Yes, in just an hour I go to the train station and begin the long journey home.

My emotions are all of joy, since I look forward to returning home and doing the things that may be done there. One thing this trip has taught me is that the Parent of all beauty is One, and thus there is equally the same Beauty there as there is here. It is always in different forms, of course, and for this travel is excellent; but the essence is One, meaning it is possible to commune with the wonder of life anywhere, if one is open. In that sense, I do not regard this place as special – simply different. And when I come to the States, I want to enjoy the States, just as I’ve enjoyed here while I’m here.

Now this really is good-bye, because the week is ending, the shops are closing for their vacation (August is the off-season), everyone is going on their holidays, and my Internet time is running out. In all, the right time to say good-bye, pay for my train ticket, and make my way back to the United States.

I have only one last realization to offer, in conclusion, which lies like the capstone on everything before. It is simple, but took several experiences to come clear: In essence it is that, just as the soul must free itself from people and definitions in order to center its life on Quality, it must also detach itself from its past and future – since Quality is found only in the present moment.

With that, this trip has reached its conclusion – in many ways – and I am very much looking forward to returning, and putting all that’s been learned to use.

At the end of this letter are several sentences from the Seven Valleys (my favorite mystical text, by Bahá’u’lláh). If you’ve followed the essays before now, perhaps you will also see the connections. It reads to me as if it had been subtitled, “The Seven Valleys: A Manual for Finding Quality”.

Ciao from Florence.

Praise be to God Who hath made being to come forth from nothingness…

…that every man may thereby win his way to the summit of realities, until none shall contemplate anything whatsoever but that he shall see God therein.

“…by whichsoever (name) ye will, invoke Him: He hath most excellent names” in the hearts of those who know.

…a station wherein thou shalt see nothing in creation save the Face of thy Beloved One, the Honored, and behold all created things only as in the day wherein none hath a mention.

It is incumbent on these servants that they… shut the door of friendliness and enmity upon all the people of the earth.

…for he hath taken his heart away from both worlds, and set out for the Ka’bih of the Beloved.

The true seeker hunteth naught but the object of his quest, and the lover hath no desire save union with his beloved. Nor shall the seeker reach his goal unless he sacrifice all things. That is, whatever he hath seen, and heard, and understood, all must he set at naught, that he may enter the realm of the spirit, which is the City of God.

…if we taste of this cup, we shall cast away the world.

…when the fire of love is ablaze, it burneth to ashes the harvest of reason.

Now is the traveler unaware of himself, and of aught besides himself.

In this station the lover hath no thought save the Beloved, and seeketh no refuge save the Friend.

…until, like Jacob, thou forsake thine outward eyes, thou shalt never open the eye of thine inward being…

Love accepteth no existence and wisheth no life…

…pass by this mortal earth that thou mayest seek a home in the nest of heaven.

Be as naught, if thou wouldst kindle the fire of being and be fit for the pathway of love.

…the denizens of the undying city, who dwell in the green garden land, see not even “neither first nor last”; they fly from all that is first, and repulse all that is last. For these have passed over the worlds of names, and fled beyond the worlds of attributes as swift as lightning.

“…honor us with the love of Thine Essence, that we may be freed from turning toward ourselves and toward all else save Thee, and may become wholly Thine, and know only Thee, and see only Thee, and think of none save Thee.”

In this station he pierceth the veils of plurality, fleeth from the worlds of the flesh, and ascendeth into the heaven of singleness.

He seeth in himself neither name nor fame nor rank, but findeth his own praise in praising God. He beholdeth in his own name the name of God; to him, “all songs are from the King,” and every melody from Him.

He sitteth on the throne of “Say, all is from God,” and taketh his rest on the carpet of “There is no power or might but in God.”

He looketh on all things with the eye of oneness, and seeth the brilliant rays of the divine sun shining from the dawning-point of Essence alike on all created things…

…and some have drunk of the wine of oneness and these see nothing but the sun itself.

…when thou strippest the wrappings of illusion from off thine heart, the lights of oneness will be made manifest.

…those personages who in a single step have passed over the world of the relative and the limited, and dwelt on the fair plane of the Absolute, and pitched their tent in the worlds of authority and command – have burned away these relativities with a single spark, and blotted out these words with a drop of dew. And they swim in the sea of the spirit, and soar in the holy air of light. Then what life have words, on such a plane, that “first” and “last” or other than these be seen or mentioned!

…shouldst thou taste of [these fruits], thou wilt shield thine eyes from all things else, and drink of the wine of contentment; and thou wilt loose thyself from all things else, and bind thyself to Him, and throw thy life down in His path, and cast thy soul away.

…there is no other in this region that thou need forget: “There was God and there was naught beside Him.”

For on this plane the traveler witnesseth the beauty of the Friend in everything.

For he hath burnt away the veils with his sighing, and unwrapped the shroudings with a single glance; with piercing sight he gazeth on the new creation; with lucid heart he graspeth subtle verities.

At every moment he beholdeth a wondrous world, a new creation, and goeth from astonishment to astonishment, and is lost in awe at the works of the Lord of Oneness.

He who hath attained this station is sanctified from all that pertaineth to the world.

This is the plane whereon the vestiges of all things are destroyed in the traveler…

Now hast thou abandoned the drop of life and come to the sea of the Life-Bestower. This is the goal thou didst ask for; if it be God’s will, thou wilt gain it.

It has been hot here in Europe the entire time, coating me in sweat constantly. But I find I do not mind it much; I drink a log of water and perhaps Tucson has inured me, since they experience much fiercer temperatures there. My friend Alex (from Zurich, incidentally) is here visiting me for the weekend. He told me about the heat you went through up there!

This time away from the world has been to worthwhile to describe. Yes, I think everyone should do it. It was good I did not bring my computer or much else, like science fiction books. And also good that I am not spending too much time on touristy things. Just a whole lot of time and only my skull to fill it. That has created a propitious atmosphere for all the realizations sent by mail. The mental progress, charted against the rate of such realizations in my past, equals about four years worth of time. Ordinary living makes it very hard to step apart, without filling that space with amusements or people.

I had always felt, before now, that boredom represented a high wall; and that if I could wait long enough to climb that wall, I would find something fascinating on the other side. In ordinary life, it was too high; I could never muster the patience to scale it when there were always more interesting things to do.

But here I have climbed it, and sit on the other side. I understand the wall, my reticence to climb it, and this fascination. It took all this time (8 weeks) to do it: to let the boredom seep in, rather than run from it. To sit and watch the people and admire the sky. It has a way of working on the brain that can’t be described.

Now I am bored in a very different way. It is no longer ennui – wanting to really want things – but knowing what I want to do and burning to do it. I cannot sleep from my desire to get back home and write computer programs. I am programming in my head, with several new ideas. Life seems so rich and… possible. Funny how impoverishing myself – by spending a fair amount of money and time on this trip – has resulted in such a large return-on-investment. I’d say even my pocketbook will come out the better for it in the long run.

Men and women seem to believe – according to the romanticized ideal of marriage in western culture – that when they marry they become number one in the other person’s eyes: the most beautiful, most interesting, most desired, most fun to be around, etc. The role of “wife” becomes a permanent assurance of value in the eyes of the “husband”, and vice-versa. This is “wedlock”, in the sense of the one’s values and appreciation being locked, or fixed, with respect to the other; it is the “marriage bond”, in terms of binding the eyes of one to a particular valuation of the other – which valuation must always, of course, regard him or her as the highest value.

This fantasy takes place independent of any actual values. The course of infatuation, unfortunately, tends to produce such inflated valuation of the other party that it seems not only possible “to love and to cherish” forever, but even feels like that must be the case. Once the infatuation passes, one finds that others do act in ways that are neither deserving of love nor of cherishing. One may still love and cherish the potential for the other to have such qualities, but if their behavior does not have them, these profound feelings cannot be faked.

