I keep wanting to go back to that analogy of fishing for facts. I can just see somebody asking with great frustration, āYes, but which facts do you fish for? Thereās got to be more to it than that.ā But the answer is that if you know which facts youāre fishing for youāre no longer fishing. Youāve caught them. Iām trying to think of a specific example. All kinds of examples from cycle maintenance could be given, but the most striking example of value rigidity I can think of is the old South Indian Monkey Trap, which depends on value rigidity for its effectiveness. The trap consists of a hollowed-out coconut chained to a stake. The coconut has some rice inside which can be grabbed through a small hole. The hole is big enough so that the monkeyās hand can go in, but too small for his fist with rice in it to come out. The monkey reaches in and is suddenly trappedā¦by nothing more than his own value rigidity. He canāt revalue the rice. He cannot see that freedom without rice is more valuable than capture with it. The villagers are coming to get him and take him away. Theyāre coming closer - closer! - now! What general adviceā¦ not specific adviceā¦ but what general advice would you give the poor monkey in circumstances like this? Well, I think you might say exactly what Iāve been saying about value rigidity, with perhaps a little extra urgency. There is a fact this monkey should know: if he opens his hand heās free. But how is he going to discover this fact? By removing the value rigidity that rates rice above freedom. How is he going to do that? Well, he should somehow try to slow down deliberately and go over ground that he has been over before and see if things he thought were important really were important and, well, stop yanking and just stare at the coconut for a while. Before long he should get a nibble from a little fact wondering if he is interested in it. He should try to understand this fact not so much in terms of his big problem as for its own sake. That problem may not be as big as he thinks it is. That fact may not be as small as he thinks it is either. Thatās about all the general information you can give him.
The next one is important. Itās the internal gumption trap of ego. Ego isnāt entirely separate from value rigidity but one of the many causes of it. If you have a high evaluation of yourself then your ability to recognize new facts is weakened. Your ego isolates you from the Quality reality. When the facts show that youāve just goofed, youāre not as likely to admit it. When false information makes you look good, youāre likely to believe it. On any mechanical repair job ego comes in for rough treatment. Youāre always being fooled, youāre always making mistakes, and a mechanic who has a big ego to defend is at a terrific disadvantage. If you know enough mechanics to think of them as a group, and your observations coincide with mine, I think youāll agree that mechanics tend to be rather modest and quiet. There are exceptions, but generally if theyāre not quiet and modest at first, the work seems to make them that way. And skeptical. Attentive, but skeptical, But not egoistic. Thereās no way to bullshit your way into looking good on a mechanical repair job, except with someone who doesnāt know what youāre doing. I was going to say that the machine doesnāt respond to your personality, but it does respond to your personality. Itās just that the personality that it responds to is your real personality, the one that genuinely feels and reasons and acts, rather than any false, blown-up personality images your ego may conjure up. These false images are deflated so rapidly and completely youāre bound to be very discouraged very soon if youāve derived your gumption from ego rather than Quality. If modesty doesnāt come easily or naturally to you, one way out of this trap is to fake the attitude of modesty anyway. If you just deliberately assume youāre not much good, then your gumption gets a boost when the facts prove this assumption is correct. This way you can keep going until the time comes when the facts prove this assumption is incorrect. Anxiety, the next gumption trap, is sort of the opposite of ego. Youāre so sure youāll do everything wrong youāre afraid to do anything at all. Often this, rather than ālaziness,ā is the real reason you find it hard to get started. This gumption trap of anxiety, which results from overmotivation, can lead to all kinds of errors of excessive fussiness. You fix things that donāt need fixing, and chase after imaginary ailments. You jump to wild conclusions and build all kinds of errors into the machine because of your own nervousness. These errors, when made, tend to confirm your original underestimation of yourself. This leads to more errors, which lead to more underestimation, in a self-stoking cycle. The best way to break this cycle, I think, is to work out your anxieties on paper. Read every book and magazine you can on the subject. Your anxiety makes this easy and the more you read the more you calm down. You should remember that itās peace of mind youāre after and not just a fixed machine. When beginning a repair job you can list everything youāre going to do on little slips of paper which you then organize into proper sequence. You discover that you organize and then reorganize the sequence again and again as more and more ideas come to you. The time spent this way usually more than pays for itself in time saved on the machine and prevents you from doing fidgety things that create problems later on. You can reduce your anxiety somewhat by facing the fact that there isnāt a mechanic alive who doesnāt louse up a job once in a while. The main difference between you and the commercial mechanics is that when they do it you donāt hear about itā¦ just pay for it, in additional costs prorated through all your bills. When you make the mistakes yourself, you at ]east get the benefit of some education. Boredom is the next gumption trap that comes to mind. This is the opposite of anxiety and commonly goes with ego problems. Boredom means youāre off the Quality track, youāre not seeing things freshly, youāve lost your ābeginnerās mindā and your motorcycle is in great danger. Boredom means your gumption supply is low and must be replenished before anything else is done. When youāre bored, stop! Go to a show. Turn on the TV. Call it a day. Do anything but work on that machine. If you donāt stop, the next thing that happens is the Big Mistake, and then all the boredom plus the Big Mistake combine together in one Sunday punch to knock all the gumption out of you and you are really stopped. My favorite cure for boredom is sleep. Itās very easy to get to sleep