Robert Pirsig
Excerpts from– ‘Zen and The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance’
“---The
intellect of modern man isn't that superior. IQs aren't that much different.
Those Indians and medieval men were just as intelligent as we are, but the
context in which they thought was completely different. Within that context of
thought, ghosts and spirits are quite as real as atoms, particles, photons and
quanta are to a modern man. In that sense I believe in ghosts. Modern man has
his ghosts and spirits too, you know.”
“What?”
“Oh,
the laws of physics and of logic -- the number system -- the principle of
algebraic substitution. These are ghosts. We just believe in them so thoroughly
they seem real.”
“They
seem real to me,” John says.
“I
don't get it,” says Chris.
So
I go on. “For example, it seems completely natural to presume that gravitation
and the law of gravitation existed before Isaac Newton. It would sound nutty to
think that until the seventeenth century there was no gravity.”
“Of
course.”
“So
when did this law start? Has it always existed?”
John
is frowning, wondering what I am getting at.
“What
I'm driving at,” I say, “is the notion that before the beginning of the earth,
before the sun and the stars were formed, before the primal generation of
anything, the law of gravity existed.”
“Sure.”
“Sitting
there, having no mass of its own, no energy of its own, not in anyone's mind
because there wasn't anyone, not in space because there was no space either,
not anywhere...this law of gravity still existed?”
Now
John seems not so sure.
“If
that law of gravity existed,” I say, “I honestly don't know what a thing has to
do to be nonexistent. It seems to me that law of gravity has passed every test
of nonexistence there is. You cannot think of a single attribute of
nonexistence that that law of gravity didn't have. Or a single scientific
attribute of existence it did have. And yet it is still ‘common sense' to
believe that it existed.”
John
says, “I guess I'd have to think about it.”
“Well,
I predict that if you think about it long enough you will find yourself
going
round and round and round and round until you finally reach only one possible,
rational, intelligent conclusion. The law of gravity and gravity itself did not
exist before Isaac Newton. No other conclusion makes sense.
“And
what that means,” I say before he can interrupt, “and what that means is that
that law of gravity exists nowhere except in people's heads! It's a ghost! We
are all of us very arrogant and conceited about running down other people's
ghosts but just as ignorant and barbaric and superstitious about our own.”
“Why
does everybody believe in the law of gravity then?”
“Mass
hypnosis. In a very orthodox form known as ‘education.’”
“You
mean the teacher is hypnotizing the kids into believing the law of gravity?”
“Sure.”
“That's
absurd.”
“You've
heard of the importance of eye contact in the classroom? Every educationist
emphasizes it. No educationist explains it.”
John
shakes his head and pours me another drink. He puts his hand over his mouth and
in a mock aside says to Sylvia, “You know, most of the time he seems like such
a normal guy.”
I
counter, “That's the first normal thing I've said in weeks. The rest of the
time I'm feigning twentieth-century lunacy just like you are. So as not to draw
attention to myself.
“But
I'll repeat it for you,” I say. “We believe the disembodied words of Sir Isaac
Newton were sitting in the middle of nowhere billions of years before he was
born and that magically he discovered these words. They were always there, even
when they applied to nothing. Gradually the world came into being and then they
applied to it. In fact, those words themselves were what formed the world.
That, John, is ridiculous.
They
are just looking at me so I continue: “The problem, the contradiction the
scientists are stuck with, is that of mind. Mind has no matter or energy but
they can't escape its predominance over everything they do. Logic exists in the
mind. Numbers exist only in the mind. I don't get upset when scientists say that
ghosts exist in the mind. It's that only that gets me. Science is only in your
mind too; it's just that that doesn't make it bad. Or ghosts either.
“
Laws of nature are human inventions, like ghosts. Laws of logic, of mathematics
are also human inventions, like ghosts. The whole blessed thing is a human
invention, including the idea that it isn't a human invention. The world has no
existence whatsoever outside the human imagination. It's all a ghost, and in
antiquity was so recognized as a ghost, the whole blessed world we live in.
It's run by ghosts.
We
see what we see because these ghosts show it to us, ghosts of Moses and Christ
and the Buddha, and Plato, and Descartes, and Rousseau and Jefferson and
Lincoln, on and on and on. Isaac Newton is a very good ghost. One of the best.
Your common sense is nothing more than the voices of thousands and thousands of
these ghosts from the past. Ghosts and more ghosts. Ghosts trying to find their
place among the living.”
