Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

“We’re in such a hurry most of the time we never get much chance to talk. The result is a kind of endless day-to-day shallowness, a monotony that leaves a person wondering years later where all the time went and sorry that it’s all gone.”

People are used to the mechanical functions of day-to-day living, never questioning the reason behind the rules. Once a person is able to see the misery that they are enmeshed in, it is often too late—too much time has passed.

“Laws of nature are human inventions, like ghosts. Laws of logic, of mathematics are also human inventions, like ghosts. The whole blessed thing is a human invention, including the idea that it isn’t a human invention. The world has no existence whatsoever outside the human imagination. It’s all a ghost….Your common sense is nothing more than the voices of thousands and thousands of these ghosts from the past.”

The narrator equates thoughts and laws as concepts of the mind, derived by thought and reason. In this sense, they function by definition like the concept of a ghost, which is thought to exist as a figment of the mind.

“What we have here is a conflict of visions of reality….What you’ve got here, really, are two realities, one of immediate artistic appearance and one of underlying scientific explanation, and they don’t match and they don’t fit and they don’t really have much of anything to do with one another. That’s quite a situation. You might say there’s a little problem here.”

This is the basis for the classic/romantic dichotomy, seeing the object as it is and seeing the underlying form of an object. The conflict produces two separate realities and the inability to merge or understand the two has caused much of the social problems in contemporary America.

“What makes his world so hard to see clearly is not its strangeness but its usualness. Familiarity can blind you too.”

As seen with John and Sylvia in the novel, being familiar with your surroundings, with running from the truth, can blind you to the fact that you are actually running. People end up becoming complacent instead of seeking answers.

“But he saw a sick and ailing thing happening and he started cutting deep, deeper and deeper to get at the root of it. He was after something. That is important. He was after something and he used the knife because that was the only tool he had. But he took on so much and went so far in the end his real victim was himself.”

The more Phaedrus cuts into the root of everything, the more he eventually exposes himself. By cutting into awareness, he became a victim and the overwhelming sensation of truth became too much for him.

“We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world.”

This quotes alludes to the narrator’s conception that people take a handful of sand from the landscape to better understand. The problem is that the landscape as a whole, as awareness itself, must be understood. If people only focus on the small part, the whole, which holds truth, is always neglected.

“What has become an urgent necessity is a way of looking at the world that does violence to neither of these two kinds of understanding and unites them into one.”

This concept is the basis of the novel. How can people look at the world without dividing it and defining it to such a degree that the bigger picture of awareness is lost? A Zen approach to life will allow for this, as the narrator explains.

“When analytic thought, the knife, is applied to experience, something is always killed in the process.”

Alluding to surgery and excising truth, the narrator states that there is something that always dies in the process of discovery. The important thing to remember is that there is also something created.

“The number of rational hypotheses that can explain any given phenomenon is infinite.”

This is the breakthrough that caused Phaedrus to question reason itself, a concept which most people can never understand.

“The cause of our current social crises, he would have said, is a genetic defect within the nature of reason itself. And until this genetic defect is cleared, the crises will continue. Our current modes of rationality are not moving society forward into a better world. They are taking it further and further from that better world.”

The division between romantic and classic is causing a crises in everyday life, one that will not be understood or addresses until rationality itself is redefined.

“Sometimes it’s a little better to travel than to arrive.”

The narrator reiterates this several times in the novel. When people are set on arriving, they are often goal-oriented, as in ego-oriented. The narrator says that true insight can be gleaned from the journey and understanding its purpose.

“You look at where you're going and where you are and it never makes sense, but then you look back at where you've been and a pattern seems to emerge.”

The narrator refers to the trials he faces when trying to figure out his concept of Quality. At times, it is impossible to know why you are going in a specific direction. It might even seem irrational, but once you look at your steps, you see the pattern.

“Quality…you know what it is, yet you don’t know what it is. But that’s self-contradictory. But some things are better than others, that is, they have more quality. But when you try to say what the quality is, apart from the things that have it, it all goes poof!”

