Piet to Rod, Heloisa and Maria

Dear Heloisa, Maria, Rod,

Thank you so much, Heloisa, for such a touching description of your reaction to your illness and life concerns. Yes, it is such a great paradox that insecurity leads us to holding on, whereas the exact opposite, letting go, is what gives us real security. It goes so much against everything we have learned in life, and yet in times of real stress it is the only real solution.

If we could just always remember it, in the middle of great anxiety and pressure! This has probably been the most important function of traditional religions, to prepare people to remember to surrender, by giving them ideas and images to access in times of crisis—even though those ideas and images, when analyzed by the modern mind, may seem ludicrous they were used for a very good reason. The problem is that we now need to overhaul them, since they no longer work very well. The use of a working hypothesis is one modest attempt to do so.

When we started these rounds of the WoK experiment, I did not expect our discussions to focus more and more on surrendering and letting go. But in retrospect, it does all seem to fit very well. New insight and creativity cannot appear where there is no new opening to make room for it. And given that the working hypothesis claims that all is complete, the simplest approach to testing it is to see whether we can just open ourselves for that completeness, without standing in the way. If the working hypothesis is really true, nothing needs to be done, nothing can even be done to make things more complete, so there is nothing left to be done.

This really goes against the grain, against the way we have been raised and educated, against the way we see ourselves as being in continuous need of this and that. And this is what makes the in-depth exploration of the working hypothesis so fascinating: it seems ridiculous and impossible, and yet it intriguingly seems to resonate with what many of the great sages of the past in all kinds of very different traditions have told us. People around them have reported about tranquility and serenity of those sages. They seemed to have found a type of peace and equipoise that struck their contemporaries as marvelous and bewildering, at the same time. And we, too, can taste at least some of that marvel, as Heloisa has just reported to us.

We have ten more days, before concluding the long haul of our WoK experiment, which has been running now for three months already. If you would like to make some concluding remarks, observations, suggestions for further WoK activities, or any other statements, please don't hesitate to do so. In particular I would love to hear what you have gotten out of working with the working hypothesis, and to what extent you consider it to be an interesting approach to explore further.

Piet