Rod Rees to Piet Hut

Piet,

Thanks for the opportunity to participate in this interesting project!

I conceive of two distinct ways of knowing. Factual Knowing and Awareness Knowing, or what you called the "way of science" and the "way of contemplation." The two are distinctly different. Factual Knowing is effortful; Awareness Knowing is effortless. Awareness simply "is" without requiring any doing or any verification. For awareness to arise there is never anything to do...it's simply there...even though what you're aware of might not be what you want to be aware of.

By analogy, consider vision. When you open up your eyes your visual world is presented instantly in full panoramic 3-D technicolor. You don't have to rebuild the world each time. Perception maintains a fresh copy of your familiar world ready for your viewing pleasure.

The trick is how to extend this automatic perceptual process from a literal "opening up your eyes" to a metaphoric "opening up your awareness." Everything is already there for you to see, and everything is already there for you to be aware of. Everything already is...but you don't know how to be aware of everything that already is.

My guess is that opening up to what-is is partly a matter of learning what NOT to do. The process might be as simple as remembering that you don't have to do something in order to see something. Perhaps we need to learn that you also don't have to do something in order to be aware of something.

If we decide to follow this thread, maybe we can explore some of the methods that have been concocted for "opening up the metaphoric eye," of which there are quite a few. My sense is that most of the methods entail giving up something you're already doing, instead of doing something you're not yet doing. I'll suggest that "resistance" is a key word. We resist awareness, even though awareness is the easiest thing in world to do.

Rod