Merging One's Identity With One's Doing

You Must Become The Change You Want To See--Gandhi
Pirsig Book Discussion Continues
Ottawa Pub

"What book did you read," exclaimed Jim, "certainly not the one I
read. Where did Pirsig say that the subjective `better, best, stuff of
the world' was the source of rationality? That's irrational! Get real
why don't you!"

"Maybe you're right. Maybe I did read a different book," replied
Riley. "The book I read made a strong case for quality first and
reason second. `Quality perceptions' take in all of it; take in
beauty, love, goodness, and reason. Pirsig's quality precedes anything
that can be known about it, but from it everything else follows, and
that includes rationality. When understood in this light, quality
closes the gap between fact and value, between `in here' and `out
there.' Reason, --quality reasoning, -- is merely an extension of the
`good' that gets produced by quality."

"If you ask me Riley," I interrupted, "I bet that's what Phaedrus was
getting at when he chose care as the expression of quality. If one
cares enough about what he or she is doing, then the duality between
self and object disappears--because that's what caring is all about,
merging one's identity with `one's doing.' It's kind of like what
Gandhi once said, `You must become the change that you want to see.'"

"That's exactly right," Riley responded, "In caring, quality is
discovered. The tree is quality; the roots are care. But the flow goes
both ways. The more one cares about knowing and doing, the more one
sees and intuits. The more one sees and intuits, the more one cares
about things. Caring puts you in front of dualisms, not in between
them. Intuition comes first, though. You intuit wholes and then reason
breaks them down into parts and subparts. Intuition then reassembles
the parts and subparts back into wholes, new and different wholes.
It's all an unconscious drive on the part of intuition to move the
whole caring process into new realms of integration and harmony."

"And `knowing?' I said.

"And `knowing,'" Riley replied, "and `knowing' for sure."