Another ocean full of bowling balls?

Once Robert Pirsig and his son Chris ascend to the mountain peak, Chris begins to ask his father about the dream, which begins to disturb Pirsig.

He knows he is a long way from help if he loses touch with reality up on the mountain, so he uses the chance of rock slides as an excuse to begin the descent, despite Chris’s obvious disappointment.

Once down off the mountain, Pirsig has another Glass Door dream, only this time he tells Chris that he’ll meet him at the bottom of the ocean!

This dream sets the stage for the next portion of the book. If Chris and Pirsig discovered the metaphysical relationship of Quality at some mountaintop of personal experience, he now seeks to apply that knowledge to all the valleys of this world, the dull dreary jobs and monotonous years that await all of us. (pg 229)

Lila Blewitt’s qualified thoughts about work

In Robert Pirsig’s masterful Lila – an inquiry into morals, there’s a great scene in Chapter eighteen, just after the Captain and Lila have a verbal altercation leading into her being thrown off the boat. Still reeling from this and a lifetime of other turmoils, she enters a restaurant in Rochester N.Y.”

“She didn’t like the dark.

In Rochester it was even darker, she thought.

Maybe she could just go back to Rochester and get a regular job.

She couldn’t go back there. They all hated her there. That’s why they fired her. Because she told them the truth.

Everybody wants to turn you into a servant. And when you won’t be a servant for them then you’re no good. Then you’re bad. No matter how hard you try to please them your still no good. You can never serve them enough. They’ve always got to have more. So it doesn’t matter; soon or later they’re going to hate you no matter what you do.”

Regarding Robert Pirsig’s catatonic state

In the “Guidebook to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”, there is an interesting passage at the end of DiSanto & Steele’s commentary over Zen Buddhism (page 133):

“I put this last question to the author of ZMM. Perhaps before you set aside the Zen packet and the Eastern portion of the backpack you would like to hear his answer. He began on a general level, by talking about the connection between enlightenment and insanity. He didn’t think all insanity was a form of enlightenment or all enlightenment was a form of insanity, but he did think there was an overlap. He made reference to a description of enlightenment in a Zen monastery, contained in Phillip Kapleau’s Three Pillars of Zen, according to which the enlightened ‘sits transfixed, unable to move, as if encased in a block of ice.” Pirsig then pointed out that an unprepared psychiatrist coming upon such a scene “would immediately make diagnosis of catatonia and hospitalize the person found in this state,” whereas the Zen master tries to end the state by snapping his fingers or giving a sharp command that will ease the student out of his unpatterned reality and back into the conventional form of patterned social behavior of the monastery. It is considered a dangerous time.” At that point, in the conversation, I pressed Pirsig a bit about what a Zen master would have done in his own case, the case described in ZMM. Pirsig responded, “It’s impossible to say what a Zen master would or would not do under a given set of circumstances, but I think I would have been a lot happier if one had been around.””