Robert Pirsig - Lila. An Inquiry Into Morals

It was the first time he’d ever seen her look down like that. That was what was so sad to see. The thing that was most attractive about her was that straight-forward, eyes-ahead look of someone who’s honest to themself, whatever others might think. Now that was gone. It meant she was turning back to the static patterns she came from. She’s sold out. The system beat her. It’s made a crook out of her at last.

It was as though she had just one more step to take and she was out of hell forever, and then instead of taking that one step she turned back. Now she’s really done for. That bastard will commit her for life.

Anyway, Phædrus supposed he would have to get busy and get ready to leave tomorrow. He’d get everything set to head out at daybreak. Possibly he could make it all the way to Barnegat inlet if he could get in there. He’d have to look at the charts again.

Somehow he didn’t feel like moving. He didn’t feel like doing anything… He supposed he shouldn’t be too hard on Lila. What had happened to her was very scary stuff. If she wants to go back to some place she thinks is safer who’s to blame her?… The funny thing was that when she said he was trying to kill her, that was insane — but it wasn’t entirely incorrect. He was trying to kill her — not the biological Lila, but the static patterns that were really going to kill her if she didn’t let go.

From the static point of view the whole escape into Dynamic Quality seems like a death experience. It’s a movement from something to nothing. How can nothing be any different from death? Since a Dynamic understanding doesn’t make the static distinctions necessary to answer that question, the question goes unanswered. All the Buddha could say was, See for yourself.

When early Western investigators first read the Buddhist texts they too interpreted nirvana as some kind of suicide. There’s a famous poem that goes:

While living,

Be a dead man.

Be completely dead,

And then do as you please.

And all will be well.

It sounds like something from a Hollywood horror-film but it’s about nirvana. The Metaphysics of Quality translates it:

While sustaining biological and social patterns

Kill all intellectual patterns.

Kill them completely

And then follow Dynamic Quality

And morality will be served.

Lila was still moving toward Dynamic Quality. All life does. This breaking up of her life’s patterns looked like it was part of that movement.

When Phædrus first went to India he’d wondered why, if this passage of enlightenment into pure Dynamic Quality was such a universal reality, did it only occur in certain parts of the world and not others? At the time he’d thought this was proof that the whole thing was just Oriental religious baloney, the equivalent of a magic land called heaven that Westerners go to if they are good and get a ticket from the priests. Now he saw that enlightenment is distributed in all parts of the world just as the color yellow is distributed in all parts of the world, but some cultures accept it and others screen out recognition of it.

Lila probably will never know what’s happened to her and neither will Rigel or anyone else. She’ll probably go through the rest of her life thinking this whole episode has been some kind of failure when in fact what had happened might not have been failure, but growth.

Maybe if Rigel hadn’t shown up she would have killed all the bad patterns right here in Sandy Hook. But it’s too late now to ever know… Strange that she’d come to Kingston on a boat called the Karma . It was unlikely anyone aboard knew what that word really meant. It was like naming a boat Causal Relationship. Of all the hundreds of Sanskrit words he had learned so long ago, dharma and karma had hung on longest and hardest. You could translate and pigeon-hole the others but these never seemed to stop needing translating.

The Metaphysics of Quality translated karma as evolutionary garbage. That’s why it sounded so funny as the name of a boat. It seemed to suggest she had arrived in Kingston on a garbage scow. Karma is the pain, the suffering that results from clinging to the static patterns of the world. The only exit from the suffering is to detach yourself from these static patterns, that is, to kill them.

A common way taken to kill them is suicide, but suicide only kills biological patterns. That’s like destroying a computer because you can’t stand the program it’s running. The social and intellectual patterns that caused the suicide have to be carried on by others. From an evolutionary point of view it’s really a backward and therefore immoral step.

Another immoral way of killing the static patterns is to pass the patterns to someone else, in what Phædrus called a karma dump. You invent a devil group, Jews or blacks or whites or capitalists or communists — it doesn’t matter — then say that group is responsible for all your suffering, and then hate it and try to destroy it. On a daily personal level everyone has things or people they hate and blame for their suffering and this hatred and blame brings a kind of relief.

Back in Kingston Rigel’s whole breakfast sermon was a karma dump. Lila’s accusation just now was another one. That’s what made it so sad. She’d received too much karmic garbage in her life and she couldn’t handle it and that’s what was making her crazy and now she’s dumped some of it and that will probably make her less crazy, for a while at least, but that’s not the moral solution.

If you take all this karmic garbage and make yourself feel better by passing it on to others that’s normal. That’s the way the world works. But if you manage to absorb it and not pass it on, that’s the highest moral conduct of all. That really advances everything, not just you. The whole world. If you look at the lives of some of the great moral figures of history — Christ, Lincoln, Gandhi and others — you’ll see that that’s what they were really involved in, the cleansing of the world through the absorption of karmic garbage. They didn’t pass it on. Their followers sometimes did, but they didn’t.

On the other hand, Phædrus supposed, when you’re on the receiving end of some karma dump like that it sets you free. If he’d thrown Lila out when she was insane it would have bothered him afterward as something he shouldn’t have done. But now, this way, with both Rigel and Lila rejecting him, there was no way he was going to feel guilty about her departure. The bond of obligation was broken. If Lila had been full of gratitude and attachment he would still be stuck with her. Now Rigel had that honor… Across the cabin, on the pilot berth, Phædrus saw that her suitcase was gone. There was a nice empty hole there. That was good. That meant he could get the trays of slips back out and have room to get to work on them again. That was good too. He remembered that PROGRAM slip he wrote to wait until Lila gets off the boat. He could cross that one off now.

He wondered if he really did want to go back to all those slips. In their own way they were a lot of karmic garbage too. Strictly speaking, the creation of any metaphysics is an immoral act since it’s a lower form of evolution, intellect, trying to devour a higher mystic one. The same thing that’s wrong with philosophology when it tries to control and devour philosophy is wrong with metaphysics when it tries to devour the world intellectually. It attempts to capture the Dynamic within a static pattern. But it never does. You never get it right. So why try?

It’s like trying to construct a perfect unassailable chess game. No matter how smart you are you’re never going to play a game that is right for all people at all times, everywhere. Answers to ten questions led to a hundred more and answers to those led to a thousand more. Not only would he never get it right; the longer he worked on it the wronger it would probably get… Then as he thought about this gloomily he saw something else in a shadow at the back of the berth: