Piet to Rod, Heloisa and Maria

Maria, and Heloisa and Rod,

Thank you, Maria, for the description of the experiments that you performed. You mentioned that the lines between different phenomena blurred, and that your senses were more dulled, but you did that in the context of describing them as becoming more open and playful. You probably did not mean the usual connotation of blurred and dulled as getting less sensitized. In my experience, such openings, while perhaps temporarily a bit disorienting, typically lead to a heightened sense of awareness, with the senses become sharpened and distinctions finer. Perhaps you meant that you felt more of a sense of relaxation, and less of a need to divide and distinguish and classify, which you expressed by describing a sense of unity between you and the sky, trees, your baby, others. Could you say a few more words about those experiences?

As for the working hypothesis implying a form of Stopping, that is a very tricky notion, and I'm not at all sure how far we can get in talking about that by email. The point is not to try to stop thought or to try to stop visualizations. Both would be a form of action, a form of `doing' something. Stopping is more subtle, amazingly subtle, in ways that until recently I could not have imagined. Every month or so, lately, I have marveled at the increasingly subtle aspects of Stopping that keep unfolding, the longer I practice with it. Let me try to unpack that a bit more in two ways, both of which I have been and am still trying to work with.

Speaking more relatively, you could say that Stopping begins with a watching of thoughts and feelings and visualizations, without suppressing them and without buying into them. This may be like the Vipassana practice that Rod has described. This picture of Stopping implies a withholding of both grasping and avoiding, of both hope and fear, in fact of any type of judgment.

Speaking more absolutely, and more radically, you could say that it is by definition not possible to begin to Stop. Even trying to stop, as in the more relative version, is still a subtle form of doing. Radical stopping can never be the result of a project. Radical Stopping means dropping: dropping time and hence dropping personal history and all personal identifications that we are normally so tightly wedded to. This is in the spirit of Heloisa's most recent contribution.

Here is a possible illustration for radical Stopping. Someone has been smoking for thirty years and suddenly extinguishes a cigarette, never to smoke again, while seeing suddenly in full clarity the whole situation: how addiction is a being-glued-to-the-past, how dropping addiction is a real liberation, how the perceived difficulty of kicking the habit itself can be seen as only a mental game, and so on. Can we, similarly, pick up a big ashtray, and extinguish the smoldering remnants of our belief in time and identity? Is anything preventing us from that type of radical Stopping?

Piet