25 June 2012

journeying along an obscure route

the other person is a shore we will never reach
It was in this spirit that the game continued.

24 June 2012

the spell-bound heart
So what builds as we get older is not structure (edifice/empire) but intensity. An asymptotic approach to death.
In my best writing, I give up all control to the poem: I’m barely holding on.
Like all central truths, its ramifications are infinite.
Spirit is agent of the event. It breaks with the past, and stimulates the future. The present is passage into the future, but it is a passage through which the future spews against me with such ferocity that my spirit needs to be charging forward just to squeeze past and through. If I stand still, or even slow down, then time will catch me and I'll be swept away into history.
energy & vitality are sacrificed, without compromise
commune with your heart and be still

18 June 2012

Relax to keep tension alive.

16 June 2012

love is a relation with that which always slips away
purging the comforts
Meditation – a category that includes taiji – is about looking into time. In particular locating – or even extracting – the present from the lazy flow of time. It would seem we have no choice but to be in the present, but in fact most of us do all we can to avoid its revealing glare. The present moment is red hot – or ice cold – and when I am truly in and of it I contain no past and no future – I am unclothed of them and stand naked, bereft of the possibility of escape or avoidance. This razor's edge requires all the intensity and concentration I can muster to sustain and bear, because the true present is in fact the absolute future opening up before me – a future untainted by the past – the unextrapolatable future – a place and time of novelty and creativity – pure spirit.

13 June 2012

the withering sun of knowledge
Knowledge is held onto
Faith is relaxed into

Habit: a set of intelligently constructed mechanisms which ensure the appropriate reply to various possible demands.
Coherence is not necessarily good, and one must question its cost. Better sometimes to remain confused.
Institutions tend to become the enemy of the very event they are supposed to embody, intent on preserving their own existence, even at the cost of the very purpose of their existence.
Most of us spend a life in anticipation. We deal with the future by anticipating it. In fact intelligence is the ability to anticipate – to see order in the past and thereby second guess what's coming. The problem with this is two-fold: firtsly it lessens the impact of events and reduces the energy of our interactions, and secondly not only does it reduce our ability to deal with whatever cannot be anticipated, it denies and suppresses the unanticipatible. Life then becomes the very thing it shouldn't: under control, and hence boring, weak and unsatisfying.
Prayer has to do with hearing, heeding, and hearkening to a provocation that draws us out of ourselves.

11 June 2012


Anxiety – the modern disease – is the result of a dissociation of mind and energy.
Like a glass focusing the suns rays on a tiny point, we focus all our attention and intention on the here & now, burning a passage into time with an intensity borne of dedication and devotion.
Certain things can only be understood when one's energy is good enough to grapple with them. This is why philosophers – those with beautiful insights but poor energy – only ever go so far.
Moving into spirit is only possible with a set of practices that discipline, strengthen and liberate one's energy.
Not really empty – just empty of all that can be known.

We're not human beings by nature but by grace.
impersonal & pre-individual
a knack for cutting through the intricacy of self-deception
uncontaminated by the mediation of sensation

09 June 2012

All structures, even those of understanding, ultimately block energy from either manifesting or moving.
to be created is to be called into being
we cannot acquire the virtue of purity unless we have first acquired humility of heart
to become worthy of what happens to us, and thus to will and release the event
True experience, far from confirming what I know, should threaten and unsettle, forcing me to review and reinterpret.
Tradition is an ocean of energy and experience waiting to be stirred up so that its secrets resurface and expose themselves. If I wish to be agent to such awakening then I must submerge myself in that tradition and cause a stir. This means not just obeying, but wrenching, wringing, rupturing its principles in order to discover what they contain. I must do what my teacher instructed me to do whilst being what he entrusted me to be – as creative and unorthodox as humanly possible.