"Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance"

[fiefoe]

This book didn't do it for me as it has for many others. As a person growing up with wu, I find people who are too attached to their ideas unsettling. And Robert M. Pirsig's axe-grinding with the University of Chicago professors is too axe-grindy.

• July they’re back and everything is at its alivest and every foot of these sloughs is humming and cricking and buzzing and chirping, a whole community of millions of living things living out their lives in a kind of benign continuum.
• With those tools and a lack of pressure to “get somewhere” it works out fine and we just about have America all to ourselves.
• In this Chautauqua I would like not to cut any new channels of consciousness but simply dig deeper into old ones that have become silted in with the debris of thoughts grown stale and platitudes too often repeated... the question “What is best?”... cuts deeply rather than broadly, a question whose answers tend to move the silt downstream.
• Now the stream of our common consciousness seems to be obliterating its own banks, losing its central direction and purpose, flooding the lowlands, disconnecting and isolating the highlands and to no particular purpose other than the wasteful fulfillment of its own internal momentum. Some channel deepening seems called for.
• “There was a whole flock of red-winged blackbirds. They rose up suddenly when we went by... I was happy to see them again. They tie things together, thoughts and such.
• But one does not convert individuals into mass people with the simple coining of a mass term.
• The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha
• I argued that physical discomfort is important only when the mood is wrong. Then you fasten on to whatever thing is uncomfortable and call that the cause. But if the mood is right, then physical discomfort doesn’t mean much.
• It seems to me that law of gravity has passed every test of nonexistence there is... The world has no existence whatsoever outside the human imagination. It’s all a ghost
• 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.”
• it is this personality that is the real object of motorcycle maintenance. The new ones start out as good-looking strangers
• You need a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree lens, or something. You see it, and then you look down in the ground glass and it’s just nothing. As soon as you put a border on it, it’s gone.”
• What you’ve got here, really, are two realities, one of immediate artistic appearance and one of underlying scientific explanation, and they don’t match and they don’t fit and they don’t really have much of anything to do with one another.
• I want to divide human understanding into two kinds—classical understanding and romantic understanding... motorcycle riding is romantic, motorcycle maintenance is purely classic.
• It is esthetically restrained. Everything is under control. Its value is measured in terms of the skill with which this control is maintained.
• The feedback system consists of a cam chain, a camshaft, tappets and a distributor...  The first is that the motorcycle, so described, is almost impossible to understand unless you already know how one works... The second is that the observer is missing.
• It is important to see this knife for what it is and not to be fooled into thinking that motorcycles or anything else are the way they are just because the knife happened to cut it up that way. It is important to concentrate on the knife itself. Later I will want to show how an ability to use this knife creatively and effectively can result in solutions to the classic and romantic split.
• From all this awareness we must select, and what we select and call consciousness is never the same as the awareness because the process of selection mutates it... The discrimination is the division of the conscious universe into parts.
• Such an understanding will not reject sand-sorting or contemplation of unsorted sand for its own sake. Such an understanding will instead seek to direct attention to the endless landscape from which the sand is taken.
• But about the Buddha that exists within analytic thought, and gives that analytic thought its direction,
• A whole personality had been liquidated without a trace in a technologically faultless act that has defined our relationship ever since. I have never met him. Never will.
• But all this can be prevented by a few thousandths of an inch fit which precision measuring instruments give, and this is their classical beauty—not what you see, but what they mean—what they are capable of in terms of control of underlying form.
• the humor of a Parkinson’s law that “The number of rational hypotheses that can explain any given phenomenon is infinite.” It pleased him never to run out of hypotheses.
• If all hypotheses cannot be tested, then the results of any experiment are inconclusive and the entire scientific method falls short of its goal of establishing... But there it was, the whole history of science, a clear story of continuously new and changing explanations of old facts.
• What shortens the life-span of the existing truth is the volume of hypotheses offered to replace it; ... Through multiplication upon multiplication of facts, information, theories and hypotheses, it is science itself that is leading mankind from single absolute truths to multiple, indeterminate, relative ones. The major producer of the social chaos, the indeterminacy of thought and values that rational knowledge is supposed to eliminate, is none other than science itself.
• We are following a creek to its source. It contains water that was probably snow less than an hour ago.
• Many trails through these high ranges have been made and forgotten since the beginning of time, and although the answers brought back from these trails have claimed permanence and universality for themselves, civilizations have varied in the trails they have chosen and we have many different answers to the same question, all of which can be thought of as true within their own context.
• Hume would have answered that the eighteen-year-old had no thoughts whatsoever, and in giving this answer would have defined himself as an empiricist, one who believes all knowledge is derived exclusively from the senses.
• The first problem of empiricism, if empiricism is believed, concerns the nature of “substance.” If all our knowledge comes from sensory data, what exactly is this substance which is supposed to give off the sensory data itself?...  Hume’s answer is “None.” There’s no evidence for causation in our sensations.