back to topHey... Hey...! Hey!!! | home Image Gallery | Short Stories | Selected Texts | Other Sites | Contact Us
Selected Texts Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Stuckness. That's what I want to talk about today.
Back on our trip out of Miles City you'll
remember I talked about how formal scientific method could be applied to the
repair of a motorcycle through the study of chains of cause and
effect and
the application of experimental method to determine these chains.
The purpose then was
to show what was meant by classic rationality.
Now I want to show that that classic pattern
of rationality can be tremendously improved, expanded and made far more effective
through the formal recognition of Quality in its operation. Before
doing this, however, I should go over some of the negative aspects
of traditional
maintenance to show just where the problems are.
The first is stuckness, a mental stuckness
that accompanies the physical stuckness of whatever it is you're working
on. The same thing Chris was suffering from. A screw sticks, for
example,
on a side cover assembly. You check the manual to see if there
might be any special cause
for this screw to come off so hard, but all it says is "Remove
side cover plate" in that wonderful terse technical style that never
tells you what you want to know. There's no earlier procedure left
undone that might cause the cover screws to stick.
If you're experienced you'd probably apply
a penetrating liquid and an impact driver at this point. But suppose
you're inexperienced and you attach a self-locking plier wrench
to the shank of
your screwdriver and really twist it hard, a procedure you've
had success with in the past, but which this time succeeds only in tearing
the slot of the screw.
Your mind was already thinking
ahead to what you would do when the cover plate was off,
and so it
takes a little time to realize that this irritating minor annoyance
of a torn screw slot isn't
just irritating and minor. You're stuck. Stopped. Terminated.
It's absolutely stopped you from fixing the motorcycle.
This isn't a rare scene in science or technology.
This is the commonest scene of all. Just plain stuck. In traditional
maintenance this is the worst of all moments, so bad that you
have avoided
even thinking about it before you come to it.
The book's no good to you now.
Neither is scientific reason. You don't need any scientific
experiments
to find out what's wrong. It's obvious what's wrong. What you
need is a hypothesis for how you're going to get that slotless
screw out of there and scientific method doesn't provide any of these hypotheses.
It operates only after they're around.
This is the zero moment of consciousness.
Stuck. No answer. Honked. Kaput. It's a miserable experience emotionally.
You're losing time. You're incompetent. You don't know
what you're
doing. You should be ashamed of yourself. You should take the
machine to a real mechanic who knows how to figure these things
out.
It's normal at this point for the fear-anger
syndrome to take over and make you want to hammer on that side plate with
a chisel, to pound it off with a sledge if necessary. You think
about it,
and the more you think about it the more you're inclined to take
the whole machine to a
high bridge and drop it off. It's just outrageous that a tiny
little slot of a screw can defeat you so totally.
What you're up against is the great unknown,
the void of all Western thought. You need some ideas, some hypotheses. Traditional
scientific method, unfortunately, has never quite gotten around
to saying exactly where to pick up more of these hypotheses. Traditional
scientific
method has always been at the very best, 20-20 hindsight.
It's good for seeing where
you've been. It's good for testing the truth of what you think
you know, but it can't tell you where you ought to go, unless
where you ought to go is a continuation of where you were going in
the past. Creativity, originality, inventiveness, intuition, imagination
- "unstuckness,"
in other words - are completely outside its domain.
We continue down the canyon, past folds
in the steep slope where wide streams enter. We notice the river grows rapidly
now as streams enlarge it. Turns in the road are less sharp here
and straight
stretches are longer. I move into the highest gear.
Later the trees become scarce and spindly,
with large areas of grass and underbrush between them. It's too hot for
the jacket and sweater so I stop at a roadside pulloff to
remove them.
Chris wants to go hiking up a trail and
I let him, finding a small shady spot to sit back and rest. Just quiet
now, and meditative.
A display describes a fire burn that took
place here years ago. According to the information the forest
is filling in again but it will be years before it returns to
its former condition.