when bored and very hard to get bored after a long rest. My next favorite is coffee. I usually keep a pot plugged in while working on the machine. If these donāt work it may mean deeper Quality problems are bothering you and distracting you from whatās before you. The boredom is a signal that you should turn your attention to these problemsā¦thatās what youāre doing anywayā¦and control them before continuing on the motorcycle. For me the most boring task is cleaning the machine. It seems like such a waste of time. It just gets dirty again the first time you ride it. John always kept his BMW spic and span. It really did look nice, while mineās always a little ratty, it seems. Thatās the classical mind at work, runs fine inside but looks dingy on the surface. One solution to boredom on certain kinds of jobs such as greasing and oil changing and tuning is to turn them into a kind of ritual. Thereās an esthetic to doing things that are unfamiliar and another esthetic to doing things that are familiar. I have heard that there are two kinds of welders: production welders, who donāt like tricky setups and enjoy doing the same thing over and over again; and maintenance welders, who hate it when they have to do the same job twice. The advice was that if you hire a welder make sure which kind he is, because theyāre not interchangeable. Iām in that latter class, and thatās probably why I enjoy troubleshooting more than most and dislike cleaning more than most. But I can do both when I have to and so can anyone else. When cleaning I do it the way people go to churchā¦not so much to discover anything new, although Iām alert for new things, but mainly to reacquaint myself with the familiar. Itās nice sometimes to go over familiar paths. Zen has something to say about boredom. Its main practice of ājust sittingā has got to be the worldās most boring activityā¦unless itās that Hindu practice of being buried alive. You donāt do anything much; not move, not think, not care. What could be more boring? Yet in the center of all this boredom is the very thing Zen Buddhism seeks to teach. What is it? What is it at the very center of boredom that youāre not seeing. Impatience is close to boredom but always results from one cause: an underestimation of the amount of time the job will take. You never really know what will come up and very few jobs get done as quickly as planned. Impatience is the first reaction against a setback and can soon turn to anger if youāre not careful. Impatience is best handled by allowing an indefinite time for the job, particularly new jobs that require unfamiliar techniques; by doubling the allotted time when circumstances force time planning; and by scaling down the scope of what you want to do. Overall goals must be scaled down in importance and immediate goals must be scaled up. This requires value flexibility, and the value shift is usually accompanied by some loss of gumption, but itās a sacrifice that must be made. Itās nothing like the loss of gumption that will occur if a Big Mistake caused by impatience occurs. My favorite scaling-down exercise is cleaning up nuts and bolts and studs and tapped holes.
Iāve got a phobia about crossed or jimmied or rust-jammed or dirt-jammed threads that cause nuts to turn slow or hard; and when I find one, I take its dimensions with a thread gauge and calipers, get out the taps and dies, recut the threads on it, then examine it and oil it and I have a whole new perspective on patience. Another one is cleaning up tools that have been used and not put away and are cluttering up the place. This is a good one because one of the first warning signs of impatience is frustration at not being able to lay your hand on the tool you need right away. If you just stop and put tools away neatly you will both find the tool and also scale down your impatience without wasting time or endangering the work.
Well, that about does it for value traps. Thereās a whole lot more of them, of course. Iāve really only just touched on the subject to show whatās there. Almost any mechanic could fill you in for hours on value traps heās discovered that I donāt know anything about. Youāre bound to discover plenty of them for yourself on almost every job. Perhaps the best single thing to learn is to recognize a value trap when youāre in it and work on that before you continue on the machine.
Truth traps are concerned with data that are apprehended and are within the boxcars of the train. For the most part these data are properly handled by conventional dualistic logic and the scientific method talked about earlier, back just after Miles City. But thereās one trap that isnātā¦the truth trap of yes-no logic. Yes and no ā this or that ā one or zero. On the basis of this elementary two-term discrimination, all human knowledge is built up. The demonstration of this is the computer memory which stores all its knowledge in the form of binary information. It contains ones and zeros, thatās all. Because weāre unaccustomed to it, we donāt usually see that thereās a third possible logical term equal to yes and no which is capable of expanding our understanding in an unrecognized direction. We donāt even have a term for it, so Iāll have to use the Japanese mu. Mu means āno thing.ā Like āQualityā it points outside the process of dualistic discrimination. Mu simply says, āNo class; not one, not zero, not yes, not no.ā It states that the context of the question is such that a yes or no answer is in error and should not be given. āUnask the questionā is what it says. Mu becomes appropriate when the context of the question becomes too small for the truth of the answer. When the Zen monk Joshu was asked whether a dog had a Buddha nature he said āMu,ā meaning that if he answered either way he was answering incorrectly. The Buddha nature cannot be captured by yes or no questions. That mu exists in the natural world investigated by science is evident. Itās just that, as usual, weāre trained not to see it by our heritage. For example, itās stated over and over again that computer circuits exhibit only two states, a voltage for āoneā and a voltage for āzero.ā Thatās silly. Any computer-electronics technician knows otherwise. Try to find a voltage representing one or zero when the power is off! The circuits are in a mu state. They arenāt at one, they arenāt at zero, theyāre in an indeterminate state that has no meaning in terms of ones or zeros. Readings of the voltmeter will show, in many cases, āfloating groundā characteristics, in which the technician isnāt reading characteristics of the computer circuits at all but characteristics of the voltmeter itself. Whatās happened is that the power-off condition is part of a context larger than the context in which the one zero states are considered universal. The question of one or zero has been āunasked.