Hi Elephant, Marty, All:
PLATT: (previously)
Am I to assume that both you gentlemen have been enlightened and
thus can claim from personal experience of the relationship between
enlightenment and compassion? Or, is the relationship something you
have gleaned from the testimony of others? I do not find it in the MOQ.
ELEPHANT:
A Proper question Platt. I should say that there is a tiny bit of both:
testimony of others (Simone Weil, Iris Murdoch, Buddhism, even
Pirsig), and 'personal' experience. Remember: all that this personal
experience needs to amount to is the realisation that subjects and
objects are not the first cut. I should say that this is pretty much co-
determinate with ceasing to be selfish, and one can test (in ones own
case) how much one has translated an intellectual insight into a
heartfelf certainty by just this fact.
PLATT:
If I understand you correctly, it's impossible to be selfish when one
comes to realize that reality is prior to the division of self/other and that
what I call myself is an illusion, just as space and time and other
divisions are illusions. Thus the truth of the phrase, "Ask not for whom
the bell tolls, it tolls for thee."
Therefore it follows that compassion is merely what anyone in his right
mind would hold as a high value since to ignore the pain and suffering
of another is, in reality, to ignore the suffering of one’s self. But wait a
minute. That can’t be. There is no self. How do you express the moral
value of compassion in world where individual selves do not exist?
I ask because it’s been my experience that behind many acts of
compassion there is self-congratulation and pride in taking and
holding the moral high ground against less enlightened beings. In fact,
those who are in a position to help or be compassionate hold power
over the helpless, not only risking a rising dependency among the
helpless but the use of compassion as weapon in the battle for
political power.
What I’m driving at is that it’s one thing to theorize from the experience
of enlightenment and logic that we’re all One, but quite another to put
the theory into practice in a world of competition and fierce struggle
between value levels, whether those levels are thought of as
independent divisions or as embodied in their entirety in human
beings.
I think Pirsig touched on this problem in Chap. 24 of Lila:
"What the Metaphysics of Quality indicates that the twentieth-century
intellectual faith in the man’s basic goodness as spontaneous and
natural is disastrously naive. The ideal of a harmonious society in
which everyone without coercion cooperates happily with everyone else
for the mutual good of all is devastating fiction."
So while it’s easy to agree that compassion is a good thing,
compassion may not always be our best moral guide in our practical
world of static quality, especially when it comes to fending off
dangerous biological values. Isn’t that what Pirsig is driving at in Chap.
24?
MARTY:
I can't speak for Elephant, but if I'm enlightened, someone forgot to tell
me about it. My opinion is based on what I have read outside of the
MOQ - it is a subject that interests me greatly, but I have no personal
experience to draw from. There are probably hundreds of descriptions
of what it means, as well as a lot of personal intuition; my definition
basically comes from Buddhist literature.
PLATT:
I have read much the same as you in the Buddhist literature about
compassion, based I believe on what Elephant properly describes as
the enlightened experience of Oneness or Self with a capital S. Having
like you never been enlightened to the best of my knowledge, I must
bow to the testimony of those who have. Since we appear to be in the
same state of unenlightenment, I wonder how you react to my
comments above about compassion as it pertains to a divided world
that most of us experience. Incidentally, I agree with Elephant’s
assertion that one need not spend years in meditation under the
tutelage of a swami to become enlightened to the fact that reality exists
prior to the self/other division. But, having realized that, where does that
leave us in guiding our daily lives?
Platt
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