Later the crunch of gravel tells me Chris
is coming back down the trail. He didn't go very far. When he arrives
he says, "Let's go." We retie the pack, which has started
to shift a little,
and then move out onto the highway. The sweat from sitting there
cools suddenly from the
wind.
We're
still stuck on that screw and the only way it's going to get unstuck
is by abandoning further
examination of the screw according to traditional scientific method.
That won't work. What
we have to do is examine traditional scientific method in the
light of that stuck screw.
We have been looking at the screw
"objectively." According to the doctrine of "objectivity,"
which is integral with traditional scientific method, what we
like or don't like about
the screw has nothing to do with our correct thinking. We should
not evaluate what we see.
We should keep our mind a blank tablet which nature fills for
us, and then reason disinterestedly
from the facts we observe.
But when we stop and think about
it disinterestedly, in terms of this stuck screw, we begin
to see that
this whole idea of disinterested observation is silly. Where are
those facts? What are
we going to observe disinterestedly? The torn slot? The immovable
side cover plate? The color
of the paint job? The speedometer? The sissy bar? As Poincare
would have said, there are an infinite number of facts about the
motorcycle, and the right ones don't just dance up and introduce
themselves. The right facts, the ones we really need, are not
only passive, they are
damned elusive, and we're not going to just sit back and
"observe" them. We're going to have to be in there looking
for them or we're going to be here a long time. Forever. As
Poincare
pointed out, there must be a subliminal choice of what
facts we observe.
The difference between a good mechanic and
a bad one, like the difference between a good mathematician and a bad one,
is precisely this ability to select the good facts from
the bad
ones on the basis of quality. He has to care! This is an
ability about which formal traditional scientific method has nothing
to say. It's long past time to take a closer look at this
qualitative
preselection of facts which has seemed so scrupulously ignored
by those who make so
much of these facts after they are "observed." I think
that it will be found that a formal acknowledgement of the role of
Quality in the scientific process doesn't destroy the empirical
vision at
all. It expands it, strengthens it and brings it far closer to
actual scientific practice.
I think the basic fault that underlies the
problem of stuckness is traditional rationality's insistence upon
"objectivity," a doctrine that there is a divided reality
of subject and object. For true science to take place these must
be rigidly separate from eachother. "You are the mechanic. There
is the motorcycle. you are forever apart from one another. You
do this to it. You
do that to it. These will be the results."
This eternally dualistic subject-object
way of approaching the motorcycle sounds right to us because we're
used to it. But it's not right. It's always been an artificial
interpretation superimposed on reality. It's
never been reality itself. When this duality is completely
accepted
a certain non-divided relationship between the mechanic and the
motorcycle, a craftsman-like
feeling for the work, is destroyed. When traditional rationality
divides the world
into subjects and objects it shuts out Quality, and when you're
really stuck its Quality, not any subjects or objects, that tells
you where you ought to go.
By returning our attention to Quality
it is hoped that we can get technological work out of the non-caring
subject-object dualism and back into craftsman-like self-involved
reality again, which
will reveal to us the facts we need when we are stuck.
In my mind right now is an image of a huge,
long railroad train, one of those 120-boxcar jobs that cross the
prairies all the time with lumber and vegetables going east and
with automobiles and other manufactured goods going west. I want
to call this railroad train "knowledge" and subdivide
it into two parts: Classic Knowledge and Romantic Knowledge.
In terms of the analogy, Classic Knowledge,
the knowledge taught by the Church of Reason, is the engine and
all the boxcars. All of them and everything that's in them. If
you subdivide the train into parts you will find no Romantic Knowledge
anywhere. And unless you're careful it's easy to make the presumption
that's all the train there is. This isn't because Romantic Knowledge
is nonexistent or even unimportant. It's just that so far the
definition of the train is static and purposeless. This was what
I was trying to get at back in South Dakota when I talked about
two whole dimensions of existence. It's two whole ways of looking
at the train.
