Robert Pirsig - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

The typical situation is that the motorcycle doesn’t work. The facts are there but you don’t see them. You’re looking right at them, but they don’t yet have enough value. This is what Phædrus was talking about. Quality, value, creates the subjects and objects of the world. The facts do not exist until value has created them. If your values are rigid you can’t really learn new facts.

This often shows up in premature diagnosis, when you’re sure you know what the trouble is, and then when it isn’t, you’re stuck. Then you’ve got to find some new clues, but before you can find them you’ve got to clear your head of old opinions. If you’re plagued with value rigidity you can fail to see the real answer even when it’s staring you right in the face because you can’t see the new answer’s importance.

The birth of a new fact is always a wonderful thing to experience. It’s dualistically called a “discovery” because of the presumption that it has an existence independent of anyone’s awareness of it. When it comes along, it always has, at first, a low value. Then, depending on the value-looseness of the observer and the potential quality of the fact, its value increases, either slowly or rapidly, or the value wanes and the fact disappears.

The overwhelming majority of facts, the sights and sounds that are around us every second and the relationships among them and everything in our memory… these have no Quality, in fact have a negative quality. If they were all present at once our consciousness would be so jammed with meaningless data we couldn’t think or act. So we preselect on the basis of Quality, or, to put it Phædrus’ way, the track of Quality preselects what data we’re going to be conscious of, and it makes this selection in such a way as to best harmonize what we are with what we are becoming.

What you have to do, if you get caught in this gumption trap of value rigidity, is slow down… you’re going to have to slow down anyway whether you want to or not… but slow down deliberately and go over ground that you’ve been over before to see if the things you thought were important were really important and to — well — just stare at the machine. There’s nothing wrong with that. Just live with it for a while. Watch it the way you watch a line when fishing and before long, as sure as you live, you’ll get a little nibble, a little fact asking in a timid, humble way if you’re interested in it. That’s the way the world keeps on happening. Be interested in it.

At first try to understand this new fact not so much in terms of your big problem as for its own sake. That problem may not be as big as you think it is. And that fact may not be as small as you think it is. It may not be the fact you want but at least you should be very sure of that before you send the fact away. Often before you send it away you will discover it has friends who are right next to it and are watching to see what your response is. Among the friends may be the exact fact you are looking for.

After a while you may find that the nibbles you get are more interesting than your original purpose of fixing the machine. When that happens you’ve reached a kind of point of arrival. Then you’re no longer strictly a motorcycle mechanic, you’re also a motorcycle scientist, and you’ve completely conquered the gumption trap of value rigidity.

The road has come up into the pines again, but I see by the map that it won’t be for long. There are some resort billboards along the road and some kids beneath them, almost as if part of the advertisement, gathering pinecones. They wave and in doing so the littlest boy drops all his cones.

I keep wanting to go back to that analogy of fishing for facts. I can just see somebody asking with great frustration, “Yes, but which facts do you fish for? There’s got to be more to it than that.”

But the answer is that if you know which facts you’re fishing for you’re no longer fishing. You’ve caught them. I’m trying to think of a specific example.

All kinds of examples from cycle maintenance could be given, but the most striking example of value rigidity I can think of is the old South Indian Monkey Trap, which depends on value rigidity for its effectiveness. The trap consists of a hollowed-out coconut chained to a stake. The coconut has some rice inside which can be grabbed through a small hole. The hole is big enough so that the monkey’s hand can go in, but too small for his fist with rice in it to come out. The monkey reaches in and is suddenly trapped… by nothing more than his own value rigidity. He can’t revalue the rice. He cannot see that freedom without rice is more valuable than capture with it. The villagers are coming to get him and take him away. They’re coming closer — closer! — now! What general advice… not specific advice… but what general advice would you give the poor monkey in circumstances like this?

Well, I think you might say exactly what I’ve been saying about value rigidity, with perhaps a little extra urgency. There is a fact this monkey should know: if he opens his hand he’s free. But how is he going to discover this fact? By removing the value rigidity that rates rice above freedom. How is he going to do that? Well, he should somehow try to slow down deliberately and go over ground that he has been over before and see if things he thought were important really were important and, well, stop yanking and just stare at the coconut for a while. Before long he should get a nibble from a little fact wondering if he is interested in it. He should try to understand this fact not so much in terms of his big problem as for its own sake. That problem may not be as big as he thinks it is. That fact may not be as small as he thinks it is either. That’s about all the general information you can give him.

At Prairie City we’re out of the mountain forests again and into a dry-land town with a wide main street that looks right down through the center of the town and onto the prairie beyond it. We try one restaurant, but it’s closed. We go across the broad street and try another. The door’s open, we sit down and order malted milks. While waiting I get the outline of the letter Chris was preparing for his mother and give it to him. To my surprise he works on it without many questions. I sit back in the booth and don’t disturb him.

I keep feeling that the facts I’m fishing for concerning Chris are right in front of me too, but that some value rigidity of my own blocks me from seeing it. At times we seem to move in parallel rather than in combination, then at odd moments collide.

His troubles at home always begin when he is imitating me, trying to command others the way I command him, particularly his younger brother. Naturally the others aren’t having any of his commands, and he can’t see their right not to, and that’s when all hell breaks loose.

He can’t seem to care whether he’s popular with anyone else. He just wants to be popular with me. Not healthy at all, everything considered. It’s about time for him to begin the long process of breaking away. That break should be as easy as possible, but it should be made. It’s time to set him on his own feet. The sooner the better.

And now, having thought all that, I don’t believe it anymore. I don’t know what the trouble is. That dream that keeps recurring haunts me because I can’t escape its meaning: I’m forever on the other side of a glass door from him which I don’t open. He wants me to open it and before I always turned away. But now there’s a new figure who prevents me. Strange.

After a while Chris says he’s tired of writing. We get up, I pay at the counter and we leave.

On the road now and talking about traps again.

The next one is important. It’s the internal gumption trap of ego. Ego isn’t entirely separate from value rigidity but one of the many causes of it.