On Quality: An Inquiry into Excellence: Unpublished and Selected Writings
updated 11h ago
updated 11h ago
But unlike the Greeks, the Hindus in their many thousands of years of cultural evolution had paid enormous attention to the conflict between ritual and freedom. Their resolution of this conflict in the Buddhist and Vedantist philosophies is one of the profound achievements of the human mind.
meghna added 8mo ago
To me “happiness” is a much narrower term than “Quality.” I think of happiness as a biological response to quality in which the quality is external (objective) and the happiness is internal (subjective). Happiness is thus subordinate to a subject-object metaphysical relationship and is limited by it.
meghna added 8mo ago
The physical order of the universe is also the moral order of the universe. Ṛta is both. This was exactly what the Metaphysics of Quality was claiming. It was not a new idea. It was the oldest idea known to man.
meghna added 8mo ago
I can talk a lot about the wording of and the language of Quality, but ultimately the Quality, which is the pure thing—or the pure non-thing, as the Buddhists would say—is apprehended in ways that are not to be described.
meghna added 8mo ago
“Write about what you know. If you write about what you know, and know personally, and know deeply, and know better than anyone else, that’s going to be plenty exotic to everybody else.”
meghna added 8mo ago
This problem of trying to describe value in terms of substance has been the problem of a smaller container trying to contain a larger one. Value is not a subspecies of substance. Substance is a subspecies of value. When you reverse the containment process and define substance in terms of value the mystery disappears: Substance is a “stable pattern
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At the instant quality is observed, observer and observed are not separate. Thought of the sort used in definitions uses symbols of past experience to account for new experience. Quality is the experience before it is symbolized. A discipline of quality is learned when one succeeds in a pure response to one’s instantaneous situation uncluttered by
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The best way of investigating Quality that I know of is the brilliant Oriental technique of zazen, which defines Dynamic Quality very precisely by forcing a subtraction of static intellectual patterns for it rather than adding new ones.
meghna added 8mo ago
By not knowing Quality in its “everything-state,” you will only see a part of reality, you will be trapped in a small life. You are likely to be technically and intellectually competent without an overall understanding. The idea is to go beyond intellect and to expand reason, fully to understand the total quality of everything. When you find it, it
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