Part of our Online RPA Resources is a growing collection of “ZMM Conversations” hosted by Sevilla King.
Sevilla King is a therapist, philosophical counsellor, and the host of A Quality Existence — a hub for conversations around Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (ZMM), and the Metaphysics of Quality (MoQ). Through in-depth interviews and thoughtful reflections, Sevilla invites listeners into the heart of the meaning crisis, seeking not only to understand it, but to live through it with depth, clarity, and care. With a background in both the arts and psychotherapy, Sevilla brings a unique perspective to her explorations — one that is grounded, intuitive, and profoundly human. Her YouTube channel features readings and interpretations of both ZMM and Lila, alongside conversations with those inspired by Pirsig’s work and vision.
A Quality Existence is more than a title — it’s a personal and philosophical commitment. Sevilla’s work invites us to attend to the patterns of value that shape our lives, and to live with greater presence, purpose, and integrity. Visit Sevilla’s personal website sevillakingmsw.com to learn more about her work as a therapist and counsellor.
The ZMM Conversation Series
- Doug Bates – Writer on Pyrrho and the pre-Socratics
- Caroling Geary – Long term Zen Buddhist friend of Robert Pirsig and first wife Nancy
- Mark Richardson – Motoring journalist, writer and ZMM Route motorcyclist
- Mick “Horse” White – Software engineer and curator of the original MoQ.org Discussion Forum
- Khoo Hock Aun – Director of ASEAN Green Chamber of Commerce
- Ramey Wood – Writer and interdisciplinary thinker
- Ian Glendinning – Engineer, systems thinker and philosophical blogger
- Lee Glover – Documentarian and motorcycle enthusiast
- Dennis Davis – Motorcycling documentary film-maker
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Douglas Bates at ZaMM Convos – Pyrrho vs the Presocratics in Pirsig’s Metaphysics
Doug Bates discusses his fascination with ancient philosophies, especially Pyrrhoism — a less known Hellenistic philosophy from ancient Greece. He compares Pyrrhoism to Stoicism and Epicureanism, explaining how these philosophies have influenced modern thinking about mindfulness and the quest for mental peace. Bates traces his philosophical journey back to his teenage years when he first read ZMM, which deeply influenced his understanding of philosophy and life. Bates has extensively explored various philosophical doctrines and shares how these ancient teachings can be applied to modern life, particularly through the lens of Zen Buddhism and the concept of “ataraxia,” which means being unperturbed.
“I was completely blown away by ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’ when I first read it at age 16.”
“My work in philosophy frequently touches on themes that came up in ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.'”
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Find Doug’s recent writing here on Pirsig and Pyrrho “Robert Pirsig, Pyrrho, and the Buddha versus Socrates“ .
Find more of Doug’s writing at https://pyrrhonism.medium.com
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Caroling Geary at ZaMM Convos – Caroling Geary is a Long Time Friend of Robert Pirsig
Caroling Geary recounts her inspiring relationship with Nancy Ann James and Bob Pirsig, exploring how their mutual interests in Zen and art shaped her life and work.
“Bob was the main thinker of my life that I have ever met.”
“Bob’s book was a masterpiece that perfectly captured his philosophical journey, which I was privileged to be part of.”
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Remembering Nancy Ann James with her writing:
How Buddhism Changed My Life, by Nancy Pirsig (Nancy Ann James), pub Emerald Coast Philosophical Society
From Nothing to Everything Just as It Is, by Nancy Pirsig (Nancy Ann James), pub Yes International Publishers, St. Paul, MN
How to do Everything by Learning to do Nothing, by Nancy Pirsig (Nancy Ann James), pub Caroling at Wholeo.Net
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Mark Richardson at ZaMM Convos – Author of Zen and Now
Mark Richardson is a Canadian journalist and long-time motorcycle enthusiast who, in 2004, set out to recreate the 2,000-mile motorcycle journey that Robert Pirsig and his son Chris rode in 1968—a journey immortalized in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. His book Zen and Now: On the Trail of Robert Pirsig and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance weaves together a compelling travelogue, a biography of Pirsig, and a deeply personal meditation on fatherhood, technology, and the search for Quality.
Mark reflects on the writing of Zen and Now, recounting the ethical and emotional complexities of researching Pirsig’s life. He discusses the parallels between his own life and Pirsig’s, the weight of discovering “unsettling truths,” and the moments of strange synchronicity that shaped his journey.
