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.
10 comments:
Thanks for sharing this, Bruce. I found your notes compelling to read! You have previously described this procedure before of writing notes in a coffee shop and editing later, and it was quite interesting to have a look in. I would certainly not complain if you shared them in the future. I occasionally read a post of yours to my wife, who often requires that I add a bit of context or translation to explain what you mean by this or that (the equivalent of you linking commenters to search terms on your blog). I think for a careful reader of yours these notes are not too hard to follow and may reveal something more about your underlying thought process - but I guess my wife would not enjoy them as much!
Coincidentally I recently began re-reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which greatly affected me as a teenager. I do not remember too much about the book now beyond the Phaedras arc, the meditations on “Quality”, and the quasi-romantic theme on life analogized through an embrace of motorcycle riding/maintenance. I felt at the time that he had found and offered a picture of the world that promised depth and truth and wholeness. I thought life would be forever different after reading it. But looking back on it afterward I could never quite remember what it all stood upon. This and similar “zen” approaches just didn’t quite work, and would always feel misty and insubstantial in the end.
@John - Thanks.
For me, the novel bit about this morning's meditation was the formulation about consciousness being related to the concentration of spirit in the making of physical matter - and that section in general. These notes represent me actually having this new idea, for the first time as such (although component notions have been thought-of before).
This feels like an important and helpful discovery that I will need to clarify and explore.
“Concentrated” implies some physical precursor; spirit cannot gather without being at least somewhat physical (i.e. in some place) to begin with. So would you agree that there had to be some precursor to physical matter that the spirit must “inhabit”, that may then concentrate into “physical matter”?
I am not sure whether atoms/molecules/physical-stuff are themselves a concentration of the spirit, but I think I agree that bodies are; and that the development of the body is a major spiritual development.
@John - "So would you agree that there had to be some precursor to physical matter that the spirit must “inhabit”, that may then concentrate into “physical matter”?"
No, I don't think I would agree. If spirit is primary, then it must be understood as such and in its own right. Also if it is the primary reality of Beings, then a spirit has attributes (presumably) but cannot be defined in terms of anything else. I think you are perhaps covertly smuggling in the assumption of matter as primary, because we modern people think we understand what physical matter is and how it works - but we don't really!
I do not believe that matter is more fundamental than spirit, but I do believe that in some sense physicality *Just Is* and always has been; that God ordered the world from *something* that already was there. I do not think I understand the nature of matter and how it “works”, in fact just the opposite; I can see perhaps how one might view the formation of bodies, and atoms/“physics-stuff” as somewhat explainable, there seems to be something fundamental there that just is.
The resolution I have accepted is to understand matter and spirit as two sides of the same coin. Spirit is the “inside”, or subjectivity, and matter is the “outside”. So perhaps we can imagine that beings before God are basically living as part of the primordial ethereal goo, disembodied and lacking meaningful communion with each other. And God has ordered things and given us bodies to develop. In this framework I think concentration makes a lot of sense. Otherwise I do not really understand what you mean by concentration, since it seems to be a physical concept.
@John - I am persuaded by Barfield that you can have spirit without matter, and the spirit came first, before there was any "matter". Maybe the best way I can imagine it is that whatever spirit is, then matter is spirit condensed.
But I think we all have an innate understanding of the nature of spirit, in early childhood, and all records of ancient religions envisage a spirit realm (eg underworld).
I like it. Particularly seeing the questions you are attempting to answer (especially between The problem of... and... Maybe that's a rule.)
re the postscript. Why was this more time consuming than your normal method? I understood you make pencil and paper notes. Do you normally take notes and then throw them away and start again a la Peter Elbow method?
@to - Like most people who write a lot in a "creative" way (i.e. I am thinking as I write), I am only a three fingered typist and need to glance down at the keyboard quite often - therefore *transcribing* text (which I did here) is more type consuming (and less rewarding) than composing a new text derived from the notes.
As far as why value values, maybe it's because although one's response to values is subjective, the nature of values is objective.
Although people can reject love, that doesn't change what it is and those who accept it receive what it is, not what those who reject it claim that it is.
Similarly, those who reject love and chose to live by other values can do this, but then there's no substitute for love, they lose that. Likewise, they get whatever those other principles actually are, not what they imagine they will be.
In the modern world, there's this idea that if you can manipulate things just right, then you can make anything be the way you want it to be or you can have the benefits without the costs by pushing them onto someone else. But at the most fundamental level of reality, it doesn't work like that: values are distinct and you can accept or reject them, but you can't twist them away from what they actually are.
@NLR "one's response to values is subjective, the nature of values is objective."
That's true - but it seems difficult for people to grasp.
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