On Quality: An Inquiry into Excellence: Unpublished and Selected Writings

Dharma, like ṛta, means “what holds together.” It is the basis of all order. It equals righteousness. It is the ethical code. It is the stable condition which gives man perfect satisfaction.

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.

Without Dynamic Quality the organism cannot grow. Without static quality the organism cannot last. Both are needed.

That way of doing things is the right way, and the way that produces things of real value, where there’s no separateness between the doer and the done.

“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.”

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.

I think that our traditional Western way is to try to capture life in a net of words. But I think one can realize that the net of words is a part of life. The danger is not in using the words; the danger is in clinging to them, clinging to their meaning, and saying, “Oh, now I have spoken a great truth.”

The ultimate goal in the pursuit of excellence is enlightenment. After that there are no goals, for one realizes emotionally as well as intellectually that all experience is of equal quality.

Normally one’s ability to see what is good marches far ahead of one’s ability to produce it.