--- > The truth knocks on the door and you say, “Go away, I’m looking for the truth,” and so it goes away. Puzzling. - [Location 150](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=150) --- > We’re in such a hurry most of the time we never get much chance to talk. The result is a kind of endless day-to-day shallowness, a monotony that leaves a person wondering years later where all the time went and sorry that it’s all gone. Now that we do have some time, and know it, I would like to use the time to talk in some depth about things that seem important. - [Location 179](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=179) --- > I would like, instead, to be concerned with the question “What is best?,” a question which cuts deeply rather than broadly, a question whose answers tend to move the silt downstream. - [Location 189](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=189) --- > It seems natural and normal to me to make use of the small tool kits and instruction booklets supplied with each machine, and keep it tuned and adjusted myself. John demurs. He prefers to let a competent mechanic take care of these things so that they are done right. - [Location 231](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=231) --- > You always suppress momentary anger at something you deeply and permanently hate. - [Location 314](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=314) --- > You go through a heavy industrial area of a large city and there it all is, the technology. ... What it’s for you don’t know, and why it’s there, there’s no one to tell, and so all you can feel is alienated, estranged, as though you didn’t belong there. Who owns and understands this doesn’t want you around. All this technology has somehow made you a stranger in your own land. - [Location 330](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=330) --- > the final feeling is hostile, and I think that’s ultimately what’s involved with this otherwise unexplainable attitude of John and Sylvia. Anything to do with valves and shafts and wrenches is a part of that dehumanized world, and they would rather not think about it. They don’t want to get into it. - [Location 338](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=338) --- > But one does not convert individuals into mass people with the simple coining of a mass term. John and Sylvia are not mass people and neither are most of the others going their way. It is against being a mass person that they seem to be revolting. And they feel that technology has got a lot to do with the forces that are trying to turn them into mass people and they don’t like it. - [Location 348](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=348) --- > The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha—which is to demean oneself. - [Location 354](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=354) --- > I argued that physical discomfort is important only when the mood is wrong. Then you fasten on to whatever thing is uncomfortable and call that the cause. But if the mood is right, then physical discomfort doesn’t mean much. - [Location 377](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=377) --- > She seems so depressed sometimes by the monotony and boredom of her city life, I thought maybe in this endless grass and wind she would see a thing that sometimes comes when monotony and boredom are accepted. It’s here, but I have no names for it. - [Location 386](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=386) --- > In a seizure, the pistons expand from too much heat, become too big for the walls of the cylinders, seize them, melt to them sometimes, and lock the engine and rear wheel and start the whole cycle into a skid. - [Location 444](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=444) --- > Why did they butcher it so? These were not people running away from technology, like John and Sylvia. These were the technologists themselves. They sat down to do a job and they performed it like chimpanzees. Nothing personal in it. There was no obvious reason for it. And I tried to think back into that shop, that nightmare place, to try to remember anything that could have been the cause. ... But the biggest clue seemed to be their expressions. They were hard to explain. Good-natured, friendly, easygoing—and uninvolved. They were like spectators. - [Location 478](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=478) --- > While at work I was thinking about this same lack of care in the digital computer manuals I was editing. ... These were spectator manuals. It was built into the format of them. Implicit in every line is the idea that “Here is the machine, isolated in time and in space from everything else in the universe. It has no relationship to you, you have no relationship to it, other than to turn certain switches, maintain voltage levels, check for error conditions…” and so on. That’s it. - [Location 495](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=495) --- > Caring about what you are doing is considered either unimportant or taken for granted. - [Location 503](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=503) --- > When you want to hurry something, that means you no longer care about it and want to get on to other things. - [Location 506](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=506) --- > “The problem, the contradiction the scientists are stuck with, is that of mind. Mind has no matter or energy but they can’t escape its predominance over everything they do. Logic exists in the mind. Numbers exist only in the mind. I don’t get upset when scientists say that ghosts exist in the mind. It’s that only that gets me. Science is only in your mind too, it’s just that that doesn’t make it bad. Or ghosts either.” - [Location 631](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=631) --- > We see what we see because these ghosts show it to us, ghosts of Moses and Christ and the Buddha, and Plato, and Descartes, and Rousseau and Jefferson and Lincoln, on and on and on. Isaac Newton is a very good ghost. One of the best. Your common sense is nothing more than the voices of thousands and thousands of these ghosts from the past. Ghosts and more ghosts. Ghosts trying to find their place among the living.” - [Location 638](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=638) --- > “Chris,” I say, “I knew a fellow once who spent all his whole life doing nothing but hunting for a ghost, and it was just a waste of time. So go to sleep.” I realize my mistake too late. “Did he find him?” “Yes, he found him, Chris.” I keep wishing Chris would just listen to the wind and not ask questions. “What did he do then?” “He thrashed him good.” “Then what?” “Then he became a ghost himself.” Somehow I had the thought this was going to put Chris to sleep, but it’s not and it’s just waking me up. “What is his name?” “No one you know.” “But what is it?” ... “His name, Chris, since it doesn’t matter, is Phaedrus. It’s