ā And there are plenty of other computer conditions besides a power-off condition in which mu answers are found because of larger contexts than the one-zero universality. The dualistic mind tends to think of mu occurrences in nature as a kind of contextual cheating, or irrelevance, but mu is found throughout all scientific investigation, and nature doesnāt cheat, and natureās answers are never irrelevant. Itās a great mistake, a kind of dishonesty, to sweep natureās mu answers under the carpet. Recognition and valuatian of these answers would do a lot to bring logical theory closer to experimental practice. Every laboratory scientist knows that very often his experimental results provide mu answers to the yes-no questions the experiments were designed for. In these cases he considers the experiment poorly designed, chides himself for stupidity and at best considers the āwastedā experiment which has provided the mu answer to be a kind of wheel-spinning which might help prevent mistakes in the design of future yes-no experiments. This low evaluation of the experiment which provided the mu answer isnāt justified. The mu answer is an important one. Itās told the scientist that the context of his question is too small for natureās answer and that he must enlarge the context of the question. That is a very important answer! His understanding of nature is tremendously improved by it, which was the purpose of the experiment in the first place. 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 āphenomenonā that inspires scientific enquiry in the first place! Thereās nothing mysterious or esoteric about it. Itās just that our culture has warped us to make a low value judgment of it. In motorcycle maintenance the mu answer given by the machine to many of the diagnostic questions put to it is a major cause of gumption loss. It shouldnāt be! When your answer to a test is indeterminate it means one of two things: that your test procedures arenāt doing what you think they are or that your understanding of the context of the question needs to be enlarged. Check your tests and restudy the question. Donāt throw away those mu answers! Theyāre every bit as vital as the yes or no answers. Theyāre more vital. Theyāre the ones you grow on!
The mu expansion is the only thing I want to say about truth traps at this time. Time to switch to the psychomotor traps. This is the domain of understanding which is most directly related to what happens to the machine. Here by far the most frustrating gumption trap is inadequate tools. Nothingās quite so demoralizing as a tool hang-up. Buy good tools as you can afford them and youāll never regret it. If you want to save money donāt overlook the newspaper want ads. Good tools, as a rule, donāt wear out, and good secondhand tools are much better than inferior new ones. Study the tool catalogs. You can learn a lot from them. Apart from bad tools, bad surroundings are a major gumption trap. Pay attention to adequate lighting. Itās amazing the number of mistakes a little light can prevent. Some physical discomfort is unpreventable, but a lot of it, such as that which occurs in surroundings that are too hot or too cold, can throw your evaluations way off if you arenāt careful. If youāre too cold, for example, youāll hurry and probably make mistakes. If youāre too hot your anger threshold gets much lower. Avoid out-of-position work when possible. A small stool on either side of the cycle will increase your patience greatly and youāll be much less likely to damage the assemblies youāre working on. Thereās one psychomotor gumption trap, muscular insensitivity, which accounts for some real damage. It results in part from lack of kinesthesia, a failure to realize that although the externals of a cycle are rugged, inside the engine are delicate precision parts which can be easily damaged by muscular insensitivity. Thereās whatās called āmechanicās feel,ā which is very obvious to those who know what it is, but hard to describe to those who donāt; and when you see someone working on a machine who doesnāt have it, you tend to suffer with the machine. The mechanicās feel comes from a deep inner kinesthetic feeling for the elasticity of materials. Some materials, like ceramics, have very little, so that when you thread a porcelain fitting youāre very careful not to apply great pressures. Other materials, like steel, have tremendous elasticity, more than rubber, but in a range in which, unless youāre working with large mechanical forces, the elasticity isnāt apparent. With nuts and bolts youāre in the range of large mechanical forces and you should understand that within these ranges metals are elastic. When you take up a nut thereās a point called āfinger-tightā where thereās contact but no takeup of elasticity. Then thereās āsnug,ā in which the easy surface elasticity is taken up. Then thereās a range called ātight,ā in which all the elasticity is taken up. The force required to reach these three points is different for each size of nut and bolt, and different for lubricated bolts and for locknuts. The forces are different for steel and cast iron and brass and aluminum and plastics and ceramics. But a person with mechanicās feel knows when somethingās tight and stops. A person without it goes right on past and strips the threads or breaks the assembly. A āmechanicās feelā implies not only an understanding for the elasticity of metal but for its softness. The insides of a motorcycle contain surfaces that are precise in some cases to as little as one ten-thousandth of an inch. If you drop them or get dirt on them or scratch them or bang them with a hammer theyāll lose that precision. Itās important to understand that the metal behind the surfaces can normally take great shock and stress but that the surfaces themselves cannot. When handling precision parts that are stuck or difficult to manipulate, a person with mechanicās feel will avoid damaging the surfaces and work with his tools on the nonprecision surfaces of the same part whenever possible.
If he must work on the surfaces themselves, heāll always use softer surfaces to work them with. Brass hammers, plastic hammers, wood hammers, rubber hammers and lead hammers are all available for this work. Use them. Vise jaws can be fitted with plastic and copper and lead faces. Use these too. Handle precision parts gently. Youāll never be sorry. If you have a tendency to bang things around, take more time and try to develop a little more respect for the accomplishment that a precision part represents.
