sometimes, what we need is not more dynamic freedom, but stable patterns to encase that freedom. We need some way of being reintegrated into the rituals of everyday living. Anthropological studies of contemporary primitive tribes, suggest that stone age people were probably bound by ritual all day long...So much so that the division between ritual and knowledge becomes indistinct.. In cultures without books, ritual seems to be a public library for teaching the young and preserving common values and information. These rituals may be the connecting link between the social and intellectual levels of evolution...One can imagine primitive song, dance rituals associated with certain cosmology stories myths which generated the first primitive religions. From these the first intellectual truths could have been derived. If ritual always comes first and intellectual principles always come later, then ritual can not be always a decadent corruption of intellect. Their sequence in history suggests that principles emerge from ritual not the other was around. That is, we don't perform religious rituals because we believe in God, we believe in God because we perform religious rituals. You can't go on with rituals you don't believe in. Real ritual had to grow of your own nature. It isn't something than can be intellectualized and patched on. Enlightnment and Dynamic Quality We may wonder why if this passage of enlightenment into pure dynamic quality is such a universal reality, did it only occur in certain parts of the world and not other...We may think that this is proof that the whole thing was just Oriental religious bollony, the equivalent of a magic land called heaven, that Western go to if they get a ticket from the priest. We can see now that enlightenment is distributed in all parts of the world but some cultures accept and some others screen it out. Karma is causal relationship. Karma is the pain, the suffering that results from clinging to the static patterns of the world. The only exist from the suffering is to detach yourself from this static patterns. That is to kill them. A common way taken to kill them is suicide. But suicide only kills biological patterns. It is like destroying a computer because you can't stand the program it is running. The social and intellectual patterns that caused the suicide have to be carried on by others. From an evolutionary point of view it is really a backward step, and therefore immoral. Another immoral way of killing static patterns it passing the patterns to someone else, or what is called a Karma dump. You invent a devil group, Jews, or blacks or whites, or capitalists or communists, it doesn't matter, and say that group is responsible for all your suffering and then hate it and try to destroy it. On a daily personal level, everyone has people they hate or blame for their suffering, and this hatred and blame brings some kind of relief. If you take all this Karmic garbage and make yourself feel better by passing it on to others, it is normal, that is how the world works. But if you manage to absorb it and not passing it on, that is the highest moral conduct of all. That really advances everything, not just you. If you look at the lives of some of some of the great moral figures of history, Christ, Lincoln, Ghandi. You will see that that is what they will really involved in. The cleansing of the world thru the absorption of Karmic garbage. They didn't pass it on. . On the other hand, when you are at the receiving end of some Karma dump, it sets you free. Something about this doll that has given it all kind of quality that he manufacturer never built into it. Lila had overlaid a whole set of value patterns on top of it. And those values where still clinging to it. It was almost like some religious idol. A genuine religious idol, of an abandoned religion of one. Once they have been ritualized and adored, these idols change in value. You can no more throw them casually, than you can throw an old church statue on the dump. You can discover a lot about a culture by what is said about its idols. The idols are an objectification of the innermost values of the culture, which are its reality. The doll represented Lila's innermost values. The real Lila, that said something about her that completely contradicted everything else. It indicated there were 2 contradictory patterns conflicting with some enormous force. And what happened what some kind of shift in these tectonic plates that produced a kind a high Richter scale earthquake. The one patter, the one Reagal denounced, was going one way. This doll was representing a pattern that was going another way. So this idol allowed Lila to objectify the other pattern and ease the pressures that were causing the earthquake, and now she has abandoned it. Evidence that she was going back to something worse, or may be not. Phoedrus was thinking that if he was looking for proof that substance is a cultural heritage from ancient Greece that an absolute reality, he should simply look at a non derived Greek culture. If the reality of substance is missing from those cultures that would prove he was right. ...Laverne was asking the question "what kind of dog is that?" in an Aristotelian framework. She wanted to know what genetic, substantive, pigeonhole of canine classification this object walking before them could be placed in. John wasn't joking when he "That is a good dog". He probably thought she was worried the dog might bite her. The whole idea of a dog as a member of a hierarchical structure of intellectual categories known generically as objects was outside his traditional cultural viewpoint. John had distinguished the dog according to its quality, rather that according to its substance. That indicated he considered quality more important. American Indians and Mysticism: When the Indians said "he is good man" , they emphasized the "good". They didn't man as an object, and "good" was the whole center of experience. When he could get all this metaphysics all put together, people would see that the value-centered reality it described wasn't a wild thesis , but a connecting link to a part of themselves that needed opening up. Experience has shown that you cannot just tell people about Indians and expect them to listen. They already know about Indians. Their cup is full. Their cultural immune system will keep them from hearing anything else... He hoped that this quality metaphysics is something that will get pass the immune system, and show that American Indian mysticism is not something alien from American culture. It is a deep submerged, hidden root of it. The American Indian way is not to be organized, they don't charge anything, they don't make a big fuss out of it...This must have been how it was...before all the claptrap got started... In a primitive culture people speak only about actual experiences. They don't discuss what is virtue, good, evil, beauty. The demands of their daily life, as the one of our uneducated classes don't extend beyond the virtues shown on definite occasions by definite people, good or evil deed of their fellow tribesmen, and the beauty of a particular man or woman or an object. They don't talk about abstract ideas. The Dakota Indian considers goodness to be a noun rather than an adjective. This very true and very objective.. But it is like an explorer noticing there is huge vein of pure yellow metal emerging from the side of a cliff, jotting the fact in his dairy , and never expanding in the subject, because he is only interested in facts and is not interested in getting into evaluations and interpretations. Good as a noun, rather than an adjective, is all what the metaphysics of quality is about. Back to Book Reports