Find Mark’s Web Page here: Mark Richardson’s Zen and Now
(Mark has updated web-pages since his later books.)
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Horse at ZaMM Convos – The Original MoQ.org Curator
Horse is a retired software engineer and the original designer of MoQ.org, the foundational website that housed early online discussions about the Metaphysics of Quality. A key figure in the digital Pirsig community, he helped initiate and maintain important forums like Lila Squad, MoQ Discuss, and MoQ Focus, where philosophical conversations unfolded throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s. He is one of the few in the community who met Robert Pirsig in person, at a 2005 event in the UK.
Horse reflects on the evolution of MoQ.org, the early days of moderated online discussion, and Pirsig’s influence on the small but passionate “Pirsigsphere.” He also recounts personal exchanges with Pirsig—who once asked if he owed Horse money for running the site—and discusses plans to restore and share archived essays and discussion files that have been offline for years. He closes by reflecting on the continuing relevance of Pirsig’s ideas in an increasingly polarized world.
“The idea of Dynamic Quality, is indescribable, because as soon as you start describing what it is it becomes something else.”
“I guess you could say even the Eastern philosophy seems to have been – not lost but – ignored more in favor of adaptation to Western society with sort of economics.”
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Khoo Hock Aun at ZaMM Convos – Eastern VS Western Values & Global Sustainability
Khoo Hock Aun is a Malaysian writer, poet, and sustainability advocate whose engagement with Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance began in the late 1970s. A long-standing voice in the Pirsig community, Khoo was one of the earliest contributors from Asia to MoQ.org and related online discussion forums. His work bridges Western philosophical traditions with Eastern values, offering a rare and vital counter-perspective in a conversation often dominated by Western intellectual frameworks.
Trained in agri-business and journalism, Khoo has spent decades organizing around sustainable trade, and now leads efforts to launch a Green Chamber of Commerce. He draws on the Metaphysics of Quality to argue for value-centered approaches to business and community—stressing the importance of stakeholder well-being over profit maximization. For Khoo, sustainability is not merely an environmental concern but a deeper issue of moral and metaphysical alignment.
In this wide-ranging conversation, he explores how Pirsig’s philosophy affirms Eastern perspectives of direct experience, mindfulness, and non-duality. He discusses the corporate subject-object divide, critiques the ideology of the “artificial person,” and reflects on the cultural dominance of Western civilization. He also shares memories of meeting Pirsig at the 2005 Liverpool conference and reading both Zen and Lila as a foundation for his life’s work. His poetic practice, influenced by James Cowan’s The Symbols, expresses the Quality experience as a form of universal consciousness—a lived and intuitive truth beyond intellect.
“the value system of any community, any group around the world becomes very important and central to the question of how we live, how we exist, and how we continue as a human race, humanity”
“And sustainability, as we are looking at it now, is basically ensuring fair returns to stakeholders, not just shareholders. So, it’s an expansion of the term, and we have to navigate this very carefully because ideologies can easily come into play, and the debate over ideology can distort the, emotionally I feel, not rationally, the discussion over what is sustainable, what is not, what should be done, and what should not be done. And in terms of value systems, which decide or activate our activities, I mean, our approach to doing things.”
Khoo Hock Aun’s Blog Post: “Asian” Versus “Western” Values
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Ramey Wood at ZaMM Convos – Neuroplasticity and ZMM
Ramey Wood is a writer and interdisciplinary thinker whose life and work have been profoundly shaped by Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Born in Boulder, Colorado in the early 1970s, Ramey was introduced to Pirsig’s work after sustaining a concussion in high school—an experience that led to his lifelong exploration of neuroplasticity, education, and the metaphysics of Quality. ZMM gave him a philosophical compass for making sense of trauma and helped him rebuild trust in his own experience at a time when institutional frameworks were failing him.
Ramey speaks about the “relational choice” at the core of motorcycle maintenance—not merely a metaphor, but a lived practice of being “response-able” in the present moment. He argues that the real integration of Pirsig’s work happens not through intellectual abstraction, but through the choices we make in our relationships and actions.