Romantic Quality, in terms of this analogy,
isn't any "part" of the train. It's the leading edge
of the engine, a two-dimensional surface of no real significance
unless you understand that the train isn't a static entity at
all. A train really isn't a train if it can't go anywhere. In
the process of examining the train and subdividing it into parts
we've inadvertently stopped it, so that it really isn't a train
we're examining. That's why we get stuck.
The real train of knowledge isn't
a static entity that can be stopped and subdivided. It's always
going somewhere. On a track called Quality. And that engine and
all those 120 boxcars are never going anywhere except where the
track of Quality takes them; and Romantic Quality, the leading
edge of the engine, takes them along the track.
Romantic reality is the cutting edge of
experience. It's the leading edge of the train of knowledge that
keeps the whole train on the track. Traditional knowledge is only
the collective memory of where that leading edge has been. At
the leading edge there are no subjects, no objects, only the track
of Quality ahead, and if you have no formal way of evaluating,
no way of acknowledging this Quality, then the entire train has
no way of knowing where to go. You don't have pure reason - you
have pure confusion. The leading edge is where absolutely all
the action is. The leading edge contains all the infinite possibilities
of the future. it contains all the history of the past. Where
else could they be contained?
The past cannot remember the past. The future
can't generate the future. The cutting edge of this instant right
here and now is always nothing less than the totality of everything
there is.
Value, the leading edge of reality,
is no longer an irrelevant offshoot of structure. It's the pre-intellectual
awareness that gives rise to it. Our structured reality is preselected
on the basis of value, and really to understand structured reality
requires an understanding of the value source from which it's
derived.
One's rational understanding of a motorcycle
is therefore modified from minute to minute as one works on it
and sees that a new and different rational understanding has more
Quality. One doesn't cling to old sticky ideas because one has
an immediate rational basis for rejecting them. Reality isn't
static anymore. It's not a set of ideas you have to either fight
or resign yourself to. It's made up, in part, of ideas that are
expected to grow as you grow, and as we grow, century after century.
With Quality as a central undefined term, reality is, in its essential
nature, not static but dynamic. And when you really understand
dynamic reality you never get stuck. It has forms but the forms
are capable of change.
To put it in more concrete terms:
If you want to build a factory, or fix a motorcycle, or set a
nation right without getting stuck, then classical, structured
dualistic subject-object knowledge, although necessary, isn't
enough. You have to have some feeling for the quality of the work.
You have to have a sense of what's good. That is what carries
you forward. This sense isn't just something you're born with,
although you are born with it. It's also something you
can develop. It's not just "intuition," not just unexplainable
"skill" or "talent." it's the direct result
of contact with basic reality, Quality, which dualistic
reason has in the past tended to conceal.
It all sounds so far out and esoteric
when it's put like that it comes as a shock to discover that it
is one of the most homespun, down-to-earth views of reality you
can have. Harry Truman, of all people, comes to mind, when he
said, concerning his administration's programs, "We'll just
try them . . . and if they don't work . . . why then we'll just
try something else." That may not be an exact quote, but
it's close.
The reality of the American government isn't
static, he said, it's dynamic. If we don't like it we'll get something
better. The American government is stuck, is incapable
of change in response to Quality, but that argument is not to
the point. The point is that the President and everyone else,
from the wildest radical to the wildest reactionary, agree that
the government should change in response to Quality, even
if it doesn't. Phaedrus's concept of changing Quality as reality,
a reality so omnipotent that whole governments must change to
keep up with it, is something that in a wordless way we have always
unanimously believed in all along.
And what Harry Truman said, really, was
nothing different from the practical, pragmatic attitude of any
laboratory scientist or any engineer or any mechanic when he's
not thinking "objectively" in the course of his daily
work.
I keep talking wild theory, but it keeps
somehow coming out stuff everybody knows, folklore. This Quality,
this feeling for the work, is something known in every shop.
Now finally let's get back to that screw.
