Partly from idleness, and partly because it might interest regular readers*, I am putting down the notes I made during this early-morning's café meditation of some three quarters of an hour, which followed a half hour amble to reach the café.
The "procedure" involves slowly drinking the largest available extra-hot cappuccino (no chocolate topping) while reading something, thinking, and making notes. This morning's book was On Quality by Robert M Pirsig - a posthumous collection of essays and aphorisms.
It is from such musings and notes that I often generate blog posts - although usually these are done at home (by a similar procedure, early in the morning) rather than in a café.
Editing is restricted to a omissions of personal data (...), additional spacing between thematic paragraphs, clarification [indicated thus], and some expansion of ungrammatical notes into sentences.
Notes from Friday 13th September 2024
...What is ultimate right and wrong? It is objective - but still, always, "a matter of opinion". Because anyone might feel that love was evil, virtue was evil - that selfish hedonistic now was the highest value - even in a world that is objectively the creation of a God motivated primarily by love. [Such a person] might claim that he intends to build another creation, based on other principles that are not love. Or he might not value creation but hate it, and enjoy destroying it - and to be indifferent to the future, or else may not care if the outcome was to destroy his own world.
The point is that the first creation was/is threatened by evil - even as by the continual erosion of entropy. A second creation was needed, in order that those who did value love above all, can love free from entropy and evil.
Pirsig's Metaphysics of Quality (explicit in Lila, implicit in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance) is true enough - but just floats unsupported as an assertion - it can't explain 1. how we could know it truly 2. why we ought to value it.
Why should we value values? - and one value over others?
"Religious mystic" - falsely associated with Eastern, deistic, oneness. Whereas Christian mystics should know that deity is God who is ultimately A Man.
- The problem with Pirsig is that Quality points at creation - a creator - and we could only know this is God loves us.
The problem of [Christianity's greatest monotheistic rival] is - How do you know? If God is as they say, then nobody would know anything about God.
For Christians it is - Why should I believe you, and do what you say? God is my "Father" as much as yours, and loves me.
If all is one, then everything is one, there are no values, no truth, no anything. Death is life, pain = pleasure, action = inaction.
But people use bits of religion 1. as palliative 2. to justify control - both by dishonesty and sleight of hand.
Purpose is a problem for many religions. Why do this not that, anything rather than nothing?
To attain salvation? Yes, but why does it need to be attained? Choices? Yes, but why are there choices? And all this is passive.
Love, Yes, but then what? A further factor is needed - consciousness, creation, development - And our unique individual primordial self.
That has a purpose, a teleology - inbuilt, as well as chosen.
Unless "values", purpose etc are inbuilt innate, then life is passive.
If life is passive, it is futile - it is not really-real.
If self is unique, it includes purpose, as well as consciousness.
The Material, boundedness, are "appearances" for what is real and physically unbounded.
Yet the spirit seems to be affected by proximity.
If The Physical is concentrated spirit, this is explicable.
When we incarnate, our spirit becomes concentrated. This increases consciousness.
Maybe that's a rule?
Consciousness is enhanced by concentration of A Being.
But perhaps also with concentrated/material Beings?
Which is why/ how we are alienated. Why we are split, why self-consciousness reduces automatic awareness of other Beings as conscious etc.
A physical Being's consciousness may seem absent - e.g. between liver and lungs, white and red blood cells, or molecules and atoms. This is because consciousness is more concentrated in modern Men.
Until [eventually] consciousness is aware only of itself! Consciousness Soul [Steiner's term] - Good name for it.
Metaphysics of Quality is true, and good - but unmoored and unjustified - dismissable as one man's intellectual construct. Needs God, creation, a loving God to provide purpose and value for MoQ etc.
Pirsig was inexorably prejudiced against Christianity, against God - could not distinguish church from reality.
Atoms are peripheral to physical/material Being, away from the concentrated consciousness.
Dynamic Quality^ = Direct Knowing, or heart-thinking/ intuition.
^[A term of Pirsig's]
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*And, no doubt, the experiment derived partly from a make-believe conceitedness on my part that - like Pascal, Thoreau, or Wittgenstein - a few people might actually be interested by my unstructured stream of consciousness. Cringe - but some truth to it... However, having done this experiment, and found that the business of transcription has taken much more time and effort than I hoped and expected, and that "the good stuff" (as it seems to me) is buried among the relative dross - today's practice may not be repeated.
