Piet Hut to Heloisa

Heloisa,

You touch upon a fundamental point, that radically new insight is especially radical in that it is not even new, a point that Rod raised as well, nine days ago, when he talked about ``an incredible realization that something was revealed that I already knew but didn't yet know I knew.''

And this touches upon the other point you raise, that the one who already knows seems to be a different one than the one who thought (s)he didn't know.

According to the working hypothesis, what we really are is not limited by anything, including past-present-future time. We could label it timeless awareness or Mind or Being or Is or Am, but it is by definition beyond labels and concepts.

What we think we are is a limited human being, with a fragile body and an ordinary mind linked to that body, located at a specific point in space and time, and in great need to worry about many things.

According to the working hypothesis, timeless awareness plays the role of everything that seems to appear: a whole world with a long history and far future, populated with many beings.

Our homework, in testing the working hypothesis, is to play a game within a game. Timeless awareness plays the game of each of us being a small limited creature. In turn, each of us can play the game of pretending to be timeless awareness.

At first, this game within a game will be a purely mental exercise. Even on that level, it can already be fascinating, a rich exploration in which we can let our fantasy roam, while using our powers of discrimination and analysis in a deeply felt inquiry, in which we question every aspect of our world and of our own felt presence here in this world.

However, after a while, or perhaps already very quickly and spontaneously, we may get glimpses of something altogether different from what he had expected we could possibly find. It is as if the game within the game gets short-circuited.

At first we find ourselves inside the box of the game called normal life, without being aware of any box. We then construct a very pretty small box within our unquestioned and unseen box, as a type of lab or sanctum, labeled timeless awareness. We enter and leave that box, entering it whenever we want to play and escape the seemingly harsh reality outside, and leaving it when we return to our normal concerns. But occasionally, we overshoot, and we leave the outer box as well without knowing what it was we left, finding ourselves suddenly outside the regular world of linear past-present-future time, outside the reign of memory and identification with our personal history.

Does this picture of ways of working with the working hypothesis make any sense? Do you perhaps have a different way of describing how you could work with it? Also, can you say something more about the type of timelessness beyond experience you alluded to?

Piet