Piet to Rod, Heloisa and Maria

Dear Heloisa, Maria, Rod,

Maria, with "all is wonderful", I meant literally full of wonder, not good rather than bad. If we take any basic ingredient of daily life, such as time, or the sense "I am", we cannot help being filled with wonder. What is time? What is this "I am"? Or take a single thought. What is a thought? It seems completely insubstantial, yet it is informed with knowing, feeling. If we look at a thought, as if for the first time, we can wonder about what a thought is, the way a child would do. This is not a negative approach, and indeed, your positive approach of acceptance and appreciation is similar in that appreciation and wondering go hand in hand: appreciating the richness of what is, beyond what we can analyze.

Stopping and letting go, however, are not negative approaches, even though their descriptions may sound like that. Both imply opening for what is, no longer shutting out what is, and in that sense they too are fully positive approaches. Running on and on and holding on are the truly negative approaches, and that's what we're doing all the time! Our negative fear and urge to protect need to be stopped.

As for `no intrinsic limits to knowing,' this clearly does not apply to who-we-think-we-are. As limited human beings we face all kind of limits, clearly. So if the working hypothesis questions those limits, by implication it questions our identification with our small body and mind. The question then comes down to `who am I', really? Grappling, working with, pondering, holding in mind the working hypothesis is connected to doing the same with the question `who am I'. And yes, while struggling with a working hypothesis it is definitely a good idea to let go of our assumptions about what we have understood, in the sense of leaving everything open to new interpretations -- not by just tossing them or stopping to think about them.

As for your last questions, whether it is possible to know without limits, and to illuminate all, using the movie metaphor, they address the same point: this is certainly not possible for who-we-think-we-are. Whether it is possible for who we actually are, that's the question! The working hypothesis says yes. It's up to us to see what that means.

When we work with the working hypothesis, what happens, what opens up, what becomes clear? This may seem like a very difficult, if not impossible, challenge. Perhaps the thing to do is not so much to try to find an answer, since that might be premature. Rather, the first and foremost thing to do is to really get under the skin of the question, to really feel and live and carry with you through daily life the question that the working hypothesis poses: if everything is complete and timeless, how can it be that things appear so different in and around me? Or is my interpretation of what appears perhaps wrong or incomplete?

Piet