Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals

by Robert M. Pirsig

  He got his billfold from a small drawer, filled it with twenties and from the wet locker by the chart table got out two canvas tote bags to carry the groceries. He said goodbye to Lila, and from the deck got down into the dinghy again and rowed ashore.

  The beach seemed to be grayish fine sand. He stepped out onto the sand and pulled the dinghy way up on the beach, then tied it off to an iron spike sticking out from the end of a large driftwood pole. The junk he’d noticed from the boat was everywhere and he studied it as he walked to the road — some glass bottles, a lot of small bleached driftwood pieces worn round at the corners and ends, an innersole of a shoe, a box with a faded Budweiser label, some old cushions, a wooden toy locomotive.

  He wondered if he would come across a doll like Lila’s, but he didn’t see any.

  Farther on was a Styrofoam coffee cup, a tire, another coffee cup, some more big burned timbers with rusted steel spikes that he had to step over. It all looked worn and bleached and seemed to have drifted in from the bay, not brought by any tourists who were here. It looked too trashy here for tourists. Strange how you could be so close to Manhattan yet in such a remote rural place. It wasn’t rural exactly. It wasn’t anything exactly except abandoned. It was a ruins of something. The vegetation was ruins vegetation.

  Back of the debris were some evergreens that looked like yews or junipers. Other bushes had only a few red leaves left. Still farther back were marsh grasses of various species, mostly gold but still a little green. They looked as pure and delicate as prehistoric plants.

  Off on the far side of marsh by an abandoned day beacon stood a white egret.

  Phædrus found the road where the chart said it would be, nice asphalt, clean, deserted. He enjoyed the stretch of his legs.

  The sumac here was just turning red.

  Another road. How many had he hiked like this?

  October was a good month for hiking.

  He walked down the tree and shrub-lined road feeling sort of marvelous about the fact that somehow he was right here. Dynamic.

  Lila was talking. That was an accomplishment. It showed he was on the right track.

  She wasn’t making much sense yet with all that talk about the island and Rigel, but that would come in time. The thing was not to force it, not to set up a confrontation. It was an intriguing idea to send someone like Lila to Samoa for a cure but it wouldn’t work. What’s wrong with insanity is that she’s outside any culture. She’s a culture of one. She has her own reality which no other culture is able to see. That’s what had to be reconciled. It could be that if he just didn’t give her any problems for the next few days her culture of one might just clear the whole thing up by itself.

  He wasn’t going to send her to any hospital. He knew that now. At a hospital they’d just start shooting her full of drugs and tell her to adjust. What they wouldn’t see is that she is adjusting. That’s what the insanity is. She’s adjusting to something. The insanity is the adjustment. Insanity isn’t necessarily a step in the wrong direction, it can be an intermediate step in a right direction. It wasn’t necessarily a disease. It could be part of a cure.

  He was no expert on the subject but it seemed to him that the problem of curing an insane person is like the problem of curing a Moslem or curing a communist or curing a Republican or Democrat. You’re not going to make much progress by telling them how wrong they are. If you can convince a mullah that everything will be of higher value if he changes his beliefs to those of Christianity, then a change is not only possible but likely. But if you can’t, forget it. And if you can convince Lila that it’s more valuable to consider her baby to be a doll than it is to consider her doll to be a baby, then her condition of insanity will be alleviated. But not before.

  That doll thing was a solution to something, some child thing, but he didn’t know what it was. The important thing was to support her delusions and then slowly wean her away from them rather than fight them.

  The catch here, which almost any philosopher would spot, is the word, delusion. It’s always the other person who’s deluded. Or ourselves in the past. Ourselves in the present are never deluded. Delusions can be held by whole groups of people, as long as we’re not a part of that group. If we’re a member then the delusion becomes a minority opinion.

  An insane delusion can’t be held by a group at all. A person isn’t considered insane if there are a number of people who believe the same way. Insanity isn’t supposed to be a communicable disease. If one other person starts to believe him, or maybe two or three, then it’s a religion.

  Thus, when sane grown men in Italy and Spain carry statues of Christ through the streets, that’s not an insane delusion. That’s a meaningful religious activity because there are so many of them. But if Lila carries a rubber statue of a child with her wherever she goes, that’s an insane delusion because there’s only one of her.

  If you ask a Catholic priest if the wafer he holds at Mass is really the flesh of Jesus Christ, he will say yes. If you ask, Do you mean symbolically? he will answer, No, I mean actually. Similarly if you ask Lila whether the doll she holds is a dead baby she will say yes. If you ask, Do you mean symbolically? she would also answer, No, I mean actually. It is considered correct to say that until you understand that the wafer is really the body of Christ you will not understand the Mass. With equal force it is possible to say that until you understand that this doll is really a baby you will never understand Lila. She’s a culture of one. She’s a religion of one. The main difference is that the Christian, since the time of Constantine, has been supported by huge social patterns of authority. Lila isn’t. Lila’s religion of one doesn’t have a chance.

  That isn’t a completely fair comparison, though. If the major religions of the world consisted of nothing but statues and wafers and other such paraphernalia they would have disappeared long ago in the face of scientific knowledge and cultural change, Phædrus thought. What keeps them going is something else.

