Depression, the modern malaise, is the result of Internal and External collapsing into one another.

Keep repeating an exercise until you get (into) it; until it transforms you.

The serious meditators I've met lack two vital ingredients which means that their meditation never goes that deep and never gets that real. These two ingredients are a root and spirit.

The true you is found at extremes.

Depression is an allergic reaction of the intellect to its host.

To better express what's inside we need not more words (things) but a more refined punctuation.

Spirit is tested, and thereby exercised, by confronting difficulty. This is why modern parents, who do everything in their power to give their children a comfortable and easy existence, are, in reality, doing them such a disservice.

Depression results from two things: a life built on self rather than faith, and weak, untested, under-exercised spirit.

By giving self centre stage – pride of place – we have forgotten how to die, and for what to be remembered.

all that's left is the procedure

What to do when you cease to be relevant? Just carry on.

The greatest gift a parent can give a child is not individuation but God.

To release spirit – effortlessly, joyously – in the spirit of play – one must be single-weighted.

Depression is the natural result of living a lie.

The mind doubts but the heart knows.

That era is gone. Now there’s less danger, less sacrifice, less journey to find something.

Love is a desire to belong to truth.

When truly quiet the room is revealed as a riot of angels.

Thoughts are morsels for the mind but stones on the heart.

Love is the trigger that releases spirit.

Heavy with deadly seriousness, light with impish playfulness.

The fight compresses time, meditation stretches time. Spirit is all about extremes: knowing both, possessing both, blending both.

Spirit is the essence of surprise. Confounded expectation.

When I type meditator on my iPhone it always corrects it to mediator. I suspect it's wiser than I.

Did I try everything, ferret in every hold, secretly, silently, patiently, listening?

Carpe diem – sieze the day – live now, here and now. I think of it as surfing a large wave or watching a terrific movie or having great sex – the mind is totally caught in the present moment as it passes through the activity. But what of meditation where all activity is reduced to the barest minimum? Here the present moment is no longer a tight point of intensity burning its way through time but instead a portal or doorway through which one passes into long time, deep time, dream time, or what my teacher simply called energy. This sense and experience of time is completely lacking in modern life, and consequently we are incapable of considering anything but the short term, hence the present predicament of the planet and its species. The only hope we have, as a species as well as individuals, is to spend some of our daily time slipping out of frenzied presence and into this deep quiet aspect of time.

this farrago of silence and words

Caught in the grip of spirit.

Beneath you Earth, above you Sky, both stretching out forever, and you the tiniest of constrictions through which each experiences the other.

From a certain point on, there is no more turning back. That is the point that must be reached.

Death is the fact thought must encounter to stay soft, to stay weird.

Be careful: it’s possible to fake anything, including a serenely quiet mind. A good teacher will instantly see it’s fake and will expose it for what it is: a shallow, mind-invented, self-imposed veneer, like everything else in modern life. All designed to express, promote and please me, me, me. We live in incredibly selfish and conservative times.

In the deepest levels of the unconscious we find not fantasies, but telepathy.

Spirit is truth, truth spirit. Whatever you touch, with hand, mind or spirit, should become kindled with the gentle fire of spirit: with life, with growth, with creation. The image of Chang San-feng walking in the snow and leaving a melted pathway behind him scattered with blooming flowers.

A first indication of glimmering understanding is the desire to die.

Nowadays life seems to revolve around how we feel. When we feel good we're happy and when we feel not so good we're moaning. We even have a new word for the ennui and apathy of feeling less than great: depression, and, of course, there are pills for that. Now meditation has nothing to do with how I feel. Assuming I have a modicum of self-discipline (self-respect) I meditate regardless of how I feel. However I know from experience that meditation allows my mind and therefore my feelings to settle and neutralise so that it is no longer a matter of feeling either good or bad but of being clear, calm and capable.

We have created safe, comfortable environments devoid of danger, and consequently, also devoid of the energy required to handle danger, namely spirit.

So long as the words keep coming nothing will have changed.

Hell is oneself.

that's the mistake I made, one of the mistakes, to have wanted a story for myself, whereas life alone is enough

pining for a future that never arrived

Gadfly ethics.

Haunted by memories that never (quite) happened, memories honed and polished by the Internal, its work, which is never (quite) right, into beacons of that Internal, to serve (in a whirlwind) as lures, in one sense stable, monolithic, distant, and, in another, evanescent, shimmering, fleet, so immediate as to be threatening.

The difference between heart and mind: Out of sight out of mind / Absence makes the heart grow fonder.

searching for techniques through which to decondition ourselves from orthodoxies

To have any success with the Internal you must become a poet.

Laughing, tough and lonesome.

Entities are so incredibly … themselves. Yet in this selfsameness they are weird, self-transcending. The chiasmic, contrary motion of what things are and how they appear makes a mockery of presence. Things emit uniqueness. They bristle with specificity. Purple, pale violet, light blue, their soft and sharp spines and flower-spines bristle forth despite me and my subject-object scissions. This flickering between a thing and its appearance is the reason why coexistence can’t be holistic. Something is always missing. My self-awareness is a sense of incompletion.

The work is all about remembering. Remembering that I am alive and that I will die.

