This week’s exercises (asking who is doing, and saying “No” to the doing) evoke a question: as Karin and Roger also describe, a lot of daily activities seem to proceed automatically, without either the need for or the apparent presence of a self controlling the process.  So what is the self’s involvement?  The difficulty in carrying out the second practice of saying “No”, suggests that there is in fact a self ready to intervene, if it’s demands are thwarted.  So where is this self when everything is going smoothly, free from visible interference?  Is our situation like a country in which a dictator is content to sleep as long as his dictates are holding sway?  It will be interesting to discover how deeply the self has embedded itself.  Sometimes I feel quite free to follow a path of my own choosing, but I suspect that this may be the self talking.  Franz Kafka seemed to know about the self when he wrote (something like): “When the Evil One takes us over, our explanations are no longer ours but those of the Evil One.”  –Michael