Spiritual Technology

Spiritual Technology

By Life Positive

September 2007

Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance by robert pirsig is an electrifying story of a man’s quest for truth

hy suppress anger at a dripping faucet? I wondered.

Then that patched in with the motorcycle maintenance, and one of those light bulbs went on over my head and I thought Ahhhhhhhhhh.

It’s not the motorcycle maintenance, not the faucet. It’s all of technology they can’t take. And then all sorts of things started tumbling into place and I knew that was it. Sylvia’s irritation at a friend who thought computer programming was ‘creative.’ All their drawings and paintings and photographs without a technological thing in them…

Other things fit in too. They talk once in a while in as few pained words as possible about ‘it’ or ‘it all’ as in the sentence. ‘There is just no escape from It.’ And if I asked ‘From what?’ the answer might be ‘the whole thing,’ or ‘the whole organised bit,’ or even ‘the system.’

… now I see that the ‘it’ was mainly, if not entirely, technology. But that doesn’t sound right either. The ‘it’ is a kind of force that gives rise to technology, something undefined, but inhuman, mechanical, lifeless, a blind monster, a death force. Something hideous they are running from but know they can never escape… And their thing, their monster keeps eating up land and polluting their air and lakes, and there is no way to strike back at it, and hardly any way to escape it.

That attitude is not hard to come to. You go through a heavy industrial area of a large city and there it all is – the technology. In front of it are high barbed-wire fence, locked gates, signs saying NO TRESSPASSING, and beyond, through sooty air, you see ugly strange shapes of metal and brick whose purpose is unknown, and whose masters you will never see… So the final feeling is hostile, and I think that’s ultimately what’s involved with this otherwise unexplainable attitude of John and Sylvia. Anything to do with valves and shafts and wrenches is a part of that dehumanised world, and they would rather not think about it. They don’t want to get into it.

If this is so, they are not alone. There is no question that they have been following their natural feelings in this and not trying to imitate anyone. But many others are also following their natural feelings and not trying to imitate anyone and the natural feelings of very many people are similar on this matter; so that when you look at them collectively, as journalists do, you get the illusion of a mass movement, an antitechnological mass movement, an entire political antitechnological left emerging, looming up from apparently nowhere, saying, ‘stop the technology. Have it somewhere else. Don’t have it here.’ It is still restrained by a thin web of logic that points out that without the factories there are no jobs or standard of living. But there are human forces stronger than logic. There always have been, and if they become strong enough in their hatred of technology that web can break.

I disagree with them about cycle maintenance, but not because I am out of sympathy with their feelings about technology. I just think that their flight from and hatred of technology is self-defeating. The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha-– which is to demean oneself. This is what I want to talk about in this Chautauqua.