What Is All Zenful?

I just finished listening to the book, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" by Robert Pirsig, a book I've read in the past and which has had a lasting impact on me. The purpose of this blog is to reflect on a quotation from the book as it may apply to current circumstances today.

For those of you who are not familiar with the book, here is a brief review:

Zen and the Art…

The book came out in the early 70s. It was rejected by over a hundred publishers. The editor who selected it for publication predicted it would not sell, but was worth publishing anyway. Surprise, at least five million copies have sold to date. It was popular with the young people I was going to college with. It presents a number of ideas. The simplest is the narrative about motorcycle maintenance as a metaphor for dealing with modern life. There are two kinds of people in the world. Those who either put off maintenance or have so called professional mechanics do it, and those who learn how to do it themselves. The first kind of person uses and relies on technology, but feels separated from it, and more or less at its mercy. The second kind of person makes themselves equal to technology and in cohesion with it.

On another level, there is a whole philosophy discussion happening, based on the question, “What is quality?” I have read or listened to this book a number of times and I still don’t get  it all. The terms are over my head, but it still raises my consciousness. For example, why do I think leather has superior qualities versus plastic? I feel it, but I can't say for sure why.

The author and his young son are taking a trip though out the west (Montana, Idaho, Oregon) so it is a bit of a travelogue. The author had suffered a mental breakdown and was involuntarily subjected to shock therapy. His kid appears to be on the brink of mental illness. There is some resolution at the end. But tragically, as we learn in the afterword, the son was murdered in a random mugging at the age of 23. The author, since re-married, learns his new wife is pregnant. Being in his fifties, he and his wife decided he was too old to go through parenting again. But he became convinced that his son would be embodied in the new child so they had the baby, a girl.

The first quotation:

“When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called a Religion.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

As you read this post, human beings in different parts of the world are killing each other with the excuse that they are defending their god or religion from insults hurled by believers in some other religion. I heard it described as people fighting on behalf of their invisible wizard in the sky against another person's invisible sky wizard.

Fundamentalist's of all types are, in my opinion, suppressing progress worldwide. I am sick and tired of how religion continues to impact politics here in the US and everywhere. It is truly insanity!