At 04:33 PM 3/23/00 +0200, you wrote:
>From: J M de la Rouviere <moller@...>
>
>Dear Dan,
>
>Yes Dan, as usual you are perfectly right. Yours is indeed a very
>interesting presentation of this 'practice'. It could indeed undermine
>everything even itself.
>
>As an afterthought to my letter to Roger on some thing he send us about
>Barry ?, I felt it may just be worth pointing to the traditional approach to
>this method. They say take away everything, and what remains will be the
>Self, reality etc. But they seem to approach the process from the position
>that none of the things they reject are reality/Self. Ie, I am not my mind,
>my body etc. To be able to say this, there must be knowledge of what the
>I/Self is. So the whole thing starts with an assumption. If the Self is
>All, and this Self is not my body, what is the body then?
>
>So I was trying to point to this difficulty in this practice which can be
>very misleading unless understood as you have so beautifully explained it.
>
>Thank you for that.
>
>love and respect,
>
>Your Brother M

Dear Mollersan,
I concur. There indeed is a tendency to present neti, neti
as a way to get to something. There is the assurance
that Something will remain, a Self, an ultimate Being.
Taken in its fullness, neti neti undermines the concept of
somewhere to get or someone getting somewhere.
And then it undermines itself, for there is then no
position from which to state "neti, neti," nor any
assumption upon which to base any further negation.

Perhaps the kind of presentation of neti, neti,
who you describe accurately, can be taken as luring
a baby from its position by showing it a rattle.
Once the baby is moving about freely, it discards its
rattle and finds other ways to play.
Ultimately, there is only "play" itself, for the baby
and the playtoys have disappeared. :-)

Love,
Dan