So the wife, for example, after cooking her first meal and finding the husband doesn’t like it, may burst into tears. The ideal is already giving way to reality. The “marriage bond” promised that he would love and cherish her always, and already he in neither loving nor cherishing her cooking. I believe these strong words regarding marriage refer to the souls involved, but the romantic ideal has taken them to refer to the self and its actions and attitudes.

Thus the husband cannot find his wife to be ugly or fat, he cannot appreciate the beauty of other women, etc. The charade of guaranteed value – from “husband” to “wife” and back again – must be maintained at all costs, lest the ideal on which their marriage was founded be utterly destroyed.

When the husband or wife is no longer number one, and one finds they have more passionate interests elsewhere (I refer to hobbies here), these can easily cause jealousy and anger. Even if they are “allowed”, they weaken the ideal. They prove that the husband, for example, has an independent sense of value as expressed by his interests. Why is the wife not as interesting, if she represents the highest value? Because of the truth – the death knell of the ideal: she is not.

This shouldn’t be surprising, because God is the highest ideal and He is manifested in His creation. Those things that are truest to their nature will reveal His light in the purest form they are capable of. If the wife or husband is not true to their nature, clearly they will not be to the other what “wedlock” was meant to ensure. One cannot exhibit a lesser value and still expect to be valued highly. This is a mythical belief in the power of marriage to get a strange-hold on the other person’s values – to fix them in the state of infatuation – that has no basis whatever.

Everyone, at some point or another, complains that, “He or she doesn’t love me like when we first met”. This expresses a wish to be over-valued: for the other party to return to the inflated values they expressed during infatuation. It is even said as though the other should do this: as though he or she had failed the promise of marriage by letting their values find moral ground again and pursuing their interests where they lay.

This explains, too, why arranged marriages can be successful, and why marriage in Western society – free marriage based on “love” – is a travesty: because couples in arranged marriages never agreed to value the other as an absolute. They were put in a situation and had to make do, so they sought value where it could be found and satisfied their needs in other ways. This is not an affront to either party, because it makes sense: Why would someone value a person for anything other than their good qualities?

Idealized marriage turns this statement completely around. It asks: How can he or she not value me completely at all times? When the other does not anymore – as must happen – that is when adultery – an attempt to recapture that promise of absolute adoration independent of merit – becomes a great danger. Or, simply, a divorce to allow both parties to “find what they were looking for” elsewhere. But it cannot be found, anywhere. No one can offer the mercy of a baseless valuation forever, unless their needs are being fully met in some other way.

Couples that survive drop the ideal. They present enough value to each other that it is worth the time and energy to stay married. Otherwise, it will lead to divorce or terminal unhappiness. After the first few years, one would hope, husband and wife stop beating on each other with the shillelagh of “wedlock”, and start to recognize that value is what value is – and that each person’s needs and capacity for appreciation of it differ. False valuation always comes to an end under the pressures of communal living; it simply requires too much energy to keep up the pretense with little return. The only time it remains imaginable is when superlative value is being offered in other ways. Then the continuing lies might have a pool of energy to draw from, to keep them going.

How to restore a lifeless marriage, then? There is only one way, and this applies to any kind of relationship: Offer more value. There are many ways to do this: find new values, increase old ones, become better, lessen flaws. All of these will increase the quality of a relationship.

What will not work is asking the other party to see value where they do not. Changing a person’s moral compass – that is, how they determine value – is not to be attempted for any reason but re-orienting them toward God. To do it for the sake of a marriage or a person is like asking them to be placed on God’s throne instead. Idols are to be cast out from the temple – not put there intentionally.

So interest may not be dictated. Dull conversation cannot be re-interpreted as interesting. If conversing is dull, the couple will have to do other things to find value. Those other things may even liven up that conversation, in which case it is the value of conversation that has changed, and not the perception of its value by either party.

Hobbies are a good thing in this respect, as well as other friendships. They take the strain off, and make lower levels of value acceptable by satisfying one’s needs elsewhere. However, they do not make the marriage itself more interesting, simply more acceptable. For the marriage to improve, it must find a greater value of its own.

Nothing, I believe, causes a greater increase in the value one offers to others than self-perfection. By the soul’s becoming educated, it grows more beautiful. This imparts value.

The danger in our idealized culture is that one party may become so disillusioned by the promise that was held out to them, that they give up on the marriage altogether. The other person is at fault, and until they receive the absolute valuation they had expected, they are not willing to accept anything else. In this case, even if the spouse offers more value, it is actually an affront! because it only emphasizes why the other is not being valued as they wish: because they haven’t offered enough value.

In this sad state, value itself becomes the enemy because what they wife or husband wants is not value, but proprietary ownership of the other’s sense of value. Aren’t they, after all, entitled to such ownership by the title of “wife” or “husband”? But unless they give up this fantastic demand, no help is possible. What they want cannot be given. The marriage must fail, or become a continual, living misery. Every avenue of survival is cut off, and even what would ordinarily help becomes poison. If the ideal is not given up, it destroys those involved, or their marriage.

If the above is true, then the road to finding a healthy marriage must begin by removing this ideal. Infatuation in the beginning cannot be helped, but there is no reason to believe in every value seen. With this in mind, one can find ways to discover the truth – especially in seeking the counsel of others.

Once married, value alone provides a foundation for happiness, just as with any aspect of life. Both parties must recognize this, and not expect values to appear which were not visible at the beginning. What needs to be known can be seen well before marriage, if one is looking honestly for values he or she is interested in. What that person offers to the other only the other can judge; but if it is not sufficient for them, there will not be the kind of love and cherishing one might expect. It is all about value.

If both parties do recognize and honor value, if they both offer substantial and numerous values to the other, if they know that marriage offers no special rights other than the legal, and if they have no expectation that they will ever be valued in ways they do not deserve – solely owing to the title of “wife” or “husband” – then it is hard to see why it would fail. This is, after all, how all good and lasting friendships are formed.

After this, I will send only if something really beautiful comes up. If you want to hear more than that, just ask. I imagine you all must be tired now of so many words.

step.outside

It can all be said  in one word  if our hearts share  the  
vocabulary.

But even then,  
it's not to be said --  
better if shown --  
the nights themselves  
will tell the meaning.

“Only heart to heart can speak the bliss of mystic knowers; no messenger can tell it, and no missive bear it.”

Perhaps I overwhelm the readers, since these days I write for my own joy. Should I end it? If you, too, haven’t the will to follow, I doubt anyone else does.

Here’s a little piece whose language style was inspired by Dickens’ “Great Expectations”, a very cute book:

There is nothing like the sight of a katsu [a cat] to take up my whole soul in one great hand, and squeeze for all the worth that may be had from it – and leave it by the side, panting and eager for breath, with ever the katsu undisturbed in his peaceful repose. If I had ten-thousand hands, and some way to manage the difficulty of so many fingers, I would find myself still lacking the capacity to pet that katsu quite as much as I would like to. And I can doubt he would sit through it all, stroked to baldness, his tufts of hair catching on the breeze like a young boy run through a field of dandelions in summer. Away he goes, my feline hope, perhaps informed of my design by his guardian, whole, alight on airy wings, shows himself equally fleet of paw, lest I should take note of him, and change the object of my fancy…

The following selection is from pages 221-2 of Zen:

He’d been speculating about the relationship of Quality to mind and matter and had identified Quality as the parent of mind and matter, that event which gives birth to mind and matter. This Copernican inversion of the relationship of Quality to the objective world could sound mysterious if not carefully explained, but he didn’t mean it to be mysterious. He simply meant that at the cutting edge of time, before an object can be distinguished, there must be a kind of non-intellectual awareness, which he called awareness of Quality. You can’t be aware that you’ve seen a tree until after you’ve seen the tree, and between the instant of vision and instant of awareness there must be a time lag. We sometimes think of that time lag as unimportant. But there’s no justification for thinking that the time lag is unimportant – none whatsoever.

