Rod,

So each moment we enter a new world. When we look carefully we can see that we always enter a fresh world with new opportunities to know.

A more radical expression would be: each moment, a fresh realm of appearance appears, and immediately we reify it into a world of objects, identifying ourselves with small parts of it, our limited body and mind.

The question is: can we learn to see this tendency to buy into the dream or story that we call ordinary reality?

The working hypothesis invites us to do as if we have already woken up from the dream, and to explore the consequences of already having woken up. And this exploring itself can help us to actually wake up; this is the third option I mentioned in my very first email, as an alternative to a lengthy contemplative training.

Let's compare notes of what happens, when we use the working hypothesis, in the laboratory of daily life.

So the working hypothesis tells me that time is a fiction, that the past and the future are experimentally given only in the present, and that neither of them exists in anything like the way we consider them to exist; nor does the present exist; nor do I exist.

This morning I again tried to keep that idea in mind, with whatever I did, sitting, standing, walking, talking, like a mathematician being gripped by a problem he or she is struggling with, or a zen practitioner working on a koan. Okay, I see objects, I see people, I notice thoughts and emotions arising, I see myself walking down the street. The only thing I am sure of is that there is appearance: appearance of things, of solidity, of individuals, appearance of time, appearance of what I label as the present, as memories of the past, as anticipations of the future. When I try to focus on appearance, I see myself getting in the way. When I try to step out of the way, there is still the preoccupation with me trying, with me deemphasizing the me. But when I occasionally get tired of that, or let my attention slip, there are moments in which suddenly and unexpectedly everything falls into place, and there is a taste of openness. A moment later I fall back into the sense of self, and the openness immediately becomes a memory, and the self starts labeling what presented itself with labels like freedom and clarity and purity. The labels are not wrong, but as labels they carry the limitations of labels. And then suddenly the real clarity, beyond labels, shows through again. And so on.

Would you like to try the experiment of no-time, exploring the consequences of the working hypothesis by pretending for a while that the past-present-future time is not real? If my description is unclear, please let me know; let us take our time to make sure that we're talking about the same thing.

Piet