Piet to Rod, Heloisa and Maria

Dear Heloisa, Maria, Rod,

I want to thank you all for joining me in this WoK experiment. After fourteen weeks, we are now reaching the finish, with the last day set at Tuesday, the day after tomorrow. During the next two days, we can all make a few last comments, if we like.

In various ways, we each have already summarized our adventure, recently, by stressing how central allowing has become for us, not-trying, surrendering, to the point of giving up our usual focus on self, time, and causality. Maria's `just observing everything that passes by', Heloisa's `resting in simple ever-present awareness', Rod's `pool of being' and my `walking without aim' indicate a remarkable convergence that I had not unexpected at all.

When introducing the working hypothesis, my hope had been to bridge scientific ways of approaching the structure of reality and more traditional ways of probing reality, including those explored by various spiritual traditions. To my surprise, we have wound up with a type of experimentation that in fact resonates with religious notions of faith, even though we are still following an agnostic experimental path.

I grew up in a small village in the countryside in the North-East of the Netherlands, dominated by the heavily Calvinist Dutch Reformed Church. In the middle of all the hypocrisy and pride and power struggles and dogmatic discussions surrounding me, there also was the remarkable practice of at least some members of the church.

Especially among the simple-minded older members, there were people who had managed to find a way of such deep surrender to their faith that they seemed to transcend all the problems in their lives. They serenely went their way, trusting God in everything large or small in their life, seemingly untouched by worries and distractions.

When talking with them, I felt torn. On the one hand, I could not help admiring their practical attitude, which reminded me of the ideal of the Stoics and various other philosophical schools that I had read about. On the other hand, they would invariably ask me questions like whether I, too, was a little sheep of the Lord. While such questions succeeded in making me feel sheepish alright, I could not possibly answer them in the terms in which they were posed, which seemed so blatantly superstitious and blatantly anti-scientific.

Over the years, little by little, I have come to understand that those older uneducated people had experimentally found something deep and real, for which they had no other vocabulary than that offered by their church context. Starting with the theory side, it was impossible to sort out their utterances from the hypocrisy and dogma surrounding them; and they themselves of course did not need any theory, since they had found experimentally enough to satisfy them.

It seems that what the working hypothesis is showing us now is a path that may fit better in the theory of our times, while retaining the power to make experiential connections with what is real. Quite amazing.

Piet