The past exists only in our memories, the future only in our plans. The present is our only reality. The tree that you are aware of intellectually, because of that small time lag, is always in the past and therefore is always unreal. Any intellectually conceived object is always in the past and therefore unreal. Reality is always the moment of vision before the intellectualization takes place. There is no other reality. This pre-intellectual reality is what Phaedrus felt he had properly identified as Quality. Since all intellectually identifiable things must emerge from this pre-intellectual reality, Quality is the parent, the source of all subjects and objects.

He felt that intellectuals usually have the greatest trouble seeing this Quality, precisely because they are so swift and absolute about snapping everything into intellectual form. The ones who have the easiest time seeing this Quality are small children, uneducated people and culturally “deprived” people. These have the least predisposition toward intellectuality from cultural sources and have the least formal training to instill it further into them….

One thing I think this is saying is that we can lose sight of the world’s beauty – of Quality – by gradually preferring the certainty of definition to the certainty of our experience of the thing defined. I think it’s hard for this to happen in one lifetime – to have such an experience and then fall in love with the description instead – but it is easy if we have not yet had that experience.

This is when the knowledge of a thing blocks our ability to recognize the thing. For example, if we idolize a great person by our knowledge of them, we are almost certain to be disappointed by the reality. This is not because the reality is lesser – after all, the person himself is the origin of that greatness and capable of more – but because our definition has rendered us incapable of seeing his value if he doesn’t take the form we expect: we can no longer directly perceive the reality-before-the-description.

Or a foreigner experiencing a food he’s never tasted. For him there is only the experience. He will value it and always associate that value with the thing itself. But for the resident it was new too long ago; he now “knows” it too well. He may have completely lost the ability to appreciate it.

The mind that does not yet know is aptly called by Zen “the beginner’s mind”. Such a mind has to interface with life directly because it possesses no knowledge that may interpose between.

There is nothing to discounted about knowledge, however. The first thing God asked Adam to do was to name the thing of the world. He even went one better: He named God Himself. Knowledge is a source of joy, so this is not where our problem lies; rejecting knowledge will not offer any solution.

The fault is solely in preferring the description of a thing to its reality. It is accepting a substitute for the experience, and a personal, immediate valuation of it. It is the difference between loving the opera, and liking the opera because other people say how great it is – while feeling empty in your heart because you don’t really like it at all. The philosopher Krishnamurti spends a great deal of his time talking about this distinction.

It is the hardest for religions, I feel. In Sunday school, as a child, I was taught all about Christ. I was given all the definitions available; but as Christ Himself is a rather inimitable figure, there was no way to present me with an immediate experience of the reality behind what was being taught. Christ faced this Himself with the Rabbis of his time – likewise educated in all the definitions of Judaism and its prophecies – who failed to recognize that the living, undefinable spirit of those prophecies was coming to fruition. They knew only the definitions, and the reality was much too different from their expectations. Now it has been so long that schools of definition combat other schools, with the Ones who started all of the schools not even present in the debate.

Children are especially immune to all of this because they lack knowledge, definitions. They also don’t have much to contribute to society as a result. But at least they know how to enjoy life and to understand their own likes and dislikes. Without knowledge, of course, the depth of their appreciation is severely limited – but it is genuine. To have both would be heavenly bliss. “Except ye be as little children, ye shall never enter the Kingdom of God.”

What can a person do? It is almost impossible, if not disastrous, to erase knowledge. Perhaps we must simply seek anew what it is that has given birth to all of our descriptions. To find love instead of theorizing about love. “The death of self is needed here, not rhetoric.” We need to get into our car and drive it to the far horizon – and put away for a moment the travel books that have been written for us.

This is the mystic’s search – where a mystic is one who desires this intimate awareness of his Beloved. The “mystics” who try to destroy knowledge are like negatives contrasted with the positive; they have corrupted the meaning of the word. The real mystic only wants to find that Source of life of whom all knowledge is the sign and proof. At that point, after the seeker ends his search and is consumed by love for his Object, the lover becomes a knower, because he now knows why the definitions of the world have the form that they do.

To seek is simple, if difficult. It involves only purifying the heart and freeing it from all external influences. The soul of man is like a compass always pointing north; but the cap must be removed and the needle read. Each person is his own guide by this measure of the heart, but he must release himself from his definitions to an incomparable extent. Perhaps it requires an element of grace even to be possible. But once found, this compass is seen to point the way, straight and true, independent of every other consideration. “He will inhale the fragrance of that City from a distance of a thousand furlongs…”

Once found, there are other difficulties to master and go beyond, but these concern other issues beyond the relation of the description and the described. All of them lead to joy, however, as the soul awakens and undertakes its greatest pilgrimage.

I am writing this evening from an old Roman amphitheater in Fiesole, which is a town in the hills north of Florence, and also the oldest settled town in Tuscany. There are both Langobard and Etruscan tombs nearby, and even one lazy cat who thinks the shade under a wall of stone is the best place to rest.

This is a pretty town, easily reached by bus, and quite different and slower-paced than Florence. It has narrow streets and not yet any main center I’ve found, except perhaps where the bus arrives. Tonight I will eat at a place called “I Pulpa” (the octopii), and be able to comment on food from smaller towns. (update: very nearly the same).

I have also found, here and everywhere, that Italians are fanatic about that invention called “the receipt”. Everyone wants you to walk away with a receipt, as though by common agreement they had decided that every hand brought into the world was deficient in the matter of holding a receipt, and it was their given duty to remedy nature’s lack. It doesn’t matter what kind of business, large or quaint: to leave without that blessing in the form of printed paper was neither to be contemplated or attempted. And so, carry bag filled with the proofs of Italian commerce, I continued my journey onward.

Roger continues his journey

Roger, from the short story a while back, also continues on his way:

Roger and his craft, together, came upon the approaching day. Without the sun yet in the sky, it appeared as if they were nearing an island of light beyond the horizon. First, the heavens turned a shade of pale, draining color from the stars, until one-by-one they stepped out from the hall of the sky. Then the waters became tinted as though somewhere, a secret hand were feeding blue drops into the black of the sea.

Though at first, it was all grey, only grey, the way the world may have seemed on its first day, before the creation of colors and of things to reveal them. Just a faint, weak grey turning black into not-black. The suggestion of colors occurred to the mind alone, who knew what they would become, and where appear. Then the grey lost its somber purity, admitting a secret joy that it, too, was eager to see the day come to life. He yielded – that pre-eternal, robed greyness of the first light – and stepped aside for the ladies, blue and pink and rose. Quickly they came, playing marigolds into the sky, throwing bouquets that fanned the light all over, from one side of the horizon to the other.

The sails of La Dolce Vita changed through every shade of white, now becoming true, and even catching some of the colored rays as well as the wind. The teak panels of the deck remembered their coffee brown, the mast’s aluminum its silver, the brass fittings their almost-gold, and the flecked lines their flecks, as they ran fore and aft. The sun rose to mount its throne in the sky, and he bestowed favor on all his subjects, ranking them by the colors he chose to give.

All around, there was naught to be seen but the perfect sea. Nor line, but the horizon’s circle that kept the border of ocean from heaven’s blue. The sun, that could not be seen, made it all visible, and all one by the many shades of blue: light above, dark below.

In the interface between water and sky, the constant congress of waves made a stately progression from east to west. Some large, some small; some true on their course, others erring to north or south; some meeting, some parting, some synchronized at ever the same distance. No two were the same, yet all were of one name, one essence. It was a kingdom of forms whose brotherhood was absolute.