This quote encapsulates Phaedrus’ dilemma in understanding Quality. Not only must he understand it, he needs to have others understand it. And yet, it seems for all intent and purposes, to be an elusive concept.

“To live only for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top. Here’s where things grow.”

This quotes points to the fact that the journey is perhaps more important than the summit. People become so fixated on the top that they cannot see the beauty of the sides.

“The ego-climber is like an instrument that’s out of adjustment….He rejects the here, is unhappy with it, wants to be farther up the trail but when he gets there will be just as unhappy because then it will be "here." What he’s looking for, what he wants, is all around him, but he doesn’t want that because it is all around him. Every step’s an effort, both physically and spiritually, because he imagines his goal to be external and distant.”

This quote sums up the narrator’s assessment of ego-climbing. People who take no note of the journey will never be satisfied, even when they reach their goal. They must constantly invent new goals to conquer.

“Squareness. When you subtract quality you get squareness. Absence of Quality is the essence of squareness.”

This quote addresses the problem of intellectualism. When Quality is removed, what results is a classic understanding, purely intellectual, with no access to the human condition.

“What he had been talking about all the time as Quality was here the Tao, the great central generating force of all religions, Oriental and Occidental, past and present, all knowledge, everything.”

This realization by Phaedrus causes his descent into madness. Seeing Quality on par with a monism was startling, and the awareness of truth became too much for him.

“He showed a way by which reason may be expanded to include elements that have previously been unassimilable and thus have been considered irrational. I think it’s the overwhelming presence of these irrational elements crying for assimilation that creates the present bad quality, the chaotic, disconnected spirit of the twentieth century.”

If seemingly conflicted elements are assimilated, a process of greater understanding can take place which will help to heal the disconnected spirit so rampant in society.

“Care and Quality are internal and external aspects of the same thing. A person who sees Quality and feels it as he works is a person who cares. A person who cares about what he sees and does is a person who’s bound to have some characteristics of Quality.”

The narrator links care and Quality. By doing so, he shows how Quality can be applied to everyday life and that it is not some intellectual, abstract truth without real application.

“Stuckness shouldn’t be avoided. It’s the psychic predecessor of all real understanding.”

Contrary to popular belief, not having an answer can actually help individuals in realizing that life is not as easy as yes/no. This understanding then opens up to a larger level of awareness and truth.

“The way to solve the conflict between human values and technological needs is not to run away from technology. That’s impossible. The way to resolve the conflict is to break down the barriers of dualistic thought that prevent a real understanding of what technology is.”

Instead of attacking the symptom, the cause of the problem must be addressed. Without attacking the root cause, people are just running from their problems, or just sitting on the sidelines at best. Human values and technology can exist together. The binary of dualistic thought is what impeded their synergy.

“A very strong case can be made for the statement that science grows by its mu answers more than by its yes or no answer. Yes or no confirms or denies a hypothesis. Mu says the answer is beyond the hypothesis. Mu is the "phenomenon" that inspires scientific enquiry in the first place! There’s nothing mysterious or esoteric about it. It’s just that our culture has warped us to make a low value judgment of it.”

The narrator again refers to the fact that yes/no answers are not the best way to address the world or any given situation. When people are left with an undefined state, truth can be gleaned without any preconceived notions of bad/good, yes/no.

“I can imitate the father he’s supposed to have, but subconsciously, at the Quality level, he sees through it and knows his real father isn’t here. In all this Chautauqua talk there’s been more than a touch of hypocrisy. Advice is given again and again to eliminate subject-object duality, when the biggest duality of all, the duality between me and him, remains unfaced. A mind divided against itself.”

The narrator alludes to the fact that, even though he has been arguing throughout the entire novel for the destruction of binaries and dualisms, he has yet to reconcile with his old self. This confession also alludes to the difficulty of bridging the gap between the two sides.