What is Quality

[James Robert Crow <jr1crow@mindspring.com>]

Hello Group:

I may have done this before, but here are some comments from ZEN AND THE
ART OF MOTORCYCLE MAINTENANCE, by Robert Presig, regarding quality.

Quality is a characteristic of thought and statement that is recongized by
a nonthinking process.  Because definitions are a product of rigid, formal
thinking, quality cannot be defined." But even though quality cannot be
defined, you know what quality is!

Aspects of Quality
Unity, vividness, authority, economy, sensitivity, clarity, emphasis, flow,
suspense, brilliance, precision, proportion, depth

If you can't define it, what makes you think it exists?
A thing exists, if a world without it can't function normally.  If we can
show that a world without quality functions abnormally, then we have shown
that quality exists, whether it's defined or not.

Fine Arts:  Take quality out of these things, would they exist?
Poetry, sports, market place goods and services.
Worth is a quality term.  Life would just be living without any values or
purpose at all.  Since the world obviously doesn/t function normally when
quality is subtracted, quality exists, whether it's defined or not.

Qualityless world
Communist Russia and her satellites, communist China, Brave New World, 1984.

Quality is what you like.

The sun of quality does not revolve around the subjects and objects of our
existence.  It does not just passively illuminate them.  It is not
subordinate to them in any way.  It has created them.  They are subordinate
to it!  Quality is the parent of mind and matter, that event which gives
birth to mind and matter.  The reason people see quality differently is
because they come to it with different sets of anologues.  It's the
person's choice of quality that defines him.  People differ about quality,
not because quaility is different, but because people are different in
terms of experience.

Quality is the source and substance of everything.

Quality isn't something you lay on top of subjects and objects like tinsel
on a Christmas tree.  Real quality must be the source of the subjects and
objects, the cone from which the tree must start.

The quality which creates the world emerges as a relationship between man
and his experience.  He is a participant in the creation of all things.
The measure of all things.

Quality is not the method, but the result of method.

RC
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