And somewhere in those depths, Roger knew, swam the great mammals of the sea. Their pounding flukes offered towering sprays to the wind. Their noble brow might gather ten thousand heads of men to equal such a furrow. Their back slapped the seas like a child’s hand in a bathtub. Their heavy suspirations could be seen at a mile’s distance. Their eyes roved in watchful contemplation, whose sight had known all the fathoms of the deep. And somewhere, they toiled and played, raised their pups, sang great, epic poems whose heroes may have watched the first fires of men with dark foreboding. Yet none were visible in all the folded carpet of the sea’s blue. It was empty, that sea; yet it was full. It was the limit of the eye that made the difference.

Ahead rose the sun’s ruby crown. The king awoke to his labors, setting the waters aflame with ardor, summoning adoration by a mere glance, and bowing all heads that could not master the vision. The sea was his cup of wine, from which he rising head was wont to sip. As the redness of morning passed, he lifted up a wreath of golden fire, and covered his face in a veil of light that denied the furtive peeks of the profane. He stood so his head looked over the horizon, and his considered his creation thoughtfully, and found it merited another day.

But how long, a pilgrimage to that king; how far, the distance between. La Dolce Vita climbed over the waves time and again, hour after hour, but made no headway. He was the easiest goal to sail for, but the hardest isle to reach. Even with wings she did not possess, the wandering ship would have deepened her sense of failure. The whole of the sky was his kingdom, forbidden to foot and sail; while the sea was her domain: a great, vast, beloved journey, never beyond the reach of his warm embrace. It was admiration alone that made the two as one, united in their roles of king and subject – as night and day are divided and united by the sun – so that in admiration she continued, her eyes and heart a well-spring of treasures, while all else served the clarity of her perception: waves and sky and sea.

The following uses the concept of Quality, as discussed in all the previous e-mails, to attempt a commentary on the last valley of The Seven Valleys. It should be obvious these are only my opinions, so I phrase the comments in direct language. I also continue to use the terms “quality” and “value”, instead of “God”, since “God” has several meanings, and has become a very confusing word.

This station is the dying from self and the living in God, the being poor in self and rich in the Desired One.

If “self” is that self of which we are conscious, apart from our awareness of quality, then “dying from self” occurs as we become absorbed in our experience of quality. This is like the car driver taking off at full speed. His consciousness of himself as a static entity gives way to his consciousness of the act of driving. This is his real, living self, and so he starts to become impoverished in terms of his definitions of what his self meant, and is now rich is the actual fact of its meaning expressed in the fulfillment of its purpose, which is the experience of quality.

Poverty as here referred to signifieth being poor in the things of the created world, rich in the things of God’s world.

The “created world” is that world of understandings and definitions – specific perceptions – that occur in the moment after our immediate experience of Quality. These have their place in a functional role – the way that everyone uses ATMs but no one is in love with them – but they do us wrong when we seek to possess them, and to feel enriched by that possession. The wayfarer at this point wholly detaches himself from these definitions as descriptors of his experience of quality, and experience the wealth of quality that results. For example: he gives up his “idea” that he likes a particular kind of painting, and now is free to fall completely in love with whatever type he truly does like – because of the quality it reveals to him.

For when the true lover and devoted friend reacheth to the presence of the Beloved, the sparkling beauty of the Loved One and the fire of the lover’s heart will kindle a blaze and burn away all veils and wrappings.

As the seeker experiences quality to a fuller extent – “the presence of the Beloved” – it has exactly this effect: his love for that quality becomes so intense that it eradicates every other considerations. He transforms into an awareness of quality alone, and now you cannot find any sign of “him”. This “blaze” is the intensity of his joy, love and awe at such a “beauty”. And the “veils and wrappings” are all those elements of the world and of the self which had prevented him from such an intimate union.

Yea, all he hath, from heart to skin, will be set aflame, so that nothing will remain save the Friend.

It continues to the fullest extent, consuming even his “knowledge” of who he is; until his universe, his existence, is only quality. There is nothing else – nor can there be anything else (see previous essay). If he shows any conception of the “world” at all, it is in the varying degrees to which it manifests “the Friend”.

When the qualities of the Ancient of Days stood revealed, Then the qualities of earthly things did Moses burn away.

Here it is in condensed form, the formula of the soul’s transformation: When the highest value becomes apparent, and the soul does not turn away from this value in denial, it will instantly begin to consume every transitory veil. “The Ancient of Days” is God-as-manifest-in-the-world, or the source of Quality; while “earthly things” are those ideas that blind us to this quality.

He who hath attained this station is sanctified from all that pertaineth to the world.

All connections are dropped, and his natural freedom is restored. He is neither dependent on words, nor meanings, nor aid, owing to his direct communion with the Beloved. “Forget all save Me and commune with My spirit; this is the essence of My command, therefore turn unto it.” He is now capable of fulfilling this command.

Wherefore, if those who have come to the sea of His presence are found to possess none of the limited things of this perishable world, whether it be outer wealth or personal opinions, it mattereth not.

This is because objects have no quality apart from the role they play in quality’s manifestation. Once that role ends, they have no significance whatever. Whether it be wealth or opinions that allowed the soul to reach his heights, those things now lose even the derivative meaning they had in helping him get there.

For whatever the creatures have is limited by their own limits, and whatever the True One hath is sanctified therefrom; this utterance must be deeply pondered that its purport may be clear.

This is because those things that we use to know quality must, at the same time and with respect to their nature, also restrict our ability to know quality. They possess inherent limitations that cannot be overcome, which causes the soul always to seek a more excellent means of communion. Quality itself, in the meanwhile, is not limited at all, and awaits only the efforts of man to achieve an ever-higher degree of its manifestation.

“Verily the righteous shall drink of a winecup tempered at the camphor fountain.”2 If the interpretation of “camphor” become known, the true intention will be evident.

I have written another essay on the meaning of camphor in this passage, which is on my website. In the context of quality: The wine is quality, and the winecup are those things – inward and outward – we use to perceive it. The element of camphor is a detaching agent, that allows us to use such methods without making the mistake of believing they possess value on their own, apart from quality.

This state is that poverty of which it is said, “Poverty is My glory.”

The poverty of definitions. They are out there, but no longer “owned”. When a person is thus empty, he is now constantly filled by his awareness of quality.

This is the plane whereon the vestiges of all things are destroyed in the traveler, and on the horizon of eternity the Divine Face riseth out of the darkness, and the meaning of “All on the earth shall pass away, but the face of thy Lord….” is made manifest.

Since the soul has burned away all obscuring veils, he is now a nothingness-of-awareness, in Sartre’s terms. He sees only; he is not. “The Divine Face” – quality; the form of God’s manifestation in the world – appears to him rising out of the dark of material things, like the rising sun that mounts the sky and pours color and life into the world of being. This quality of light is utterly independent, however, even of its manifestation. If the world were to vanish, the sun would still be shining. The seeker recognizes this, and so the mutability of earthly forms is of no concern, since quality exists independently of all changes, and would be present even if only a single atom remained.

O Brother! Not every sea hath pearls; not every branch will flower, nor will the nightingale sing thereon. Then, ere the nightingale of the mystic paradise repair to the garden of God, and the rays of the heavenly morning return to the Sun of Truth, make thou an effort, that haply in this dustheap of the mortal world thou mayest catch a fragrance from the everlasting garden, and live forever in the shadow of the peoples of this city.

This is a warning that not everything offers quality in a form the seeker is capable of recognizing. Until he has reached the point of burning away all veils, those veils will obscure his ability to perceive quality in its lesser forms. Bahá’u’lláh states that He is offering this text (The Seven Valleys) as both a description, and an example, of quality, so that the soul of the reader may be quickened and guided to the palace of his love, Who dwells in the city of those who live only for quality.