Maybe itās just the usual late afternoon letdown, but after all Iāve said about all these things today I just have a feeling that Iāve somehow talked around the point. Some could ask, āWell, if I get around all those gumption traps, then will I have the thing licked?ā The answer, of course, is no, you still havenāt got anything licked. Youāve got to live right too. Itās the way you live that predisposes you to avoid the traps and see the right facts. You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? Itās easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally. Thatās the way all the experts do it. The making of a painting or the fixing of a motorcycle isnāt separate from the rest of your existence. If youāre a sloppy thinker the six days of the week you arenāt working on your machine, what trap avoidances, what gimmicks, can make you all of a sudden sharp on the seventh? It all goes together. But if youāre a sloppy thinker six days a week and you really try to be sharp on the seventh, then maybe the next six days arenāt going to be quite as sloppy as the preceding six. What Iām trying to come up with on these gumption traps I guess, is shortcuts to living right. The real cycle youāre working on is a cycle called yourself. The machine that appears to be āout thereā and the person that appears to be āin hereā are not two separate things. They grow toward Quality or fall away from Quality together.
I watch the cars go by for a while on the highway. Something lonely about them. Not lonelyā¦worse. Nothing. Like the attendantās expression when he filled the tank. Nothing. A nothing curb, by some nothing gravel, at a nothing intersection, going nowhere. Something about the car drivers too. They look just like the gasoline attendant, staring straight ahead in some private trance of their own. I havenāt seen that since ā since Sylvia noticed it the first day. They all look like theyāre in a funeral procession. Once in a while one gives a quick glance and then looks away expressionlessly, as if minding his own business, as if embarrassed that we might have noticed he was looking at us. I see it now because weāve been away from it for a long time. The driving is different too. The cars seem to be moving at a steady maximum speed for in-town driving, as though they want to get somewhere, as though whatās here right now is just something to get through. The drivers seem to be thinking about where they want to be rather than where they are. I know what it is! Weāve arrived at the West Coast! Weāre all strangers again! Folks, I just forgot the biggest gumption trap of all. The funeral procession! The one everybodyās in, this hyped-up, fuck-you, supermodern, ego style of life that thinks it owns this country. Weāve been out of it for so long Iād forgotten all about it.
We see much more of this loneliness now. Itās paradoxical that where people are the most closely crowded, in the big coastal cities in the East and West, the loneliness is the greatest. Back where people were so spread out in western Oregon and Idaho and Montana and the Dakotas youād think the loneliness would have been greater, but we didnāt see it so much. The explanation, I suppose, is that the physical distance between people has nothing to do with loneliness. Itās psychic distance, and in Montana and Idaho the physical distances are big but the psychic distances between people are small, and here itās reversed. Itās the primary America weāre in. It hit the night before last in Prineville Junction and itās been with us ever since. Thereās this primary America of freeways and jet flights and TV and movie spectaculars. And people caught up in this primary America seem to go through huge portions of their lives without much consciousness of whatās immediately around them. The media have convinced them that whatās right around them is unimportant. And thatās why theyāre lonely. You see it in their faces. First the little flicker of searching, and then when they look at you, youāre just a kind of an object. You donāt count. Youāre not what theyāre looking for. Youāre not on TV. But in the secondary America weāve been through, of back roads, and Chinamanās ditches, and Appaloosa horses, and sweeping mountain ranges, and meditative thoughts, and kids with pinecones and bumblebees and open sky above us mile after mile after mile, all through that, what was real, what was around us dominated. And so there wasnāt much feeling of loneliness. Thatās the way it must have been a hundred or two hundred years ago. Hardly any people and hardly any loneliness. Iām undoubtedly over-generalizing, but if the proper qualifications were introduced it would be true. Technology is blamed for a lot of this loneliness, since the loneliness is certainly associated with the newer technological devicesā¦TV, jets, freeways and so onā¦but I hope itās been made plain that the real evil isnāt the objects of technology but the tendency of technology to isolate people into lonely attitudes of objectivity. Itās the objectivity, the dualistic way of looking at things underlying technology, that produces the evil. Thatās why I went to so much trouble to show how technology could be used to destroy the evil. A person who knows how to fix motorcyclesā¦with Qualityā¦is less likely to run short of friends than one who doesnāt. And they arenāt going to see him as some kind of object either. Quality destroys objectivity every time.
Or if he takes whatever dull job heās stuck withā¦and they are all, sooner or later, dullā¦and, just to keep himself amused, starts to look for options of Quality, and secretly pursues these options, just for their own sake, thus making an art out of what he is doing, heās likely to discover that he becomes a much more interesting person and much less of an object to the people around him because his Quality decisions change him too. And not only the job and him, but others too because the Quality tends to fan out like waves. The Quality job he didnāt think anyone was going to see is seen, and the person who sees it feels a little better because of it, and is likely to pass that feeling on to others, and in that way the Quality tends to keep on going.
My personal feeling is that this is how any further improvement of the world will be done: by individuals making Quality decisions and thatās all. God, I donāt want to have any more enthusiasm for big programs full of social planning for big masses of people that leave individual Quality out. These can be left alone for a while. Thereās a place for them but theyāve got to be built on a foundation of Quality within the individuals involved. Weāve had that individual Quality in the past, exploited it as a natural resource without knowing it, and now itās just about depleted. Everyoneās just about out of gumption. And I think itās about time to return to the rebuilding of this American resourceā¦individual worth. There are political reactionaries whoāve been saying something close to this for years. Iām not one of them, but to the extent theyāre talking about real individual worth and not just an excuse for giving more money to the rich, theyāre right. We do need a return to individual integrity, self-reliance and old-fashioned gumption. We really do. I hope that in this Chautauqua some directions have been pointed to.