Let's consider a reevaluation of
the situation in which we assume that the stuckness now occurring,
the zero of consciousness, isn't the worst of all possible situations,
but the best possible situation you could be in. After all, it's
exactly this stuckness that Zen Buddhists go to so much trouble
to induce; through koans, deep breathing, sitting still and the
like. Your mind is empty, you have a "hollow-flexible"
attitude of "beginner's mind." You're right at the front
end of the train of knowledge, at the track of reality itself.
Consider, for a change, that this is a moment not to be feared
but cultivated. If your mind is truly, profoundly stuck, then
you may be much better off than when it was loaded with ideas.
The solution to the problem often
at first seems unimportant or undesirable, but the state of stuckness
allows it, in time, to assume its true importance. It seemed small
because your previous rigid evaluation which led to the stuckness
made it small.
But now consider the fact that no matter
how hard you try to hang onto it, this stuckness is bound to disappear.
Your mind will naturally and freely move toward a solution. Unless
you are a real master at staying stuck you can't prevent this.
The fear of stuckness is needless because the longer you stay
stuck the more you see the Quality-reality that gets you unstuck
every time. What's really been getting you stuck is running
from the stuckness through the cars of your train of knowledge
looking for a solution that is out in front of the train.
Stuckness shouldn't be avoided. It's the
physic predecessor of all real understanding. An egoless acceptance
of stuckness is a key to an understanding of all Quality, in mechanical
work as in other endeavors. It's this understanding of Quality
as revealed by stuckness which so often makes self-taught mechanics
so superior to institute-trained men who have learned how to handle
everything except a new situation.
Normally screws are so cheap and small and
simple you think of them as unimportant. But now, as your Quality
awareness becomes stronger, you realize that this one, individual,
particular screw is neither cheap nor small nor unimportant. Right
now this screw is worth exactly the selling price of the whole
motorcycle, because the motorcycle is actually valueless until
you get the screw out. With this reevalution of the screw comes
a willingness to expand your knowledge of it.
With the expansion of the knowledge, I would
guess, comes a reevalution of what the screw really is. If you
concentrate on it, think about it, stay stuck on it for a long
enough time, I would guess that in time you will come to see that
the screw is less and less an object typical of a class and more
an object unique in itself. Then with more concentration you will
begin to see the screw as not even an object at all but as a collection
of functions. Your stuckness is gradually eliminating patterns
of traditional reason.
In the past when you separated subject and
object from one another in a permanent way, your thinking about
them got very rigid. You formed a class called "screw"
that seemed to be inviolable and more real than the reality you
are looking at. And you couldn't think of how to get unstuck because
you couldn't think of anything new, because you couldn't see
anything new.
Now in getting that screw out,
you aren't interested in what it is. What it is
has ceased to be a category of thought and is a continuing direct
experience. It's not in the boxcars anymore, it's out in front
and capable of change. You are interested in what it does
and why it's doing it. You will ask functional questions. Associated
with your questions will be a subliminal Quality discrimination
identical to the Quality discrimination that led Poincare to the
Fuchsian equations.
What your actual solution is is unimportant
as long as it has Quality. Thoughts about the screw as combined
rigidness and adhesiveness and about its special helical interlock
might lead naturally to solutions of impaction and use of solvents.
That is one kind of Quality track. Another track may be to go
to the library and look through a catalog of mechanic's tools,
in which you might come across a screw extractor that would do
the job. Or to call a friend who knows something about mechanical
work. Or just to drill the screw out, or just burn it out with
a torch. Or you might just, as a result of your meditative attention
to the screw, come up with some new way of extracting it that
has never been thought of before and that beats all the rest and
is patentable and makes you a millionaire five years from now.
There's no predicting what's on that Quality track. The solutions
all are simple - after you have arrived at them. But they're simple
only when you know already what they are.
Highway 13 follows another branch of our
river but now it goes upstream past old sawmill towns and sleepy
scenery. Sometimes when you switch from a federal to a state highway
it seems like you drop back like this in time. Pretty mountains,
pretty river, bumpy but pleasant tar road . . . old buildings,
old people on a front porch . . . strange how old, obsolete buildings
and plants and mills, the technology of fifty and a hundred years
ago, always seem to look so much better than the new stuff. Weeds
and grass and wild flowers grow where concrete has cracked and
broken. Neat, squared, upright lines acquire a random sag. The
uniform masses of the unbroken color of fresh paint modify to
a mottled, weathered softness. Nature has a non-Euclidian geometry
of her own that seems to soften the deliberate objectivity of
these buildings with a kind of random spontaneity that architects
would do well to study.
