Piet to Rod, Heloisa and Maria

Maria,

Thanks for jumping right in indeed! You're asking a central question in contemplative practice: how to practice without expectations; how to be with what IS without letting hope and disappointments pull us right back into linear time.

From within our ordinary way of scheming and planning and analyzing there seems to be no solution at all. Either we try to obtain a different state, or we give up and just fall back in the old state and just stay there. The real solution comes in ways that cannot be grasped by the ordinary mind, and this is why contemplative writing at first seems so paradoxical, and remains paradoxical until we learn to let a different way of being function. This can appear through small glimpses first, little openings in a thick cloud deck, or it may suddenly overwhelm us; there is no fixed pattern.

But how can we gain access, without a `we' and without `gain'? Working with the working hypothesis is my attempt at a novel way to answer that old question, by injecting a taste of modern science into the old contemplative way of practice.

Starting from the hypothesis that there is no `we' and no `gain', we conclude that what we really are is already complete and needs no gain, that there is not even room for gain. Now how to work with that hypothesis? Not by keeping it in mind only as an idea. But we have to start somewhere, and at first it will be an idea. But then we confront the difference between that idea and what we see around us and in us. During that confrontation we `Stop'; we remain silent and focused, gently and broadly, yet intently yet not tensely -- very much the way a scientist holds a scientific question in mind.

So yes, your question goes to the heart of what we have been trying to address. I look forward to hear how Heloisa and Rod will respond to your refreshingly provocative remarks

Piet