Sunday, January 26, 2020

an absence of separateness






One says of him that he is "interested" in what he's doing, that he's "involved" in his work. What produces this involvement is, at the cutting edge of consciousness, an absence of any sense of separateness of subject and object. "Being with it," "being a natural," "taking hold"-- there are a lot of idiomatic expressions for what I mean by this absence of subject-object duality, because what I mean is so well understood as folklore, common sense, the everyday understanding of the shop...Zen Buddhists talk about "just sitting," a meditative practice in which the idea of a duality of self and object does not dominate one's consciousness. What I'm talking about here in motorcycle maintenance is "just fixing," in which the idea of a duality of self and object doesn't dominate one's consciousness. 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.



~ Robert Pirsig
from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

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4 comments:

Mystic Meandering said...

Very helpful - thank you... being absorbed by what on is doing...

atloveisaplace said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Dean Keller said...

no, you are especially welcome.
glad to hear from you.

atloveisaplace said...

can't seem to do it, but i managed to subscribe. ok, get busy! )