“We have to know what we’re communicating. We don’t have to prove to anybody else, the truth of that or how sincere we are or anything. Because our awareness of that present moment and what someone else may be authentically going through instead of trying to be there for them, sometimes the strongest position for being there for someone is to really know your orientation. And then to be response-able from there. That’s the motorcycle maintenance. It’s in that space where the classic-romantic and even the Dynamic-static, that’s where all that bleeds together, and it allows for that relational choice.”
Ramey’s Writing on Warm Beverage
X: @iramey
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Psybertron at ZaMM Convos – The Pirsig Space Yesterday, Today and Coming up
Ian Glendinning is a UK-based professional engineer and amateur philosopher whose work has long explored the relationship between metaphysics, systems thinking, and lived experience. Since 2001, his blog Psybertron has served as a space for sustained inquiry into the foundations of knowledge, logic, and value, with Pirsig’s ZMM and the Metaphysics of Quality forming a key part of that philosophical orientation.
Ian encountered Pirsig’s work in the early 2000s while working on complex socio-technical systems, and his interest in epistemology and metaphysics aligned closely with the questions Pirsig raised. He became deeply involved in online discussions surrounding the MoQ, including the MoQ.org community, and contributed to shaping the early digital discourse around Pirsig’s ideas and in those days, long before RPA was founded, created his own Psybertron Pirsig Pages. His background in engineering deepened his engagement with the classical-romantic split, while his broader philosophical work considers the ethical and systemic implications of metaphysical frameworks. Ian participated in the 2005 Liverpool conference where Pirsig appeared in person, and he is a founding member of the Robert Pirsig Association.
“The fact that we are communicating more with each other through social media and things like that, 24/7 news of every kind, you know so many channels – so many social channels as well as media channels – any impression that we get gets reinforced really fast as a sort of group think – as a sort of global group think all the time – so you end up with people who are very much into one topic or very much against a topic and things get polarized really really fast. And the fact it’s more complicated that you can’t have that conversation – More people are saying there must be something more we’re missing something here – science has made such huge advances you know and we got all this technology just keeps getting better by the day for some reason the way we interact seems to be getting worse and I think a lot of people say that Hmm, we must be missing something and I think that’s that thing has put a lot of people thinking more philosophically about well where does this kind of meaning and trust and all these kind of things come from. They don’t come from the technology that’s for sure.”
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See also Psybertron at The Meaning Code – On Complex Systems Thinking, Cybernetics and Quality
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Lee Glover at ZaMM Convos – Reflections on ZMM from Bozeman, Montana – Fathers and Sons
Lee Glover is a documentarian and motorcycle enthusiast whose journey to retrace the original 1968 route from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance became a decade-long exploration of place, memory, and meaning. What began as a curiosity sparked by a yard-sale copy of ZMM in 2005 transformed into a personal pilgrimage in 2008—forty years after the events in the book—guided by a vintage 1964 Honda Superhawk and a deepening appreciation for Robert Pirsig’s metaphysical inquiry.
In this special conversation, Lee joins from the historic Dewey’s house near Bozeman, Montana—exactly where Chapter 14 of ZMM unfolds. From revisiting the canyon described in the book to sleeping by the same creek, Lee shares reflections on the power of geography, friendship, and following Quality. He recounts poignant stories of meeting key figures along the route, including John Sutherland and the artist family of the Deweys, and describes how the philosophy of ZMM helped him create lasting memories with his own father in the mountains above Bozeman.
His encounters often border the serendipitous, like discovering a Buddhist shrine at Evel Knievel’s infamous crash site in Las Vegas, or acquiring the exact model motorcycle Pirsig rode—just in time, from a seller in Milwaukee. For Lee, this project became less about travel and more about listening: to land, to legacy, and to the voices of those moved by Pirsig’s work.
“You don’t get forever to do these things… That’s what inspired the idea to go hiking with my father—to do it while we still could.”
“The real treasure wasn’t just the places, it was the people—the stories they shared, their intersections with the book. That’s what made the whole thing come alive.”
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Dennis Davis at ZaMM Convos – Interview with Filmmaker, Pirsig’s Journey
Filmmaker Dennis Wilde discusses his upcoming documentary Pirsig’s Journey, which retraces the original motorcycle route from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance while exploring Robert Pirsig’s life and the development of the Metaphysics of Quality. Dennis shares how the project began after meeting Henry Gurr at Montana State University, and how the film will blend cinematic landscapes with interviews from key figures in the Pirsig community. A powerful reflection on philosophy, identity, and inner transformation.
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