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Rod,
I, too, have been traveling: I just arrived in Kyoto, where I will
spend a few months doing joint research with Japanese astronomers.
Yes, it would be wonderful to be truly open and aware. And this
brings us back to the first question on the
WoK Experiments page: How far can we go in knowing reality
directly?
In my first email, I contrasted two approaches: the long path approach
of a traditional practice curriculum and the alternative of starting at
the end, with the insight that everything is already complete. The way
I proposed to study that insight is to treat it as a working
hypothesis.
I now realize that I may have not been clear enough in what I meant,
when I introduced this working hypothesis. Let me try to be more clear,
which implies that I have to be more radical in my formulation.
The hypothesis can be stated as: "nothing, yet there", to
borrow a phrase from Longchenpa, a Tibetan contemplative from the
fourteenth century. Our impression that there are real objects and
subjects, in a real space and time, are wrong in the sense that there
is nothing there. Yet, at the same time, there is a there there:
something seems to be happening, each moment. But to call it
`happening' and to talk about moments, already goes beyond what is
indubitable: it buys into a flow notion of time. The working hypothesis
wants to drop anything that can be doubted, and even the flow of time,
from past to present to future, can and should be doubted,
i.e. critically investigated.
In other words, the working hypothesis tells us that there is a there
there, which you might call suchness, or Being, or any word that you
think is appropriate; Longchenpa calls it naturally occurring timeless
awareness. And it is this that we misinterpret as a world in space and
time populated with beings.
What I would like to do in these email exchanges, is to test this
working hypothesis, to work with it in terms of exploring its
consequences in our daily life. What can it possibly mean, to
entertain the possibility that the flow of time is only an illusion?
The radicalness of this hypothesis is hard to fathom. If someone came
up to you with the intention to kill you, you would be faced with the
possibility of losing your life, but at least you would have lived up
till that point. The working hypothesis tells us that we have never
lived! It tells us that there is no time to live in, and that there is
no
space to offer room for beings, so there is no you and there is no me
and
there are no others.
I propose that we consider this radicality, for the next several email
exchanges. And let us go really really slowly, investigating all
aspects very carefully, like a mathematician or a lawyer or an engineer
working on a delicate precision instrument.
Piet