30 November 2015
Most of us seem to subsist as overfed yet undernourished automata: chronically exhausted and periodically frazzled. Both safe and sorry, we have traded in the edge of our warrior spirit for a cozy comfortable existence. We are the worst form of slaves: willing slaves, without even the energy to imagine an alternative. And this is the tragedy: our imagination is now refuge rather than forge: a place to flee rather than a place from which to create vibrant viable alternatives.
29 November 2015
28 November 2015
Tense shoulders effectively shorten the arms and make the hands more easily controlled by the manipulating mind. The hands then become excellent tools for moving things around but lose their true function which is to transmit energy through touch. When the shoulders relax the hands will feel distant and alien – as though they don't belong. And in fact they no longer do, not to the same mind anyway.
27 November 2015
26 November 2015
23 November 2015
Back in 1980, against the advice of all who knew me well, I started a PhD. After doing all the necessary work I got bored and, like many research students, struggled to write the thesis. By 1984 I had pretty much resigned myself to not completing. Then I got a bossy girlfriend who convinced me that if I didn't finish I would spend the rest of my life regretting it, so I buckled down and wrote up. About ten years later my teacher took me aside and we had a little chat:
"Finishing that PhD was one of the worst decisions you ever made."
"Why's that?!"
"Because it's put you on top of something you may never climb down from."
"Finishing that PhD was one of the worst decisions you ever made."
"Why's that?!"
"Because it's put you on top of something you may never climb down from."
22 November 2015
21 November 2015
Meditation struggles to retrieve and develop the prelinguistic mind: the mind before words, before mediation. In fact, it is a mind devoid of any signification. Such a mind does not think in the normal way but it does work, largely through intention, by intending energy into a vector, a direction, a flow. So, for example, the lowly amoeba does not think, not in the way we do anyway, but it does intend otherwise it would not move or envelop.
20 November 2015
19 November 2015
18 November 2015
Traditionally, the Samurai warrior meditates on death, his own death, especially before battle. In fact he enters battle firmly convinced that he is already dead. He does this for purely practical reasons: it makes him unafraid of death and therefore better able to take life-threatening risks. He understands that in face-to-face combat, the only honorable way to fight, he can only threaten life by putting his own equally at risk. It is impossible for us to even imagine the level of liveliness, the pitch of intensity, the absolute death and therefore life in such a warrior. And this is my point: only when death looms large and impending, if not inevitable, do I become truly alive.
17 November 2015
16 November 2015
The quality of my relationship with the Earth sets the ground, and ultimately determines, the quality of all my relationships. And it's all in the footfall: do I plant my foot by banging down my heel and thereby pushing the ground away from me – a careless action that unknowingly encourages an "us & them" attitude to everything else – or do I caress the ground with the front of my foot and draw the Earth up into me – a dance that as well as creating compassion also seduces spirit to rise and embed me in the midst of the event.
15 November 2015
Most people sacrifice their spirit and their destiny for the sake of a comfortable well-to-do life – the Bourgeois Dream; and they are well aware of what they're doing. We, impeccable warriors, sacrifice everything else for the sake of our spirit: a daunting, near impossible task. My teacher used to say that the most important thing for the warrior is companionship: a network of like-minded souls always willing to give a positive boost of energy to a comrade who finds himself dragged down by the claws of convention. Without such help on hand there is always the risk of being sucked down instead by your own negative responses to the tawdriness of conventionality.
All social and political action, designed to shift the balance of power, will eventually play into the hands of the powers on high. This is because, ultimately, those powers are not the few mega-rich families that rule the world, and certainly not the governments, but the very powers of evil – what used to be called the devil – that sap not just our time and hard earned cash but our spirits and ultimately our souls. The only way to resist such evil is to eradicate it from ourselves by becoming impeccable warriors: shore up collapse and leakage, harbour personal energy, and polish the spirit until that inevitable time when the enemy must be faced head on.
13 November 2015
12 November 2015
11 November 2015
Love governs being, passion generates becoming. Love is continuous and extensive, passion is transient and intense. Passion is high energy – destructive and creative, love is relatively low energy – soft and enduring. It is easy to see that the quickness of passion brings about a new state which the patience of love then nurtures to endure. More difficult to comprehend is how love manages to intensify into passion in order not to settle into the hardness of habit. This is where ethics enters. Ethics – the conceptual container of my being – offers an unleaking vessel within which the energy of love can build in intensity sufficient for passion to be available when destiny requires it. Here, and hopefully everywhere, ethics and discipline are the same: a set of behavioural restrictions designed to gather, harbour and intensify my energy. If you limit the external intelligently then the internal will grow and develop; if you indulge the external then the internal will weaken and dribble away.
10 November 2015
09 November 2015
08 November 2015
07 November 2015
With the advent of set theory it became clear that mathematics is more about classification than about numbers: before a thing can be counted it must be given a name or a label. What a weight of responsibility!
During the 1950's the Australian (British) government carried out a census in the desert prior to proposed nuclear testing. It couldn't be decided how to class the Aborigines. Eventually they were classed with livestock. This story, probably apocryphal, was told me whilst in Sydney in 1985.
My daughter's little cousin Amalia is just beginning to get a grip of speaking. It's cute, but also heart-wrenchingly tragic, to see the rational process installing itself and eradicating innocence forever.
When I was ten I got into bird-watching, largely because it was my best friend's hobby. Looking back I can see that it was all about getting terribly anxious over identification, and very little about the birds. Somehow, being able to give something a name meant that I was better than someone who could not. My whole schooling never got more profound than this.
Yet, looking back, it was those birds I couldn't identify, those that eventually escaped the clutches of my anxiety – my system – that I remember. For me they will always stand sentinel to a reality unbesmirched by the human mind.
During the 1950's the Australian (British) government carried out a census in the desert prior to proposed nuclear testing. It couldn't be decided how to class the Aborigines. Eventually they were classed with livestock. This story, probably apocryphal, was told me whilst in Sydney in 1985.
My daughter's little cousin Amalia is just beginning to get a grip of speaking. It's cute, but also heart-wrenchingly tragic, to see the rational process installing itself and eradicating innocence forever.
When I was ten I got into bird-watching, largely because it was my best friend's hobby. Looking back I can see that it was all about getting terribly anxious over identification, and very little about the birds. Somehow, being able to give something a name meant that I was better than someone who could not. My whole schooling never got more profound than this.
Yet, looking back, it was those birds I couldn't identify, those that eventually escaped the clutches of my anxiety – my system – that I remember. For me they will always stand sentinel to a reality unbesmirched by the human mind.