Paths to Enlightenment

Both works tend to emphasize an Eastern approach to wisdom, although Pirsig's journey takes place entirely in the United States, while Galland travels throughout the world, East and West. This Eastern approach to wisdom stresses intuition and experience over dogma or doctrine. Although both authors include many elements of Western religion and thought (especially Greek philosophy in Pirsig and Christian faith in Galland), it would be fair to say that their hearts belong more to the open-ended ways of the East than the conclusion-oriented ways of the West. Both works emphasize the holistic nature of the spiritual journey---the journey takes place both inside the individual and outside in the world at the same time. This is what gives the reader the sense that both authors see the spiritual journey as a natural one, one which is not unusual or based on some extreme religious or philosophical idea.

What is unnatural to both authors is accepting the dogma that other people set forth as the truth. Both authors see the journey as a process in which the individual must decide for himself or herself wha

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narrowly. What's really angering about instructions of this sort is that they imply there's only one way to put this [machine] together---their way. And that presumption wipes out all the creativity. Actually, there are hundreds of ways to put the [machine] together. . . . [Sticking to the instructions,] you lose feeling for the work. . . . And it's very unlikely that they've told you the best way (Pirsig 147). This passage can be seen as a description of the spiritual journey itself. One loses one's "feeling" for the journey if one follows the "instructions" set down by others. Those instructions may apply to the one who wrote them, or they may apply to the one who gave them to the one who wrote them, but they do not necessarily apply to the one who is reading them. The spiritual journey is the journey of the individual who uses his or her intuition to decide what is true and important. Galland seems to be slightly more reverential toward spiritual thinkers than Pirsig. She is less analytical and more immediately accepting of the ideas she encounters in the East. She states ideas as if they facts more than Pirsig does. For example, we read in her book: This is darkness to the thinking mind, to the ego that grasps and holds t
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Approximate Word count = 1313
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)

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