Piet's Summary

I continued to work with time, with the contrast between the working hypothesis talking about timelessness and our daily life that seems to present a world unfolding in time. On Monday, during my morning practice, I noticed how I tend to lean forward, so to speak, inside the little bubble of the moment. Unwittingly, I tend to stick my neck out to the next moment. Having noticed that, I experimented with sitting back and relaxing in the moment itself, in the middle of the moment, rather than at the future edge. That brought a very noticeable change, from a physical sense of relaxation to a mental sense of balance and quiet contentment.

Later that week I focused on the connection between meditation and working with the working hypothesis, the parallels and differences. I have suggested that we all spend five minutes every morning focusing on the working hypothesis, using that time as a little laboratory. And of course, this may feel like a form of meditation or contemplation. At the same time, I've also presented the working hypothesis as an alternative for spiritual practice, as something different altogether.

It is up to each of you, whether to consider our early morning sessions as a form of meditation, or just a way to focus on the working hypothesis. Either way is fine, and the emphasis is on discipline: if we can bring up the discipline to take some time, each morning, to work with the wh, it is far more likely that we can keep the wh in mind during the rest of the day.

In order to explore the connections myself, I decided to spend the rest of the week without any other contemplative sessions, longer than the five minutes each morning, putting myself on a contemplative diet, so to speak, forcing myself to really view the rest of the day as a form for me to lead an active contemplative life. Interestingly, that did give the whole day more of a flavor of a contemplative session. It is remarkable how we can combine, or how we can let flow together, the characteristics of a contemplative openness to all that presents itself with the active focus that we need in daily life to do what we have to do.

*Responses*

Frank wrote about using the breath as a way to remove artificial barriers between meditation and non-meditation, and exploring that further. This resonates with what I discussed above, and I look forward to hear what he finds.

Rod made an interesting attempt at systematizing two ways of looking at the world, Linear-Causal and Tranquil-Holistic. I, too, enjoy drawing up such schemas, and then I enjoy walking around them to see what can be improved. My first question to Rod is: you talk about my L-C and my T-H world [emphasis added], as if they are on a par, and as if you own both, and you can view and review both. Does this `you' live in yet a different world? Or in one of the two worlds? Or in both, in different identities? If the later, which one is more true, and is there really room in the T-H world for a `you', and if so, in what form?

Miles asked me to explain what I meant when I described a mistake that I saw myself making. The mistake was to explore the wrong version of the wh, a version that was too limited. I set out to explore the wh notion that all is complete and perfect, and hence timeless and not bound to our ordinary interpretations. But then I noticed that there was still a subtle sense of I as an observer watching all that, and `drinking it all in', as if through a straw. So yes, losing a sense of self is a good thing if it happens naturally, as part of the whole world opening up, so to speak (language is tricky here), but it is extremely easy to congratulate yourself with a bit of losing and loosening up and opening up without noticing how much you're still stuck in the ordinary patterns.