In taiji we struggle with one problem: how do I achieve a more direct – a truer – connexion with reality. It is the same problem all spiritual practitioners face, or other martial artists, or artists, and it is the opposite of the problem facing the average middle-class, well-to-do person, whose main concerns are comfort, health, safety, and acquiring series of comfortably spaced, well controlled, sanitized experiences – happiness. Spiritual work is negative – it is all about stripping away the layers of wadding protecting me from a confrontation with reality – always difficult, wadding that has developed because I am cowardly and weak, a barricade of images and opinions – memories. This is how, try as I might to be fully present, the act of consciously experiencing necessarily brings up the past – structures I have previously built to deal with such experiences. So how do I proceed, given that my consciousness is me, and my conscious experience says more about me than what I am experiencing? We proceed with and into dark energy – a deep awareness of darkness – of what cannot be experienced but can be confronted and engaged. This is what we mean by faith, not believing blindly, but rather being able to proceed openly and whole-heartedly without belief, and this is the level at which a great master such as John Kells has always worked – what you see is not what you get, in fact what you see, what you experience of him, has absolutely nothing to do with the real level at which he is working with your energy and destiny.