I keep wanting to go back to that analogy of fishing for facts. I can just see somebody asking with great frustration, āYes, but which facts do you fish for? Thereās got to be more to it than that.ā But the answer is that if you know which facts youāre fishing for youāre no longer fishing. Youāve caught them. Iām trying to think of a specific example. All kinds of examples from cycle maintenance could be given, but the most striking example of value rigidity I can think of is the old South Indian Monkey Trap, which depends on value rigidity for its effectiveness. The trap consists of a hollowed-out coconut chained to a stake. The coconut has some rice inside which can be grabbed through a small hole. The hole is big enough so that the monkeyās hand can go in, but too small for his fist with rice in it to come out. The monkey reaches in and is suddenly trappedā¦by nothing more than his own value rigidity. He canāt revalue the rice. He cannot see that freedom without rice is more valuable than capture with it. The villagers are coming to get him and take him away. Theyāre coming closer - closer! - now! What general adviceā¦ not specific adviceā¦ but what general advice would you give the poor monkey in circumstances like this? Well, I think you might say exactly what Iāve been saying about value rigidity, with perhaps a little extra urgency. There is a fact this monkey should know: if he opens his hand heās free. But how is he going to discover this fact? By removing the value rigidity that rates rice above freedom. How is he going to do that? Well, he should somehow try to slow down deliberately and go over ground that he has been over before and see if things he thought were important really were important and, well, stop yanking and just stare at the coconut for a while. Before long he should get a nibble from a little fact wondering if he is interested in it. He should try to understand this fact not so much in terms of his big problem as for its own sake. That problem may not be as big as he thinks it is. That fact may not be as small as he thinks it is either. Thatās about all the general information you can give him.
The next one is important. Itās the internal gumption trap of ego. Ego isnāt entirely separate from value rigidity but one of the many causes of it. If you have a high evaluation of yourself then your ability to recognize new facts is weakened. Your ego isolates you from the Quality reality. When the facts show that youāve just goofed, youāre not as likely to admit it. When false information makes you look good, youāre likely to believe it. On any mechanical repair job ego comes in for rough treatment. Youāre always being fooled, youāre always making mistakes, and a mechanic who has a big ego to defend is at a terrific disadvantage. If you know enough mechanics to think of them as a group, and your observations coincide with mine, I think youāll agree that mechanics tend to be rather modest and quiet. There are exceptions, but generally if theyāre not quiet and modest at first, the work seems to make them that way. And skeptical. Attentive, but skeptical, But not egoistic. Thereās no way to bullshit your way into looking good on a mechanical repair job, except with someone who doesnāt know what youāre doing. I was going to say that the machine doesnāt respond to your personality, but it does respond to your personality. Itās just that the personality that it responds to is your real personality, the one that genuinely feels and reasons and acts, rather than any false, blown-up personality images your ego may conjure up. These false images are deflated so rapidly and completely youāre bound to be very discouraged very soon if youāve derived your gumption from ego rather than Quality. If modesty doesnāt come easily or naturally to you, one way out of this trap is to fake the attitude of modesty anyway. If you just deliberately assume youāre not much good, then your gumption gets a boost when the facts prove this assumption is correct. This way you can keep going until the time comes when the facts prove this assumption is incorrect. Anxiety, the next gumption trap, is sort of the opposite of ego. Youāre so sure youāll do everything wrong youāre afraid to do anything at all. Often this, rather than ālaziness,ā is the real reason you find it hard to get started. This gumption trap of anxiety, which results from overmotivation, can lead to all kinds of errors of excessive fussiness. You fix things that donāt need fixing, and chase after imaginary ailments. You jump to wild conclusions and build all kinds of errors into the machine because of your own nervousness. These errors, when made, tend to confirm your original underestimation of yourself. This leads to more errors, which lead to more underestimation, in a self-stoking cycle. The best way to break this cycle, I think, is to work out your anxieties on paper. Read every book and magazine you can on the subject. Your anxiety makes this easy and the more you read the more you calm down. You should remember that itās peace of mind youāre after and not just a fixed machine. When beginning a repair job you can list everything youāre going to do on little slips of paper which you then organize into proper sequence. You discover that you organize and then reorganize the sequence again and again as more and more ideas come to you. The time spent this way usually more than pays for itself in time saved on the machine and prevents you from doing fidgety things that create problems later on. You can reduce your anxiety somewhat by facing the fact that there isnāt a mechanic alive who doesnāt louse up a job once in a while. The main difference between you and the commercial mechanics is that when they do it you donāt hear about itā¦ just pay for it, in additional costs prorated through all your bills. When you make the mistakes yourself, you at ]east get the benefit of some education. Boredom is the next gumption trap that comes to mind. This is the opposite of anxiety and commonly goes with ego problems. Boredom means youāre off the Quality track, youāre not seeing things freshly, youāve lost your ābeginnerās mindā and your motorcycle is in great danger. Boredom means your gumption supply is low and must be replenished before anything else is done. When youāre bored, stop! Go to a show. Turn on the TV. Call it a day. Do anything but work on that machine. If you donāt stop, the next thing that happens is the Big Mistake, and then all the boredom plus the Big Mistake combine together in one Sunday punch to knock all the gumption out of you and you are really stopped. My favorite cure for boredom is sleep. Itās very easy to get to sleep