The river changes even as we step into it, and so do we.

The legs straighten to generate force, and bend to issue energy

Gravity is a field which contains and influences. The first instruction of taiji – sink & relax – means to become deeply mindful of this. Other concepts in taiji – the Other, the Internal, the Principles, Yielding, Energy, Spirit – are also best conceived of as inescapable fields through which to roam and glow.

Sink & relax = yield to gravity

I yield when I offer no resistance – when I am soft.

Taiji is the practice and study of yielding.

Is it not possible that there are two distinct dimensions ... one always concealed by the other, yet continuously coming to the aid of, or subsisting under, the other?

escape the inescations of sense

All you have to decide is what to do with the time given to you

The next stage is always the most difficult

(2) a pure becoming without measure, a veritable becoming-mad,

which never rests. It moves in both directions at once. It always eludes
the present, causing future and past, more and less, too much and not
enough to coincide in the simultaneity of a rebellious matter.

The primary fact of taiji is its martial status : we train for situations where there is literally no time for thought, language, decisions, not even consciousness. Situations where there is only automatic response.

Everything becomes principle

All hinges on how I present myself to the world and the work; how am I present?
Naked – with nothing between me and it. No impediment in the heart.

Attack without malice

I strayed out of thought & time

Freedom lies not in being able to chose what to do, but in being able to transform into whatever is required to do what is necessary.

A feeling bears on itself the scars of its birth; it recollects as a subjective emotion its struggle for existence; it retains the impress of what it might have been, but is not.

Rational mind reduces the world to numbers

Suffering is slavery

an exceeding which thwarts any recuperation

awareness
intensity
invention

shadow substance one

Compassionate mind (surely our greatest achievement) is a mind all heart, which, in the limit, becomes Universal Mind, admitting so much of reality that it becomes indistinguishable from it.

The ever-present dancing machines

Rational mind is an affront to Nature.

Poetry isn’t easy to come by.
You have to write it like you owe a debt to the world.
In that way poetry is how the world comes to be in you.

Alan Davies

Time presses everywhere

imbibe delight through every pore

Free of passion we perceive the virtual; full of passion we realise the actual. So says the Tao Te Ching. The task at hand is to be free of passion and full of passion at the same time.

With connexion comes obligation

The vital force of life that resides in the belly rises up the spine as a vapour, touches the base of the skull, diffuses through the body, and spins the spirit into a higher consciousness.

Belly is power – pulling in and down. Heart is love – pouring up and out. This is obvious. What is less obvious is the connexion between the two. Given that taiji is the balance of yin & yang: love depends upon a strong root otherwise it is weak and undirected, and power actively generates an open giving heart otherwise it becomes stagnant and choked. A good heart needs to be supported from below otherwise it worries to death.

I continue to live in the wonder wherein I recognize my affirmation as just and lasting, the weight of my existence as an operative reality that I project forward every day, in each moment, displacing it continuously, constructing it each day, in each instant, for collective being.

Antonio Negri

Joy is an affect by which the body's power of acting is increased or aided

I was never really insane except upon occasions when my heart was touched

Repetition is not the recurrence of the same old thing over and over again; to repeat something is to begin again, to renew, to question, and to refuse to remain the same.

Creativity is not the making of things, but the ever renewing discovery of principle through principled work.

sentient landscape

What matters is the discovery of ways of aligning yourself with the creative processes that work through you.

The principles aren't cages, but elastic skins to stretch and press into

String of pearls

The arms industry needs war, the drug companies need disease, the police need crime, the ego needs fear : corruption is built into the system. The struggle for purity – humility – is never ending.

The Internal is the virtual or ineffable content of a thing or event. Always just beyond. All I can do is believe and create – become aware.

Dedicating a life to the Internal. Not because I want to, but because I have no choice.

Success is possible only when the effort is total

Philosophy inverts the movement that leads from metaphysics to psychology.

As far away from mechanical movement as is humanly possible

the arduous procedure of counting to Two

Reason can simply be a way for the powerful and 'unreasonable' to enforce their institutional domination.

try to unite the brain with the heart, bodily suppleness with tension;
an agile mind and body will intuitively produce the right response

an intensity darker than

Rendered passive by the need to understand

communication through mutual grappling

Thinking cannot solve problems – only pose them.
Spirit is the agent of deproblematization.

The power to affect and the power to be affected

free & wild

How much pure reality manages to break through?
Maybe a few seconds in a lifetime.

Significance always lies elsewhere

Put emptiness into motion

the gnawing fire at heart and brain

evidence of things not seen

Al wyt, reson, and sens, felyng, lyfe, and al other natural powar, spryngyth out of the hart.

If sinking gives me depth, then turning gives me subtlety

struggle into and out of meaning

variegated, mobile, assymmetrical, decentred, spiraloid

To relax is to admit difference

The world that we try to explain is simply there.

In the composition, the artist does exactly what the eye must do with life, fix the particular with the universality of his own personality