This search for Quality is an example of what I see as a basic flaw in our necessity to frame existance, through human experience, in that it conflates the ideal with the absolute. Which goes to the core of Western culture.
For example, the logical fallacy of monotheism is that a spiritual absolute would be the essence of sentience, from which we rise, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell. The fact we are aware, than any of the myriad details of which we are aware.
The problem this creates is that while the ideal, like quality, is aspirational, the absolute is elemental. Leading to the ever present political reality of many ideologies/religions, all assuming their particular cultural assumptions and ideals to be absolute.
What has occurred to me is that reality is more the dichotomy of balance, tension and the resulting fluctuations, than it is any ultimate state, either ideal, or absolute. More yin and yang, than God Almighty.
For instance, the absolute, as universal state, amounts to zero. The flatline between the ups and downs. The black hole at the center. The equilibrium of the vacuum. The frame with the fastest clock and longest ruler.
Yet opposing the absolute is the infinite, of which any effort to define is an oxymoron.
Suffice it to say, the absolute is the zero between the positives and negatives, with the infinite being the arrows going out.
Then within these logical and metaphysical parameters, we have human experience, which needs to be unpacked.
What differentiates the flora from the fauna is that one moves and the other doesn't. So one branches out and roots into the environment, physically and chemically bonding to it, while the other evolved methods and mechanisms of moving about in it, thus some sense of being distinct from context.
For one thing we have this sequential process of perception, which we are constantly sorting and judging, in order to navigate the environment. Then as humanity, we've learned to communicate first our experiences and then the lessons drawn from them.
Consequently this process we call time is integral to our understanding of our reality. Which physics codifies as measures of duration, in order to explain as this narrative dimension.
The fact though is that it is not so much the point of the present, moving past to future, as it is change, turning future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. Duration is the present, as the events form and dissolve.
There can be no literal dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect. That we are surrounded by evidence and memories of past events means they no longer exist, only the residual information.
Energy is "conserved," because it is the present. Its changing form creates time, as well as temperature, pressure, color, sound. Frequencies and amplitudes.
So the energy, as process, goes past to future, while the patterns generated go future to past. Think in terms of a wave; The energy is what drives it, while the forms we sense, the undulations and fluctuations, rise and fall, come and go, as the energy mutates to other forms. Thus energy and the forms manifest go opposite directions of time.
Consider a factory, where the product goes start to finish, while the production line goes the other way, consuming material and expelling product. As lives go birth to death, while live moves onto the next generation, shedding the old.
Since consciousness goes past to future, while the forms it manifests, perceptions, thoughts, emotions, come and go, future to past, it would seem this state of awareness exists as an energy. While we might reflect on awareness as a neutral observer, think of the mind at night, when it insists on rifling through the list of things to think and worry about, rather than easily slipping off to sleep, unless fully drained first.
Yet it is the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems processing the energy driving us on, while the central nervous system seems to be the focus of this navigational perception. Motor and steering.
The problem though, is the mind really only processes the forms arising from the energy, or it would be a white-out of too much input. Our minds are like a movie camera, formulating images out of the sea of energy and form, selecting those most necessary to our individual function. Signal from the noise. Thus quality as integral to our thought. Survival. Aspiration as fundamental.
Yet yesterday doesn't cause today. The sun shining on this spinning planet creates this cycle of days and nights. Our reality is linear and goal oriented, while nature is cyclical, reciprocal and feedback driven. The world is round, not flat.
I could continue with this, especially in the realm of society and politics, with the mythos as the cultural narrative, etc. As liberalism and conservatism is the dichotomy of social expansion, versus civil and cultural consolidation.
Though I will leave it at this, as a critique of Pirsig's work.
When I read it as a teenager, shortly after it came out, I didn't finish it, as it really wandered too far off into the bushes of abstraction and neurosis. While I've spent my life riding motorcycles, I've spent most of it working with horses and there is nothing abstract about them. All here and now. Bubbles of consciousness, intersecting my own and much better peripheral vision.