when bored and very hard to get bored after a long rest. My next favorite is coffee. I usually keep a pot plugged in while working on the machine. If these donāt work it may mean deeper Quality problems are bothering you and distracting you from whatās before you. The boredom is a signal that you should turn your attention to these problemsā¦thatās what youāre doing anywayā¦and control them before continuing on the motorcycle. For me the most boring task is cleaning the machine. It seems like such a waste of time. It just gets dirty again the first time you ride it. John always kept his BMW spic and span. It really did look nice, while mineās always a little ratty, it seems. Thatās the classical mind at work, runs fine inside but looks dingy on the surface. One solution to boredom on certain kinds of jobs such as greasing and oil changing and tuning is to turn them into a kind of ritual. Thereās an esthetic to doing things that are unfamiliar and another esthetic to doing things that are familiar. I have heard that there are two kinds of welders: production welders, who donāt like tricky setups and enjoy doing the same thing over and over again; and maintenance welders, who hate it when they have to do the same job twice. The advice was that if you hire a welder make sure which kind he is, because theyāre not interchangeable. Iām in that latter class, and thatās probably why I enjoy troubleshooting more than most and dislike cleaning more than most. But I can do both when I have to and so can anyone else. When cleaning I do it the way people go to churchā¦not so much to discover anything new, although Iām alert for new things, but mainly to reacquaint myself with the familiar. Itās nice sometimes to go over familiar paths. Zen has something to say about boredom. Its main practice of ājust sittingā has got to be the worldās most boring activityā¦unless itās that Hindu practice of being buried alive. You donāt do anything much; not move, not think, not care. What could be more boring? Yet in the center of all this boredom is the very thing Zen Buddhism seeks to teach. What is it? What is it at the very center of boredom that youāre not seeing. Impatience is close to boredom but always results from one cause: an underestimation of the amount of time the job will take. You never really know what will come up and very few jobs get done as quickly as planned. Impatience is the first reaction against a setback and can soon turn to anger if youāre not careful. Impatience is best handled by allowing an indefinite time for the job, particularly new jobs that require unfamiliar techniques; by doubling the allotted time when circumstances force time planning; and by scaling down the scope of what you want to do. Overall goals must be scaled down in importance and immediate goals must be scaled up. This requires value flexibility, and the value shift is usually accompanied by some loss of gumption, but itās a sacrifice that must be made. Itās nothing like the loss of gumption that will occur if a Big Mistake caused by impatience occurs. My favorite scaling-down exercise is cleaning up nuts and bolts and studs and tapped holes.
Iāve got a phobia about crossed or jimmied or rust-jammed or dirt-jammed threads that cause nuts to turn slow or hard; and when I find one, I take its dimensions with a thread gauge and calipers, get out the taps and dies, recut the threads on it, then examine it and oil it and I have a whole new perspective on patience. Another one is cleaning up tools that have been used and not put away and are cluttering up the place. This is a good one because one of the first warning signs of impatience is frustration at not being able to lay your hand on the tool you need right away. If you just stop and put tools away neatly you will both find the tool and also scale down your impatience without wasting time or endangering the work.
Well, that about does it for value traps. Thereās a whole lot more of them, of course. Iāve really only just touched on the subject to show whatās there. Almost any mechanic could fill you in for hours on value traps heās discovered that I donāt know anything about. Youāre bound to discover plenty of them for yourself on almost every job. Perhaps the best single thing to learn is to recognize a value trap when youāre in it and work on that before you continue on the machine.
Truth traps are concerned with data that are apprehended and are within the boxcars of the train. For the most part these data are properly handled by conventional dualistic logic and the scientific method talked about earlier, back just after Miles City. But thereās one trap that isnātā¦the truth trap of yes-no logic. Yes and no ā this or that ā one or zero. On the basis of this elementary two-term discrimination, all human knowledge is built up. The demonstration of this is the computer memory which stores all its knowledge in the form of binary information. It contains ones and zeros, thatās all. Because weāre unaccustomed to it, we donāt usually see that thereās a third possible logical term equal to yes and no which is capable of expanding our understanding in an unrecognized direction. We donāt even have a term for it, so Iāll have to use the Japanese mu. Mu means āno thing.ā Like āQualityā it points outside the process of dualistic discrimination. Mu simply says, āNo class; not one, not zero, not yes, not no.ā It states that the context of the question is such that a yes or no answer is in error and should not be given. āUnask the questionā is what it says. Mu becomes appropriate when the context of the question becomes too small for the truth of the answer. When the Zen monk Joshu was asked whether a dog had a Buddha nature he said āMu,ā meaning that if he answered either way he was answering incorrectly. The Buddha nature cannot be captured by yes or no questions. That mu exists in the natural world investigated by science is evident. Itās just that, as usual, weāre trained not to see it by our heritage. For example, itās stated over and over again that computer circuits exhibit only two states, a voltage for āoneā and a voltage for āzero.ā Thatās silly. Any computer-electronics technician knows otherwise. Try to find a voltage representing one or zero when the power is off! The circuits are in a mu state. They arenāt at one, they arenāt at zero, theyāre in an indeterminate state that has no meaning in terms of ones or zeros. Readings of the voltmeter will show, in many cases, āfloating groundā characteristics, in which the technician isnāt reading characteristics of the computer circuits at all but characteristics of the voltmeter itself. Whatās happened is that the power-off condition is part of a context larger than the context in which the one zero states are considered universal. The question of one or zero has been āunasked.