Ignorance is a state of resistance – a blockage, a stupidity. Knowledge is a state of assistance – a reinforcement which swiftly becomes a coercion. Awareness is a hovering, in-between, egoless state – not yet knowing but certainly not ignorant. Awareness does not think and so has no desire to profit from intelligence or advantage. It resists its own processing. Awareness is negative capability. That's its deep intelligence.

We live in an age of inflated ego and depressed heart.

Once the world was full of wonders, but it belongs to humans now.

Just finished working with a student who was bemoaning the unreality of her life: "My whole life is just so flat and unreal that it's got to the point where the only part I really value and treasure and look forward to is my dreaming. My dreams are now my reality."

Something is alive only to the extent that it contains contradiction within itself: indeed, its force is this, to hold and endure contradiction within.

If our environment was more dangerous, if everyone we passed was a potential assailant, if we lived in the ghetto or the hood, then our minds would naturally be in the dantien, our spirits would naturally simmer and we would naturally house just the right amount of connected tension. If not then we would probably be dead.

The problem with humans is that they're naturally lazy. If there's an easy way on offer then they'll take it, even if a more difficult way offers richer rewards.

Philosophy lost its grip when, for the sake of consistency, of making a living, it insisted on taking a position, of digging itself in, inhabiting a hole. When it lost its ability to appreciate the multi-faceted, multidimensional nature of the human being, the fact that a Parmenides and a Heraclitus can happily coexist in the same space if not the same breath, though in different dimensions, then it stopped being either interesting or useful to the practical man, the man that actually lives and works, with and in, practice.

The only thing worth mastering is your own mood.

a high-tension contact between the world’s inconsistencies

The problem nowadays is that the intelligent and sensitive lack confidence (hence depression) and the stupid have all the confidence in the world (hence the present state of affairs).

The Academy (as actuality and as image of the privileged position of thought) is the place where it is possible (in fact, necessary) to be pretentious without appearing so. All a sham.

There is nothing more important than the leap.

Philosophy, etymologically at least, is the love of wisdom. So when was it that it shifted instead to the justification of thought? That's a radical shift, to a completely opposite position.

Faith is a lonely business. Keeping a vision alive which no one else has the heart to share.

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

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.