not a name you know.” - [Location 657](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=657) --- > “Dad?” “This had better be the last question, Chris, or I’m going to become angry.” “I was just going to say you sure don’t talk like anyone else.” “Yes, Chris, I know that,” I say. “It’s a problem. Now go to sleep.” - [Location 671](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=671) --- > Each machine has its own, unique personality which probably could be defined as the intuitive sum total of everything you know and feel about it. This personality constantly changes, usually for the worse, but sometimes surprisingly for the better, and it is this personality that is the real object of motorcycle maintenance. The new ones start out as good-looking strangers and, depending on how they are treated, degenerate rapidly into bad-acting grouches or even cripples, or else turn into healthy, good-natured, long-lasting friends. - [Location 778](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=778) --- > So we move down the empty road. I don’t want to own these prairies, or photograph them, or change them, or even stop or even keep going. We are just moving down the empty road. - [Location 857](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=857) --- > I tried to get John interested in that sound once but it was hopeless. ... That didn’t work. He didn’t really see what was going on and was not interested enough to find out. He isn’t so interested in what things mean as in what they are. - [Location 899](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=899) --- > I guess I forgot to mention John is a musician, a drummer, who works with groups all over town and makes a pretty fair income from it. I suppose he just thinks about everything the way he thinks about drumming—which is to say he doesn’t really think about it at all. He just does it. Is with it. - [Location 947](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=947) --- > Sylvia says, “Do you suppose he really has stomach pains?” “Yes,” I say, somewhat dogmatically. ... “He’s been examined a half-dozen times for it. Once it was so bad we thought it was appendicitis…. ... where that was I’ll never remember, but they found nothing.” “Nothing?” “No. But it happened again on other occasions too.” “Don’t they have any idea?” Sylvia asks. “This spring they diagnosed it as the beginning symptoms of mental illness.” - [Location 1053](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=1053) --- > A few words of consolation might have helped there. He was trying to be friendly. But the words weren’t forthcoming for some reason. Consoling words are more for strangers, for hospitals, not kin. Little emotional Band-Aids like that aren’t what he needs or what’s sought…. I don’t know what he needs, or what’s sought. - [Location 1117](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=1117) --- > A classical understanding sees the world primarily as underlying form itself. A romantic understanding sees it primarily in terms of immediate appearance. - [Location 1197](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=1197) --- > The classic style is straightforward, unadorned, unemotional, economical and carefully proportioned. Its purpose is not to inspire emotionally, but to bring order out of chaos and make the unknown known. It is not an esthetically free and natural style. It is esthetically restrained. Everything is under control. Its value is measured in terms of the skill with which this control is maintained. - [Location 1210](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=1210) --- > Once we have the handful of sand, the world of which we are conscious, a process of discrimination goes to work on it. ... we can form the sand into separate piles on the basis of this similarity and dissimilarity. ... Classical understanding is concerned with the piles and the basis for sorting and interrelating them. Romantic understanding is directed toward the handful of sand before the sorting begins. - [Location 1351](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=1351) --- > What has become an urgent necessity is a way of looking at the world that does violence to neither of these two kinds of understanding and unites them into one. Such an understanding will not reject sand-sorting or contemplation of unsorted sand for its own sake. Such an understanding will instead seek to direct attention to the endless landscape from which the sand is taken. - [Location 1361](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=1361) --- > When analytic thought, the knife, is applied to experience, something is always killed in the process. That is fairly well understood, at least in the arts. ... But what is less noticed in the arts—something is always created too. - [Location 1374](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=1374) --- > He was insane. And when you look directly at an insane man all you see is a reflection of your own knowledge that he’s insane, which is not to see him at all. - [Location 1386](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=1386) --- > Phaedrus spent his entire life pursuing a ghost. ... The ghost he pursued was the ghost that underlies all of technology, all of modern science, all of Western thought. It was the ghost of rationality itself. - [Location 1391](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=1391) --- > But who was the old personality whom they had known and presumed I was a continuation of? This was my first inkling of the existence of Phaedrus, many years ago. - [Location 1495](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=1495) --- > These tools for example—this wrench—has a certain romantic beauty to it, but its purpose is always purely classical. It’s designed to change the underlying form of the machine. - [Location 1570](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=1570) --- > To speak of certain government and establishment institutions as “the system” is to speak correctly, since these organizations are founded upon the same structural conceptual relationships as a motorcycle. ... But to tear down a factory or to revolt against a government or to avoid repair of a motorcycle because it is a system is to attack effects rather than causes; and as long as the attack is upon effects only, no change is possible. ... If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government. There’s so much talk about the system. And so little understanding. - [Location 1619](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=1619) - _Tags_: `favorite` --- > Actually I’ve never seen a cycle-maintenance problem complex enough really to require full-scale formal scientific method. Repair problems are not that hard. When I think of formal scientific method an image sometimes comes to mind of an enormous juggernaut, a huge bulldozer—slow, tedious, lumbering, laborious, but invincible. It takes twice as long, five times as long, maybe a dozen times as long as informal mechanic’s techniques, but you know in the end you’re going to get it. - [Location 1718](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=1718) - _Note_: Cannot help but think of programming's formal methods --- > The real purpose of scientific method is to make sure Nature hasn’t misled you into thinking you know something you don’t actually know. - [Location 1734](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=1734) --- > A person is sitting somewhere, minding his own business, and suddenly—flash!