ā And there are plenty of other computer conditions besides a power-off condition in which mu answers are found because of larger contexts than the one-zero universality. The dualistic mind tends to think of mu occurrences in nature as a kind of contextual cheating, or irrelevance, but mu is found throughout all scientific investigation, and nature doesnāt cheat, and natureās answers are never irrelevant. Itās a great mistake, a kind of dishonesty, to sweep natureās mu answers under the carpet. Recognition and valuatian of these answers would do a lot to bring logical theory closer to experimental practice. Every laboratory scientist knows that very often his experimental results provide mu answers to the yes-no questions the experiments were designed for. In these cases he considers the experiment poorly designed, chides himself for stupidity and at best considers the āwastedā experiment which has provided the mu answer to be a kind of wheel-spinning which might help prevent mistakes in the design of future yes-no experiments. This low evaluation of the experiment which provided the mu answer isnāt justified. The mu answer is an important one. Itās told the scientist that the context of his question is too small for natureās answer and that he must enlarge the context of the question. That is a very important answer! His understanding of nature is tremendously improved by it, which was the purpose of the experiment in the first place. 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 āphenomenonā that inspires scientific enquiry in the first place! Thereās nothing mysterious or esoteric about it. Itās just that our culture has warped us to make a low value judgment of it. In motorcycle maintenance the mu answer given by the machine to many of the diagnostic questions put to it is a major cause of gumption loss. It shouldnāt be! When your answer to a test is indeterminate it means one of two things: that your test procedures arenāt doing what you think they are or that your understanding of the context of the question needs to be enlarged. Check your tests and restudy the question. Donāt throw away those mu answers! Theyāre every bit as vital as the yes or no answers. Theyāre more vital. Theyāre the ones you grow on!
The mu expansion is the only thing I want to say about truth traps at this time. Time to switch to the psychomotor traps. This is the domain of understanding which is most directly related to what happens to the machine. Here by far the most frustrating gumption trap is inadequate tools. Nothingās quite so demoralizing as a tool hang-up. Buy good tools as you can afford them and youāll never regret it. If you want to save money donāt overlook the newspaper want ads. Good tools, as a rule, donāt wear out, and good secondhand tools are much better than inferior new ones. Study the tool catalogs. You can learn a lot from them. Apart from bad tools, bad surroundings are a major gumption trap. Pay attention to adequate lighting. Itās amazing the number of mistakes a little light can prevent. Some physical discomfort is unpreventable, but a lot of it, such as that which occurs in surroundings that are too hot or too cold, can throw your evaluations way off if you arenāt careful. If youāre too cold, for example, youāll hurry and probably make mistakes. If youāre too hot your anger threshold gets much lower. Avoid out-of-position work when possible. A small stool on either side of the cycle will increase your patience greatly and youāll be much less likely to damage the assemblies youāre working on. Thereās one psychomotor gumption trap, muscular insensitivity, which accounts for some real damage. It results in part from lack of kinesthesia, a failure to realize that although the externals of a cycle are rugged, inside the engine are delicate precision parts which can be easily damaged by muscular insensitivity. Thereās whatās called āmechanicās feel,ā which is very obvious to those who know what it is, but hard to describe to those who donāt; and when you see someone working on a machine who doesnāt have it, you tend to suffer with the machine. The mechanicās feel comes from a deep inner kinesthetic feeling for the elasticity of materials. Some materials, like ceramics, have very little, so that when you thread a porcelain fitting youāre very careful not to apply great pressures. Other materials, like steel, have tremendous elasticity, more than rubber, but in a range in which, unless youāre working with large mechanical forces, the elasticity isnāt apparent. With nuts and bolts youāre in the range of large mechanical forces and you should understand that within these ranges metals are elastic. When you take up a nut thereās a point called āfinger-tightā where thereās contact but no takeup of elasticity. Then thereās āsnug,ā in which the easy surface elasticity is taken up. Then thereās a range called ātight,ā in which all the elasticity is taken up. The force required to reach these three points is different for each size of nut and bolt, and different for lubricated bolts and for locknuts. The forces are different for steel and cast iron and brass and aluminum and plastics and ceramics. But a person with mechanicās feel knows when somethingās tight and stops. A person without it goes right on past and strips the threads or breaks the assembly. A āmechanicās feelā implies not only an understanding for the elasticity of metal but for its softness. The insides of a motorcycle contain surfaces that are precise in some cases to as little as one ten-thousandth of an inch. If you drop them or get dirt on them or scratch them or bang them with a hammer theyāll lose that precision. Itās important to understand that the metal behind the surfaces can normally take great shock and stress but that the surfaces themselves cannot. When handling precision parts that are stuck or difficult to manipulate, a person with mechanicās feel will avoid damaging the surfaces and work with his tools on the nonprecision surfaces of the same part whenever possible.
If he must work on the surfaces themselves, heāll always use softer surfaces to work them with. Brass hammers, plastic hammers, wood hammers, rubber hammers and lead hammers are all available for this work. Use them. Vise jaws can be fitted with plastic and copper and lead faces. Use these too. Handle precision parts gently. Youāll never be sorry. If you have a tendency to bang things around, take more time and try to develop a little more respect for the accomplishment that a precision part represents.
