Piet to Heloisa and Rod

Heloisa,

The distinction you are making between time-based experience, no matter how lofty and meaningful, and a clear presence that is a non-experience and is not time-based, is essential. Thank you for your lucid description! While we cannot describe the indescribable, we can still try to point to it, and your way of expressing some side effects, such as immense freedom and no sense of history and expectations, was very helpful, and resonated with my own (memories of) such non-experiences.

You asked about my experiences with playing a game within a game. I can describe those as the third in a series of three shifts. The first can be done easily, and is quite likely to produce some effect right away (the philosopher Husserl called it the epoché).

For example, while I am writing these lines, in a coffee shop in Kyoto, I am looking around me, and I feel aware of my tendency to interpret everything around me as people and objects interacting in a physical way, as players of matter and energy on the stage of space and time. But I can shift my attention from this every-day interpretation to seeing and feeling everything around me as a play of consciousness. Everything then appears more vividly, taking on a more dreamlike quality, becoming more incisive as in a very clear dream, but I am still aware of the self-pole associated with me as a subject that is identified with a body and a specific location.

This first shift `grows on you' when you do it repeatedly, over a period of weeks or months. It may begin as an intellectual exercise, but over time it `sinks in' and it becomes something much deeper, influencing the way to walk, talk, breathe, experience the world and self and others. But this is only the first step. A second shift drops not only matter but also consciousness, leaving a type of bare awareness, no longer strictly associated with a subject.

The first shift reinterprets the hardness of a material object as the experience of hardness, without the need to impute the reality of its material aspect. The second shift reinterprets the experience and seeming presence of a subject and object pole as the appearance of subject, interaction, and object, without buying into the reality of those three.

Here in the coffee shop I am now trying out the second shift. I feel myself less body-centered, more associated with the whole room. I feel less need to classify phenomena that occur into `inner' and `outer.' My body and my mind, both, can be left alone, like a bicycle seeming to ride itself or my digestion happening autonomously. There is a sense of peace and relaxation that simply cannot occur as long as my awareness is tied to a self-pole, a central singularity in an ego-centered coordinate system.

I'll leave the third shift for my next email. Are my descriptions of these first two shifts clear enough? Can you play with them?

Piet