34 : Dynamic Quality

The last two posts were foreplay and heavy petting to get you in the right state of mind for this post, which is the mindgasm. Mindgasms make bubbles, and bubbles transcend the dichotomy between self and other for a moment. Mindgasms spurt frothy nondual-understanding into your brain strong enough and ecstatic enough for you to make a meaningful, though subtle shift in your worldview, your bedrock understanding of reality. Bubbles exist in an interstitial state between material and immaterial, between visible and invisible, between frozen and supple, between static and dynamic…

If you read the previous two posts and you find yourself having a mental orgasm when you read today’s post, you’re doing it right.

Trey Anastasio Band at ACL Live 1.24.20. A wonderful example of dynamic vs. static patterns of quality.

Phaedrus thought that the story of the old Pueblo Indian, seen in this way, made deep and broad sense, and justified the enormous feeling of drama that it produced. After many months of thinking about it, he was left with a reward of two terms: Dynamic good and static good, which became the basic division of his emerging Metaphysics of Quality.

It certainly felt right. Not subject and object but static and Dynamic is the basic division of reality. When A. N. Whitehead wrote that 'mankind is driven forward by dim apprehensions of things too obscure for its existing language,' he was writing about Dynamic Quality. Dynamic Quality is the pre-intellectual cutting edge of reality, the source of all things, completely simple and always new. It was the moral force that had motivated the brujo in Zuni. It contains no pattern of fixed rewards and punishments. Its only perceived good is freedom and its only perceived evil is static quality itself - any pattern of one-sided fixed values that tries to contain and kill the ongoing free force of life.

Static quality, the moral force of the priests, emerges in the wake of Dynamic Quality. It is old and complex. It always contains a component of memory. Good is conformity to an established pattern of fixed values and value objects. Justice and law are identical. Static morality is full of heroes and villains, loves and hatreds, carrots and sticks. Its values don't change by themselves. Unless they are altered by Dynamic Quality they say the same thing year after year. Sometimes they say it more loudly, sometimes more softly, but the message is always the same.

During the next few months that Phaedrus reflected he began to transpose the static-Dynamic division out of the moral conflict of Zuni into other seemingly unrelated areas. The negative esthetic quality of the hot stove in the earlier example was now given some added meaning by a static-Dynamic division of Quality. When the person who sits on the stove first discovers his low-Quality situation, the front edge of his experience is Dynamic. He does not think, 'This stove is hot,' and then make a rational decision to get off. A 'dim perception of he knows not what' gets him off Dynamically. Later he generates static patterns of thought to explain the situation.

A subject-object metaphysics presumes that this kind of Dynamic action without thought is rare and ignores it when possible. But mystic learning goes in the opposite direction and tries to hold to the ongoing Dynamic edge of all experience, both positive and negative, even the Dynamic ongoing edge of thought itself. Phaedrus thought that of the two kinds of students, those who study only subject-object science and those who study only meditative mysticism, it would be the mystic students who would get off the stove first. The purpose of mystic meditation is not to remove oneself from experience but to bring one's self closer to it by eliminating stale, confusing, static, intellectual attachments of the past.

In a subject-object metaphysics morals and art are worlds apart, morals being concerned with the subject quality and art with object quality. But in the Metaphysics of Quality that division doesn't exist. They're the same. They both become much more intelligible when references to what is subjective and what is objective are completely thrown away and references to what is static and what is Dynamic are taken up instead.

He found an example within the field of music. He said, imagine that you walk down a street past, say, a car where someone has the radio on and it plays a tune you've never heard before but which is so fantastically good it just stops you in your tracks. You listen until it's done. Days later you remember exactly what that street looked like when you heard that music. You remember what was in the store window you stood in front of. You remember what the colors of the cars in the street were, where the clouds were in the sky above the buildings across the street, and it all comes back so vividly you wonder what song they were playing, and so you wait until you hear it again. If it's that good you'll hear it again because other people will have heard it too and have had the same feelings and that will make it popular.

One day it comes on the radio again and you get the same feeling again and you catch the name and you rush down the street to the record store and buy it and can hardly wait until you can get it home and play it.

You get home. You play it. It's really good. It doesn't quite transform the whole room into something different but it's really good. You play it again. Really good. You play it another time. Still good, but you're not so sure you want to play it again. But you play it again. It's OK but now you definitely don't want to play it again. You put it away.

The next day you play it again, and it's OK, but something is gone. You still like it and always will, you say. You play it again. Yeah, that's sure a good record. But you file it away and once in a while play it again for a friend and maybe months or years later bring it out as a memory of something you were once crazy about.

Now what has happened? You can say you've gotten tired of the song but what does that mean? Has the song lost its quality? If it has, why do you still say it's a good record? Either it's good or it's not good. If it's good why don't you play it? If it's not good why do you tell your friend it's good?

If you think about this question long enough you will come to see that the same kind of division between Dynamic Quality and static quality that exists in the field of morals also exists in the field of art. The first good, that made you want to buy the record, was Dynamic Quality. Dynamic Quality comes as a sort of surprise. What the record did was weaken for a moment your existing static patterns in such a way that the Dynamic Quality all around you shone through. It was free, without static forms. The second good, the kind that made you want to recommend it to a friend, even when you had lost your own enthusiasm for it, is static quality. Static quality is what you normally expect.

- ‘Lila’ by Robert Pirsig