—he understands something he didn’t understand before. Until it’s tested the hypothesis isn’t truth. For the tests aren’t its source. Its source is somewhere else. - [Location 1820](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=1820) --- > It looked as though the time spans of scientific truths are an inverse function of the intensity of scientific effort. ... What shortens the life-span of the existing truth is the volume of hypotheses offered to replace it; the more the hypotheses, the shorter the time span of the truth. And what seems to be causing the number of hypotheses to grow in recent decades seems to be nothing other than scientific method itself. The more you look, the more you see. - [Location 1856](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=1856) --- > The purpose of scientific method is to select a single truth from among many hypothetical truths. That, more than anything else, is what science is all about. But historically science has done exactly the opposite. Through multiplication upon multiplication of facts, information, theories and hypotheses, it is science itself that is leading mankind from single absolute truths to multiple, indeterminate, relative ones. - [Location 1867](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=1867) --- > I feel happy to be here, and still a little sad to be here too. Sometimes it’s a little better to travel than to arrive. - [Location 1905](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=1905) --- > Science cannot study scientific method without getting into a bootstrap problem that destroys the validity of its answers. The questions he’d asked were at a higher level than science goes. - [Location 2009](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=2009) --- > The scientific method of experimentation is carefully controlled empiricism. Common sense today is empiricism, since an overwhelming majority would agree with Hume, even though in other cultures and other times a majority might have differed. - [Location 2103](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=2103) --- > From what sense data is our knowledge of causation received? In other words, what is the scientific empirical basis of causation itself? Hume’s answer is “None.” There’s no evidence for causation in our sensations. Like substance, it’s just something we imagine when one thing repeatedly follows another. - [Location 2112](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=2112) --- > Kant says there are aspects of reality which are not supplied immediately by the senses. These he calls a priori. An example of a priori knowledge is “time.” You don’t see time. Neither do you hear it, smell it, taste it or touch it. It isn’t present in the sense data as they are received. Time is what Kant calls an “intuition,” which the mind must supply as it receives the sense data. The same is true of space. ... What we think of as reality is a continuous synthesis of elements from a fixed hierarchy of a priori concepts and the ever changing data of the senses. ... But I’m satisfied with this because I’ve faith that if I need the things that money enables, the bank will provide the means, through their checking system, of getting it. Similarly, even though my sense data have never brought up anything that could be called “substance” I’m satisfied that there’s a capability within the sense data of achieving the things that substance is supposed to do, and that the sense data will continue to match the a priori motorcycle of my mind. - [Location 2128](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=2128) --- > We sense objects in a certain way because of our application of a priori intuitions such as space and time - [Location 2134](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=2134) --- > Our reason, which is supposed to make things more intelligible, seems to be making them less intelligible, and when reason thus defeats its own purpose something has to be changed in the structure of our reason itself. - [Location 2151](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=2151) --- > The motorcycle that I believe in an a priori way to be outside of myself is like the money I believe I have in the bank. If I were to go down to the bank and ask to see my money they would look at me a little peculiarly. They don’t have “my money” in any little drawer that they can pull open to show me. - [Location 2171](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=2171) --- > If you presume that the a priori concepts in our heads are independent of what we see and actually screen what we see, this means that you are taking the old Aristotelian concept of scientific man as a passive observer, a “blank tablet,” and truly turning this concept inside out. Kant and his millions of followers have maintained that as a result of this inversion you get a much more satisfying understanding of how we know things. - [Location 2188](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=2188) --- > suppose if I were a novelist rather than a Chautauqua orator I’d try to “develop the characters” of John and Sylvia and Chris with action-packed scenes that would also reveal “inner meanings” of Zen and maybe Art and maybe even Motorcycle Maintenance. That would be quite a novel, but for some reason I don’t feel quite up to it. They’re friends, not characters, ... not really relevant to the Chautauqua. That’s the way it should be with friends. - [Location 2208](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=2208) --- > doctrinal differences among Hinduism and Buddhism and Taoism are not anywhere near as important as doctrinal differences among Christianity and Islam and Judaism. Holy wars are not fought over them because verbalized statements about reality are never presumed to be reality itself. - [Location 2305](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=2305) --- > In all of the Oriental religions great value is placed on the Sanskrit doctrine of Tat tvam asi, “Thou art that,” which asserts that everything you think you are and everything you think you perceive are undivided. To realize fully this lack of division is to become enlightened. - [Location 2308](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=2308) --- > The illusion of separation of subject from object is best removed by the elimination of physical activity, mental activity and emotional activity. There are many disciplines for