The limited understanding of dynamic quality has brought into question some of my approaches to static notions such as intellect. At the same time a friend pointed out that my approach to intellect might be limited. I am now moving towards intellect being the bastion of static quality. The intellect is that part of the mind which collects ideas, it has a static collection of ideas. Reason can develop these ideas thus providing different ideas which can then be added to the collection. At the same time insight can create ideas, and once created these ideas become part of the intellect. The label intellectual would perhaps best be described as the person who is satisfied with the collection of ideas and who is satisfied with reason as the process by which ideas can change. The intellectual is static.

As a static person an intellectual is not all bad. It is necessary to have static quality for those whose approach does not seek to question deeper. There are people who are comfortable following moral codes and social laws. They bring up their families, perform their jobs, and enjoy some free time; moral codes and social laws give these people structure and give society stability. However the 60s generation brought many of these laws and codes into question, laws and codes which had been followed by what might be termed Victorian mentality. As a result many people did not continue to follow these codes, unfortunately most of those people did not replace it with something better. What is better? The dynamic understanding that comes from meditation or similar quality processes. Instead of following codes ego broke out, and this led to such an entrenchment of greed in the West that even the current economic catastrophe is not altering the mindset. It is not insignificant that the source of this catastrophe is the US where there is no tradition to speak of, sadly western countries with a tradition have chosen to follow the US rather than their tradition.

In terms of dynamic and static what is happening in meditation? The soul is the vehicle of the dynamic and in meditation I am trying to return to the soul. In meditation we let go of ideas that have been collecting and blocking the dynamic movement of the soul. Once these blocks have been cleared insight is free to create new ideas. What is the source of these new ideas? Quality. Ethics. Sila. Creativity is the process by which quality comes into being through insight, when the blocks have been cleared and when we are able to focus on the fundamental dynamic that is underneath - the Tao. This is right concentration. It is also very significant that sila is part of the 8-fold Path, there has to be an underlying morality for people to follow the Path. By attempting to be moral people are aligning their daily lives with the underlying fundamental Good or Ethics - the Path of Life, this alignment brings with the reward of enjoyment of a Life on the Path, and the eventual enlightenment at the end of the Path.

What is significant in viewing this analysis is that the battle between insight and intellect still rages but has taken on different terms - dynamic vs static. Our souls need to follow the dynamic Path, what prevents us from doing so - blocks of ideas. Whilst ideas are essential in daily life they need to be eschewed in meditation, thus allowing the natural free flow of dynamic ethic that is fundamental to life. An intellectual who holds onto ideas cannot hope to touch this dynamic as they are holding to the very blocks that prevent the free flow. Once there is free flow we have insight, and so the previous battle has just been clarified rather than altered.

One person described an intellectual as a person who loves ideas. This definition practically illustrates the problem although in fact as a definition it could be fine. The knub of it lies in the understanding of love. Is love free-flowing or is love a process of attachment. If the love attaches to the ideas they become blocks thus preventing effective meditation - effective alignment to Good.

Why was I so furious? I don't really know. Maybe it was the relationship I was in, the school I was teaching in, but the fury only elicited stubbornness and the arguments strained our friendship - that friendship still exists thankfully. But the fury was not the discussion. There was however value in my position in negating morality, and despite what I have just said this position does not negate Pirsig's discussion. At the time I was arguing - early 80's and in the UK prevails more so now - intellectuals were using morality as a justification. This was not a deep morality but a rationalisation based on a set of morals. Why does that matter? Because there was not a deep prevailing conviction in the morality. It was intellectual rationalisation and sophistry.

That could be hair-splitting if it wasn't for one thing. How does one measure the quality of these rationalisations? The result. In teaching there was much rationalisation of what was going on, were the teaching institutions successful? The labour party under Blair and then Brown have taken moral lie-speak to a peak, and it has generally become acceptable to justify whatever you want around morality. Paraphrasing and simplifying I am a caring teacher and I can do whatever I want because I say that including screw the kids and fellow staff whilst I make my career. This was prevalent before I left the UK end of 1992 but it is now common practice - teaching in 2003-4.

And what factor allows this moral lie-speak to continue and prevail? Power. And fundamentally where does this power come from? The police back up laws to absurdity, and lurking in the background there is the hammer of the armed forces whose global actions demonstrate a complete lack of morality. Both act as a reinforcement of the neo-colonial economy, and the global and local status quo. The justification of these global actions is the hegemony, and locally the propagation of existing society. Around pp310-318 discusses this power structure.

Pirsig discussed a good example of the emptiness of intellectual argument per se, when the professor [pp315-6] was unable to persuade his neighbours to be decent. The professor was deeply frustrated when his intellectual arguments did not prevail but he did not understand that in his situation he had no power. Yet his intellectual arguments prevailed (presumably) in his faculty because there the system gave him power. Now UK (and elsewhere) government moral lie-speak is just accepted as a fact of life, people hear the political justifications and ignore them. It is not that the arguments are flawed it is just the speakers have no heart, no soul; the arguments simply come from political expediency and the desire to maintain the status quo - usually the politician's job.

