Word: zens
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...Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Pirsig
...that confluence more needed than in psychology, which he contends has been too narrowly confined by the behaviorists and the positivists. He wants to return to the broader preoccupation with consciousness and subconsciousness shared by earlier thinkers, including his idol William James. The road back has led Ornstein to Zen and the I Ching...
...last of these attitudes--care and insight--are embodied in the "good mechanic's" relation to the machine. Here enters the "Zen" of the title, in the attentiveness and patience, the carefully attained identification with his work that characterize a good mechanic: "The material and the craftsman's thoughts change together in a progression of smooth, even changes until his mind is at rest at the exact instant the material is right." The good mechanic becomes our own down-home counterpart of the Zen archer...
PIRSIG IS unabashed and maybe naive in his echoes and borrowings. He mines ideas, allusions, archetypes and symbols not only from Zen, but from Greek, German and Christian mythology, from films and novels of the American Road and from the scores of scientists and philosophers who populate his "talks." After setting Aristotle in a historical context he inserts him into American experience by likening the philosopher to a "third-rate technical instructor, naming everything, showing the relationships among the things named, cleverly inventing an occasional new relationship... and then waiting for the bell so he can get on to repeat...
...blatantness of Pirsig's borrowings, his Americanizing of Aristotle and the Zen archer will appear vulgar to some readers. To me the borrowings are signs of a vital writer, maybe a myth-maker. The "good mechanic" resonates in my own experience; he brings to mind a good friend, a mechanic and scientist...