Robert Pirsig - Lila. An Inquiry Into Morals

When Socrates says in one of his dialogues, Our greatest blessings come to us by way of madness provided the madness is given us by divine gift, the psychiatric profession doesn’t know what in the world he is talking about. Or when traces of this identification are found in the expression touched in the head meaning touched by God, the roots of this expression are ignored as ignorant and superstitious.

It’s another case of the Cleveland Harbor Effect, where you don’t see what you don’t look for, because when one looks through the record of our culture for connections between insane understanding and religious understanding one soon finds them everywhere. Even the idea of insanity as possession by the Devil can be explained by the Metaphysics of Quality as a lower biological pattern, the Devil, trying to overcome a higher pattern of conformity to cultural belief.

The Metaphysics of Quality suggests that in addition to the customary solutions to insanity — conform to cultural patterns or stay locked up — there is another one. This solution is to dissolve all static patterns, both sane and insane, and find the base of reality, Dynamic Quality, that is independent of all of them. The Metaphysics of Quality says that it is immoral for sane people to force cultural conformity by suppressing the Dynamic drives that produce insanity. Such suppression is a lower form of evolution trying to devour a higher one. Static social and intellectual patterns are only an intermediate level of evolution. They are good servants of the process of life but if allowed to turn into masters they destroy it.

Once this theoretical structure is available, it offers solutions to some mysteries in the present treatment of the insane. For example, doctors know that shock treatment works, but are fond of saying that no one knows why.

The Metaphysics of Quality offers an explanation. The value of shock treatment is not that it returns a lunatic to normal cultural patterns. It certainly does not do that. Its value is that it destroys all patterns, both cultural and private, and leaves the patient temporarily in a Dynamic state. All the shock does is duplicate the effects of hitting the patient over the head with a baseball bat. It simply knocks him senseless. In fact it was to imitate the effect of hitting someone over the head with a baseball bat without the risk of skull injury that Ugo Cerletti developed shock treatment in the first place.

But what goes unrecognized in a subject-object theoretical structure is the fact that this senseless unpatterned state is a valuable state of existence. Once the patient is in this state the psychiatrists of course don’t know what to do with it, and so the patient often slips back into lunacy and has to be knocked senseless again and again. But sometimes the patient, in a moment of Zen wisdom, sees the superficiality of both his own contrary patterns and the cultural patterns, sees that the one gets him electrically clubbed day after day and the other sets him free from the institution, and thereupon makes a wise mystic decision to get the hell out of there by whatever avenue is available.

Another mystery in the treatment of the insane explained by a value-centered metaphysics is the value of peace and quiet and isolation. For centuries that has been the primary treatment of the insane. Leave them alone. Ironically the one thing the mental hospitals and doctors do best is the one thing they never take credit for. Maybe they’re afraid some crusading journalist or other reformer will come along and say, Look at all those poor crazies in there with nothing to do. Inhuman treatment, so they don’t play that part of it up. They know it works, but there’s no way of justifying that because the whole cultural set they have to operate in says that doing nothing is the same as doing something wrong.

The Metaphysics of Quality says that what sometimes accidentally occurs in an insane asylum but occurs deliberately in a mystic retreat is a natural human process called dhyana in Sanskrit. In our culture dhyana is ambiguously called meditation. Just as mystics traditionally seek monasteries and ashrams and hermitages as retreats into isolation and silence, so are the insane treated by isolation in places of relative calm and austerity and silence. Sometimes, as a result of this monastic retreat into silence and isolation the patient arrives at a state Karl Menninger has described as better than cured. He is actually in better condition than he was before the insanity started. Phædrus guessed that in many of these accidental cases, the patient had learned by himself not to cling to any static patterns of ideas — cultural, private or any other.

In the insane asylum this dhyana is underrated and often undermined because there is no metaphysical basis for understanding it scientifically. But among religious mystics, particularly Oriental mystics, dhyana has been one of the most intensely studied practices of all.

This Western treatment of dhyana is a beautiful example of how the static patterns of a culture can make something not exist, even when it does exist. People in this culture are hypnotized into thinking they do not meditate when in fact they do.

Dhyana was what this boat was all about. It’s what Phædrus had bought it for, a place to be alone and quiet and inconspicuous and able to settle down into himself and be what he really was and not what he was thought to be or supposed to be. In doing this he didn’t think he was putting this boat to any special purpose. That’s what the purpose of boats like this has always been… and seaside cottages too… and lake cabins… and hiking trails… and golf courses… It’s the need for dhyana that is behind all these.

Vacations too… how perfectly named that is… a vacation, an emptying out… that’s what dhyana is, an emptying out of all the static clutter and junk of one’s life and just settling into an undefined sort of tranquillity.

That’s what Lila’s involved in now, a huge vacation, an emptying out of the junk of her life. She’s clinging to some new pattern because she thinks it holds back the old pattern. But what she has to do is take a vacation from all patterns, old and new, and just settle into a kind of emptiness for a while. And if she does, the culture has a moral obligation not to bother her. The most moral activity of all is the creation of space for life to move onward.

The Metaphysics of Quality associates religious mysticism with Dynamic Quality but it would certainly be a mistake to think that the Metaphysics of Quality endorses the static beliefs of any particular religious sect. Phædrus thought sectarian religion was a static social fallout from Dynamic Quality and that while some sects had fallen less than others, none of them told the whole truth.

His favorite Christian mystic was Johannes Eckhart, who said, Wouldst thou be perfect, do not yelp about God. Eckhart was pointing to a profound mystic truth, but you can guess what a hand of applause it got from the static authorities of the Church. Ill-sounding, rash, and probably heretical, was the general verdict.

From what Phædrus had been able to observe, mystics and priests tend to have a cat-and-dog-like coexistence within almost every religious organization. Both groups need each other but neither group likes the other at all.

There’s an adage that Nothing disturbs a bishop quite so much as the presence of a saint in the parish. It was one of Phædrus' favorites. The saint’s Dynamic understanding makes him unpredictable and uncontrollable, but the bishop’s got a whole calendar of static ceremonies to attend to; fund-raising projects to push forward, bills to pay, parishioners to meet. That saint’s going to up-end everything if he isn’t handled diplomatically. And even then he may do something wildly unpredictable that upsets everybody. What a quandary! It can take the bishops years, decades, even centuries to put down the hell that a saint can raise in a single day. Joan of Arc is the prime example.