And when thou hast attained this highest station and come to this mightiest plane, then shalt thou gaze on the Beloved, and forget all else.

Now there is only quality; one ceases even to notice that he had once believed that things-other-than-quality had a separate form of existence.

The Beloved shineth on gate and wall Without a veil, O men of vision.

Another reference to quality’s being everywhere, all the time. It is not obscured from us, but we obscure ourselves from it by our selves and our ideas.

Now hast thou abandoned the drop of life and come to the sea of the Life-Bestower. This is the goal thou didst ask for; if it be God’s will, thou wilt gain it.

The individual self, as the “drop”, has rejoined the sea of quality, since he is but a part of the same drama as all other things, and is of little significance in himself. He is great only to the extent that he participates in this drama. The drop merges with the waters of the sea, since the existence of forms is of the mind only, while the essence of water – quality – truly exists.

In this city, even the veils of light are split asunder and vanish away.

The “veils of light” are the magnificence of quality itself. For example: good, pretty, wonderful, fun; if these are taken as having value in themselves, apart from the quality that gives them meaning, then again the seeker has gone astray. But even these veils are “split asunder” at this stage, and the wayfarer is only distracted even by quality’s beauty.

“His beauty hath no veiling save light, His face no covering save revelation.”

Like the Taoist: “Looked at, it cannot be seen; listened to, yet it cannot be heard.” It is everywhere; it is the most simple fact in all existence. Souls exist only to commune with it. Yet somehow, this very simplicity has made it the most difficult thing to grasp.

How strange that while the Beloved is visible as the sun, yet the heedless still hunt after tinsel and base metal.

Indeed, how strange that quality is everywhere, and every soul knows it, and yet still people strive after possessions and the accretion of a sense of self – as if to create a substitute for the very quality they love! Why??

Yea, the intensity of His revelation hath covered Him, and the fullness of His shining forth hath hidden Him.

Here it is explained: Quality is revealed so perfectly in the world, it can pass by unnoticed. It is too easy for a person to imagine that there is some other reason – like, the attributes of their self – that explain why something is good. Quality does not strive to distinguish itself from creation, since it is the basis of creation’s being.

Even as the sun, bright hath He shined, But alas, He hath come to the town of the blind!

Quality is shining, every day, on a humanity that is paying no attention, and that rarely ever does, if history is an example. All of this stems from love of self – even though there is nothing about the self to be loved, except those moments when it participates in the discovery of quality.

In this Valley, the wayfarer leaveth behind him the stages of the “oneness of Being and Manifestation” and reacheth a oneness that is sanctified above these two stations.

I’m not familiar enough with this Sufi doctrine to connect it to Quality.

Ecstasy alone can encompass this theme, not utterance nor argument; and whosoever hath dwelt at this stage of the journey, or caught a breath from this garden land, knoweth whereof We speak.

Quality can only be known by experience; you cannot discuss it. And once a person knows it, they know it completely, emphatically.

In all these journeys the traveler must stray not the breadth of a hair from the “Law,” for this is indeed the secret of the “Path” and the fruit of the Tree of “Truth”; and in all these stages he must cling to the robe of obedience to the commandments, and hold fast to the cord of shunning all forbidden things, that he may be nourished from the cup of the Law and informed of the mysteries of Truth.

A reference to the fact that morality is what allows our vision to be clear enough to perceive quality. Since morality is knowing what is better from what is worse, then an architect who is moral will be able to create a building that can reveal quality. If he ignored the moral laws of architecture, he would always be hunting blindly for the right form, and would lose his way. The same applies to human lives: in which our moral code is exactly like those laws, and our own being is the edifice we are constructing, whose perfection determines our capacity to know quality in its highest forms.

For the head raised up in the love of God will certainly fall by the sword, and the life that is kindled with longing will surely be sacrificed, and the heart which remembereth the Loved One will surely brim with blood.

An interesting statement that describes what happens in this world to those who dedicate themselves to quality and live for nothing but. Such a person is simply too great a threat to those who desire to sustain their definitions apart from quality, and if such people are prone to violence and lack restraint, they will try to beat the quality-lover back into shape. This has been the response of society to every one of the Manifestations of God, Who had no eye for anything but Quality, and Whose being revealed nothing else – and that, to the greatest extent.

I walked away after the last message to have a Panini sandwich with fresh mozzarella and prosciutto crudo (one of my favorites), and to start reading Atlas Shrugged again, this time beginning with part three.

What I found, from the very first sentence, was Rand’s own description of a world where there is only quality and the awareness of quality, and her image of the type of man who lives in that world. It was so beautiful and clear, that it needs no interpretation to fit it into the scheme of these messages:

Atlas Shrugged, part 3, chapter 1: Atlantis.

When she opened her eyes, she saw sunlight, green leaves and a man’s face. She thought: I know what this is. This was the world as she had expected to see it at sixteen – and now she had reached it – and it seemed so simple, so unastonishing, that the thing she felt was like a blessing pronounced upon the universe by means of three words: But of course.

She was looking up at the face of a man who knelt by her side, and she knew that in all the years behind her, this was what she would have given her life to see: a face that bore no mark of pain or fear or guilt… It was a face that had nothing to hide or to escape, a face with no fear of being seen or of seeing, so that the first thing she grasped about him was the intense perceptiveness of his eyes – he looked as if his faculty of sight were his best-loved tool and its exercise were a limitless, joyous adventure, as if his eyes imparted a superlative value to himself and to the world – to himself for his ability to see, to the world for being a place so eagerly worth seeing. It seemed to her for a moment that she was in the presence of a being who was pure consciousness…

This was her world, she thought, this was the way men were meant to be and to face their existence – and all the rest of it, all the years of ugliness and struggle were only someone’s senseless joke. She smiled at him, as at a fellow conspirator, in relief, in deliverance, in radiant mockery of all the things she would never have to consider important again. He smiled in answer, it was the same smile as her own, as if he felt what she felt and knew what she meant.

“We never had to take any of it seriously, did we?” she whispered. “No, we never had to.”

Ok, I told my heart it could stop creating and also go on vacation, but it was right to just ignore that idea!

a.pen.that.wants.no.rest

I must say that this thirst for writing is an entirely new experience for me. I have never liked writing this way – certainly not non-fiction. And everything you’re reading is written longhand first! I’ve used up half a bottle of ink, and I’m halfway through the second journal. This is like… sailing my old boat in the Monterey Bay, and feeling it yearn for the wind. The root feeling is the same. It makes me happy to see the words appear on the page, the turns of phrase, the connection of ideas. It’s simply… enjoyable. That’s it. It’s fun to do! Ah, that that should surprise me. It will seem silly in someday that it could have been so.

The meaning of a metaphysics of quality

The purpose of a metaphysics of quality is to make that value the sole focus of each individual’s life. If this seems isolating in any way, consider what one is really seeing when he interacts with other people. On the contrary, this focus is submerging, like a drop returning to the primordial sea – by abandoning the shores of definition-without-meaning and casting up pearls from the living depths.

Current metaphysics – and every person has metaphysical beliefs, it concerns your certainty of the world and of your knowledge of it – places the comprehension of reality between the subject and the object. You look at a tree, you see a ‘tree’. This ‘tree’ is what makes you certain that you have seen a tree, and that that tree belongs in the world. Something bizarre and distorted, that does not fit any category, would be by nature distasteful because it defies the metaphysics of reason. Any real pleasure taken in such an object likely feel like an act of rebellion.

In a metaphysics of value, the rightness of a thing’s being in the world corresponds to the quality one experiences in relation to it. Knowledge of the thing in this case is not primary, but functional. It can be used to profit by that thing, or to appreciate it more deeply, but it does not stand between the subject and the object. It is an adjunct, and might be absent entirely. Quality is the feeling of communing with something inimitable, albeit universal, in the conjunction of perceiver and perceived; in this case words may or may not be useful, according to the lover’s desire.

The whole of the world becomes a variegation of quality – a light reflecting in the mirrors of names and attributes. Every thing, everyone, reveals this quality according to his efforts and capacity, and we perceive it in measure to ours. The role of human beings? As the most perfect revealers of this quality, to a degree incomparable – if they choose to do so.

That is why the individual is both utterly alone and never alone at the same moment. His own being reflects the quality that he sees everywhere. In this scheme there is no self, there is only quality and the awareness of quality. The existence of free will allows that awareness to change its vantage point, even manipulate that-which-reveals-quality toward a greater clarity, but in his own being the perceiver cannot perceive any value other than the value whose nature is manifested everywhere.

Thus on the one hand, the world and the individual are of one substance, and there is neither distinction nor separation. Not even “the world” exists: there is only the reality of quality; there is no self, no others, no action or reaction. It is undifferentiated, like the essence of all light being of the same fundamental type of energy.

On the other hand, that light is revealed in varying degrees in each place, and in this respect we can point to this or that thing, and say that one thing reveals a greater degree of quality than another. That is, objects do not differ in their essence, but in the measure of their capacity to reveal that essence.

In one sense people are no different from a blade of grass, just as one may say that it is true for both a candle and the sun to manifest the same “light”. In the degree of revelation, however, immeasurable is the difference! This is why human beings can achieve the highest value: by the extent of their potential to reveal that value.

A metaphysics of value erases the meaning of the individual in the first sense, and places him alone as a kind of nothingness-that-is-awareness in a world of quality; in the second sense, such a metaphysics distinguishes him from all other things, and according to his faithfulness to his potential, he may become the most precious being known.

The point is that we relate, not to objects or individuals, but to the quality they manifest. This annihilates the world and gives meaning to the world in the same instant; it eliminates “others” and validates the importance of others in one metaphysical twist. However, it cannot be forgotten that nothing is important in itself; its importance is only to the degree of its manifestation of quality.

This implies work to achieve that manifestation, and that if a person gives up on pursuing quality, he gives up on having value. He is then simply not worth relating to – except that he retains the potential to manifest that quality should he endeavor to do so in the future. This explains the concept of “salvation through works”, since one saves himself from non-existence – in terms of quality – by making an effort to become a means of quality’s manifestation. In that sense he lives, and bereft of this quality he dies, in the way that an extinguished lamp succumbs to invisibility in the night.

Those who believe in “salvation through faith” would like for the lamp’s ability to shine to count for as much as its actual shining. Thus an unlit lamp, in the dark, visible only because it stands next to one that is lit, would like to be considered as equal in value to that other. According to potential they are equal, but according to the degree of quality they are obviously not. In fact, if the first is an especially beautiful lamp, he will want to be considered superior to the other. For a collector of lamps, he may choose that one; but for someone who wants to make his way through the night: by no means. Which, then, is of greater benefit to mankind?

Further, the unlit lamp considers it an affront for the other to be lighted so brightly in his presence – no matter that this other makes his existence knowable – and he will prefer to compare the “qualities” of his exterior favorably against the quality of the other’s shining. This is all he can do – or else accept the fact that he has not fulfilled the conditions of his being: to shine. He would rather choose his external “value” over the value of being lighted, whether he realizes that his “value” is only derivative of that value or not.

Such a claim to value where none exists, especially in contrast to the reality of value itself, is the “ego”, which can only exist in the minds of those who agree to accept such a baseless valuation. For ego to survive it must obtain from others their approval, and it moves and has life in direct proportion to the number of those people and the extent of their approval. This leads to a web of dependence-on-definition that begins to extinguish quality altogether, by everyone’s having accepted a lifeless substitute. They head toward death.

The use of “quality” and “value” as terms to describe the core of this metaphysics is as accurate and misleading as to say that its aim is to establish God as the true purpose of human life. We cannot define what it is this philosophy is based on, but at the same time such definition is unnecessary. Everyone knows what is meant by one thing’s being better than another – if they know it by their own, unbiased experience. It is this latter clause that justifies the existence of such a metaphysics altogether: because people do corrupt their knowledge of what is good, and they do this precisely in order to establish a false basis for the valuation of their ego.

This being the case, the aim is not to justify or establish what quality is, but to make clear to the individual why he may be unable presently to see it. After all, it is all that he sees! Lying atop that vision, however, is a hierarchy of definitions that in the end dilute the original spirit of the experience, until time itself has grown impatient and moved on.

It is not by focusing on the individual, or on his definitions, that these falsehoods are cleared away, and reality perceived in honesty. The focus must always, entirely, singly, utterly be on quality. From the beginning to the end: God, value, spirit: it is the only genuine reality, and it is our “selves” that obscure it.

There is also the real self, it must be mentioned, who does not obscure, but is the agency of perception; and while this self may also prevent a full appreciation of quality due to its limitations, these are natural and can be overcome with effort. A muscle grows stronger as you use it, but always has its limits; what is referred to above is the cast we’ve trapped our arms and legs in by the artificial valuation of the ego and what it thinks it knows.

With quality as the focus, we undertake to seek it. An absurd task when this is all that exists, but not so absurd when we see that the journey is entirely within. It is a scary idea for the ego, at first, because it must begin to die. Yet it is fun at the same time – like a return to youth. You get to do what you want, and avoid what you don’t! Within the moral system you use to improve your relation to quality, of course.

Woohoo! Watch the movies you like, listen to the music you like. The task now is to find out what that is. It is the easiest and hardest task at the same time, because it is your own “self” that you have to get past in order to know it. It will probably mean skeletons coming out of the closet to life, and other zombies returning to their graves. It is harder than it sounds.

Once a whiff of true quality is found – and it will be: pursue it, hold onto it with all your might, and savor the experience to recognize its nature. It is not where or how it is found that matters, but what – in terms of that ineffable joy – you have found. It’s everywhere, and now you can begin to pull off the lid of “self”, and catch the aromas of all that beautiful food waiting to be laid on the table of revelation.

The philosopher of value’s task, then, is the pursuit of quality’s highest expression. This will likely be found in the creations of men, and in that sense he will either himself be an artist of some kind – in physical media, or as a scientist in the fields of the mind – or he will be a supporter of those with greater ability. He will still be an artist in every aspect of his life, even if he cannot by his own creations satisfy the extent of his thirst. He runs left and right, sensible while insane, caring for nothing but his love: quality – he doesn’t even consider anything else. The philosopher becomes a mystic seeking full absorption in his beloved.

The ethics of this being are the guides to his long-term pursuit of quality; in the short-term he needs only his heart. Much more could be said on this point, but to summarize: He conforms his actions to what will best aid in the discovery, and foster the brilliance, of quality.

His social affairs, like his state of mind, are organized around this unitary principle: He seeks to give and receive experiences of quality. The justification of society’s existence, to him, is as a group effort to serve the knowing of quality – and each serves the others only for the sake of that goal.

Everything is derived from, and returns to, this principle. It is life, and all else is annihilation. Consciousness of other things begins to fade away – to be replaced by an awareness of their utility in the scheme of seeking communion with the highest value. All becomes one in purpose, one in reality. All knowledge is returned to a single point, “in the hearts of those who know”.

This leads to the conclusion that such a metaphysics, while retaining the form of words, is replaced in the end by a direct knowledge of quality. It is a metaphysics that plans its own obsolescence; as all knowledge should, whose raison d’etre is as a tool to facilitate the discovery of what will lead in the end to the highest value.

Which brings us to an appropriate place to end this rhapsody on a single theme, that only hearts may know and minds grasp for in vain: All the parts of being serve the discovery that there are no such parts, and they strive for their obliteration in the final exaltation of reunion with their highest love. As it is written in the Qur’án: “Verily, we are from God and to Him shall we return.”