Soon we leave the river and the old sleepy
buildings and now climb to some sort of dry, meadowy plateau.
The road rolls and bumps and rocks so much I have to keep the
speed down to fifty. There are some bad chuckholes in the asphalt
and I watch carefully for more.
We're really accustomed to making mileage.
Stretches that would have seemed long back in the Dakotas now
seem short and easy. Being on the machine seems more natural than
being off it. We're nowhere that I'm familiar with, in country
that I've never seen before, yet I don't feel a stranger in it.
At the top of the plateau at Grangeville,
Idaho, we step from the blasting heat into an air-conditioned
restaurant. Deep cool inside. While we wait for chocolate malteds
I notice a high-schooler sitting at the counter exchanging looks
with the girl next to him. She's gorgeous, and I'm not the only
other one who notices it. The girl behind the counter waiting
on them is also watching with an anger she thinks no one else
sees. Some kind of triangle. We keep passing unseen through little
moments of other people's lives.
Back in the heat again and not far from
Grangeville we see that the dry plateau that looked almost like
prairie when we were out on it suddenly breaks away into an enormous
canyon. I see our road will go down and down through what must
be a hundred hairpin turns into a desert of broken land and crags.
I tap Chris's knee and point and as we round a turn where we see
it all I hear him holler, "Wow!"
At the brink I shift down to third, then
close the throttle. The engine drags, backfiring a little, and
down we go.
By the time our cycle has reached the bottom
of wherever it is we are, we have dropped thousands of feet. I
look back over my shoulder and see antlike cars way back at the
top. Now we must head forward across this baking desert to wherever
the road leads.
This morning a solution to he problem of
stuckness was discussed, the classic badness caused by traditional
reason. Now it's time to move to its romantic parallel, the ugliness
of the technology traditional reason has produced.
The road has twisted and rolled over desert hills into a little, narrow thread of green surrounding the town of White Bird, then proceeded on to a big fast river, the Salmon, flowing between high canyon walls. Here the heat is tremendous and the glare from the white canyon rock is blinding. We wind on and on through the bottom of the narrow canyon, nervous about fast-moving traffic and oppressed by the fiery heat.
The ugliness the Sutherlands were fleeing
is not inherent in technology. It only seemed that way to them
because it's so hard to isolate what it is within technology that's
so ugly. But technology is simply the making of things and the
making of things can't by its own nature be ugly or there would
be no possibility for beauty in the arts, which also include the
making of things. Actually a root word of technology, techne,
originally meant "art." The ancient Greeks never
separated art from manufacture in their minds, and so never developed
separate words for them.
Neither is the ugliness inherent in the
materials of modern technology - a statement you sometimes hear.
Mass-produced plastics and synthetics aren't in themselves bad.
They've just acquired bad associations. A person who's lived inside
stone walls of a prison most of his life is likely to see stone
as an inherently ugly material, even though it's also the prime
material of sculpture, and a person who's lived in a prison of
ugly plastic technology that started with his childhood toys and
continues through a lifetime of junky consumer products is likely
to see this material as inherently ugly. But the real ugliness
of modern technology isn't found in any material or shape or act
or product. These are just the objects in which low Quality appears
to reside. It's our habit of assigning Quality to subjects or
objects that gives this impression.
The real ugliness is not the result of any
objects of technology. Nor is it, if one follows Phaedrus' metaphysics,
the result of any subjects of technology, the people who produce
it or the people who use it. Quality, or its absence, doesn't
reside in either the subject or the object. The real ugliness
lies in the relationship between the people who produce the technology
and the things they produce, which results in a similar relationship
between the people who use the technology and the things they
use.
