Rod,

I agree with everything you wrote. We find ourselves stuck in conceptual trappings. It is as if we are living in a house where the furniture is wrapped in plastic, and we never touch the real fabric of reality.

There are many techniques to get glimmers of insight into this situation, including those you enumerated before. But whatever the technique that gives us an insight/hunch/intuition, the next question is how we respond to it. There are three main ways.

The first is to play with the ideas a bit, and then drop them, forget them, and go back to life as usual. The second way is to entertain the ideas in great detail and analyze them further, getting a deep sense of relaxation and relief from a conceptual understanding of how we are trapped in conceptual understanding. That in itself can be remarkably refreshing. In fact, it can be a life-changing experience. It certainly has been for me, on several occasions.

But then there is the third way, in which the plastic begins to get removed, and the texture of reality begins to shine through. Space and time are no longer what we thought they were. We ourselves are not what we thought we were. This is so truly utterly amazing that I'm at a complete loss of how to even begin to put this into words.

I'm delighted that you and I avoid the first way of response, and that we see eye-to-eye with respect to the positive aspects of the second way. The challenge for both of us is to enter the third way.

To start with, a disclaimer: I feel I've only just begun to explore this third way; or more accurately, I've only just begun to step out of the way to let the third way shine through; the third way is not about me, and in a very real way I'm no longer there.

For more than thirty years I walked the second way, expecting it to stretch on and on, leading eventually to the most ultimate insights. Though I got occasional glimpses of the third way, I invariably interpreted those as just part of the landscape of the second way.

When I started to `roll into' the third way, or `roll out' of my sense of being a-self-in-a-world-in-space-and-time, I was utterly amazed, and not prepared for it, no matter how long I had explored the second way, and no matter how much I had learned there, in dozens of retreats and in years and years of daily personal practice. It was like starting all over again.

The challenge of the third way is to find a mode of speaking that does not flatten back onto the second way—just like staying with the second way involves the challenge of not falling back onto the first way. Going from the first to the second involves a paradox. Going from the second to the third involves a totally different paradox.

Piet