ZenAndMotorcycleMaintenance
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. (Robert M. Pirsig)
- Average overall, entertaining.
- "Plans are deliberately indefinite, more to travel than arrive"
- Caring about what your doing is considered either unimportant or taken for granted.
- Laws of science contain no matter and have no energy and therefore only exist in people minds
- We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful the world.
- Sometimes just the act of writing down the problems straightens out your head as to what they really are.
As long as the need for food, clothing and shelter is dominant they will continue to work. But now that for huge masses of people there needs no longer overwhelm everything else, the whole structure of reason is no longer adequate. It begins to be seen for what it really is – emotionally hollow, aesthetically meaningless and spiritually empty.
- So hard when contemplated in advance, and so easy when you do it.
- If we start with the notion that all knowledge must come to us via sense data, one must ask, from what sense data is our knowledge of causation received?
- If one accepts the notion that all knowledge comes via senses, Hume says then one must conclude that both "Nature" and "Nature's Laws" are creations of our own imagination.
- This idea (that the entire world is in ones own mind) could be dismissed as absurd if Hume has just thrown it out for speculation, but he was making an air tight case.
- It was necessary to throw out Hume's conclusion, unfortunately he had arrived at them in such a way that it was seemingly impossible to throw them out without abandoning empirical reason itself.
- Kant was trying to save scientific empiricism from the consequences of its own self-devouring logic. "Although all knowledge begins with experience, it doesn't follow that it arises out of experience". As a result of this difference, Kant skirts right around the abyss of solipsism that Hume's path leads to and proceeds on an entirely different path.
- You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in.
Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and with out desire.
To live only for some future goal is shallow. Its the sides of the mountain that sustains life, not the top.
- Metaphysics is good if it improves everyday life, otherwise forget it.
- What guarantees the objectivity of this world is that this world is common to us with other thinking beings.
The cutting edge of this instant right here and now is always nothing less that the totality of everything there is.
Peace of mind produces right values, right values produces right thoughts, right thoughts reproduces right actions and right actions produces right work.
- There's an aesthetic to doing things that are unfamiliar and another aesthetic to doing things that are familiar.
- When a Sheppard goes to kill a wolf and takes his dog to see the sport, he should take care to avoid mistakes. The dog has a certain relationship to the wolf the Shepard may have forgotten.