There are no easy answers to the big questions

"WHAT I would like to do is use the time that is coming now to talk about some things that have come to mind. We’re in such a hurry most of the time we never get much chance to talk. The result is a kind of endless day-to-day shallowness, a monotony that leaves a person wondering years later where all the time went and sorry that it’s all gone. Now that we do have some time, and know it, I would like to use the time to talk in some depth about things that seem important."

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, from which the above quote comes, is, at one level, a story about a road journey. A middle-aged man – we assume it’s Robert Pirsig, the author himself – sets out with his son, Chris, on a motorcycle trip from Minnesota to California.

They take all the back roads, camping out or sleeping in motels. Pirsig describes the wind moving across the plains, he shares moments when birds rise up from marshes next to the road, we almost become part of ferocious storms that develop.

Tom Butler-Bowdon writes an excellent synopsis of Pirsig’s epic in his own 2005 publication, 50 Spiritual Classics, a diverse "bite-sized" collection of the most enduring spiritual traditions relevant to our contemporary lives.

Pirsig’s novel, which received rave reviews and has sold millions of copies since its release in 1974, also offers a philosophical approach to life based on the narrator’s experiences maintaining his motorbike.

It seems he had a bad experience with a previous garage repair which convinced him to do his own maintenance. Anyone, he suggests, can replace a motorcycle part. Our narrator should know, after all, he writes technical manuals in his day job.

But looking after a motorbike, he argues, is not simply about replacing parts; it’s more about a regard for the overall machine.

So, as you share the road trip, you come to realise mechanics – or what he calls quality – is not about the parts, it’s beyond mechanics... it’s about the overall experience. And to get that best performance – the best quality – requires dedication and commitment. The whole machine has to be cared for. It’s not about appearances, how a thing looks; more the truth behind appearances. Ultimately, he’s talking about love itself.

I know a few motorbike petrol heads. Some of them are masters at a motorcycle restoration. They know how to fix things – how to make things work. Nearly all of them can strip a bike down and put it back together again. Some of them know maintaining a motorbike is much more than the sum of all the parts. Some are up there with Pirsig – whether they know it or not!

RICHARD Alpert didn’t know what he believed any more; which was a bit unusual given, in his day job, he was a distinguished psychology professor lecturing at Harvard University.

"I had a Mercedes-Benz, a Triumph 500cc motorcycle and a Cessna 172 airplane," he reflected. Yet, for all his wealth and the material trappings associated with his success back in the 1960s, something was missing... He realised he was just going through the motions without any core belief system to direct his life.

Then he met the legendary Timothy Leary, prophet of the 1960s’ counterculture movement, who introduced him to Tioananctyl, or magic mushrooms... later he met the intellectual and satirist Aldous Huxley who was a strong advocate of psychedelic drugs.

With drug-induced hallucinations and a range of mind-altering experiences, it seems Alpert embraced the, then, vogue (though with hindsight naïve) belief that true enlightenment would come from the new consciousness euphoria only drugs could inspire.

Habitual drug use, though, as his generation discovered, can also lead to depression, paranoia and early onset psychoses. Those early advocates raved about life-transforming spiritual experiences and there is some academic evidence to support this but far from experiencing a modernist utopia the US – read "the West" – sank into the nightmarish squalor and ravages of rising crime we now associate with substance abuse.

Alpert became marginalised and left the States to travel throughout India in search of holy men, who, he hoped would show him "the way". Irony of ironies he met, thousands of miles from home, a fellow Californian named Bhagwan Dass.

They travelled together. Bhagwan Dass, who had gained a reputation as a guru, had a powerful mantra: "Don’t think about tomorrow. Just be here now."

Alpert changed his name to Ram Dass (which means "servant of God"). He came to realise that we function at many different levels, that we each have many different "selves".

Like Pirsig, in a way, he concluded that a "purely rational approach to life leads to madness". Like a motorcycle engine we, as individuals, are much more than the sum of our parts.

While some had believed that LSD, for example, was "God’s way of getting Americans to embark on a more spiritual path", Ram Dass ultimately concluded that: "The goal of the path is to BE high, not GET high".

FROM California to Caithness... of our own Dunbeath-born novelist Neil Miller Gunn it was once said that, if assembled, his collective literary canon could be entitled A Scottish Mystic’s Search for the Conditions of Human Fulfilment.

The renowned author, whose work included Morning Tide, Highland River and The Well at the World’s End, wrote an unconventional autobiography, The Atom of Delight, in 1956. Written in third person and mostly intriguing essays about his youth, it was his last book. (Then in his mid-60s he said he had run out of energy to write about his adulthood.)

Many regarded the book as a reflective philosophy, even a spiritual autobiography, in which he sought (and offers) a transcendent meaning beyond our immediate daily lives.

"Often when looking for a thing I find something else," Gunn had reflected. "I knew what I was looking for, but what I find is surprising. At once some part of life is resurrected; persons move about, I see their faces, the place, almost the air of that forgotten time. Yes, it was like that – for now in some mysterious way the happenings, the arrested moments are cleansed. Outlines are clear; the expression in the eyes, caught out of a myriad of expressions, is the lasting, the essential one; clothes, colour; the leaves on the tree, the sky; not the scent, perhaps, but the freshness of the scent. Now there is no confusion. That is how it was; if love, it was wonderful; if tragedy, it is accepted at last. I inhabit that place and judge no more."

Gunn was fascinated by the prospect of a second self or inner core in which he found true delight. It provided the very atom and was the source of insights from which his true transcendence emanated.

And it was the very atom – as he wrote at the height of the Cold War – which literally had the potential to destroy the planet... though Gunn preferred the prospect of integration rather than disintegration.

Pirsig, Alpert and Gunn had each sought to share, albeit alternative, perspectives to the age-old questions about the meaning of life. Each, in their own way, offered very personal insights about life, love and the pursuit of happiness.

There are no easy answers to the big questions. But, as Gunn reminds us, "Hang on to the hunt, however elusive the quarry may be".

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Dan Mackay is a former chairman of the Neil Gunn Society.