Sara wrote:<br>&gt; The books are monuments to
the beautiful<br>&gt; search for higher meaning in
life, beyond earthly successes, and try<br>&gt; to form
a connectedness to a greater GOOD. Yes, I see a
higher level<br>&gt; of consciousness as possible for
human beings. This will never be<br>&gt; paradisical,
we have left the innocence and brutality of
animal<br>&gt; existence long behind - but where we perhaps get
a bit of that<br>&gt; interconnected cycle feeling
of eden back again. Through dedicating<br>&gt;
ourselves to MEANING, and living every day in the pursuit
of QUALITY<br>&gt; in our life. <br><br>Dear Sara
and All.<br>I am a bit reluctant to speak about the
Quality Metaphysics' impact on the "meaning of life"
issue, it has a religious ring to it and we are supposed
to be strictly rational, but I'll try to convey my
take on this issue. Your "greater GOOD" triggered it.
<br><br>In LILA Pirsig says that the quality idea isn't new
rather the oldest there is and my interpretation is as
follows. The "proto" approach to explaining reality was
that all aspects of existence were different god's
domains. This was common to all pre-modern mythologies
....up to a critical point in history and in what
loosely may be called the Mediterranean world. In Greece
the shift took the form we know in usual lingo to be
the emergence of philosophy and the first inkling of
the sciences (in MoQish: dividing the world into
subjective and objective). Afterwards the gods became
subjective fantasies and the world objective matter.
<br><br>Over at the other shore a similar yet different
development took place (this is thousands of years before
Christ) where the idea of monotheism emerged - in Egypt
presumably and adopted by the Hebrews - an by and by
resulted in the replacement of the different separate gods
by the omni-everything Jahve of this region. A
distant deity who had created the world an left it to its
own fate. There are a many details that could be
added and the time scale is millennia, but the Greek
subject/object idea and the Semitic Jahve merged in Christianity
with the material body and a spiritual soul
(mind/matter) and a God that could save this soul. <br><br>This
is RELIGION as we Westerners know it with the
notorious sceptic/believer chasm that makes us feel that we
have to forego reason to be a Christian. Science goes
to great lengths to tell us that it is completely
neutral and that it does not say anything about "the
final things", yet uses each opportunity to tell that
all such is speculations, that existence is without
meaning - at the final plane. <br><br>To keep this within
bounds my interpretation of Pirsig's statement is that
the MoQ is a return to a pre-Greek, pre-everything
situation. No, simple retro-movement, but a spiral one that
brings it back at a higher plane. If MoQ's "intellectual
level" can be equalized with the subject-object dualism,
then the level below (the Social) is the said
pre-everything situation. But - as also said - this is no
retro-movement, the new higher plane is a new 5th Q-level, which
(this is terribly important) according to the MoQ each
level - to obtain control over the lower - sort of
joins force with the next lower. The 5th will
"sympathize" with the social level ...which is the old world
of a god-world - not a material godless
place!<br><br>Robert Pirsig may have stumbled upon the wrestler's grip
(he does not endorse the above, but maintains the
safe position that the MoQ is a better i n t e l l e c
t u a l idea than the SOM) that leaves
SOM-cum-Intellect-cum-Reason powerless ...for the ever first time. To me this
is the wonder of it and what keeps me at the
discussions acting the role of the proverbial Dutch boy who
put a finger in each hole in the dyke ...against a
tide of well-meaning "spiritualism" - which I
sympathize with, but will lay the MoQ wide open to ridicule.
I know it sounds pompous, but it's my deepest
"credo".<br>Bo