Hardcore—with a light heart.

Freud takes us back to childhood, where he said it all began. The Taoists, however, take us back to the womb, to before it all began, to a time before time, when we floated warm and weightless inside a living mother, breathed through an umbilicus from the belly/navel, saw nothing yet heard and felt everything, and were loved by a remote father whether we felt it or not.

A permanent state of transition is man's most noble condition.

Down the hatch.

create a project of life

What’s shocking about the twentieth century is not that so many were killed by wars and ideologies, but that so many were born in the first place. Over 10% of all the people who have ever lived were born in the last 100 years. A veritable plague of people.

Life : a fate worse than death?

The human project has been reduced to the rationalization of desire: finding good reason for self-interest, justifying vulgarity, revealing (thereby negating) the unconscious. Taoism suggests reversing this trend: hiding rather than exposing, loving rather than knowing, endarkenment rather than enlightenment.

disappointment is a chronic feature of modern life

Up the dosage.

No excuses left.

Be radical : develop a root.

Bounce back.

A smile broad enough to embrace the body. This is meditation, at least in posture: cross-legged, Riding Horse, Ward-Off. The in-breath. The depressed diaphragm. The Inner Smile. The fundamental, tonic, root. Deep time. Soul.

A sense of privacy.

Smile. The middle relaxes downward, the corners rise upwards, the face broadens. The whole thing stretches into a cup, a receptacle, a container, a welcome, an invitation.

Go with the feeling, the intensity, and make an impression, a difference.