It's really true. When I ride a motorcycle, I'm completely immersed in my surroundings and totally aware and lucid. I think it's because I'm completely focused on riding. I'm sure the levels of dopamine in the brain increase a lot.

I worked in the bookstore at my college during my first year as a student, and this book was assigned reading for intro to philosophy. So I sold it to a lot of kids. Cool review, good words thanks for writing

I love this book. I wrote about reading it as a teenager in my Zen Of Stacking Sats post. #184545

I also really liked Zen in the Art of Archery. Excellent choice of topic (I'm not surprised) and thanks for posting.

love this book. This quote always reminded me of bitcoin:

"We're living in topsy-turvy times, and I think what causes the topsy-turvy feeling is inadequacy of old forms of thought to deal with new experiences. I've heard it said that the only real learning results from hang-ups, where instead of expanding the branches of what you already know, you have to stop and drift laterally for a while until you come across something that allows you to expand the roots of what you already know. Everyone's familiar with that. I think the same thing occurs with whole civilizations when expansion's needed at the roots."

One of my all time favorite reads.

I think I was struggling in my mind to feel the differences, or the different emphasis on different schools of thought. East to West, perhaps. I think Pirsig did what rarely authors are able to do, that takes an everyday subject and its milieu, and imparts a sense of wisdom that never seems to be the main focus and so is never preachy, but just allows you to take it on board, or ignore it entirely and focus on an interesting account of life and relationships.

Inspiring book I read in my travels a few decades ago. Should give it another read actually

Good book.

The part of the discussion that delves into the mindset of trying to understand things deeply, and understand how they work, and not just be a surface-level "user" of motorcycles, is directly applicable to bitcoin.

Not only is it applicable, that attitude is sorely needed in bitcoin, I think, since it's incompatible with stumbling around hollering "bitcoin fixes this!" into people's faces in response to every statement.

The terror of the possibility of being trapped in your own body. To look at your own hands and know that their occupant may not be you. "And yet strange wisps of his memory suddenly match and fit this road and desert bluffs and white-hot sand all around us and there is a bizarre concurrence and then I know he has seen all of this. He was here, otherwise I would not know it. He had to be. And in seeing these sudden coalescences of vision and in recall of some strange fragment of thought whose origin I have no idea of, I'm like a clairvoyant, a spirit medium receiving messages from another world. That is how it is. I see things with my own eyes, and I see things with his eyes too. He once owned them. These EYES! That is the terror of it. These gloved hands I now look at, steering the motorcycle down the road, were once his! And if you can understand the feeling that comes from that, then you can understand real fear...the fear that comes from knowing there is nowhere you can possibly run."

It was the first book a mentor told me to read, that was 12 years ago, I think this is a reminder. I need to read it.

Does the book have any Bitcoin in it?

The whole book is an exploration of Quality. We know Quality when we see it. But what is it? It sent him mad.

In Bitcoiner-speak Pirsig is railing against the "fiat world".

Bitcoin is Quality.