Maybe itās just the usual late afternoon letdown, but after all Iāve said about all these things today I just have a feeling that Iāve somehow talked around the point. Some could ask, āWell, if I get around all those gumption traps, then will I have the thing licked?ā The answer, of course, is no, you still havenāt got anything licked. Youāve got to live right too. Itās the way you live that predisposes you to avoid the traps and see the right facts. You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? Itās easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally. Thatās the way all the experts do it. The making of a painting or the fixing of a motorcycle isnāt separate from the rest of your existence. If youāre a sloppy thinker the six days of the week you arenāt working on your machine, what trap avoidances, what gimmicks, can make you all of a sudden sharp on the seventh? It all goes together. But if youāre a sloppy thinker six days a week and you really try to be sharp on the seventh, then maybe the next six days arenāt going to be quite as sloppy as the preceding six. What Iām trying to come up with on these gumption traps I guess, is shortcuts to living right. The real cycle youāre working on is a cycle called yourself. The machine that appears to be āout thereā and the person that appears to be āin hereā are not two separate things. They grow toward Quality or fall away from Quality together.
I watch the cars go by for a while on the highway. Something lonely about them. Not lonelyā¦worse. Nothing. Like the attendantās expression when he filled the tank. Nothing. A nothing curb, by some nothing gravel, at a nothing intersection, going nowhere. Something about the car drivers too. They look just like the gasoline attendant, staring straight ahead in some private trance of their own. I havenāt seen that since ā since Sylvia noticed it the first day. They all look like theyāre in a funeral procession. Once in a while one gives a quick glance and then looks away expressionlessly, as if minding his own business, as if embarrassed that we might have noticed he was looking at us. I see it now because weāve been away from it for a long time. The driving is different too. The cars seem to be moving at a steady maximum speed for in-town driving, as though they want to get somewhere, as though whatās here right now is just something to get through. The drivers seem to be thinking about where they want to be rather than where they are. I know what it is! Weāve arrived at the West Coast! Weāre all strangers again! Folks, I just forgot the biggest gumption trap of all. The funeral procession! The one everybodyās in, this hyped-up, fuck-you, supermodern, ego style of life that thinks it owns this country. Weāve been out of it for so long Iād forgotten all about it.
We see much more of this loneliness now. Itās paradoxical that where people are the most closely crowded, in the big coastal cities in the East and West, the loneliness is the greatest. Back where people were so spread out in western Oregon and Idaho and Montana and the Dakotas youād think the loneliness would have been greater, but we didnāt see it so much. The explanation, I suppose, is that the physical distance between people has nothing to do with loneliness. Itās psychic distance, and in Montana and Idaho the physical distances are big but the psychic distances between people are small, and here itās reversed. Itās the primary America weāre in. It hit the night before last in Prineville Junction and itās been with us ever since. Thereās this primary America of freeways and jet flights and TV and movie spectaculars. And people caught up in this primary America seem to go through huge portions of their lives without much consciousness of whatās immediately around them. The media have convinced them that whatās right around them is unimportant. And thatās why theyāre lonely. You see it in their faces. First the little flicker of searching, and then when they look at you, youāre just a kind of an object. You donāt count. Youāre not what theyāre looking for. Youāre not on TV. But in the secondary America weāve been through, of back roads, and Chinamanās ditches, and Appaloosa horses, and sweeping mountain ranges, and meditative thoughts, and kids with pinecones and bumblebees and open sky above us mile after mile after mile, all through that, what was real, what was around us dominated. And so there wasnāt much feeling of loneliness. Thatās the way it must have been a hundred or two hundred years ago. Hardly any people and hardly any loneliness. Iām undoubtedly over-generalizing, but if the proper qualifications were introduced it would be true. Technology is blamed for a lot of this loneliness, since the loneliness is certainly associated with the newer technological devicesā¦TV, jets, freeways and so onā¦but I hope itās been made plain that the real evil isnāt the objects of technology but the tendency of technology to isolate people into lonely attitudes of objectivity. Itās the objectivity, the dualistic way of looking at things underlying technology, that produces the evil. Thatās why I went to so much trouble to show how technology could be used to destroy the evil. A person who knows how to fix motorcyclesā¦with Qualityā¦is less likely to run short of friends than one who doesnāt. And they arenāt going to see him as some kind of object either. Quality destroys objectivity every time.
Or if he takes whatever dull job heās stuck withā¦and they are all, sooner or later, dullā¦and, just to keep himself amused, starts to look for options of Quality, and secretly pursues these options, just for their own sake, thus making an art out of what he is doing, heās likely to discover that he becomes a much more interesting person and much less of an object to the people around him because his Quality decisions change him too. And not only the job and him, but others too because the Quality tends to fan out like waves. The Quality job he didnāt think anyone was going to see is seen, and the person who sees it feels a little better because of it, and is likely to pass that feeling on to others, and in that way the Quality tends to keep on going.
My personal feeling is that this is how any further improvement of the world will be done: by individuals making Quality decisions and thatās all. God, I donāt want to have any more enthusiasm for big programs full of social planning for big masses of people that leave individual Quality out. These can be left alone for a while. Thereās a place for them but theyāve got to be built on a foundation of Quality within the individuals involved. Weāve had that individual Quality in the past, exploited it as a natural resource without knowing it, and now itās just about depleted. Everyoneās just about out of gumption. And I think itās about time to return to the rebuilding of this American resourceā¦individual worth. There are political reactionaries whoāve been saying something close to this for years. Iām not one of them, but to the extent theyāre talking about real individual worth and not just an excuse for giving more money to the rich, theyāre right. We do need a return to individual integrity, self-reliance and old-fashioned gumption. We really do. I hope that in this Chautauqua some directions have been pointed to.