this. One of the most important is the Sanskrit dhyana, mispronounced in Chinese as “Chan” and again mispronounced in Japanese as “Zen.” - [Location 2311](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=2311) --- > The school was what could euphemistically be called a “teaching college.” At a teaching college you teach and you teach and you teach with no time for research, no time for contemplation, no time for participation in outside affairs. Just teach and teach and teach until your mind grows dull and your creativity vanishes and you become an automaton saying the same dull things over and over to endless waves of innocent students who cannot understand why you are so dull, lose respect and fan this disrespect out into the community. The reason you teach and you teach and you teach is that this is a very clever way of running a college on the cheap while giving a false appearance of genuine education. - [Location 2362](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=2362) --- > He was regarded as something of a trouble-maker but was never censured for it in any proportion to the amount of trouble he made. What saved him from the wrath of everyone around him was partly an unwillingness to give any support to the enemies of the college, but also partly a begrudging understanding that all of his troublemaking was ultimately motivated by a mandate they were never free from themselves: the mandate to speak the rational truth. - [Location 2444](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=2444) --- > You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it’s going to rise tomorrow. When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kinds of dogmas or goals, it’s always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt. - [Location 2455](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=2455) --- > That was why his Church of Reason lecture was so carefully prepared. He was telling them you have to have faith in reason because there isn’t anything else. But it was a faith he didn’t have himself. - [Location 2465](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=2465) --- > “Peace of mind isn’t at all superficial, really,” I expound. “It’s the whole thing. That which produces it is good maintenance; that which disturbs it is poor maintenance. What we call workability of the machine is just an objectification of this peace of mind. The ultimate test’s always your own serenity. If you don’t have this when you start and maintain it while you’re working you’re likely to build your personal problems right into the machine itself.” - [Location 2673](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=2673) - _Tags_: `favorite` --- > “It’s an unconventional concept,” I say, “but conventional reason bears it out. The material object of observation, the bicycle or rotisserie, can’t be right or wrong. ... The test of the machine is the satisfaction it gives you. There isn’t any other test. If the machine produces tranquillity it’s right. If it disturbs you it’s wrong until either the machine or your mind is changed. The test of the machine’s always your own mind. There isn’t any other test.” - [Location 2677](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=2677) --- > “What if the machine is wrong and I feel peaceful about it?” ... “That’s self-contradictory. If you really don’t care you aren’t going to know it’s wrong. The thought’ll never occur to you. The act of pronouncing it wrong’s a form of caring.” ... “What’s more common is that you feel unpeaceful even if it’s right, and I think that’s the actual case here. In this case, if you’re worried, it isn’t right. That means it isn’t checked out thoroughly enough. ... You haven’t completed the ultimate requirement of achieving peace of mind, because you feel these instructions were too complicated and you may not have understood them correctly.” - [Location 2682](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=2682) - _Tags_: `favorite` --- > Technology presumes there’s just one right way to do things and there never is. And when you presume there’s just one right way to do things, of course the instructions begin and end exclusively with the rotisserie. But if you have to choose among an infinite number of ways to put it together then the relation of the machine to you, and the relation of the machine and you to the rest of the world, has to be considered, because the selection from among many choices, the art of the work is just as dependent upon your own mind and spirit as it is upon the material of the machine. - [Location 2702](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=2702) --- > look at a novice workman or a bad workman and compare his expression with that of a craftsman whose work you know is excellent and you’ll see the difference. The craftsman isn’t ever following a single line of instruction. He’s making decisions as he goes along. For that reason he’ll be absorbed and attentive to what he’s doing even though he doesn’t deliberately contrive this. His motions and the machine are in a kind of harmony. - [Location 2708](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=2708) --- > “This divorce of art from technology is completely unnatural. It’s just that it’s gone on so long you have to be an archeologist to find out where the two separated. Rotisserie assembly is actually a long-lost branch of sculpture, so divorced from its roots by centuries of intellectual wrong turns that just to associate the two sounds ludicrous.” - [Location 2714](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=2714) --- > “You look at where you’re going and where you are and it never makes sense, but then you look back at where you’ve been and a pattern seems to emerge. And if you project forward from that pattern, then sometimes you can come up with something. - [Location 2734](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=2734) --- > it’s quite a bootstrap operation. It’s analogous to the kind of hang-up Sir Isaac Newton had when he wanted to solve problems of instantaneous rates of change. It was unreasonable in his time to think of anything changing within a zero amount of time. Yet it’s almost necessary mathematically to work with other zero quantities, such as points in space and time that no one thought were unreasonable at all, although there was no real difference. So what Newton did was say, in effect, ‘We’re going to presume there’s such a thing as instantaneous change, and see if we can find ways of determining what it is in various applications.’ The result of this presumption is the branch of mathematics known as the calculus, which every engineer uses today. Newton invented a new form of reason. - [Location 2752](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=2752) --- > “I’m not sure what you mean by classical reason.” “Analytic reason, dialectic reason. Reason which at the University is sometimes considered to be the whole of understanding. You’ve never had to understand it really. It’s always been completely bankrupt with regard to abstract art. Nonrepresentative art is one of the root experiences I’m talking about. Some people still condemn it because it doesn’t make ‘sense.’ But what’s really wrong is not the art but the ‘sense,’ the classical reason, which can’t grasp it. People keep looking for branch extensions of reason that will cover art’s more recent occurrences, but the answers aren’t in the branches, they’re at the roots.” - [Location 2783](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=2783) --- > “Where are you teaching?” she finally asks. “I’m not teaching anymore,” I say. “I’ve stopped.” She looks incredulous. “You’ve stopped?” She frowns and looks at me again, as if to verify that she is really talking to the right person. “You can’t do that.” “Yes, you can.” She shakes her head in disbelief. “Not you!” - [Location 2926](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=2926) --- > Another thing that depressed him was prescriptive rhetoric, which supposedly had been done away with but was still around. This was the old slap-on-the-fingers-if-your-modifiers-were-caught-dangling stuff. Correct spelling, correct punctuation, correct grammar. Hundreds of itsy-bitsy rules for itsy-bitsy people. No one could remember all that stuff and concentrate on what he was trying to write about. It was all table manners, not derived from any sense of kindness or decency or humanity, but originally from an egotistic desire to look like gentlemen and ladies. - [Location 2989](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=2989) --- > Quality…you know what it is, yet you don’t know what it is. But that’s self-contradictory. But some things are better than others, that is, they have more quality. But when you try to say what the quality is, apart from the things that have it, it all goes poof! There’s nothing to talk about. But if you can’t say what Quality is, how do you know what it is, or how do you know that it even exists? If no one knows what it is, then for all practical purposes it doesn’t exist at all. But for all practical purposes it really does exist. - [Location 3012](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=3012) --- > To doubt the literal meaning of the words of Jesus or Moses incurs hostility from most people, but it’s just a fact that if Jesus or Moses were to appear today, unidentified, with the same message he spoke many years ago, his mental stability would be challenged. This isn’t because what Jesus or Moses said was untrue or because modern society is in error but simply because the route they chose to reveal to others has lost relevance and comprehensibility. - [Location 3045](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=3045) --- > Phaedrus’ second metaphysical phase was a total disaster. Before the electrodes were attached to his head he’d lost everything tangible: money, property, children; even his rights as a citizen had been taken away from him by order of the court. All he had left was his one crazy lone dream of Quality, a map of a route across the mountain, for which he had sacrificed everything. Then, after the electrodes were attached, he lost that. - [Location 3051](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=3051) --- > Chris doesn’t know about this, and it would hurt his YMCA-camp sense of adventure to tell him, but after enough trips into the high country, the YMCA desire for adventure diminishes and the more substantial benefits of cutting down risks appear. This country can be dangerous. You take one bad step in a million, sprain an ankle, and then you find out how far from civilization you really are. - [Location 3237](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=3237) --- > Grades really cover up failure to teach. A bad instructor can go through an entire quarter leaving absolutely nothing memorable in the minds of his class, curve out the scores on an irrelevant test, and leave the impression that some have learned and some have not. - [Location 3247](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=3247) --- > The reality of your own nature should determine the speed. If you become restless, speed up. If you become winded, slow down. You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion. Then, when you’re no longer thinking ahead, each footstep isn’t just a means to an end but a unique event in itself. This leaf has jagged edges. This rock looks loose. From this place the snow is less visible, even though closer. These are things you should notice anyway. To live only for some future goal is shallow. It’s the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top. Here’s where things grow. - [Location 3312](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=3312) --- > If you can’t define something you have no formal rational way of knowing that it exists. Neither can you really tell anyone else what it is. There is, in fact, no formal difference between inability to define and stupidity. - [Location 3350](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=3350) --- > Any effort that has self-glorification as its final endpoint is bound to end in disaster. - [Location 3425](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=3425) --- > You take your analytic knife, put the point directly on the term Quality and just tap, not hard, gently, and the whole world splits, cleaves, right in two—hip and square, classic and romantic, technological and humanistic—and the split is clean. There’s no mess. No slop. No little items that could be one way or the other. Not just a skilled break but a very lucky break. - [Location 3551](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=3551) --- > I’m making a big thing out of all this, these classical-romantic differences, but Phaedrus didn’t. He wasn’t really interested in any kind of fusion of differences between these two worlds. He was after something else—his ghost. In the pursuit of this ghost he went on to wider meanings of Quality which drew him further and further to his end. I differ from him in that I’ve no intention of going on to that end. He just passed through this territory and opened it up. I intend to stay and cultivate it and see if I can get something to grow. - [Location 3630](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=3630) --- > He looks at me strangely. “You kept me awake.” “Me?” “Talking.” “In my sleep, you mean.” “No, about the mountain!” Something is odd here. “I don’t know anything about a mountain, Chris.” “Well, you talked all night about it. You said at the top of the mountain we’d see everything. You said you were going to meet me there.” I think he’s been dreaming. “How could I meet you there when I’m already with you?” “I don’t know. You said it.” He looks upset. - [Location 3712](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=3712) --- > Little children were trained not to do “just what they liked” but…but what?