Our power (energy level) draws us to consciously enter the process of becoming. We become acutely aware that each present moment is a passage from past to future. This awareness demands we effectively become two – the past we are leaving behind at one end of the passage and the future we are becoming at the other. For an instant we feel both clearly, and become the flow between. Like an amoeba.

The world is not a grab-bag of things. It’s an always-in-germ.

The taiji mind is neither distanced nor removed from the actual world. It is intensely and intently with and of the world it inhabits. The imagination, as such, does not enter the picture at all. We do not think above and beyond what is actual. But our intense presence gives us power beyond the usual: a power to squeeze and press as though into time and thereby feel much more than usual – the power to travel deeper into reality. We effectively choose consciousness and awareness over thinking. And the world which opens up to this intensity teems with life and detail – we become aware of potential – of possibility – and we feel that what this potential possesses as potential – a fine charge and delicacy – an evanescent incandescence too beautiful to imagine – dies the moment it actualizes and enters the so-called real world of actual things. So, for me at least, coming into being represents a sort of death, or at least a shocking let-down, and actual death, which allows entrapped essence to re-enter the virtual world, a sort of birth.

The first stage is to develop a root and make an ally of the Earth. We need all the help we can get.

duplicity is an artifact of immediacy

Taiji, as a practice, is simply a means of gathering energy and developing the power to travel ever deeper into awareness. To be effective it must go hand-in-hand with an ascetic life style that puts the truth of solitude and virtue above consumerism (a life that doesn't waste energy). It also requires vision : the ability to formally commit the whole of one's life to one course.

When I think of my body and ask what it does to earn that name, two things stand out. It moves. It feels. In fact, it does both at the same time.

I am handing you
what I do, as I do it.
I have to tear down a wall
in the way, and that
is what I do.

a creative activity belonging to the very essence of the occasion

Think of energy as the transmission of physical feelings.

For better or for worse

Problems arise when we try to make sense of feelings – when we begin to think we understand. Mystery is not just a state of not knowing; it is a charged state of heightened awareness because of not knowing. Understanding brings comfort and relief but also deflation and disappointment. Truth ultimately lies in the spirit of the connexion – the mystery – not in the understanding.

What we give to the moment is our attention and our intention : our engagement.

A life full of giving. Not necessarily to others but to each and every moment.

you startle from the sleep
in which you have celibated yourself
to serenity

fluid & permeable

the word ‘or’ names a genuine reality

interwoven with everything that is, yet trapped in an illusion of separateness

Slumped shoulders & drooping buttocks.

Energy flows down the front of the upper body (head & torso), and down the back of the lower body (legs).

The good therapist should, at the same time, be above the situation.

Mind should never be allowed to feed upon itself.

How difficult it is!

progress is always a transcendence of the obvious

bold & humble

Mind directs the energy which directs the body.

like the thin line of flame advancing across the dry autumnal field

Rationality is just a vulgar means of making opinions respectable.

You can’t control anything. What you have to do is let yourself be taken over.

No blame, no regret.

Low expectation, high self-worth.

The enemy is always fear, and what is built on fear : self-image.

Never listen to second thoughts.

poetry liberates words from their emotional implications, prose confirms them in it

Mind makes feelings, and then feelings make thoughts or movements or emotions.

Root is not only in the foot. It is a line of connexion from every part of the body to the ground beneath the foot.

Hasdai continued to impress Abd al-Rahmaan with both his knowledge and his way with people.

with a single purpose out of a single fountain

Dissociate the mind from thinking in order to associate it with feeling

Impossible without the other

the man who, having reconciled the opposites of (his) nature, is whole

the feminine aspect of empathy : the opening of self to other

Delve

So I come again to my present day gyrations

Psychosomatic : unity of mind and body

reason is emotion’s slave and exists to rationalize emotional experience

understand what you learn by questioning

our desire for desire / our appetitite for life

a somatic base

Plumb from the perineum

Leave home. Meet strangers. And learn to draw.

The nature of the mind is luminosity.

these rotten churches / in my head

It's all in the connexion

actively engaged in the expansion of revolutionary perception

my knees are in my knees
 my eyes are in my eyes

Aram Saroyan

Or is language itself the negative of no known positive?

We live in a world largely at odds with the feelings that create it. This is because the objects of creation – the stuff created – clutter and interrupt the creative process. Even a practice as unmaterialistic as taiji: how often do we try to remember a feeling we've had before – recreate yesterdays form – instead of starting afresh and creating anew.

a shell of words scaled off

essential practice

gentle violence

What makes taiji, or anything else for that matter, spiritual is the fact that at the level of first principle it puts the Other first. Our struggle is not to befriend the Other – not to find common ground – not to identify in any way – but to open to its otherness as a means of dissolving self.

The best time to practice is when you're too tired to practice

Humour is the art of the surface

The external supports and contains the internal; whilst the internal softens, melts and floods the external.

a militant of truth

I must necessarily turn to something other than myself since it is a question of being delivered from self

Simone Weil

an active fidelity to the event of truth

Spirit is the agent of the event, and the whole idea of becoming versed in spirit is to consistently rupture the ever-constricting skin of normality, burst into the eventual, and become. And spirit is simply this – something that breaks whatever separates us from reality, and then acts as guiding light – luring us forth, radiant, unafraid, into the events of life.

to be means to exist the way nature does

a vision of entities as mobile arrangements of disparate (or nonequivalent) forces

One of the fundamental facts of ego is it's oneness. Not a unity but individual and individuated – to the point of isolation. In fact one of Nietzsche's beautiful insights was that with the death of God, the temptation to install one's own ego as substitute will be irresistable, and mankind will be really fucked. The fundamental fact of the body is it's twoness – a body of two halves, elastically and dynamically interacting to generate and revel in energy, for its own sake if nothing else. When the mind quietens in taiji it does so into movement – a body in motion – into this writhing twoness, rather than into the lonely oneness of a self set apart.

the coherence of a body

The Age of Reason was preceeded by, and probably required, a 300 year witch hunt to eradicate all vestiges of energy and spirit – all madness – before it could establish itself. Reason only takes root in barren ground.

energy erupts anew in each moment

tentative formulations