Today, the future is shedding the negativity of the Other and positivizing itself into an optimized present that excludes all disaster.

The meaning of life is not to cheat death but to deserve death.

And the irony is: we spend a lifetime learning to ignore the mind and trust the spirit to command the body, lead the life; and then we die.

The skill, the knack, is not just doing the work but doing it well, doing it in such a way that it takes you somewhere new and worthwhile each time.

Faithfulness is a form of decision and conclusion that introduces an eternity into time.

Invest the work with enthusiasm, imagination and grace and it will come alive, rewarding you, in the process, with spiritual insight.

Effectiveness of practice depends largely on how deeply you sink into it. Just going through the motions – skimming the surface – is better than nothing, but barely.

Spirit owes its liveliness specifically to the capacity for death.

Taiji teaches that to get energy into something I must first open up and let that something into me. This we call the Principle of Reciprocity. By calling it a principal we suggest a suspicion that it operates on all levels all the time. That is, it is a universal law.

Literature is not primarily a place for truths, it is the space where truths play out.

And the irony is that direct relation, direct communication, is only possible when mediated through a third party, through some commonality, be it ground or God or simple mutual respect.

Have you noticed how Enlightened masters don't make old bones? Once you've got it right, why stick around?

The future – destiny – is aching to open up, yet we prevent it by refusing to face what needs to be faced in ourselves.

The intelligence that opposes stupidity must be intelligence used against itself. It incessantly tests its instruments and means. It never stops doubting itself. Instead of sitting near the warm hearth, it distances itself from it. It is the hyperboreanism of thought. It implies the cold fever of martial intelligence.

The Unknowable demands I wake up to hidden resources that surprise me as much as you, that force me to confront my own strangeness – a reality I know exists, but which, for the most part, eludes me.

There's little nowadays that requires us to be at our best, let alone our very best.

a feverish vector that leads into the unknown