Piet's Summary

Dear Frank, Jake, Maria, Miles, Nicole, Rod:

It is wonderful to start each new week of practice by reading the summaries of the six of you, and to know that we are all working on a shared topic, investigating the working hypothesis. Even though we do our five-minute practice sessions in isolation, and though we make our daily lab notes and field notes for ourselves, the very fact that we share our highlights at the end of the week makes this whole exercise into a valuable group activity. I was also glad to see that Jake, Maria, Miles and Nicole found my play with breathing to be of some use.

I felt especially touched by what Miles wrote, "I am coming to realize what a gift it is to have a practice for an entire lifetime. What else will I be able to keep being challenged by for my entire life?" Like scientific research, our investigations, too, are open-ended and hence never-ending, yet can change flavor dramatically at every major turn of the road. And there is definitely a sense of passion behind the explorations, like in science, as Maria described in "I saw that I had tremendous love for the appearances and all is so intimate and beautiful."

As for my own reflections, this last week I again stumbled upon the timelessness aspect of reality. According to the working hypothesis, if all is complete already, there can be no coming and going, no birth and death, no malfunctioning and breakdown, no worries or needs of any kind. Yes, this of course sounds ridiculous, but then again, the working hypothesis is extremely radical. The challenge is to hold the tension between the way we normally interpret everything that seems to be going on around us, in terms of causality and happening, and the working hypothesis which tells us that past-present-future time is an illusion.

The way timelessness hit me, was through a focus on happening. Each moment, all kind of things are happening. According to Descartes, the one thing we know for sure is that we think, or more generally, we have cognitive experiences (cogito). A more radical version is: the one thing we know for sure is that there is an IS involved. Something is. It's not that there is just a blank nothingness. Whether what is is a world of things with us as one of the players on the stage, well, that's quite a different matter. Let's not buy into all that right away.

What is the minimum that we can accept, based on what is directly given, on what is indubitably there? Well, you might say: at least there is the experience of something happening. Even if I am not who I think I am and even if this whole world turns out to be a dream or an illusion, at least there is the experience unfolding of there seeming to be happenings going on. I understand Descartes as having started there.

But starting there, we have already bought into time as real, and so we are already missing the real point of the working hypothesis. We may have a vivid sense of all kind of things happening, or more accurately and minimally, of having the experience of all kind of things happening. But that sense, vivid as it may be, might be wrong. Maybe nothing is happening at all. And indeed, that is what the working hypothesis implies. 

Any happening is an illusion.

True or false? I don't want to believe that sentence and I don't want to disbelieve it. I want to taste it and test it, as much as possible, each moment of the day, as a specific version of exploring the consequences of the working hypothesis. Since this is such a radical and counterintuitive consequence, I felt that I could get good traction there. I started to do this a few days ago, and clearly I've been bitten now by the bug of daring to doubt happening. A lot of fun and consternation and fun in consternation. To be continued!