'Mage: the Ascension' & Zen.

Dedication.

'Mage: the Ascension' game is dedicated to Robert M. Pirsig, author of 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance' (1974) and 'Lila' (1991).

'Many people talk of paradigm shifts, but Pirsig makes them real. In this game, mages are people who draw us onward toward their own Dynamic Quality. Pirsig is a mage of this kind, and I highly recommend both of his books.'

-- Paraphrased & Quoted from 'Mage: the Ascension' book, a 'Dedication' part.


Quote.

'What is in mind is a sort of Chautauqua - that's the only name I can think of for it - like the travelling tent-show Chautauquas that used to move across America, this America, the one that we are now in, an old-time series of popular talks intended to edify and entertain, improve the mind and bring culture and enlightenment to the ears and thoughts of the hearer. The Chautauquas were pushed aside by faster-paced radio, movies and TV, and it seems to me the change was not entirely and improvement. Perhaps because of these changes the stream of national consciousness moves faster now, and is broader, but it seems to run less deep. The old channels cnnot contain it and in its search for new ones there seems to be growing havoc and destruction along its banks. In this Chautauqua I would like not to cut any new channels of consciousness, but simply dig deeper into old ones that have become silted in with the debris of thoughts grown stale and platitudes too often repeated. "What's now?" is an interresting and broadening eternal question, but one which, if pursued exclusively, results in an edless parade of trivia and fashion, the silt of tomorrow. I would like, instead, to be concerned with question "What is best?", a question which cuts deeply rather than broadly, a question whose answers tend to move the silt downstream. There are eras of human history in which channels of thought have been too deeply cut and no change was possible, and nothing new ever happened, and "best" was a matter of dogma, but that is not the situation now. Now the stream of our common consciousness seems to be obliterating its own banks, losing its central direction and purpose, flooding the lowlands, disconnecting and isolating the highlands and to no particular purpose other than the wasteful fulfillment of its own internal momentum. Some channel deepening seems called for."

-- Robert M. Pirsig, 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance'.
-- Quoted from 'Mage: the Ascension' book, a 'Dedication' part.