A little background. First read it as a teen or college student. Remembered maybe 3% of it. In my 40s and time to reread it because it was mentioned in the Zen Center book (Shoes at the Door). Specifically mentions Pirsig's son. He was murdered. Odd, weird bit is that Pirsig kind of hints at his son's death early on in the book. Creepy.
Once again, glad that I didn't read the introduction. I never do. Gives too much away. As a rule, always read Introductions afterwards, never before.
On a side note: found two typos in the book.
Part I
- There is no manual that deals with the real business of motorcycle maintenance, he most important aspect of all. Caring about what you are doing is considered either unimportant or taken for granted.
- We should notice it, explore it a little, to see if in that strange separation of what man is from what a man does we may have some clues as to what the hell has gone wrong in this 20th century.
- I don't want to hurry it. That itself is a poisonous 20th century attitude. When you want to hurry something, that means you no longer care about it and want to get on to other things, I just want to get at it slowly, but carefully and thoroughly...
- You've heard of the importance of eye contact in the classroom? Every educationist emphasizes it. No educationist explains it.
- Conflict of visions of reality: got upset when there was an intrusion on his reality.
- He felt that institutions such as schools, churches, governments and political organizations of every sort all tended to direct thought for ends other than truth, for the perpetuation of their own functions, and for control of individuals in the service of these functions.
- It's a problem of our time. The range of human knowledge today is so great that we're all specialists and the distance between specializations has become so great that anyone who seeks to wander freely among them almost has to forego closeness with the people around him.
- The best students always are flunking. Every good teacher knows that.
- Sanskrit doctrine of Tat tvam asi, "Thou are that," which asserts that everything you think you are and everything you think you perceive are undivided. To realize fully this of division is to become enlightened.
- She was strangely unaware that she could look and see freshly for herself, as she wrote, without primary regard for what had been said before. The narrowing down to one brick destroyed the blockage because it was so obvious she had to some original and direct seeing.
- Schools teach you to imitate. If you don't imitate what the teacher wants you get a bad grade.
- He'd no longer be a grade-motivated person. He'd be a knowledge-motivated person. He would need no external pushing to learn. He'd be a free man.
- Grades really cover up failure to teach.
- Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire. The reality of your own nature should determine the speed. To live only for some future goal is shallow.
- ego goals to fulfill -- ultimately that kind of motivation is destructive. Any effort that has self-glorification as its final endpoint is bound to end in disaster. When you climb a mountain to prove how big you are, you almost never make it. And even if you do it's a hollow victory. In order to sustain the victory you have to prove yourself again and again in some other way ... driven forever to fill a false image, haunted by the fear that the image is not true and someone will find out. That's never the way.
- Every step's an effort, both physically and spiritually, because he imagines his goal to be external and distant.
- By refusing to define Quality he had placed it entirely outside the analytic process. If you can't define Quality, there's no way you can subordinate it to any intellectual rule.
- 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.
- The result is rather typical of modern technology, an overall dullness of appearance so depressing that it must be overlaid with a veneer of "style" to make it acceptable. ... You have to be awfully stylish yourself not to get sick of it once in a while. It's the style that gets you; technological ugliness syruped over with romantic phoniness in an effort to produce beauty and profit by people who, though stylish, don't know where to start because no one has ever told them there's such a thing as Quality in this world and it's real, not style. [Wow. This was written in the 70s. And it perfectly describes early computers and cell phones. Then Apple and the iPod and iPhones came along. But did the designers of Apple products read this book or are they also guilty of sugaring style on top of ugly, non-Quality technology?]
- When this concept of peace of mind is introduced and made central to the act of technical work, a fusion of classic and romantic quality can take place at a basic level within a practical working context.
- You can actually see this fusion in skilled mechanics ... To say they are not artists is to misunderstand the nature of art.
- "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 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 of caring, Quality itself.
- So the thing to do when working on a motorcycle, as in any other task, is to cultivate the peace of mind which does not separate one's self from one's surroundings. When that is done successfully then everything else follows naturally. Peace of mind produces right values, right values produce right thoughts. Right thoughts produce right actions and right actions produce work which will be a material reflection for others to see of the serenity at the center of it all.
- If you're going to repair a motorcycle, an adequate supply of gumption is the first and most important tool.
- A gumption trap: anything that causes one to lose sight of Quality, and thus lose one's enthusiasm for what one is doing.
- First technique for preventing the out-of-sequence-reassembly gumption trap -- write it down in notebook. Second way -- lay it out on newspaper, left to right, top to bottom, like you read a page.
- Internal gumption traps: value traps, truth traps, muscle traps.
- Value rigidity. Ego trap. Your ego isolates you from Quality.
- The mu expansion (not yes/no; black/white) is the only thing I want to say about truth traps at this time.
- Psychomotor traps. Inadequate tools. Muscular insensitivity.
- Even if you lick the gumption traps. You've got to live right, too. It's the way you live that predisposes you to avoid the traps and see the right facts. You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It's easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally. That's the way all the experts do it.
- The making of a painting or the fixing of a motorcycle isn't separate from the rest of your existence.
- The real cycle you're working on is a cycle called yourself. Machine and you grow toward Quality or fall away from Quality together.
- Ancient Greeks, whose mythos had endowed our culture with the tendency underlying all the evil of our technology, the tendency to do what is "reasonable" even when it isn't any good.
- Turn of the Screw, Henry James
- Lila (sequel to this book)
- Socrates dialogue with Phaedrus.
- Walden, Thoreau
- Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu.
