Robert Pirsig - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

We’re pulling into Dayville and my rear end feels like it’s turned to concrete.

Well, that about does it for value traps. There’s a whole lot more of them, of course. I’ve really only just touched on the subject to show what’s there. Almost any mechanic could fill you in for hours on value traps he’s discovered that I don’t know anything about. You’re bound to discover plenty of them for yourself on almost every job. Perhaps the best single thing to learn is to recognize a value trap when you’re in it and work on that before you continue on the machine.

Dayville has huge shade trees by the filling station where we wait for the attendant to appear. None does, and we, being stiff and uneager to get back on the cycle, do leg exercises under the shade of the trees. Big trees that almost completely cover the road. Odd, in this desertlike country.

The attendant still doesn’t show, but his competitor at the filling station across the narrow intersection is watching this, and soon comes over to fill the tank. “I don’t know where John is”, he says.

When John appears, he thanks the other attendant and says proudly, “We always help each other out like this.”

I ask him if there’s a place to rest and he says, “You can use my front lawn.” He points across the main road to his house behind some cottonwood trees that must be three to four feet in diameter.

We do this, stretch out on some long green grass, and I see that the grass and trees are irrigated from a ditch by the road that has clear moving water in it.

We must have slept half an hour when we see John is in a rocking chair on the green grass beside us, talking to a fire warden in another chair. I listen. The conversation’s pace intrigues me. It isn’t intended to go anywhere, just fill the time of day. I haven’t heard steady slow-paced conversation like that since the thirties when my grandfather and great-grandfather and uncles and great-uncles used to talk like that: on and on and on with no point or purpose other than to fill time, like the rocking of a chair.

John sees I’m awake and we talk a little. He says the irrigation water comes from the “Chinaman’s Ditch.” “You never could get a white man to dig a ditch like that”, he says. “They dug that ditch eighty years ago when they thought there was gold here. You couldn’t get a ditch like that anywhere nowadays.” He says that’s why the trees are so big.

We talk some about where we’re from and where we’re going, and when we leave John says he’s happy to have met us and hopes we’re rested. As we move off under the big trees Chris waves and he smiles and waves back.

The desert road winds through rocky gorges and hills. This is the driest country yet.

I want to talk now about truth traps and muscle traps and then stop this Chautauqua for today.

Truth traps are concerned with data that are apprehended and are within the boxcars of the train. For the most part these data are properly handled by conventional dualistic logic and the scientific method talked about earlier, back just after Miles City. But there’s one trap that isn’t… the truth trap of yes-no logic.

Yes and no — this or that — one or zero. On the basis of this elementary two-term discrimination, all human knowledge is built up. The demonstration of this is the computer memory which stores all its knowledge in the form of binary information. It contains ones and zeros, that’s all.

Because we’re unaccustomed to it, we don’t usually see that there’s a third possible logical term equal to yes and no which is capable of expanding our understanding in an unrecognized direction. We don’t even have a term for it, so I’ll have to use the Japanese mu.

Mu means “no thing.” Like “Quality” it points outside the process of dualistic discrimination. Mu simply says, “No class; not one, not zero, not yes, not no.” It states that the context of the question is such that a yes or no answer is in error and should not be given. “Unask the question” is what it says.

Mu becomes appropriate when the context of the question becomes too small for the truth of the answer. When the Zen monk Joshu was asked whether a dog had a Buddha nature he said “Mu”, meaning that if he answered either way he was answering incorrectly. The Buddha nature cannot be captured by yes or no questions.

That mu exists in the natural world investigated by science is evident. It’s just that, as usual, we’re trained not to see it by our heritage. For example, it’s stated over and over again that computer circuits exhibit only two states, a voltage for “one” and a voltage for “zero.” That’s silly!

Any computer-electronics technician knows otherwise. Try to find a voltage representing one or zero when the power is off! The circuits are in a mu state. They aren’t at one, they aren’t at zero, they’re in an indeterminate state that has no meaning in terms of ones or zeros. Readings of the voltmeter will show, in many cases, “floating ground” characteristics, in which the technician isn’t reading characteristics of the computer circuits at all but characteristics of the voltmeter itself. What’s happened is that the power-off condition is part of a context larger than the context in which the one zero states are considered universal. The question of one or zero has been “unasked.” And there are plenty of other computer conditions besides a power-off condition in which mu answers are found because of larger contexts than the one-zero universality.

The dualistic mind tends to think of mu occurrences in nature as a kind of contextual cheating, or irrelevance, but mu is found throughout all scientific investigation, and nature doesn’t cheat, and nature’s answers are never irrelevant. It’s a great mistake, a kind of dishonesty, to sweep nature’s mu answers under the carpet. Recognition and valuatian of these answers would do a lot to bring logical theory closer to experimental practice. Every laboratory scientist knows that very often his experimental results provide mu answers to the yes-no questions the experiments were designed for. In these cases he considers the experiment poorly designed, chides himself for stupidity and at best considers the “wasted” experiment which has provided the mu answer to be a kind of wheel-spinning which might help prevent mistakes in the design of future yes-no experiments.

This low evaluation of the experiment which provided the mu answer isn’t justified. The mu answer is an important one. It’s told the scientist that the context of his question is too small for nature’s answer and that he must enlarge the context of the question. That is a very important answer! His understanding of nature is tremendously improved by it, which was the purpose of the experiment in the first place. A very strong case can be made for the statement that science grows by its mu answers more than by its yes or no answer. Yes or no confirms or denies a hypothesis. Mu says the answer is beyond the hypothesis. Mu is the “phenomenon” that inspires scientific enquiry in the first place! There’s nothing mysterious or esoteric about it. It’s just that our culture has warped us to make a low value judgment of it.

In motorcycle maintenance the mu answer given by the machine to many of the diagnostic questions put to it is a major cause of gumption loss. It shouldn’t be! When your answer to a test is indeterminate it means one of two things: that your test procedures aren’t doing what you think they are or that your understanding of the context of the question needs to be enlarged. Check your tests and restudy the question. Don’t throw away those mu answers! They’re every bit as vital as the yes or no answers. They’re more vital. They’re the ones you grow on!