…Of course! What others liked. And which others? Parents, teachers, supervisors, policemen, judges, officials, kings, dictators. All authorities. When you are trained to despise “just what you like” then, of course, you become a much more obedient servant of others—a good slave. When you learn not to do “just what you like” then the System loves you. - [Location 3799](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=3799) --- > The world now, according to Phaedrus, was composed of three things: mind, matter, and Quality. - [Location 3890](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=3890) --- > subjective pleasure wasn’t what he meant by Quality either. Quality decreases subjectivity. Quality takes you out of yourself, makes you aware of the world around you. Quality is opposed to subjectivity. - [Location 3902](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=3902) --- > eventually he saw that Quality couldn’t be independently related with either the subject or the object but could be found only in the relationship of the two with each other. It is the point at which subject and object meet. That sounded warm. Quality is not a thing. It is an event. Warmer. It is the event at which the subject becomes aware of the object. And because without objects there can be no subject—because the objects create the subject’s awareness of himself—Quality is the event at which awareness of both subjects and objects is made possible. Hot. Now he knew it was coming. This means Quality is not just the result of a collision between subject and object. The very existence of subject and object themselves is deduced from the Quality event. The Quality event is the cause of the subjects and objects, which are then mistakenly presumed to be the cause of the Quality! - [Location 3905](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=3905) --- > People say strange things in their sleep, but why would I tell him I’ll meet him? And why would he think I was awake? There’s something really wrong there that produces a very bad quality feeling, but I don’t know what it is. First you get the feeling, then you figure out why. - [Location 3947](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=3947) --- > The past exists only in our memories, the future only in our plans. The present is our only reality. The tree that you are aware of intellectually, because of that small time lag, is always in the past and therefore is always unreal. Any intellectually conceived object is always in the past and therefore unreal. Reality is always the moment of vision before the intellectualization takes place. There is no other reality. This preintellectual reality is what Phaedrus felt he had properly identified as Quality. - [Location 4049](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=4049) --- > If you conceived the past and future to be all contained in the present, why, that was groovy, the present was what you lived for. And if your motorcycle is working, why worry about it? But if you consider the present to be merely an instant between the past and the future, just a passing moment, then to neglect the past and future for the present is bad Quality indeed. - [Location 4070](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=4070) --- > He began to see that he had shifted away from his original stand. He was no longer talking about a metaphysical trinity but an absolute monism. Quality was the source and substance of everything. - [Location 4119](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=4119) --- > He read on. Line after line. Page after page. Not a discrepancy. What he had been talking about all the time as Quality was here the Tao, the great central generating force of all religions, Oriental and Occidental, past and present, all knowledge, everything. Then his mind’s eye looked up and caught his own image and realized where he was and what he was seeing and…I don’t know what really happened…but now the slippage that Phaedrus had felt earlier, the internal parting of his mind, suddenly gathered momentum, as do the rocks at the top of a mountain. Before he could stop it, the sudden accumulated mass of awareness began to grow and grow into an avalanche of thought and awareness out of control; with each additional growth of the downward tearing mass loosening hundreds of times its volume, and then that mass uprooting hundreds of times its volume more, and then hundreds of times that; on and on, wider and broader; until there was nothing left to stand. No more anything. It all gave way from under him. - [Location 4167](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=4167) --- > One thing about pioneers that you don’t hear mentioned is that they are invariably, by their nature, mess-makers. - [Location 4192](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=4192) --- > Poincaré concluded that the axioms of geometry are conventions, our choice among all possible conventions is guided by experimental facts, but it remains free and is limited only by the necessity of avoiding all contradiction. - [Location 4320](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=4320) --- > Then, having identified the nature of geometric axioms, he turned to the question, Is Euclidian geometry true or is Riemann geometry true? He [Poincaré] answered, The question has no meaning. - [Location 4324](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=4324) - _Note_: Talking about Poincare --- > Poincaré laid down some rules: There is a hierarchy of facts. The more general a fact, the more precious it is. Those which serve many times are better than those which have little chance of coming up again. ... Which facts are likely to reappear? The simple facts. How to recognize them? Choose those that seem simple. Either this simplicity is real or the complex elements are indistinguishable. - [Location 4342](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=4342) --- > It’s proper to begin with the regular facts, but after a rule is established beyond all doubt, the facts in conformity with it become dull because they no longer teach us anything new. Then it’s the exception that becomes important. We seek not resemblances but differences, choose the most accentuated differences because they’re the most striking and also the most instructive. - [Location 4354](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=4354) --- > The subliminal self, Poincaré said, looks at a large number of solutions to a problem, but only the interesting ones break into the domain of consciousness. Mathematical solutions are selected by the subliminal self on the basis of “mathematical beauty,” of the harmony of numbers and forms, of geometric elegance. ... It is the quest of this special classic beauty, the sense of harmony of the cosmos, which makes us choose the facts most fitting to contribute to this harmony. It is not the facts but the relation of things that results in the universal harmony that is the sole objective reality. - [Location 