  It sounds quite blasphemous to put religion and insanity on an equal footing for comparison, but his point was not to undercut religion, only to illuminate insanity. He thought the intellectual separation of the topic of sanity from the topic of religion has weakened our understanding of both.

  The current subject-object point of view of religion, conventionally muted so as not to stir up the fanatics, is that religious mysticism and insanity are the same. Religious mysticism is intellectual garbage. It’s a vestige of the old superstitious Dark Ages when nobody knew anything and the whole world was sinking deeper and deeper into filth and disease and poverty and ignorance. It is one of those delusions that isn’t called insane only because there are so many people involved.

  Until quite recently Oriental religions and Oriental cultures have been similarly grouped as backward, suffering from disease and poverty and ignorance because they were sunk into a demented mysticism. If it were not for the phenomenon of Japan suddenly leaving the subject-object cultures looking a little backward, the cultural immune system surrounding this view would be impregnable.

  The Metaphysics of Quality identifies religious mysticism with Dynamic Quality. It says the subject-object people are almost right when they identify religious mysticism with insanity. The two are almost the same. Both lunatics and mystics have freed themselves from the conventional static intellectual patterns of their culture. The only difference is that the lunatic has shifted over to a private static pattern of his own, whereas the mystic has abandoned all static patterns in favor of pure Dynamic Quality.

  The Metaphysics of Quality says that as long as the psychiatric approach is encased within a subject-object metaphysical understanding it will always seek a patterned solution to insanity, never a mystic one. For exactly the same reasons that Choctaw Indians don’t distinguish blue from green and Hindi-speaking people don’t distinguish ice from snow, modern psychology cannot distinguish between a patterned reality and an unpatterned reality and thus cannot distinguish lunatics from mystics. They seem t
o be the same.

  When Socrates says in one of his dialogues, Our greatest blessings come to us by way of madness provided the madness is given us by divine gift, the psychiatric profession doesn’t know what in the world he is talking about. Or when traces of this identification are found in the expression touched in the head meaning touched by God, the roots of this expression are ignored as ignorant and superstitious.

  It’s another case of the Cleveland Harbor Effect, where you don’t see what you don’t look for, because when one looks through the record of our culture for connections between insane understanding and religious understanding one soon finds them everywhere. Even the idea of insanity as possession by the Devil can be explained by the Metaphysics of Quality as a lower biological pattern, the Devil, trying to overcome a higher pattern of conformity to cultural belief.

  The Metaphysics of Quality suggests that in addition to the customary solutions to insanity — conform to cultural patterns or stay locked up — there is another one. This solution is to dissolve all static patterns, both sane and insane, and find the base of reality, Dynamic Quality, that is independent of all of them. The Metaphysics of Quality says that it is immoral for sane people to force cultural conformity by suppressing the Dynamic drives that produce insanity. Such suppression is a lower form of evolution trying to devour a higher one. Static social and intellectual patterns are only an intermediate level of evolution. They are good servants of the process of life but if allowed to turn into masters they destroy it.

  Once this theoretical structure is available, it offers solutions to some mysteries in the present treatment of the insane. For example, doctors know that shock treatment works, but are fond of saying that no one knows why.

  The Metaphysics of Quality offers an explanation. The value of shock treatment is not that it returns a lunatic to normal cultural patterns. It certainly does not do that. Its value is that it destroys all patterns, both cultural and private, and leaves the patient temporarily in a Dynamic state. All the shock does is duplicate the effects of hitting the patient over the head with a baseball bat. It simply knocks him senseless. In fact it was to imitate the effect of hitting someone over the head with a baseball bat without the risk of skull injury that Ugo Cerletti developed shock treatment in the first place.

  But what goes unrecognized in a subject-object theoretical structure is the fact that this senseless unpatterned state is a valuable state of existence. Once the patient is in this state the psychiatrists of course don’t know what to do with it, and so the patient often slips back into lunacy and has to be knocked senseless again and again. But sometimes the patient, in a moment of Zen wisdom, sees the superficiality of both his own contrary patterns and the cultural patterns, sees that the one gets him electrically clubbed day after day and the other sets him free from the institution, and thereupon makes a wise mystic decision to get the hell out of there by whatever avenue is available.

  Another mystery in the treatment of the insane explained by a value-centered metaphysics is the value of peace and quiet and isolation. For centuries that has been the primary treatment of the insane. Leave them alone. Ironically the one thing the mental hospitals and doctors do best is the one thing they never take credit for. Maybe they’re afraid some crusading journalist or other reformer will come along and say, Look at all those poor crazies in there with nothing to do. Inhuman treatment, so they don’t play that part of it up. They know it works, but there’s no way of justifying that because the whole cultural set they have to operate in says that doing nothing is the same as doing something wrong.

