Piet to Rod, Heloisa and Maria

Heloisa, Maria, Rod

Thanks, Maria, for your clarification, and I'm glad to hear you are enjoying working with the various suggestions that have come up in these conversations. And you put your finger on a weak point in the analogy that I made between stopping and giving up smoking, when you wrote "Unlike a bad habit, I find that what we are talking about is so subtle and the habit is so ingrained that it is sometimes hard to see what is happening."

Indeed, when we are caught in any of the usual addictions, as Rod also discussed, we find ways to ignore or deny the addiction, but to some extent we are at least aware of the presence of our habit. When we are smoking, or watching tv mindlessly, or overindulging in eating or drinking, we at least know what it is like to not smoke, or not watch tv, and so on. In contrast, our addiction to the ordinary working hypothesis of being incomplete is far more tricky: we may have no recollection of ever having had any break in that habit.

Kicking a habit is hard enough if you know when you are engaged in it and when you are not. Kicking a habit where you are swimming it, like a fish swimming in water, seems to be impossible. How can a fish kick the habit of swimming in water? The answer is to wake up and realize that the water is not real. No amount of fighting the water or denying it or wishing it away is going to help. But what is this mysterious `waking up'? All spiritual traditions use terms like that, but what does it mean, for us, concretely? It is here that I hope the already-complete working hypothesis can help us stumble upon the obvious, can help us to `wake up' by Stopping the habit of holding on to the ordinary incompleteness working hypothesis.

Rod, I very much appreciate your point that we are addicted to the habit of trying. And I like the experiment you proposed: "Let go of the habit of trying... take a chance... and see what happens."

How about all of us doing that for a day, as yet another experimental way to work with the working hypothesis, from a different angle? Each of us can then report what happened when you take up Rod's challenge to `take a chance'!

Shall we schedule Rod's experiment for Friday, November 24? In that way, we still have a few days to make some comments or ask questions about the notion of kicking the trying habit, before we engage in our one-day experiment.

One comment, to start with: when we want to drop "I am trying" we should drop not only the "try" but also the "I" and the "am ...ing", i.e. the addictions to identification and time, as Heloisa described in more detail in her Nov. 17 contribution.

Piet