Piet to Rod, Heloisa and Maria

Dear Heloisa, Maria, Rod,

Rod, I'm thrilled by your ongoing attempts to formulate the working hypothesis. Like you, I highly value attempts to express everything as much as possible in `clear and distinct ideas'. In that sense I am a real Cartesian! I think that Descartes started off correctly, but that he stopped too soon. I keep wondering what would have happened if Descartes could have had a conversation with, say, a Tibetan contemplative. I think he would have been receptive, given his stated purpose to reevaluate everything we know from the ground up. The problem is that it is so very hard to see our ground clearly! And while he was digging deeper than most people in his days, he didn't dig deep enough. He took too many assumptions for granted.

We are facing a similar problem. Given your systematic attempt to formulate the working hypothesis, where do you stand on? What is your starting point? Right in point a) you write "we can access that completeness by means of a simple realization" but who or what is the "we" involved in there? Is it the "we" we normally identify with? That seems hard to accept, given the many limitations that are built in into what we think we are. If not, what other "we" are we talking about, and is it appropriate even to use the term "we"?

I would restate your a) as "the completeness is fully accessible" without even using terms like "we" and "realization". And far from being a play with words, the difference is enormous. We are just figures in a play.

To sum up:

1) I fully agree with your final paragraph: ``At this point we can ask, "what are the common features of letting-go which allow practitioners of such diverse endeavors to by-pass the paradox of trying?" What does it mean to let go? What does it mean to accept? And how is letting-go accomplished?''

2) I fully agree with the spirit of trying to capture the working hypothesis into a short formulation, as you have attempted to do in your a) to e) listing. More than that, I think that the specific formulation you have used, and the pointers they contain for working with them, are very useful, and indeed reflect some important aspects of meditative training in many traditions.

3) My only reservation is that the formulation may not be radical enough, in that it still allows and in fact invites an interpretation that uses the old stage, the old view of world and self and time.

Let me try to make the last point more concrete. If I would have read your summary ten years ago, or twenty years ago, just as you have written it here, I would probably have whole-heartedly agreed. I would have understood the central elements and recognized their importance. Yet, as I know now, I would probably have interpreted their meaning using the old familiar stage, rather than a radically new stage.

Piet