Piet's Quarterly Summary

The most important lesson I learned in these three months concerns the notion of `work' in working with the working hypothesis. As long as I was trying to do the work, struggling with the hypothesis, all kinds of interesting insights came up, and I learned quite a bit. However, this was all still ensconced in the normal picture of me living my life in linear time in a world full of objects. And it was all about me, a small needy creature in an uncertain world on an uncertain path leading to death as the only certain outcome of the adventure.

From the beginning I knew that there was an alternative. I knew that the point of working with the working hypothesis was to let what IS do the work -- IS, Being, the Universe, God, Tao, whatever label we like to use to point to the unsayable. I knew it, and I had some experience with it, but the experiences were few and far between. With only memory bridging the gaps between genuine experience, the trail would have been lost. Alas, memory is an unreliable guide, worse, memory distorts all of our genuine experiences, shoehorning them into the system of concepts that are the only currency for memory. Fortunately, besides memory, I had my intuition to guide me, an intuition that seems to come from elsewhere, as the Greeks knew when they talked about the Muses whispering. And I had books to read, with the voices of those of the past who had truly seen. And equally important, I had my friends walking along with me, including the participants in this WoK Practice Intensive.

So the experiences became more frequent, and deeper. But this is the story told from memory. If there would be words to tell the story from the side of IS, then I should say that everything has always already been IS, with no time for anything to deepen, and no experiencer to experience anything. But I know of no such words, so I will continue the (rather misleading) story from the point of view of the (fictitious) experiencer-I that seems to have experiences in (non-existing) time.

Told from this point of view then, I learned more and more what it means to let the working hypothesis do the work, to let it work all by itself. Simply focusing on the content of the working hypothesis, that all is complete, completeness can then come to the fore and take the lead. This sounds like a metaphor, like a poetic image, but nothing could be further from the truth. Instead, what I began to see more and more clearly, is that all that we normally hold to be near and dear and clear is metaphor, are false images. We think in terms of agency, of us acting, of others acting, of nature acting. But in fact only IS acts, or more precisely, only IS is, and we interpret its issing as acting. I'm struggling for words here. The point is, as Steven has often emphasized, that we are continually siphoning off. We think we are acting but in doing so, we are trying to siphon off from IS, and using IS in a very very inefficient and partial way.

When you observe a real master craftsman or craftswoman at work, a top musician or accomplished sushi chef or anyone who has learned to work with great calm and precision without wasting energy, you can get a sense of what it can mean to step out of the way, to stop the usual clumsy siphoning off, and to let what is real work, rather than you trying to do the working. This is what martial arts are trying to teach, and what yoga and various contemplative disciplines are trying to point out, in different levels of directness.

The most direct way, however, drops all tools, all applications, and directly lets IS be. Entering this IS, which means realizing that one has always been part of this IS, is so totally unlike any other sense of -- of what, of bliss, of clarity, of ease -- that I don't know what words to use for it. Coming home perhaps. Waking up from a dream, perhaps. Words falter here.

I hope that this story, while ultimately false, is not too misleading. I wrote this both for myself and for those who may enjoy the taste of it. May it help us, in some small sense, to look through the story, and smile.

In gratitude to my fellow WoK practitioners,

Piet