Re: MD Ponderings...

[Thracian Bard]

I hope that I am welcome to participate in the discussion of the past several days.   Having particularly enjoyed elephant's monosyllabic response to the Zen Koan, I was reminded of Alan Watts' relating a version of this Koan in a lecture, many years ago. In Mr. Watts' version, the Master presents the stick to one of his students and asks, "What is it?"  The student replies that it is a stick, to which the Master hits him. The Master then turns to another student and asks, "What is it?" The second student says, "Give it to me." The Master hands the stick to the second student who then hits the Master with it.   Having read and re-read Robert Pirsig's works over the past twenty-one years, in conjunction with other stimuli, has resulted in my on-going attempts to eliminate convention and to try to think as non-linearly as possible. So, if I digress, I beg your tolerance.   Dilemma and paradox seem to be at the heart of much of this discussion as it is in many discussions of MOQ in general, and by extension, of reality itself. I wish to propose that the apparent paradox in much of what we intuitively know to be true is merely an illusion conjured through society' s acceptance of abstract conventions, the primary culprit being the concept of zero. Zero and it's cousins "never", "none" , "every", "beginning", and "end" (to name a few) have no basis in reality, yet chronically confound logical argument, have become accepted into the scientific method - although the recognition of QM among much of the scientific community has helped in this regard, and form the foundation of currently available technology, the result of which allows me to type this seemingly real, but truly illusory statement.   Nothing cannot be! Never never is! Zero represents a beginning. But who has really observed anything actually begin? Aren't these observations just the witnessing of change from one form to another? Teaching during the last two millennia, at least, has conditioned society to find comfort in the concepts of beginnings and ends, of births and deaths. Science in the eighteenth through much of the twentieth century continued to propagate this myth, unwittingly, as industrialization promoted, and was in many ways, linked to an acceptance of the concept of project over process. Much like a society of Deadalus-es, it was much more comfortable to fly within a prescribed and neatly packaged concept of reality ( the phenomenon of SQ) than to venture as did the few Icarus-es and risk melted wings to expand their thinking (the phenomenon of DQ).   I would submit that DQ is not so much the evolutionary event that leads to the next level of SQ, as it is the recognition and acceptance of what has always been, but because of abstract conventions, which are indeed the result of evolution, have been hidden from us in much the same way as the narrator in ZMM fails to accept and see his true self, Phaedrus, and resultantly blocks this view from his son, until they remove their metaphorical helmets at the end of the book. Let's remove our helmets, starting with the concept of "zero", and take a look around.   I appreciate this opportunity to share these thoughts, and am looking for further enlightenment from my colleagues in this discussion group.   ThracianBard