  The Metaphysics of Quality says that what sometimes accidentally occurs in an insane asylum but occurs deliberately in a mystic retreat is a natural human process called dhyana in Sanskrit. In our culture dhyana is ambiguously called meditation. Just as mystics traditionally seek monasteries and ashrams and hermitages as retreats into isolation and silence, so are the insane treated by isolation in places of relative calm and austerity and silence. Sometimes, as a result of this monastic retreat into silence and isolation the patient arrives at a state Karl Menninger has described as better than cured. He is actually in better condition than he was before the insanity started. Phædrus guessed that in many of these accidental cases, the patient had learned by himself not to cling to any static patterns of ideas — cultural, private or any other.

  In the insane asylum this dhyana is underrated and often undermined because there is no metaphysical basis for understanding it scientifically. But among religious mystics, particularly Oriental mystics, dhyana has been one of the most intensely studied practices of all.

  This Western treatment of dhyana is a beautiful example of how the static patterns of a culture can make something not exist, even when it does exist. People in this culture are hypnotized into thinking they do not meditate when in fact they do.

  Dhyana was what this boat was all about. It’s what Phædrus had bought it for, a place to be alone and quiet and inconspicuous and able to settle down into himself and be what he really was and not what he was thought to be or supposed to be. In doing this he didn’t think he was putting this boat to any special purpose. That’s what the purpose of boats like this has always been… and seaside cottages too… and lake cabins… and hiking trails… and golf courses… It’s the need for dhyana that is behind all these.

  Vacations too… how perfectly named that is… a vacation, an emptying out… that’s what dhyana is, an emptying out of all the static clutter and junk of one’s life and just settling into an undefined sort of tranquillity.

  That’s what Lila’s involved in now, a huge vacation, an emptying out of the junk of her life. She’s clinging to some new pattern because she thinks it holds back the old pattern. But what she has to do is take a vacation from all patterns, old and new, and just settle into a kind of emptiness for a while. And if she does, the culture has a moral obligation not to bother her. The most moral activity of all is the creation of space for life to move onward.

  The Metaphysics of Quality associates religious mysticism with Dynamic Quality but it would certainly be a mistake to think that the Metaphysics of Quality endorses the static beliefs of any particular religious sect. Phædrus thought sectarian religion was a static social fallout from Dynamic Quality and that while some sects had fallen less than others, none of them told the whole truth.

  His favorite Christian mystic was Johannes Eckhart, who said, Wouldst thou be perfect, do not yelp about God. Eckhart was pointing to a profound mystic truth, but you can guess what a hand of applause it got from the static authorities of the Church. Ill-sounding, rash, and probably heretical, was the general verdict.

  From what Phædrus had been able to observe, mystics and priests tend to have a cat-and-dog-like coexistence within almost every religious organization. Both groups need each other but neither group likes the other at all.

  There’s an adage that Nothing disturbs a bishop quite so much as the presence of a saint in the parish. It was one of Phædrus' favorites. The saint’s Dynamic understanding makes him unpredictable and uncontrollable, but the bishop’s got a whole calendar of static ceremonies to attend to; fund-raising projects to push forward, bills to pay, parishioners to meet. That saint’s going to up-end everything if he isn’t handled diplomatically. And even then he may do something wildly unpredictable that upsets everybody. What a quandary! It can take the bishops years, decades, even centuries to put down the hell that a saint can raise in a single day. Joan of Arc is the prime example.

  In all religions bishops tend to gild Dynamic Quality with all sorts of static interpretations because their cultures require it. But these interpretations become like golden vines that cling to a tree, shut out its sunlight and eventually strangle it.

  Phædrus heard the sound of a car coming closer from behind. When it approached he held out his thumb and it stopped. He told the driver he was looking for groceries and the driver took him to Atlantic Highlands where the car was going anywa
y. At a supermarket Phædrus filled the tote bags with all the food he could find that looked good, then found another ride back as far as the junction in the road where Sandy Hook started. He shouldered his bags, now pretty heavy, hoping another ride would come along, but none came.

  He thought some more about Lila’s insanity and how it was related to religious mysticism and how both were integrated into reason by the Metaphysics of Quality. He thought about how once this integration occurs and Dynamic Quality is identified with religious mysticism it produces an avalanche of information as to what Dynamic Quality is. A lot of this religious mysticism is just low-grade yelping about God of course, but if you search for the sources of it and don’t take the yelps too literally a lot of interesting things turn up.

  Long ago when he first explored the idea of Quality he’d reasoned that if Quality were the primordial source of all our understanding then it followed that the place to get the best view of it would be at the beginning of history when it would have been less cluttered by the present deluge of static intellectual patterns of knowledge. He’d traced Quality back into its origins in Greek philosophy and thought he’d gone as far as he could go. Then he found he was able to go back to a time before the Greek philosophers, to the rhetoricians.

  Philosophers usually present their ideas as sprung from nature or sometimes from God, but Phædrus thought neither of these was completely accurate. The logical order of things which the philosophers study is derived from the mythos. The mythos is the social culture and the rhetoric which the culture must invent before philosophy becomes possible. Most of this old religious talk is nonsense, of course, but nonsense or not, it is the parent of our modern scientific talk. This mythos over logos thesis agreed with the Metaphysics of Quality’s assertion that intellectual static patterns of quality are built up out of social static patterns of quality.