Category: Lila
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Reading Lila PDF
I thought I was finished with Reading Lila – but it resurfaced in my consciousness. This time around the content became associated with my images. So after a week of random & associative browsing through my image archives I have put together a PDF version of the excerpt with a more personal touch and a…
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About Reading Lila
Updated: June 21, 2010 after launch of modified online version. When? In early March 2010 I began my third reading of “Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals” by Robert Pirsig. I returned to it for inspiration which it quickly began to provide. I wanted to share some of that inspiration by sending out some quotations on…
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Reading Lila
Following is a kind of excerpt of Robert Pirsig’s book “Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals“. It is the lesser known sequel to the more famous “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance“. In the coming days I will post a followup on how this came to be. Update: The excerpt is now available in PDF…
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Reading Lila – Dharma
Dharma is Quality itself, the principle of ‘rightness’ which gives structure and purpose to the evolution of all life …
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Reading Lila – Rta
The mythos is the social culture and the rhetoric which the culture must invent before philosophy becomes possible
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Reading Lila – Meditation
Just as mystics traditionally seek monasteries and ashrams … so are the insane treated by isolation in places of relative calm and austerity and silence.
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Reading Lila – Shock
The value of shock treatment is not that it returns a lunatic to normal cultural patterns. It certainly does not do that. It’s value is that it destroys all patterns … cultural and private, and leaves the patient temporarily in a Dynamic state …
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Reading Lila – Religion
Religious mysticism is one of those delusions that isn’t called insane only because there are so many people involved …
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Reading Lila – Dynamic
Dynamic Quality is a higher moral order than scientific truth, and it is as immoral for philosophers of science to try to suppress Dynamic Quality as it is for church authorities to suppress scientific method. Dynamic value is an integral part of science. It is the cutting edge of scientific progress itself.
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Reading Lila – Contrarians
Sometimes the insane and the contrarians and the ones who are closest to suicide are the most valuable people society has …
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Reading Lila – Sanity
… the insane person is running a private unapproved film which he happens to like better than the current cultural one …
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Reading Lila – Do You See the Light?
When a cartoonist wants to show someone getting a great idea he puts an electric bulb over the character’s head. Everybody understands … Why?
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Reading Lila – Facts & Culture
Your static value system filters out the undesirable opinions & preserves the desirable ones … it isn’t just opinions that get filtered out. It’s also data.
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Reading Lila – Insanity
Insanity isn’t an ‘object’ of observation. It’s an alteration of observation itself …
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Reading Lila – Ruthlessness
Today we are living in an intellectual and technological paradise and a moral and social nightmare.
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Reading Lila – Hippies
The intellect’s evolutionary purpose has never been to discover an ultimate meaning of the universe. That is a relatively recent fad. It’s historical purpose has been to help a society find food, detect danger, and defeat enemies.
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Reading Lila – Paradise
Paradise was always at the end of some intellectual, technological ride, but you knew that when you got there paradise wouldn’t be there either.
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Reading Lila – Indians & Cowboys
The moral values that were replacing the old European Victorian ones were the moral values of American Indians: kindness to children,maximum freedom, openness of speech, love of simplicity, affinity for nature.