4387](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=4387) --- > We know that these reasonings do not come from us and at the same time we recognize in them, because of their harmony, the work of reasonable beings like ourselves. - [Location 4398](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=4398) --- > we know from Phaedrus’ metaphysics that the harmony Poincaré talked about is not subjective. It is the source of subjects and objects and exists in an anterior relationship to them. It is not capricious, it is the force that opposes capriciousness; the ordering principle of all scientific and mathematical thought which destroys capriciousness, and without which no scientific thought can proceed. - [Location 4416](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=4416) --- > “Dad?” “What?” A small bird rises from a tree in front of us. “What should I be when I grow up?” The bird disappears over a far ridge. I don’t know what to say. “Honest,” I finally say. “I mean what kind of a job?” “Any kind.” - [Location 4466](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=4466) --- > if the problem of technological hopelessness is caused by absence of care, both by technologists and antitechnologists; and if care and Quality are external and internal aspects of the same thing, then it follows logically that what really causes technological hopelessness is absence of the perception of Quality in technology by both technologists and antitechnologists. - [Location 4524](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=4524) --- > Quality is the Buddha. Quality is scientific reality. Quality is the goal of Art. - [Location 4535](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=4535) --- > I tell him getting stuck is the commonest trouble of all. Usually, I say, your mind gets stuck when you’re trying to do too many things at once. What you have to do is try not to force words to come. That just gets you more stuck. What you have to do now is separate out the things and do them one at a time. You’re trying to think of what to say and what to say first at the same time and that’s too hard. So separate them out. - [Location 4557](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=4557) --- > You’re stuck. Stopped. Terminated. ... What you’re up against is the great unknown, the void of all Western thought. You need some ideas, some hypotheses. Traditional scientific method, unfortunately, has never quite gotten around to say exactly where to pick up more of these hypotheses. Traditional scientific method has always been at the very best, 20–20 hindsight. It’s good for seeing where you’ve been. ... Creativity, originality, inventiveness, intuition, imagination—“unstuckness,” in other words—are completely outside its domain. - [Location 4587](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=4587) --- > As Poincaré would have said, there are an infinite number of facts about the motorcycle, and the right ones don’t just dance up and introduce themselves. The right facts, the ones we really need, are not only passive, they are damned elusive, and we’re not going to just sit back and “observe” them. We’re going to have to be in there looking for them or we’re going to be here a long time. - [Location 4621](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=4621) --- > The difference between a good mechanic and a bad one, like the difference between a good mathematician and a bad one, is precisely this ability to select the good facts from the bad ones on the basis of quality. He has to care! This is an ability about which formal traditional scientific method has nothing to say. - [Location 4625](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=4625) --- > In my mind now is an image of a huge, long railroad train, one of those 120-boxcar jobs ... I want to call this railroad train “knowledge” and subdivide it into two parts: Classic Knowledge and Romantic Knowledge. In terms of the analogy, Classic Knowledge, the knowledge taught by the Church of Reason, is the engine and all the boxcars. All of them and everything that’s in them. If you subdivide the train into parts you will find no Romantic Knowledge anywhere. ... Romantic Quality, in terms of this analogy, isn’t any “part” of the train. It’s the leading edge of the engine, a two-dimensional surface of no real significance unless you understand that the train isn’t a static entity at all. A train really isn’t a train if it can’t go anywhere. ... The real train of knowledge isn’t a static entity that can be stopped and subdivided. It’s always going somewhere. On a track called Quality. - [Location 4641](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=4641) --- > The past cannot remember the past. The future can’t generate the future. The cutting edge of this instant right here and now is always nothing less than the totality of everything there is. - [Location 4660](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=4660) --- > If you want to build a factory, or fix a motorcycle, or set a nation right without getting stuck, then classical, structured, dualistic subject-object knowledge, although necessary, isn’t enough. You have to have some feeling for the quality of the work. You have to have a sense of what’s good. That is what carries you forward. This sense isn’t just something you’re born with, although you are born with it. It’s also something you can develop. It’s not just “intuition,” not just unexplainable “skill” or “talent.” It’s the direct result of contact with basic reality, Quality, which dualistic reason has in the past tended to conceal. - [Location 4670](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=4670) --- > Stuckness shouldn’t be avoided. It’s the psychic predecessor of all real understanding. An egoless acceptance of stuckness is a key to an understanding of all Quality, in mechanical work as in other endeavors. It’s this understanding of Quality as revealed by stuckness which so often makes self-taught mechanics so superior to institute-trained men who have learned how to handle everything except a new situation. - [Location 4702](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=4702) --- > There’s no predicting what’s on that Quality track. The solutions all are simple—after you have arrived at them. But they’re simple only when you know already what they are. - [Location 4725](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=4725) --- > We keep passing unseen through little moments of other people’s lives. - [Location 4741](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=4741) --- > Quality, or its absence, doesn’t reside in either the subject or the object. The real ugliness lies in the relationship between the people who produce the technology and the things they produce, which results in a similar relationship between the people who use the technology and the things they use. - [Location 4768](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=4768) --- > At