Back to the South Downs, and it is this I was trying to convey. In truth with the emotions flying around, my own fury and the ensuing perceived stubbornness I am not sure whether my friend actually accepted what I said or not. I was hung up on words, and because of my anger unwilling to go past them. Morality has soul - sila, and moral lie-speak is not morality but intellectual rationalisation (without conviction). There is so obviously agreement here it was a crazy argument. The issue is not our discussion, it is the force that empowers the moral lie-speak. It is the lack of soul, the lack of search for soul, the lack of recognition that within intellectualism justification is empty unless the fundamental axiom of good is prevalent within the being of the arguer.

Sadly intellectuals do not see the hidden agenda of the power that is given to academia. Academia is fundamentally driven by research, and research is funded by business and government. The power in academia is the money, the direction of the intellect and research is financed. This is the foundation that academia is built on. Of course there are money good people who make their living in academia. As with life as a whole these people are forced to compromise to make a living, this is understood, is a fact of life, and is not a criticism. But what might be a legitimate criticism is the unwillingness of many academics to accept the underlying power and direction of their institution. In the same way as teaching is taught as "educare" - bringing out, academics are taught that their institutions are the places of learning in contemporary society. But both are cons. The teacher is a childminder, a protector of business, a purveyor of the status quo, and occasionally passes on learning. The academic provides the justification that business wants (research that cigarettes were safe for many years), it provides think tanks and experts that the establishment can bring forth to present a public rationalisation to justify the status quo, and even occasionally there are people who work in academia as places of learning. In teaching the moral lie-speak brigade purvey the rationale that the school is for learning as do the same brigade of the academics, and both build a career. The real teachers and learners end up fighting with the establishment.

Pirsig's structure of biological, social and intellectual helps clarify the above arguments as he examines the intellectual in response to the Victorians. He brings the intellectuals in before I do in my 60s generation warning. But this might well because he is in America and I am British. Whilst there were upheavals in the UK between the wars, the social establishment was still based more on a social moral code. The Hippies were fighting this social moral code as much as having intellectual development with their mind-blowing. But as Pirsig points out, even in the UK the Hippies were trying to attack the pseudo-power of the intellectual by exposing them for the establishment heroes their actions made them.

But what they did not do is replace the social codes and intellectualism with a moral power, not moral lie-speak which has become common parlance, but an actual moral power, a conviction that comes from soul. This is significant in understanding the value of Buddhism. This moral power comes from sila but that is not enough if sila exists only in the intellectual. It has to be a deep power, a conviction, and this comes in Buddhists from meditation, finding that sila is substantive as soul, and that sila has strength to withstand the power that moral lie-speak throws against it.

It is also good to note the role of the biological, here I am basically taking Pirsig's argument [pp317-8] and developing it for reference. The biological might be considered instinctual, the instinct for survival and procreation. The social codes held these in place but the intellectual began to question the codes. Questioning is an important intellectual tool but if it is not used as purposive enquiry it can just create doubt and insecurity. Early intellectual enquiry into the moral codes brought in sexual hedonism, for example, and how much has breakdown in the home contributed to social breakdown. What was missing in this questioning was the underlying morality that the questioning needed to have been based on. Instead biological drives used the ensuing doubt and insecurity to re-establish themselves. And with the introduction of drugs the intellect is used to justify the use of drugs and the increasing biological hedonism. What the drugs do is effectively destroy the conviction of the soul. The drugs destroy the state of mind that would encourage meditation, an important source of such conviction. How many artists had their conviction of their art but allowed that conviction to be destroyed through the use of drugs - the sexual lifestyle being a concomitant.

How does the intellectual and social combine in terms of this moral code? The fundamental axioms of morality and consideration can be combined through the use of the intellect to provide a better basis for society and a social code. Consider the law and the way that power has corrupted it. Every person has a right to defence - a good right in general, but is it good in every case? Should obvious criminals be allowed to escape because of police procedure? There are limits to the right of defence and that limit is governed by discerning use of moral understanding through the intellect. Instead the intellect is used by the defence to find loopholes to allow criminals to escape. This is not a flaw in the system but a fundamental acceptance by those in power because they can use their finances to pervert justice. This is not a by-product of the legal system in the same way as the flaws of compromise in schools and academia; this misuse of the legal system is needed to ensure the status quo of society. Big business can continue to exploit because big business can tie up legitimate complaints in courts with the use of finance.

There is only one way to fight this control by finance and that is by raising morality as a code to be higher than that which can be bought by finance. If the morality is recognised as the higher code then financial attempts at hijacking the process can be circumvented. But this requires such a level of conviction on the part of the judges and the officers of the court it is unlikely to happen. The powers-that-be do not want that conviction. But that conviction is needed, soul and sila is the way forward.

Towards the end of the book Pirsig briefly discusses meditation. Whilst I still see it as important to the integrity of his work there is no evidence in his books that it is.

I wanted to mention two quotes from his book that place his studies in context, and the context is that he is trying to academicise the mystical. Whilst it is not a compromise I am comfortable with it is something that he wants. There is a quote early in the book in which he says the mystics might reject MOQ but he wanted to go there, and that was the end of the discussion. I took that to mean that he was accepting compromise.

At the end of the book [p408] "Strictly speaking the creation of any metaphysics is an immoral act since it's a lower form of evolution, intellect, trying to devour a higher mystic one. .... It attempts to capture the Dynamic within a static pattern."

Whether it was Pirsig's intention or not, these quotes contextualise the two books for me.

I now need to study Lila to note my understandings in this blog.