Another Excerpt:
There
was a passage he had read and repeated to himself so many times it survives
intact. It begins:
“ In the temple of science are many mansions
-- and various indeed are they that dwell therein and the motives that have led
them there. Many take to science out of a joyful sense of superior intellectual
power; science is their own special sport to which they look for vivid
experience and the satisfaction of ambition; many others are to be found in the
temple who have offered the products of their brains on this altar for purely
utilitarian purposes.
Were
an angel of the Lord to come and drive all the people belonging to these two
categories out of the temple, it would be noticeably emptier but there would
still be some men of both present and past times left inside -- . If the types
we have just expelled were the only types there were, the temple would never
have existed any more than one can have a wood consisting of nothing but
creepers -- those who have found favor with the angel -- are somewhat odd,
uncommunicative, solitary fellows, really less like each other than the hosts
of the rejected.
What
has brought them to the temple -- no single answer will cover -- escape from
everyday life, with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the
fetters of one's own shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape
from his noisy cramped surroundings into the silence of the high mountains
where the eye ranges freely through the still pure air and fondly traces out
the restful contours apparently built for eternity.”
The
passage is from a 1918 speech by a young German scientist named Albert
Einstein.
The
formation of hypotheses is the most mysterious of all the categories of
scientific method. Where they come from, no one knows. A person is sitting
somewhere, minding his own business, and suddenly...flash!...he understands
something he didn't understand before. Until it's tested the hypothesis isn't
truth. For the tests aren't its source. Its source is somewhere else.
Einstein
had said: “Man tries to make for himself, in the fashion that suits him best, a
simplified and intelligible picture of the world. He then tries to some extent to
substitute this cosmos of his for the world of experience, and thus to overcome
it -- .He makes this cosmos and its construction the pivot of his emotional
life in order to find in this way the peace and serenity which he cannot find
in the narrow whirlpool of personal experience -- .The supreme task -- is to
arrive at those universal elementary laws from which the cosmos can be built up
by pure deduction. There is no logical path to these laws; only intuition,
resting on sympathetic understanding of experience, can reach them --“
Intuition?
Sympathy? Strange words for the origin of
scientific knowledge.
The
sun of quality does not revolve around the subjects and objects
of our existence. It does not just passively illuminate them. It is not
subordinate to them in any way. It has created them. They are subordinate to
it!
When the world is seen not as a duality of mind and matter but as a
trinity of quality, mind, and matter, then the art of
motorcycle maintenance and other arts take on a dimension of meaning they never
had.
Any
philosophic explanation of Quality is going to be both false and true
precisely because it is a philosophic explanation. The process of philosophic
explanation is an analytic process, a process of breaking something down into subjects
and predicates. What I mean (and everybody else means) by the word quality
cannot be broken down into subjects and predicates. This is not because Quality
is so mysterious but because Quality is so simple, immediate and direct. The
easiest intellectual analogue of pure Quality that people in our environment
can understand is that ‘Quality is the response of an organism to its
environment' (he used this example because his chief questioners seemed to see
things in terms of stimulus-response behavior theory). An amoeba, placed on a
plate of water with a drip of dilute sulfuric acid placed nearby, will pull
away from the acid. If it could speak, the amoeba - without knowing anything
about sulfuric acid - could say, ‘This environment has poor quality.' If it had
a nervous system it would act in a much more complex way to overcome the poor
quality of the environment. It would seek analogues, that is, images and
symbols from its previous experience, to define the unpleasant nature of its
new environment and thus ‘understand' it.
In
our highly complex organic state we advanced organisms respond to our
environment with an invention of many marvelous analogues. We invent earth and
heavens, trees, stones and oceans, gods, music, arts, language, philosophy,
engineering, civilization and science. We call these analogues reality. And
they are reality. We mesmerize our children in the name of truth
into knowing that they are reality. We throw anyone who does not accept these
analogues into an insane asylum. But that which causes us to invent the
analogues is Quality.
Quality
is the continuing stimulus which our environment puts upon us to create the
world in which we live. All of it. Every last bit of it.
Now, to take that which has caused us to create the world, and include it within the world we have created, is clearly impossible. That is why Quality cannot be defined. If we do define it we are defining something less than Quality itself.”
Keith and Marnie
Elliott’s “REMEDY” Site
Home
|
Our Stories
|
The Sublime
|
Our World and Times
|
Book Reviews
|
Marnie's Images
|
The Journal
|
Gleanings
|
From The Writings Of. . .
|
Allegories
|