Chaosmos and the White Lodge (Third Note about Robert M. Pirsig)

When something has „quality“ it means it has „the right fit“, and when something is of very supreme quality it means it has even more than the right fit and/or it does so in an unexpected way – it is transcendent.

Based on an investigation of „classicism vs romaticism“ (and somehow mirroring Nietzsche´s Apollonian vs Dionysian principle and other juxtapositional stuff that may come to mind in this respect) Pirsig speaks of „static“ and „dynamic“ quality. Static quality refers to the quasi-conservative principle of form, dynamic quality to the transformation and extension of form. Dynamic quality is „the conceptually unknown“, or, as Pirsig scholar Northrop says, „the undifferentiated aesthetic continuum“. We may also call it ontological potential.

Indeed, everything in the cosmos is about establishing and transformation of forms (at least seen through our humble perspective). At the ultimate level what you will see is the chaosmos, the permanent interplay of form and its aleatoric transformation; the interplay of the static and the dynamic; the classic and the romantic; art, philosophy and science. I have from time to time explained it as having before my inner eye something rotating with many chambers, with one or some of it emerging, destined to give a new sense to the whole; or now many small squares and now suddenly a lightning shooting from the horizontal towards me, etc. It all happens very quickly and is elusive, forms falling apart to give place to new forms. And it is finally the end of vision. The highest artistic vision is to directly gaze into the chaosmos. Ultraintelligent poet Arthur Rimbaud reached such a level of vision, also Lautréamont and Büchner. Taken to this extreme, vision finally might evaporate and art becoming irrelevant (or whatever). Ultraintelligent engineer Nikola Tesla also liked to entertain himself with such visions before his inner eye (as tells Clifford M. Pickover´s Strange Brains and Genius).

Chaosmos is the synthetic vision of everything, of the whole. I have also spoken about the White Lodge. With the White Lodge I was somehow referring to a state in which you experience yourself after you have analytically figured it all out.  You experience that the space of knowledge isn´t anymore made of dialectics, oppositions and the like, it has all dissolved into a white light, or white space, with entitities that instantaneously affect you floating as a kind of a bit grey rippling alongside you. Brecht says intellectual superiority means being able to hold two contradictory concepts in the mind at the same time. I say it is about holding five or so concepts in the mind at the same time, so as that you finally see they may not be contradictory, instead they hold various versimilitudes and truth contents. If you see things that way and have established that kind of vision your mind is free and free to navigate through intellectual space, and your ego has evaporated as it is not tied anymore to any preference to any (ideological) (half-) truths.

Chaosmos and the White Lodge means that you see it all as well as that you permanently sort out things anew. It is not some self-sufficient state of enlightenment. It is progressive. It refers to infinity, and the vision of infinity, being fractal-like, as well as progress of knowledge being fractal-like (or semi/pseudofractal-like). Chaosmos refers to the synthetic, the White Lodge to the analytical; respectively that such distinctions have become superseded in the eye of the respective beholder.

UPDATE APRIL 2019: Proof Finds That All Change Is a Mix of Order and Randomness