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WoK Practice Intensive: Feb 4, 2007


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Piet's Summary

This last week was both very busy and very rich for me. It was busy because I had various visitors at work, from astrophysics colleagues to friends of WoK, and it was rich because of a number of new insights, triggered partly by the WoK friends who dropped by, including Jake, Nicole, and Miles.

I saw more deeply into the meaning of wu-wei, not-doing. The "-ing" of "doing", the very notion of anything "happening" or anything "xxx-ing" for that matter, for any xxx, is what comes in the way of seeing reality.

The working hypothesis tells us that time does not exist, that it does not function the way we think it does. However, stating it that way is rather abstract. The same message gets a lot more umph for me when I look around me, and tell myself that perhaps there is no happening at all. There is presence, yes. There is not just a big void or blackness. There is . . . what? Something? Not necessarily. Is something arising, changing, disappearing? Well, it seems that way, but . . . perhaps not necessarily so. Can I drop the addiction to happening, and focus on presence instead?

It depends. The I whom I think I am cannot. The I that is part of the story of there being a world with all kind of things going on, that I cannot drop time, because it is woven into time. But perhaps that I does not exist, because the story doesn't exist.

The I whom I really am, according to the working hypothesis, also cannot drop an addiction to happening, since that I has never had that addiction.

So the answer is a resounding no. There is no I there that can drop an addiction to happening. So whatever addicted I there would be, would be stuck. But fortunately there is no such I, according to the wh.

This may all sound philosophical, or even nonsensical, but it is my attempt to describe phenomenologically what I can now remember as having happened on several occasions this week, while working with the wh. The sense of liberation and ease is hard to put into words; art would be a far better tool, or just a gesture.

Piet


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