I highly recommend the CBC Ideas podcast interview with Pirsig. "The Motorcycle is Yourself" https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/the-motorcycle-is-yourself-revisitin

I highly recommend the CBC Ideas podcast interview with Pirsig. "The Motorcycle is Yourself" https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/the-motorcycle-is-yourself-revisiting-zen-and-the-art-of-motorcycle-maintenance-1.2914205 https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/the-motorcycle-is-yourself-re... It was originally a radio show, way back, before podcasts. The podcast version is a revisit, revision and update but substantially the same as the original. It was recorded some years after the book was public, and he was working as a technical writer, IIRC. There is a philosophical term that somewhat overlaps with Pirsig's "Quality", to my mind. The ancient Greek idealization of "moderation." When you read Xenophon's surviving text of Agricultural advice; he's pulling much the same move as Persig. When telling you how deep to plant an olive pit, he assumes you'll intuit how deep. He never tries to give a measure just saying something like "not too deep or too shallow." Thanks, Xenophon. He might as well be saying "put it at the point with the highest planting quality." What I take from Pirsig is this: Most of the brain doesn't speak or process speech; moderns do need to tune into more of their brains, where useful intuitions (from experience) lie. If you decide to roll with just rationality, you're leaving most of your brain behind, and the rest is very helpful (see Antonio Domasio and many other psychology profs.) Of course, utterly uniformed intuition isn't of much value, but as we get older, it's time to tune into the parts of the brain (often accessed through subtle body feelings) that don't do logic, or language, per se.