"It's such a Pirsig day, I'm glad I spen' it with you"

When somebody goes outside the cultural norms, the culture has to protect itself.

Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a 30,000 page menu and no food.

Metaphysics - The branch of philosophy which examines the nature of reality,

including the relationship between mind and matter, substance and attribute, fact and value.

Observer Interview with RMP, 191106. Robert M. Pirsig discovered, amongst many other things, that a person who copies others can only become an incomplete version of the object of their imitation. Great writers, great trainers, etc. don't really copy others, they incorporate ideas from many others and then create their own unique syntheses that go beyond what has happened before. They have to be both followers and their own leaders, and their mentors have to encourage them to grow beyond the egoistic desire of those leaders to be copied.

Robert Pirsig sought to demonstrate the existence of “Quality:” that dynamic interaction between subject and object, which gives rise to our perceptions of reality. According to Pirsig, and a school of philosophy called realism, “A thing exists if a world without it can’t function normally.” 

He used that approach to subtract Quality from his imagined world and discovered, for example, that the fine arts immediately disappeared. Without Quality one painting was as good as another (or a blank wall), and Beethoven was no more remarkable than Britney Spears. Poetry and comedy vanished, (“Heard any good jokes lately?” was a question that made no sense in a world where there was no difference between a joke and no joke.).  Professional sports became a collection of empty statistics. Industrial design, advertising, architecture, brand names and fashion vanished and much of applied science and technology also was altered. 

A world without Quality was a colourless, static existence not unlike that of ancient Sparta, present day North Korea, or the twisted utopias of 1984 and Brave New World. From this imaginary experiment Pirsig concluded that Quality, though difficult to define, clearly existed as demonstrated by the wounded world left in its absence.

Not a Harley, nor a BMW, but a Honda Superhawk.	"The only Zen you find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there". "You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow.....When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths, or any other kinds of dogmas or goals, it's always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt".       "The thing to understand is that if you are going to reform society you don't start with cops. And if you are going to reform intellect you don't start with psychiatrists. If you don't like our present social system or intellectual system the best thing you can do with either cops or psychiatrists is stay out of their way. You leave them till last". Pirsig, Robert M., Lila. An inquiry into morals. New York (Bantam Books) 1991

 

The bestselling (5 million copies) book rejected by the largest number of publishers (121). "I can see by my watch, without taking my hand from the left grip of the cycle, that it is eight-thirty in the morning. The wind, even at sixty miles an hour, is warm and humid. When it's this hot and muggy at eight-thirty, I'm wondering what it's going to be like in the afternoon. In the wind are pungent odors from the marshes by the road. We are in an area of the Central Plains filled with thousands of duck hunting sloughs, heading northwest from Minneapolis toward the Dakotas. This highway is an old concrete two-laner that hasn't had much traffic since a four-laner went in parallel to it several years ago. When we pass a marsh the air suddenly becomes cooler. Then, when we are past, it suddenly warms up again. I'm happy to be riding back into this country. It is a kind of nowhere, famous for nothing at all and has an appeal because of just that. Tensions disappear along old roads like this. We bump along the beat-up concrete between the cattails and stretches of meadow and then more cattails and marsh grass. Here and there is a stretch of open water............." From "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - An Enquiry Into Values", by Robert M. Pirsig If that brief extract does anything for you, or to you, (and to me it's like poetry, immensely evocative and very familiar and distant enough to be very interesting too), you can buy it! (Any bookshop which doesn't have it, isn't really a bookshop).  In the meantime, assuming there is a meantime, and that you haven't rushed straight out to get your own copy, you could go straight here to "a site primarily concerned with the philosophy of Robert Pirsig". And do have a look at a 10,000THINGS supporter's site here.