Robert Pirsig: Lila. An Inquiry Into Morals

This statement is absolute jabberwocky to a conventional subject-object metaphysics. How can a chair be composed of individual little moral orders? But if one applies the Metaphysics of Quality and sees that a chair is an inorganic static pattern and sees that all static patterns are composed of value and that value is synonymous with morality then it all begins to make sense.

It occurred to Phædrus that this was one answer, perhaps the basic answer, to why workmen in Japan and Taiwan and other areas in the Far East are able to maintain quality levels that compare so favorably to those in the West. In the past the mystics' traditional low regard for inorganic static patterns, laws of nature has kept the scientifically derived technology of these cultures poor, but since Orientals have learned to overcome that prejudice times have changed. If one comes from a cultural tradition where an electronic assembly is primarily a moral order rather than just a neutral pile of substance, it is easier to feel an ethical responsibility for doing good work on it.

Phædrus thought that Oriental social cohesiveness and ability to work long hard hours without complaint was not a genetic characteristic but a cultural one. It resulted from the working out, centuries ago, of the problem of dharma and the way in which it combines freedom and ritual. In the West progress seems to proceed by a series of spasms of alternating freedom and ritual. A revolution of freedom against old rituals produces a new order, which soon becomes another old ritual for the next generation to revolt against, on and on. In the Orient there are plenty of conflicts but historically this particular kind of conflict has not been as dominant. Phædrus thought it was because dharma includes both static and Dynamic Quality without contradiction.

For example, you would guess from the literature on Zen and its insistence on discovering the unwritten dharma that it would be intensely anti-ritualistic, since ritual is the written dharma . But that isn’t the case. The Zen monk’s daily life is nothing but one ritual after another, hour after hour, day after day, all his life. They don’t tell him to shatter those static patterns to discover the unwritten dharma . They want him to get those patterns perfect!

The explanation for this contradiction is the belief that you do not free yourself from static patterns by fighting them with other contrary static patterns. That is sometimes called bad karma chasing its tail. You free yourself from static patterns by putting them to sleep. That is, you master them with such proficiency that they become an unconscious part of your nature. You get so used to them you completely forget them and they are gone. There in the center of the most monotonous boredom of static ritualistic patterns the Dynamic freedom is found.

Phædrus saw nothing wrong with this ritualistic religion as long as the rituals are seen as merely a static portrayal of Dynamic Quality, a sign-post which allows socially pattern-dominated people to see Dynamic Quality. The danger has always been that the rituals, the static patterns, are mistaken for what they merely represent and are allowed to destroy the Dynamic Quality they were originally intended to preserve.

Suddenly the foliage by the road opened up and there it was: the ocean.

He stopped for a second by the beach and just stared at the endless procession of waves moving slowly in from the horizon.

The south wind was stronger here and it cooled him. It was steady, like a trade wind. Nothing interfered with its flow toward him over the huge ocean. Vast emptiness and nothing sacred. If ever there was a visible concrete metaphor for Dynamic Quality this was it.

The beach looked much cleaner here than on the other side of the hook and he would have liked to walk for a while, but he had to get back to the boat… And to Lila.

Where to start with her? That was the question. The rta interpretation of Quality would say that more ritual is what she needs — not the kind of ritual that fights Dynamic Quality, but the kind that embodies it. But what ritual? She wasn’t about to follow rituals of any kind. Ritual was what she was fighting.

But that could be an answer. Lila’s problem wasn’t that she was suffering from lack of Dynamic freedom. It’s hard to see how she could possibly have any more freedom. What she needed now were stable patterns to encase that freedom. She needed some way of being reintegrated into the rituals of everyday living.

But where to start?… That doll, maybe. She had to give up that doll. She wasn’t going to convert anyone to that religion. The longer she hung on to it the firmer the static pattern was likely to get. These defensive patterns were not only as bad as the patterns she was running from, they were worse! Now she’s got two sets of patterns to break away from, the culture’s and her own… He wondered if it was possible to put these defensive patterns to sleep by means of the doll. Just accept the idea that the doll is her real child and treat the doll in such a way as to quiet down all those longings. She says the doll, her baby, is dead. She thinks this is some sort of island. Why not bury the doll with full honors?

That would be a ritual, Phædrus thought. That’s exactly what Lila needs. Don’t fight her patterns. Amalgamate them. She already seemed to think of him as some sort of priestly figure. Why disappoint her? He could use this image to try to bury her insane patterns with the baby. It would be sort of theatrical and fake, he supposed, but that’s what funerals were: theater. They weren’t for the corpse, certainly, but to help end the longings and old patterns of the living, who had to go on. The funeral would be real to Lila. That baby probably embodied just about every care she had.

Rta . That’s what was missing from her life. Ritual.

Arriving at work Monday morning is rta . Getting paid Friday evening is rta . Walking into the grocery store and taking food off the shelf to feed one’s children is rta . Paying for it with the money received on Friday is more rta . The entire mechanism of society is rta from beginning to end. That’s what Lila really needed.

He could only guess how far back this ritual-cosmos relationship went, maybe fifty or one hundred thousand years. Cave men are usually depicted as hairy, stupid creatures who don’t do much, but anthropological studies of contemporary primitive tribes suggest that stone-age people were probably bound by ritual all day long. There’s a ritual for washing, for putting up a house, for hunting, for eating and so on — so much so that the division between ritual and knowledge becomes indistinct. In cultures without books ritual seems to be a public library for teaching the young and preserving common values and information.

These rituals may be the connecting link between the social and intellectual levels of evolution. One can imagine primitive song-rituals and dance-rituals associated with certain cosmology stories, myths, which generated the first primitive religions. From these the first intellectual truths could have been derived. If ritual always comes first and intellectual principles always come later, then ritual cannot always be a decadent corruption of intellect. Their sequence in history suggests that principles emerge from ritual, not the other way around. That is, we don’t perform religious rituals because we believe in God. We believe in God because we perform religious rituals. If so, that’s an important principle in itself.

But after a while, as Phædrus walked along, his enthusiasm for the baby funeral started to go downhill. He didn’t like this idea of going along with some ritual he didn’t really believe in. He had a feeling that real ritual had to grow out of your own nature. It isn’t something that can be intellectualized and patched on.