Rod Rees' Summary of Interchanges with Piet Hut

We began by considering how one might achieve "contemplative knowing" without going through a tedious training regimen. We proposed that while contemplative knowing might actually be effortless & natural, it has become obscured by analytic/factual knowing which interferes with the natural process. I suggested that perception is an example of effortless knowing that might be a useful model; we don't have to do anything in order to perceive—it just happens.

After we struggled a bit with the definition of "working hypothesis," Piet introduced timelessness as a possible attribute of effortless-knowing, and I introduced the concept of the paradox of consciousness as a linguistic problem that interferes with attempts to define effortless-knowing.

Piet presented the metaphor of "plastic wrap" stuck between us and the world, obscuring our effortless-knowing. We began to focus on situations where the plastic-wrap effortlessly & unexpectedly disappears, revealing a world in which texture & meaning are vividly alive. We looked at how Knowing arises naturally & effortlessly out of Not-knowing.

I suggested that consciousness is the unfolding edge between the already-known & the not-yet-known, and that this unfolding-edge cannot be frozen in time or space. Thus, consciousness is timeless, and exists only as a moving here & now. We then looked at ways of expressing this concept, including simplistic formulations such as "just relax"; profound but paradoxical formulations such as "nothing, yet there"; and comprehensive formulations such as "naturally occurring timeless awareness."

Deeper exploration of the meaning of consciousness led us to focus on non-dualistic consciousness as an expression of those episodes in which we lose the separation between Self & World and in which time disappears. We described several personal episodes which had a timeless feel for us, from which we began a lexicon of metaphors for expressing non-dualistic consciousness (e.g., being carried away by a beautiful sunset or a wonderful piece of music).

For me, it was fascinating to watch the two of us struggle, at times, to develop a shared vocabulary of metaphors such that we could be confident we were talking about the same thing. There was such a richness of ideas that it was sometimes difficult to focus on one single thread, and I very much enjoyed the playfulness of our explorations.

Equally fascinating was the process of moving from generalities to greater & greater specificity. By the end, I felt we were at the beginning of transforming the vague working-hypothesis into a set of specific dimensions that underlie non-dualistic consciousness. In terms of scientific method, we were beginning to evolve a set of specific hypotheses about the nature of non-dualistic consciousness which would be testable. It would be very interesting, for example, to see if a hypothesis of the form, "X is an attribute of non- dualistic consciousness," would allow other people to use X as a mind-set for achieving a state of non-dualistic consciousness.

No doubt it will be just as fascinating to see where the dialog moves when new participants enter the process!

Rod