The greatest impediment to progress – to stepping forward into the vast unknown – is defensive thought. And all thought is defensive (backward) in that it interprets new experience according to patterns set up by past experience. This is why when we experience something completely different – out of the mould – it stops the mind, at least for a time. Our spiritual work is to rid ourselves of these old patterns so that every experience is fully experienced as it is, as it happens, and as it continues to resonate within us – new, exciting and unique.

a beautiful and awful vulnerability

consolidate the formal
codify an ensemble
expose the frivolity
nurture a mind

One achieves simplicity despite one's self by entering into the real sense of things.

Constantin Brancusi

To join I must remember.

All that we are is the result of what we have thought.

Buddha

It was just his own innate goodness that guided others.

There's more than meets the eye.

Language is like a map: we spread the map of the world before us and we smugly pretend to know its experience.

John Cage

I am a society.

Maturity is a consequence of making peace with the past – putting it to rest.

Peace is a condition of my internal space. We call this space Heart-Mind because it is these two things, together. Hence three. That condition has four qualities: calm, empty, expanding and including. Calm could also be still, and expanding could be opening. Empty can be emptying – the mind emptying, and including could also be filling or even full – a full heart – containing everything. When, and only when, I am at peace, then I am ready to make society – to take another into my space. Without such peace we can exist side by side but not together.

Earth has no escape from heaven – flee it up or flee it down, heaven invades it, energizes it, makes it sacred.

Meister Eckhart

Make peace. Make society.

Authenticity is invaluable; originality is nonexistent.

Jim Jarmusch

Guilt is the clinging of the past.

Ataraxia

irrigate the dryness of decline

a serious sense of humour

anarchic harmony

John Cage

unfettered & alive

The teacher's job is to open the student up to energy. The student's job is to take this to heart.

Mastery is service: a life of service.

a register of quiddity

Stephen Ratcliffe

The burden of what's forgotten.

more and more my own language appears to me like a veil that must be torn apart in order to get at the things (or the Nothingness) behind it

Samuel Beckett

My tension hurts not just me but everything I touch. When I understand this then I change : I become compassionate.

Delight in energy we call play; the use of energy we call work.

Connecting tension (tonus) is an elastic connectivity – as though each particle is holding hands with its neighbours; it encourages energy to manifest and flow.
Disconnected tension is a holding-on – a refusal/inability to let go; it blocks energy and communication.

Verticals stagger and extend the spiral –
resisting the pull of gravity, slicing
a disputed form into gestures.

Ray DiPalma

Asquat a vast dune in the Sinai desert, my daughter and I talked about the spiritual life. We decided that the two most important things are Great Teaching – to direct one beyond the petty predictability of thought and aspiration; and friends – fellow aspirants – who keep each other going – buoyant.

To be clear of all deceit.

Connected mind – heart – embracing awareness.
Disconnected mind – head – excluding thoughts.

Tread lightly and deeply.

the body is the temple of the spirit, and the spirit is the temple of God.

Edmond Bordeaux Szekely

Life's big big secret:  SPIRIT

Sometimes courage, sometimes affection—what then remains?

Ray DiPalma

make health

Transformation through awareness : the meaning of being human.

let's
move
on

In giving the nature of all being.

Ludwig Wittgenstein