On Quality: An Inquiry into Excellence: Unpublished and Selected Writings

The ultimate goal in the pursuit of excellence is enlightenment. After that there are no goals, for one realizes emotionally as well as intellectually that all experience is of equal quality.

Quality is a characteristic of thought and statement that is recognized by a non-thinking or intuitive process. Because definitions are a product of rigid reasoning, quality can never be rigidly defined. But everyone knows what it is.

The best way of investigating Quality that I know of is the brilliant Oriental technique of zazen, which defines Dynamic Quality very precisely by forcing a subtraction of static intellectual patterns for it rather than adding new ones.

I can talk a lot about the wording of and the language of Quality, but ultimately the Quality, which is the pure thing—or the pure non-thing, as the Buddhists would say—is apprehended in ways that are not to be described.

Dynamic Quality is outside all patterns including philosophical rules. It is perceived directly, without intellectual mediation.

At the instant quality is observed, observer and observed are not separate. Thought of the sort used in definitions uses symbols of past experience to account for new experience. Quality is the experience before it is symbolized. A discipline of quality is learned when one succeeds in a pure response to one’s instantaneous situation uncluttered by

The past exists only in our memories, the future only in our plans. The present is our only reality.

Dharma, like ṛta, means “what holds together.” It is the basis of all order. It equals righteousness. It is the ethical code. It is the stable condition which gives man perfect satisfaction.

Normally one’s ability to see what is good marches far ahead of one’s ability to produce it.