I decided to visit the hospital since the pain in my hand was pretty bad, and it was feeling cold under the bandage I had bought. Always a bad sign.

One of the benefits of socialized medicine, of course, is the cost. It was only $20 per plate for the x-rays, of which they took three photos (2 plates). They said there were no fractures, and that I had probably torn the ligaments from straining my wrist.

The benefit of this knowledge for me is that my Tourette’s Syndrome will now leave that hand alone. There is nothing that causes me to move a part of my body more, than thinking such movement will damage it. Such is the bizarre nature of the disorder.

The part of the hospital I went to was called “Pronto Socorro”, which I guess would translate as “Ready Aid”. It’s like the emergency room, except that you can go there for non-emergency problems. Sort of a walk-in hospital department.

While waiting and looking around, I found that I love the way foreign people use English words sometimes. For example, the brand of latex gloves they use is called “Touchy”. How very cute! It makes me think all those rubber hands are just dying for a doctor to come along, so that they can get out of the box and touch me all over. They should have cotton swabs named “Feely”, or maybe tongue depressors called “Proby”.

After they look at you, you pay your bill in a machine that accepts coins and bills and gives change. It was all rather laid back, with departments spread all over, so that I got to walk through the old building a lot, and see its many lovely courtyards.

It is worth putting this hand in a splint anyway and giving it a rest. Damage like this will probably take a long time to heal. At least I don’t feel it while typing. There is always something to be grateful for.

Ciao della bella cittá di Firenze.

Hello to everyone, and good bye!!

This is likely to be my last message. Things have been quieting down, and recently I have refractured some bones in my left wrist, at the Gym, that never properly healed from an earlier break two years ago. It doesn’t affect typing, but it would be better to put that hand in a splint and leave it alone for a while. So I will wish you all good bye now, and thank you for being a group to write my thoughts to during this time.

Things are quieter, but not in the sense of slowing down, as in ceasing to accelerate. Times have been different for me since the start of this trip. I thought of describing some of those differences – as evidence that the foregoing has not been merely words – but every example could likely be explained away in other terms by someone choosing to do so. So I leave my poetry as the only evidence of the way life looks to me now.

The following essay examines the concept of dependence in the light of what has gone before. In The Fountainhead, the character of Howard Roark is completely disconnected from the world. This lack of any connection causes resentment and fear in the majority of the other characters. The essay below attempts to analyze the nature of this disconnection, why it is in fact the natural state of human beings, and why there should be fear at perceiving or considering such an independence.

In the meantime, I have been reading parts 3 and 4 from Zen. Now that I am going back again, after all this progression of thought, I am amazed at how much is there. There are epiphanies of intense character on almost all of the pages that talk about Quality. I’ve kept most of this excitement to myself because it’s all there for anyone else who wants to read it. And it would be only a description of my excitement anyway.

What Pirsig only barely touches on is what happens when an individual who is devoted solely to Quality encounters people who are devoted to ideas about it. This is the difference between independence and dependence, as I discuss below. Probably he omits this because his own main character is already disconnected from the world, although at the same time self-isolated even from interaction with it.

The clash between quality-focused and idea-of-quality-focused people is exactly where Rand picks up. She does not spend her time proving the existence of value – and so the two authors complement each other beautifully. Pirsig dwells on quality and the individual, and Rand, on striving for quality in a world that denies it.

To show how much these authors connect, here are a few more quotes from Pirsig. In the following paragraph he practically writes a summation of The Fountainhead!!

My personal feeling is that this is how any further improvement of the world will be done: by individuals making Quality decisions and that’s all. God, I don’t want to have any more enthusiasm for big programs full of social planning for big masses of people that leave individual Quality out. These can be left alone for a while. There’s a place for them but they’ve got to be built on a foundation of Quality within the individuals involved. We’ve had that individual Quality in the past, exploited it as a natural resource without knowing it, and now it’s just about depleted. Everyone’s just about out of gumption. And I think it’s about time to return to the rebuilding of this American resource – individual worth. There are political reactionaries who’ve been saying something close to this for years. I’m not one of them, but to the extent they’re talking about real individual worth and not just an excuse for giving more money to the right, they’re right. We do need a return to individual integrity, self-reliance and old-fashioned gumption.

Every time I read this, I could swear he was influenced by reading Atlas Shrugged. Some of those ideas are almost straight out of that book.

Here’s another, which Pirsig quotes a Greek historian:

“What moves the Greek warrior to deeds of heroism,” Kitto comments, “is not a sense of duty as we understand it – duty towards others: it is rather duty towards himself. He strives after that which we translate virtue' but is in Greek aretê,excellence’… we shall have much to say about aretê. It runs through Greek life.”

When you compare the later description of Ulysses in terms of arete with Francisco d’Anconia in Atlas Shrugged, you can see that Rand’s heroes are Greek heroes: “excellent all-rounders”, excellent in everything that they do. Compare with the Bahá’í ideal of “excellence in all things”.

Further, one last quote that sounds as though it jumped right out of Atlas:

The Church of Reason, like all institutions of the System, is based not on individual strength but upon individual weakness. What’s really demanded in the Church of Reason is not ability, but inability. Then you are considered teachable. A truly able person is always a threat [Howard Roark]. Phaedrus sees that he has thrown away a chance to integrate himself into the organization by submitting to whatever Aristotelian thing he is supposed to submit to. But that kind of opportunity seems hardly worth the bowing and scraping and intellectual prostration necessary to maintain it. It is a low-quality form of life.

The mechanism of dependence

Earlier I had written that “When we want anything from another person we create a dependence on them in regard to that thing”. I think further that we cannot ever justifiably want things from people. We cannot ask them to be rational, for example, because they are always free not to be. We cannot ask them to think of us as good, because such attributes do not pertain to us – only to their image of us. We cannot ask that they appreciate something we’ve done, because this must occur between them and the thing alone. And if they do like it, this has nothing to do with us. We can neither predict their response nor take credit for their capacity to experience it.

What we can take credit for is the work’s existence – but not for its quality in the eyes of others. With respect to its value, it has a separate meaning for each person, according to their capacity, even if it has its own degree of perfection according to its ability to satisfy that capacity. None can say the exact degree of this perfection, either; we have only the measure of our own capacity, and our knowledge that it is good enough to satisfy us. But this knowledge cannot in any way be influenced by others.

So our relationship to others can only exist on the plane of free exchange of value: A value of ours they accept, for an offer of theirs we recognize as having value (i.e., as making possible by relation to it the experience we refer to as “value”).

Other than this, our respective beings can have no point of conjunction. Any such connection that is imagined must be one that been stated and believed in with respect to definitions about the self – i.e., the ego – but such statements cannot establish a connection where none can exist.

This fits Sartre’s conception of the for-itself, because he says that a being of awareness can only be aware. In what manner would a connection or dependence for such a being be possible? We do not need others to be aware, and even if we tried, association with them would not sharpen our basic faculty of awareness. They could, by presenting us value, give us something to be aware of that would foster our growth, but this an offer from them to us – not the form of a bond. This is because we are always relating to value, not to the person who presented us with that value.

By these terms it is impossible to relate to other beings directly. We are aware only of value, and our understanding of the forms of that value. This is the solipsism I mentioned parenthetically a while back: Look for another’s being and you cannot find it, because their being also is the nothingness of awareness.

What, then, is the nature of the connection we imagine to exist and feel bound to? These are not connections to us, but the feelings of a connection we try to make but cannot. That is, we feel bound because we must constantly exert energy in order to maintain the illusion of such a connection. And owing to our innate sense of justice, any claim we make on another causes us to believe in their right to a counter-claim, and thus we feel as though we ourselves had been bound.

