The beginning.......

In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Robert Pirsig says,

"Sometimes it's a little better to travel than to arrive."

 

I used to be a goal person, always trying to arrive. Somewhere along the line I quit worrying about the goal and started getting into the journey. I learned a few things:

There are lessons in the sparkle of morning. When you are in process, the goal doesn't disappear.  Straying off the path can lead you to serendipity. The path always leads to where you belong.

I think process people understand that the process includes the goal, and you can't explain this..... .... it has to be experienced.

 

Reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance sparked my first real journey into spiritual thought.... a true entrance from the periphery. Each of my four copies is scribbled with margin notes. I gave one copy to each of my two children. This is one of my favorite passages:

on lateral truths....

"In a laboratory situation, when your whole procedure goes haywire, when everything goes wrong or is indeterminate or is so screwed up by unexpected results you can't make head or tail out of anything, you start looking laterally. That's a word [Phaedrus] later used to describe a growth of knowledge that doesn't more forward like an arrow in flight, but expands sideways, like an arrow enlarging in flight, or like the archer, discovering that although he has hit the bull's-eye and won the prize, his head is on a pillow and the sun is coming in the window. Lateral knowledge is knowledge that's from a wholly unexpected direction, from a direction that's not even understood as a direction until the knowledge forces itself upon one. Lateral truths point to the falseness of axioms and postulates underlying one's existing system of getting at truth."

(page 121, Morrow edition, 1979)

 

continue......