Phaedrus felt that at the moment of pure
Quality perception, or not even perception, at the moment of pure
Quality, there is no subject and there is no object. There is
only a sense of Quality that produces a later awareness of subjects
and objects. At the moment of pure Quality, subject and object
are identical. This is the tat tvam asi truth of the Upanishads,
but it's also reflected in modern street argot. "Getting
with it," "digging it," "grooving on it,"
are all slang reflections of this identity. It is this identity
that is the basis of craftsmanship in all the technical arts.
And it is this identity that modern, dualistically conceived technology
lacks. The creator of it feels no particular sense of identity
with it. The owner of it feels no particular sense of identity
with it. The user feels no particular sense of identity with it.
Hence, by Phaedrus's definition, it has no Quality.
That wall in Korea that Phaedrus saw was
an act of technology. It was beautiful, but not because of any
masterful intellectual planning or any scientific supervision
of the job, or any added expenditures to "stylize" it.
It was beautiful because the people who worked on it had a way
of looking at things that made them do it right un-self-consciously.
They didn't separate themselves from the work in such a way as
to do it wrong. There is the center of the whole situation.
The way to
solve the conflict between human values and technological needs
is not to run away from technology. That's impossible.
The way to resolve the conflict
is to break down the barriers of dualistic thought that prevent
a real understanding of what technology is - not an exploitation
of nature, but a fusion of nature and the human spirit into a
new kind of creation that transcends both. When this transcendence
occurs in such events as the first airplane flight across the
ocean or the first footstep on the moon, a kind of public recognition
of the transcendent nature of technology occurs. But this transcendence
should also occur at the individual level, on a personal basis,
in one's own life, in a less dramatic way.
The walls of the canyon here are completely vertical now. In many
places room for the road had to be blasted out of it. No alternate
routes here. Just whichever way the river goes. It may be just
my imagination, but it seems the river's already smaller than
it was an hour ago.
Such personal transcendence of
conflicts with technology doesn't have to involve motorcycles,
of course. It can be as simple as sharpening a kitchen knife or
sewing a dress or mending a broken chair. The underlying problems
are the same. In each case there's a beautiful way of doing it
and an ugly way of doing it, and arriving at the high-quality,
beautiful way of doing it, both an ability to see what "looks
good" and an ability to understand the underlying methods
to arrive at that "good" are needed. Both classic and
romantic understanding of Quality must be combined.
The nature of our culture is such
that if you were to look for instruction in how to do any of these
jobs, the instruction would always give only one understanding
of Quality, the classic. It would tell you how to hold the blade
when sharpening the knife, or how to use the sewing machine, or
how to mix and apply glue with the presumption that once these
underlying methods were applied, "good" would naturally
follow. The ability to see directly what "looks good"
would be ignored.
The result is rather typical of
modern technology, an overall dullness of appearance so depressing
that it must be overlaid with a veneer of "style" to
make it acceptable. And that, to anyone who is sensitive to romantic
Quality, just makes it all the worse. Now it's not just depressingly
dull, it's also phony. Put the two together and you get a pretty
accurate basic description of modern American technology: stylized
cars and stylized outboard motors and stylized typewriters and
stylized clothes. Stylized refrigerators filled with stylized
food in stylized houses. Plastic stylized toys for stylized children,
who at Christmas and birthdays are in style with their stylish
parents. You have to be awfully stylish yourself not to get sick
of it once in awhile. It's the style that gets you; technological
ugliness syruped over with romantic phoniness in an effort to
produce beauty and profit by people who, though stylish, don't
know where to start because no one has ever told them there's
such a thing as Quality in this world and it's real, not style.
Quality isn't something you lay on top of subjects and objects
like tinsel on a Christmas tree. Real Quality must be the source
of the subjects and objects, the cone from which the tree must
start.
To arrive at this Quality
requires a somewhat different procedure from the "Step 1,
Step 2, Step 3" instructions that accompany dualistic technology,
and that's what I'll now try to go into.