For example, if I desire others to be rational, I have committed folly because they do not need to be rational. A mature relationship would be one where I seek those who offer rationality as a value, and then I give it in return. If they stopped being rational, I would have to seek it elsewhere. But when I expect it, I make a claim where none can exist. If they are not rational now, it affects me; it bothers me. I seek every way possible to return them to a rational state because I “depend” on them to be rational to satisfy my expectation. They can still choose not to be at any time, and this is why I feel the ties that bind: by own expectation that they not be free to be whatever they desire, and hence I cannot justly expect that I am free to do whatever I desire.

As I condemn their freedom by making a claim on it that cannot fairly be made, my sense of fairness balances the matter by condemning my own freedom and causing me to feel equally bound in the same respect. Said inversely: if I believe myself constrained to be rational, I expect others to be likewise constrained. Now not only am I bothered if they are irrational, but I am bothered if they think that I am irrational. I need for both of us to be rational, and both to agree that we are, since artificial contracts of this type only exist in the schemes of definition that each party accepts. (i.e., if what one considers rational is what the other considers irrational, it is still regarded as irrational).

This is the nature of the “bond”, and why one feels obligated to another not only to be rational, but according to their own definition of rationality!

Since both parties are at all times free to do as they wish, and since the reality of their being will not admit of definition, this entire structure can only exist within the mind of each individual himself – its basis being the desire that another being not be free. This situation can even occur between humans and other objects – even abstractions – but in that case only one half of the dynamic is visible since the other half is not capable of making judgment; this is the feeling that life “owes us something”, such as making sense.

The collapse of this whole scheme happens through detachment. Remove the desire. The writer who feels bound by the expectations of others – in terms of his writing – has bound himself by a desire for a world that recognizes and values his writing. If he expects nothing of people – not even their literacy – he would feel an equal lack of expectation from them.

This mirror effect can be further reduced by returning to an earlier point: We cannot be aware of another’s awareness, but can only interact with them by a trade of value. With this said, there are no “others” to be aware of. When the writer feels the expectation of others, he is actually feeling an expectation he has placed upon himself. Again, we bind ourselves by our desire, while we experience freedom through detachment. A writer without expectations as to the recognition of “good writing” has only himself and his own pleasure to refer to. Then the only question with merit is, “Do I like it?” This goes back to another essay on this subject.

The individual, then, binds himself by his attempt to restrict the freedom of his own being. Psychologically this must be horrifying to admit, so the restriction is felt by projecting it onto the larger population, and feeling as though we owe them something to satisfy their expectations of us.

What cements this whole mess in place is that just as we are doing this, others are doing it also! Our projections come to life and we hear other people voicing, of their own will, the very expectation we had projected upon them in the form of our constraining desire. This does not change the dynamic, but it makes it seem more real than it is. It also makes it incredibly difficult to see the nature of the dependency, and for the individual to see that really he has bound himself to his own idea of himself. His soul is captivated by his ego [Peter Keating].

Why would anyone restrict themselves in this way? After all, everyone complains of it. There is not one artist, starting out and not yet popular, who does not loathe this scheme to tears. It is, for everyone involved, torture, and the pressure of it ultimately squeezes the life out of some, until the whole of their energy is spent maintaining these illusory bonds. Why would a free being do this to itself, and undermine the very freedom that distinguishes it from the rest of creation?

This, also, has been referred to earlier: It happens in order to escape the responsibility of that freedom, and because recognizing the implications of such a freedom require accepting our complicity in every compromise we have ever made with the world. A painful step, but much more liberating than it is condemning. We will all face it on the Judgment Day, we are told, so what harm is there in getting a head start.

To use the writing example again: having an externally defined standard, apart from individual recognition of value, is simply easier that having constantly to rely on our own ability to recognize value. We may barely be able to see value at all. A “standard” rescues us from acknowledging that. Even though many hate the standard, and write works conforming to its exact opposite, yet it still exists in the mind, and serves as a relief from the horror of one’s having no one but himself to turn to.

This should not be a horror at all, but a joy, if we had been raised to understand and respect the nature of our being. But it is described as terrifying so universally and graphically that even the suggestion of being fundamentally, completely alone – independent and without any possible connection to others – is enough to frighten people. This is why a character like Howard Roark, who incarnates the ideal of freedom, is frightening. Never mind that no one has ever disappeared as a result of this freedom, and that we may now interact with them far more honestly – each according to his own sense of value – but just the word “alone” is so anathema, somehow the scheme of mutual binding of self-images has come to seem preferable.

In conclusion, the nature of our freedom makes connection impossible. If we were connected in any way, we would not be free. Birds don’t fly with strings attached. This does not mean that we do not interact, but only that such interaction must be negotiated in terms of value – not the perceived identities of the individuals themselves.

The mood of the lake at midnight was like the waters it contained. Moonlight from a full moon flowed on the pebbles and the watercress at shore, raining a slow, silvery life. The drops of light on the waters moved in brief circles like pupilless, enchanted eyes that wanted to see everything. It ran from the rocks to gather in still pools without ripples. It dripped, faster than mercury, between the earth and moon in an instant, but also slow like a merely soft silver, melted but almost solid; a luminous molten glow that poured over all – but did not burn.

The wind found the hollows of trees and made them whistle in mournful longing. For what I could not hear: it was in the language of trees. The leaves rubbed each other like crickets with legs only, broad and flat, their soft, green song adding chorus to the melancholy. The wind passed me as I stood; I watched the branches groan with age, the saplings bend before a greater force. The turn of the trunks, the rough bark, had changed a note in the wind. It reached my ears and whispered secrets, caressing my face as it did so. I knew I loved the wind at that moment; perhaps its answer is what I heard.

I walked further to find an empty field, a clearing perfectly round to my eyes. The wind had no chords for voice in that place; it spoke in words of touching silence. The short grasses spread in ripples toward the other side. I stood among them, an obelisk in that moment illumined by the moon, my brow smoothed by the hand of wonder, my eyes tracing out movement where there were only hints and guesses. I saw in my mind’s eye the life of the place opened out before me: the creatures in their burrows, or hunting; the insects out of sight on the wing; the unmoving eyes that watched from behind trunks and leaves. I was a swimmer in a different lake, of silence and space, with the secrets of another world suspended to wait my passing. I moved on.

Gradually I found a place for camp, footsteps slowing in the silence, the night breeze, this walking at the bottom of a moonlit sea of peace. I found a place to lay my head, and grasses for a pallet under me. A silvered cloud made the night real for a moment. For dreams, I left this place of all sensations but the sights and sounds of tranquillity.

From what you’ve said, I understand your philosophy to be:

Human beings are not complete in themselves, but require spiritual connection with others to find happiness.

I do not accept this, and see no reason to accept it. If such connections were fundamental to my being’s fulfillment, I would expect to see some mention of it in my Obligatory Prayers, for example. What I see there talks only about me and God.

I have believed this statement in the past, and found how tenuous and inconstant that “happiness” is. I think that while it may work for you, in your life right now, it does not work for a host of other people. What about the man who gets stranded on an island? Or the disfigured person with few friends? Or the person in a political prison who is kept in solitary confinement? Are these simply various forms of hell, and happiness is impossible?

I think this formula hides the fact that the person who believes in it is unhappy. That is why they seek spiritual sustenance from other people: because they feel empty when alone. I do not call this “happiness”, but “staving off unhappiness”.

My own formulation, derived from these weeks abroad, is:

Being is all that being needs to be.

A human being’s being is that of being aware. What is he aware of? Quality; God; beauty; the unnameable reality that exists before all definition. His happiness is the function of this awareness, and so happiness is his natural state. If he feels unhappy, it is because he has turned away from the nature of his being and is trying to seek happiness elsewhere – such as in other people. Like the person described above.

That is my position. I cannot see how it threatens anyone, since by its own definition it implies that people cannot be threatened.