Live by example. Don't hide. Only then will the feedback be true.

It may appear that I am proposing anarchy or nihilism. Maybe so. But really I'm trying to point out that you must exist in such a way that the unavoidable structures that support you are always being tested because if they become stiff and rotten then so will you.

Yielding assumes you're already in a fight. In order to yield you need to first be aggressive enough to find yourself in a contest. Otherwise it's not yielding at all but avoidance – the bane of all our lives.

When I meet people who are old in years but essentially young at heart, the quality they seem to have in common is fearlessness, in particular, they are unafraid of confrontation, so much so that they appear to relish a fight. Yielding doesn't come into it.

When I truly listen to the Other I am willing to become them on every level. And this is the good student, not just willing to listen but unable not to listen.

Psychotherapy, as far as I can tell, amounts to an attempt to integrate the subject into a system of bourgeois values. And, for me, this is the problem with democracy now, it has far more to do with inviting the Other into my club than it has with any real, that is deep, listening. Our first responsibility, as intelligent mature adults, is to question the values – the axioms – of our inherited culture: that monster that insists on blotting out precisely what's interesting and dangerous about each and every one of us.

Discontent conceals contentment. This is the fact at the root of our work: that beneath the anxiety – the suffering – everything is OK.

There was a time when the rigours of rational argument were championed not because they enabled a scientific reduction of the world, but because they best modelled the rigours of heart and spirit that God demands of his subjects. A time when the rational was primarily ethical.

Any theory of spirit must contain a complete understanding of death.

Mind in dantien. Despite everything, mind in dantien. This is our contraction, our withdrawal into object, entity, that allows our spirit to be free to touch everything else.

"Freedom is not the property of a subject but rather belongs to existence at the level of its singularity, irreducibility, and irrepressibility."

events & movements rather than structures & meanings

The time of my life.

Every experienced teacher knows that the best way to fob off a poor student is to tell them how well they're doing, and the best way to galvanize a good student is to tell them how poorly they're doing – to give them the proverbial pep talk.

Spirit and matter (property, wealth) move in opposite directions.

"The self is not something I possess; it is a regulatory concept that keeps the "I" in line like a number in a sequence or a slot in a hierarchy."

Is Otherness ever really Other? Is it not ourselves reflected back with an authenticity that startles?