Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance

The real cycle you’re working on is a cycle called ‘yourself.’

Highlight:

• Chapter 13 – What is a real university? What is a real church?
• Chapter 16 – Eliminate the whole degree-and-grading system and then you’ll get real education.
• Part III – What is Quality?

• It is a kind of nowhere, famous for nothing at all and has an appeal because of just that. Tensions disappear along old roads like this.
• On sights and sounds, on the mood of the weather and things remembered, on the machine and the countryside you’re in, thinking about things at great leisure and length without being hurried and without feeling you’re losing time.
• To get away from technology out into the country in the fresh air and sunshine is why they are on the motorcycle in the first place.
• 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.
• I don’t want to hurry it. That itself is a poisonous twentieth-century attitude. When you want to hurry something, that means you no longer care about it and want to get on to other things.
• Each machine has its own, unique personality which probably could be defined as the intuitive sum total of everything you know and feel about it.
• I want to divide human understanding into two kinds – classical understanding and romantic understanding. A classical understanding sees the world primarily as underlying form itself. A romantic understanding sees it primarily in terms of immediate appearance. The romantic mode is primarily inspirational, imaginative, creative, intuitive. The classic mode, by contrasts, proceeds by reason and by laws – which themselves underlying forms of thought and behavior.
• Great minds struggle to cure diseases so that people may live longer, but only madmen ask why. One lives longer in order that he may live longer. There is no other purpose.
• A motorcycle functions entirely in accordance with the laws of reason, and a study of the art of motorcycle maintenance is really a miniature study of the art of rationality itself.
• The overall name of the interrelated structures, the genus of which the hierarchy of containment and structure of causation are just species, is system. The motorcycle is a system. A real system.
• The system – hierarchies of thought. Logic – methods of finding one’s way through these hierarchies.
• Two kinds of logic are used, inductive and deductive. Inductive inferences start with observations of the machine and arrive at general conclusions. Deductive inferences do the reverse. They start with general knowledge and predict a specific observation.
• The logical statements entered into the notebook are broken down into six categories: (1) statement of the problem, (2) hypotheses as to the cause of the problem, (3) experiments designed to test each hypothesis, (4) predicted results of the experiments, (5) observed results of the experiments and (6) conclusions from the results of the experiments.
• If all of human knowledge, everything that’s known, is believed to be an enormous hierarchic structure, then the high country of the mind is found at the uppermost reaches of this structure in the most general, the most abstract considerations of all.
• 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.
• At a teaching college you teach and you teach and you teach with no time for research, no time for contemplation, no time for participation in outside affairs.
• Most people stand in sight of the spiritual mountains all their lives and never enter them, being content to listen to others who have been there and thus avoid the hardships. Some travel into the mountains accompanied by experienced guides who know the best and least dangerous routes by which they arrive at their destination. Still others, inexperienced and untrusting, attempt to make their own routes. Few of these are successful, but occasionally some, by sheer will and luck and grace, do make it. Once there they become more aware than any of the others that there’s no single or fixed number of routes. There are as many routes as there are individual souls.
• Quality
  • Quality cannot be defined.
  • Even though Quality cannot be defined, you know what Quality is.
  • Quality can be improved with techniques.
  • If we can show that a world without Quality functions abnormally, then we have shown that Quality exists, whether it’s defined or not.
  • Is Quality objective or subjective? Quality is beyond both categories. Quality is neither a part of mind, nor is it a part of matter.
  • Quality was the source and substance of everything.
  • Quality is the Buddha. Quality is scientific reality. Quality is the goal of Art.
• If your mind is truly, profoundly stuck, then you may be much better off than when it was loaded with ideas.
• Stuckness shouldn’t be avoided. It ‘s the psychic predecessor of all real understanding.
• The inner peace of mind occurs on three levels of understanding: physical quietness, mental quietness (one has no wandering thoughts at all), and value quietness (one has no wandering desires at all but simply performs the acts of his life without desire).
• 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.
• Three main types of internal gumption traps: those that block affective understanding, called “value traps”; those that block cognitive understanding, called “truth traps”; and those that block psychomotor behavior , called “muscle traps”. The value traps are by far the largest and the most dangerous group.
• This book has a lot to say about Ancient Greek perspective and their meaning but there is one perspective it misses. That is their view of time. They saw the future as something that came upon them from behind their backs with the pas receding away before their eyes.
• This book offers another, more serious alternative to material success. It’s not so much an alternative as an expansion of the meaning of “success” to something larger than just getting a good job and staying out of trouble. And also something larger than mere freedom. It gives a positive goal to work toward that does not confine.