Piet to Heloisa and Rod

Heloisa and Rod,

Yesterday I did Heloisa's one-day experiment. I started by trying to shift my attention from the content to the texture of anything that presented itself, all phenomena, whether we normally label them as external or internal. I was watching the whole world around me, and my own `inner' landscape as well, as one huge integrated painting with many different panels. The shift felt like switching my attention from the painting to the paint.

Soon a deep sense of peace came over me. I was surprised about the vast sense of silence. I noticed it especially while walking on the street, looking around me: disturbing sounds seemed to have vanished. An image came to mind, as if I had been bobbing up and down the surface of the ocean, and now became immersed in the ocean itself, feeling its quiet vastness undisturbed by the surface phenomena.

As Rod and Heloisa have also mentioned, I found it harder to consciously maintain this kind of `texture of phenomena' awareness when I was in the middle of focused activities, such as talking with others; it was easier when I was looking out the window, walking outside, or otherwise free to just watch without having to react.

When I tried to combine this texture awareness with the question `who am I,' really one of my favorite questions, I felt how I could let go more of my habitual anchoring in my ordinary physical presence and in my mental concerns. It was as if I could feel a singularity dissolve. In mathematical terms, I felt as if the every-day polar coordinate system, with lines radially emerging from me as the center, were replaced by a Cartesian coordinate system, with lines equally spaced everywhere. But this transformation happened without creating the usual sense of distance between the equally spaced lines: the being given together sense of the centrally converging polar lines were preserved in the transition to the Cartesian frame.

Later on, the recurring sense of peace took on a yet lighter sense. The shift from painting to paint continued to the space in which the painting was given. It was as if the paint itself was emerging from space, as if all phenomena, inner and outer, were colored and textured forms of space.

While I was looking up from my desk, watching the Northern Hills of Kyoto in front of me, I also reflected on the many layers of meanings pointing to each other, within these textured forms of space: the characters of the computer code I was writing, presented as ones and zeroes in computer memory, as letters on the screen, as a text that carried meaning for both humans and computers, and that had the power to set into motion simulations of stars and galaxies, presented on the screen as moving pictures, but connected meaningfully to huge structures elsewhere in space and time. All so full of many layers of intricate meanings, and yet so empty and open.

Piet