Rod,

Thank you for your delicate descriptions. I resonate with your photography experiences, and I remember how wonderful it was when I started making photographs, as a teenager, and saw my surroundings transforming from a world of objects to a world of light. Seeing the world become hyper-real is unmistakably direct yet it cannot be expressed with our usual vocabulary based on conventional reality.

Let me see whether I can summarize what seems to me to be the main point of your last few emails: you stress that we can find knowing in the middle of not-knowing. Is that a fair characterization?

To use a metaphor: within a movie, each scene has light and dark parts, and some scenes as a whole are lighter or darker, but really all the light comes from the projector, and it is the same light, with the same quality, that is present in each part of each scene, or better, that generates and constitutes each scene and each part thereof. Similarly, if we look for deeper insight, we can take each moment of our life, and anything that presents itself, and right there and then we have the opportunity to find knowing in and as what appears.

Every metaphor is only partially valid, but does this capture some of the ideas that you have described already with different metaphors?

Perhaps we should spend a few days to distill a one-liner that we can both agree on, as a type of verbal currency, and to use that then as a platform to take off from, in exploring what the working hypothesis can offer us. I suggest `looking for knowing in not-knowing', to express how we can take any situation that seems to be void of knowing, and learn to find a deep form of knowing right in and as that situation. Many situations in life may seem unclear or simply uninteresting, may just draw a blank, but we can learn to find forms of knowing, as a not-even-buried treasure that we routinely overlook, passing it by.

Would `looking for knowing in not-knowing' be a useful one-liner, or do you perhaps prefer one or more different summary sentences? We can start by formulating one or two or three such sentences, and then investigate them using the working hypothesis.

Piet