After
many turns in the canyon wall we stop for a break under a scrubby
patch of small trees and rocks. The grass around the trees is
burned and brown and scattered with litter from picnickers.
I collapse into some shade, and
after awhile squint up at the sky, which I haven't really looked
at since we entered this canyon. Up there above the canyon walls
it's cool and dark blue and far away.
Chris doesn't even go over to see
the river, something he'd normally do. Like me, he's tired and
content just to sit under the scant shade of these trees.
After awhile he says there's an
old iron pump, it looks like, between us and the river. He points
to it and I see what he means. He goes over and I can see him
pump water onto his hand and then splash it onto his face. I go
over and pump for him so he can use both hands. Then I do the
same. The water feels cold on my hands and face. When done we
walk to the cycle again and climb on and pull back on to the canyon
road.
Now that solution. Throughout this Chautauqua so far this whole
problem of technological ugliness has been looked at in a negative
way. It's been said that romantic attitudes towards Quality such
as the Sutherlands have are, by themselves, hopeless. You can't
live on just groovy emotions alone. You have to work with the
underlying form of the universe too, the laws of nature which,
when understood, can make work easier, sickness rarer and famine
almost absent. On the other hand, technology based on pure dualistic
reason has also been condemned because it obtains these material
advantages by turning the world into a stylized garbage dump.
Now's the time to stop condemning things and come up with some
answers.
The answer is Phaedrus' contention
that classic understanding should not be overlaid with romantic
prettiness; classic and romantic understanding should be united
at a basic level. In the past our common universe of reason has
been in the process of escaping, rejecting the romantic, irrational
world of prehistoric man. It's been necessary since before the
time of Socrates to reject the passions, the emotions, in order
to free the rational mind for an understanding of nature's order
which was as yet unknown. Now it's time to further an understanding
of nature's order by reassimilating those passions which were
originally fled from. The passions, the emotions, the affective
domain of man's consciousness, are a part of nature's order too.
The central part.
At present we're snowed under with
an irrational expansion of blind data-gathering in the sciences
because there's no rational format for any understanding of scientific
creativity. At present we are also snowed under with a lot of
stylishness in the arts - thin art - because there's very little
assimilation or extension into underlying form. We have artists
with no scientific knowledge and both with no spiritual sense
of gravity at all, and the result is not just bad, it is ghastly.
The time for real reunification of art and technology is really
long overdue.
At the DeWeeses I started to talk
about peace of mind in connection with technical work but got
laughed off the scene because I brought it up out of the context
in which it had originally appeared to me. Now I think it is
in context to return to peace of mind and see what I was talking
about.
Peace of mind isn't at all superficial
to technical work. It's the whole thing. That which produces it
is good work and that which destroys it is bad work. The specs,
the measuring instruments, the quality control, the final checkout,
these are all means toward the end of satisfying the peace
of mind of those responsible for the work. What really counts
in the end is their peace of mind, nothing else. The reason for
this is that peace of mind is a prerequisite for a perception
of that Quality which is beyond romantic Quality and classic Quality
and which unites the two, and which must accompany the work as
it proceeds. The way to see what looks good and understand the
reasons it looks good, and to be at one with this goodness
as the work proceeds, is to cultivate an inner quietness, a peace
of mind so that goodness can shine through.
I say inner peace of mind.
It has no direct relationship to external circumstances. It can
occur to a monk in meditation, to a soldier in heavy combat or
to a machinist taking off that last ten-thousandth of an inch.
It involves un-self-consciousness, which produces a complete identification
with one's circumstances, and there are levels and levels of this
identification and levels and levels of quietness quite as profound
and difficult of attainment as the more familiar levels of activity.
The mountains of achievement are Quality discovered in one direction
only, and are relatively meaningless and often unobtainable unless
taken together with the ocean trenches of self-awareness - so
different from self-consciousness - which result from inner peace
of mind.
