Piet to Rod, Heloisa and Maria

Dear Heloisa, Maria, Rod,

Thank you, Maria and Heloisa, for your reflections on surrendering. I'm really glad that working with the working hypothesis has opened so many unexpected doors for the four of us, in different yet similar ways. And I second Heloisa: the journey is just beginning.

And thank you, Rod, for your powerful description of your experiences with `no causality.' What I find most striking in your report is the different logic that is in operation when the normal barriers of time and identity and causality begin to open up. We have talked about phenomenology before: it seems that in our explorations not only the phenomena but even the very logic that holds them together are shifting dramatically.

During the last few days, while I was traveling through Japan, and outside regular email contact, the enormity of dropping causality hit me a number of times. It was generally unexpected, not during formal practice sessions, sitting on a cushion. Rather, while walking through streets and subway tunnels and crowded stations, occasionally I would just notice that causality had left, and that I was walking without aim, without purpose or consequences, other than that the walking I was doing was just the right thing to do in that situation, at that time, at that place. The usual friction of causality had utterly evaporated, was gone, and it was hard to see how it could ever have been there in the first place. An amazing yet utterly natural sense of flow and peace and silence, in which everybody and everything else was embedded as well.

I find it not easy to describe what happened. In order to report something, we have to cast it into a language of events and experiences. I'm not sure it was an experience, even though my memory, while writing now, does want to group it into events and cast it in experience form, out of habit I guess. But I think it was more like switching channels, or better like switching logic. Or like watching tv and then suddenly having the sound drop away. Something profound where nothing changes and everything changes.

I'm really groping for words here. I can describe how my body felt suddenly far more relaxed, how those switching moments made me aware of a background tension that I could suddenly let go of. However, such experiences were clearly secondary, reactions to the more profound nature of the switches. It really feels like the switches themselves went beyond experience-language and event-logic.

Each time a switch happened, the different logic would operate for a while, without any sense of anything fading or changing, but then after a while longer, again to my surprise, I would find myself having returned to `normal', to the ordinary way our mind operates. In an uncanny way, the switch back was like falling asleep, in that you later realize that you must have fallen asleep, without consciously being able to trace back exactly how you fell asleep.

Piet