the moment of pure quality, subject and object are identical. This is the tat tvam asi truth of the Upanishads, but it’s also reflected in modern street argot. “Getting with it,” “digging it,” “grooving on it” are all slang reflections of this identity. - [Location 4772](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=4772) --- > technology is a fusion of nature and the human spirit into a new kind of creation that transcends both. When this transcendence occurs in such events as the first airplane flight across the ocean or the first footstep on the moon, a kind of public recognition of the transcendent nature of technology occurs. But this transcendence should also occur at the individual level, on a personal basis, in one’s own life, in a less dramatic way. - [Location 4782](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=4782) --- > In each case there’s a beautiful way of doing it and an ugly way of doing it, and in arriving at the high-quality, beautiful way of doing it, both an ability to see what “looks good” and an ability to understand the underlying methods to arrive at that “good” are needed. Both classic and romantic understandings of Quality must be combined. - [Location 4790](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=4790) --- > We have artists with no scientific knowledge and scientists with no artistic knowledge and both with no spiritual sense of gravity at all, and the result is not just bad, it is ghastly. The time for real reunification of art and technology is really long overdue. - [Location 4830](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=4830) --- > The way to see what looks good and understand the reasons it looks good, and to be at one with this goodness as the work proceeds, is to cultivate an inner quietness, a peace of mind so that goodness can shine through. - [Location 4839](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=4839) --- > When one isn’t dominated by feelings of separateness from what he’s working on, then one can be said to “care” about what he’s doing. That is what caring really is, a feeling of identification with what one’s doing. When one has this feeling then he also sees the inverse side of caring, Quality itself. - [Location 4873](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=4873) --- > Other people can talk about how to expand the destiny of mankind. I just want to talk about how to fix a motorcycle. I think that what I have to say has more lasting value. - [Location 4885](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=4885) --- > Of the value traps, the most widespread and pernicious is value rigidity. This is an inability to revalue what one sees because of commitment to previous values. In motorcycle maintenance, you must rediscover what you do as you go. Rigid values makes this impossible. - [Location 5109](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=5109) --- > The birth of a new fact is always a wonderful thing to experience. It’s dualistically called a “discovery” because of the presumption that it has an existence independent of anyone’s awareness of it. When it comes along, it always has, at first, a low value. Then, depending on the value-looseness of the observer and the potential quality of the fact, its value increases, either slowly or rapidly, or the value wanes and the fact disappears. - [Location 5118](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=5118) --- > The overwhelming majority of facts have no Quality, in fact they have a negative quality. If they were all present at once our consciousness would be so jammed with meaningless data we couldn’t think or act. So we preselect on the basis of Quality, or, to put it Phaedrus’ way, the track of Quality preselects what data we’re going to be conscious of, and it makes this selection in such a way as to best harmonize what we are with what we are becoming. - [Location 5122](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=5122) --- > The best way to break this cycle, I think, is to work out your anxieties on paper. Read every book and magazine you can on the subject. Your anxiety makes this easy and the more you read the more you calm down. You should remember that it’s peace of mind you’re after and not just a fixed machine. - [Location 5194](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=5194) --- > When you’re bored, stop! Go to a show. Turn on the TV. Call it a day. Do anything but work on that machine. If you don’t stop, the next thing that happens is the Big Mistake, - [Location 5206](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=5206) --- > 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. - [Location 5269](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=5269) --- > Every laboratory scientist knows that very often his experimental results provide mu answers to the yes-no questions the experiments were designed for. ... 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. - [Location 5290](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=5290) --- > Nothing’s quite so demoralizing as a tool hang-up. Buy good tools as you can afford them and you’ll never regret it. If you want to save money don’t overlook the newspaper want ads. Good tools, as a rule, don’t wear out, and good secondhand tools are much better than inferior new ones. - [Location 5315](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=5315) --- > You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It’s easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally. - [Location 5351](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=5351) --- > The real cycle you’re working on is a cycle called yourself. The machine that appears to be “out there” and the person that appears to be “in here” are not two separate things. They grow toward Quality or fall away from Quality together. - [Location 5357](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=5357) --- > Adler and Hutchins were concerned fundamentally with the “oughts” of life, with values, with Quality and with the foundations of Quality in theoretical philosophy. Thus they had apparently been traveling in the same direction as Phaedrus but had somehow ended with Aristotle and stopped there. There was a clash. - [Location 5627](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=5627) --- > The term logos, the root word of “logic,” refers to the sum total of our rational understanding of the world. Mythos is the sum total of the early historic and prehistoric myths which preceded the logos. The mythos-over-logos argument states that our rationality is shaped by these legends, that our knowledge today is in relation to these legends as a tree is in relation to the little shrub it once was. One can gain great insights into the complex overall structure of the tree by studying the much simpler shape of the shrub. - [Location 5732](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0026772N8&location=5732) ---