This inner peace of mind occurs
on three levels of understanding. Physical quietness seems the
easiest to achieve, although there are levels and levels of this
too, as attested by the ability of Hindu mystics to live buried
alive for many days. Mental quietness, in which one has no wandering
thoughts at all, seems more difficult, but can be achieved. But
value quietness, in which one has no wandering desires at all
but simply performs the acts of his life without desire, that
seems the hardest.
I've sometimes thought this inner
peace of mind, this quietness is similar if not identical with
the sort of calm you sometimes get when going fishing, which accounts
for much of the popularity of this sport. Just to sit with the
line in the water, not moving, not really thinking about anything,
not really caring about anything either, seems to draw out the
inner tensions and frustrations that have prevented you from solving
problems you couldn't solve before and introduced ugliness and
clumsiness into your actions and thoughts.
You don't have to go fishing, of
course, to fix your motorcycle. A cup of coffee, a walk around
the block, sometimes just putting off the job for five minutes
of silence is enough. When you do you can almost feel yourself
grow toward that inner peace of mind that reveals it all. That
which turns its back on this inner calm and the Quality it reveals
is bad maintenance. That which turns toward it is good. The forms
of turning away and toward are infinite but the goal is always
the same.
I think that when this concept
of peace of mind is introduced and made central to the act of
technical work, a fusion of classic and romantic quality can take
place at a basic level within a practical working context. I've
said you can actually see this fusion in skilled mechanics and
machinists of a certain sort, and you can see it in the work they
do. To say that they are not artists is to misunderstand the nature
of art. They have patience, care and attentiveness to what they're
doing, but more than this - there's a kind of inner peace of mind
that isn't contrived but results from a kind of harmony with the
work in which there's no leader and no follower. The material
and craftsman's thoughts change together in a progression of smooth,
even changes until his mind is at rest at the exact moment the
material is right.
We've all had moments of that sort
when we're doing something we really want to do. It's just that
somehow we've gotten into an unfortunate separation of those moments
from work. The mechanic I'm talking about doesn't make this separation.
One says of him that he is "interested" in what he's
doing, that he's "involved" in his work. What produces
this involvement is, at the cutting edge of consciousness, an
absence of any sense of separateness of subject and object. "Being
with it," "being natural," "taking hold"
- there are a lot of idiomatic expressions for what I mean by
this absence of subject-object duality, because what I mean is
so well understood as folklore, common sense, the everyday understanding
of the shop. But in scientific parlance the words for this absence
of subject-object duality are scarce because scientific minds
have shut themselves off from consciousness of this kind of understanding
in the assumption of the formal scientific outlook.
Zen Buddhists talk about "just
sitting," a meditative practice in which the idea of the
duality of self and object does not dominate one's consciousness.
What I'm talking about here in motorcycle maintenance is "just
fixing," in which the idea of a duality of self and object
doesn't dominate one's consciousness. When one isn't dominated
by feelings of separateness from what he's working on, then one
can be said to "care" about what he's doing. That is
what caring really is, a feeling of identification with what one's
doing. When one has this feeling then he also sees the inverse
side of caring, Quality itself.
So the thing to do when working
on a motorcycle, as in any other task, is to cultivate the peace
of mind which does not separate one's self from one's surroundings.
When that is done successfully then everything else follows naturally.
Peace of mind produces right values, right values produce right
thoughts. Right thoughts produce right actions and right actions
produce work which will be a material reflection for others to
see of the serenity at the center of it all. That was what it
was about the wall in Korea. It was a material reflection of a
spiritual reality.
I think that if we are going to
reform the world, and make it a better place to live in, the way
to do it is not with talk about relationships of a political nature,
which are inevitably dualistic, full of subjects and objects and
their relationships to one another; or with programs full of things
for other people to do. I think that kind of approach starts at
the end and presumes the end is the beginning. Programs of a political
nature are important end products of social quality that
can be effective only if the underlying structure of social values
is right. The social values are right only if the individual values
are right. The place to improve the world is first in one's own
heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there. Other
people can talk about how to expand the destiny of mankind. I
just want to talk about how to fix a motorcycle. I think that
what I have to say has more lasting value.