Literally 'call to mind' from re (intensive) + Latin memor 'mindful'

Many live under the presumption that happiness is just around the corner, that a change of fortune is all that's required: meeting my soulmate, winning the lottery, a promotion, a holiday in the sun, a baby, future enlightenment, whatever; all to do with feeling unhappy now because I don't quite have what I want. And yet experience repeatedly tells me that the happiness of wish-fullfilment is shallow, short-lived and anti-climactic to say the least. That the thrill of the chase made me happier than catching and having what I was chasing. Real happiness comes from active engagement rather than from winning. Everything required, not just for happiness but for complete enlightenement is here, right now, if only I awaken to it AND engage it. Real happiness is always creative, active, interested, and interesting, and yet the deeper I become, the richer my internal life, the less I need to do to be creative and to be active. Being becomes becoming and becoming is being.

Comedy: the genre of coexistence.

Mind in dantien is the energetic equivalent of worry. A persistent nagging in the background (25% of the mind always in dantien) that prevents me settling into self; that keeps me trembling on the edge.

Thoughts are not bad in themselves; only when heeded.

Because of interconnectedness, it always feels as if there is a piece missing. Something just doesn’t add up.

Repetition does not lead to boredom, but rather to an uncanny sense of refreshment.

It takes time, lots of time, to acquire the strength, the wisdom, to make sense, to grow up, mature. Especially difficult nowadays since most of our social structures/institutions seem hell-bent on maintaining us in servile infantility.

It's not the pleasures you've enjoyed that matter but the lessons you've learnt.

Don't mistake willfulness for spirit. They may sometimes appear similar but they come from very different places.

Find a way to see how things sparkle all by themselves. How they play despite intentions.

In time the dantien becomes a psychic anchor as well as a physical center, enabling the mind to travel and explore very weird territories and terrains. But of course this can only happen when the dantien is so well established that the mind is free to roam.

Practice is the only way to stay connected to the ever bountiful Tao. Indulging the self with an endless string of enjoyable experiences is the opposite to practice – it simply wastes priceless time with no accrual of wisdom.

The Internal can be summed up in one phrase: Truth is never what you think it is.

We are less than the sum of our parts; multitudes teem in us.

Patience is not simply a matter of waiting. It is abiding in the ever passing present. Teasing an unbroken thread of listening through the passage of time.

the force or inertia 
that brought the boulder 
to lodge against the birch 
is irreducible

When we were young, too young to remember, as the ego began to develop and establish itself, we chanced upon a use of the mind that appeared to work for us. It brought success to the fledgling self – it largely guaranteed that we got our own way. That use of mind, which is really just a ruse, a deception, then becomes our identity, the stamp of who even we consider ourselves to be, and we can then go through life appearing as though there is nothing more to us than that, yet with this nagging suspicion that we are a fraud, that, in fact, we are something else, someone different. Spiritual work – the work – is all about digging beneath this false self to find the true Self, which, especially nowadays, is so different as to be unadmitable.

After victory, tighten the cords of your helmet.

We spoil our children by giving them choices they shouldn't have to make – by conditioning them to value choice – freedom of choice – above all else. All spiritual and religious work gives the same unequivocal message: choices strengthen ego and weaken spirit. Hence my teacher's saying: You are truly blessed to know you have no choice.

When you understand, you cannot help but love.

We practice to make happiness an internal matter – something we give to the world rather than something the world bestows upon us.

The whole idea of practice is that you do it whether you want to or not. Not as some perverse punishment but as a practice, a practice of choicelessness. The more respect and grace you give it the more it'll give back to you. Think of it as an activity like breathing: you can do it how you like: fast/slow, shallow/deep, tense/relaxed, but you have to do it otherwise you'll die.

Anxiety is the modern hysteria – a weak, low-grade, chronic version of something that would be strong, spirited and intermittent if only our energy were good enough.

much that is light 

outshines itself

Without practice I'll never reach the end.

Consumerism's ravenous desire to eat the world.

Without practice it's all just wishful thinking.

About 15000 years ago the Pleistocene ended beckoning warmth and stability. These conditions allowed homo sapiens to develop agriculture which in turn allowed them to break out of balance with nature and proliferate like a cancer. This drastic overpopulation is now causing global warming, and wrecking the fragile ecosystems that sustain the conditions for the survival of our (and almost every other) species. It's beautifully logical, and obvious, in retrospect. And I'm only writing this because there's a moral, a principle, in there somewhere if you care to dig it up.

Mind in dantien is the bitter astringency that balances and anchors a heart opening in sweetness.

Without practice I'll never reach the source.

Animism: awareness of nonhuman agency, consciousness, affect, significance beyond the human.

Without practice it all remains theoretical, external, soulless.

The heart has its own reasons, embedded in the unforeseeable future.

It's not what you do that matters, it's how you do it. The quality, the measure, of respect and devotion.

Without practice I'll never find out for myself.

Beauty needs to be seen because it can't see itself.

Without practice I'll always forget.

It is the very mind itself that leads the mind astray – of the mind, do not be mindless.

Establish a daily practice. Same thing, repeated respectfully, every day. In time, once you relax into it, this opens up the world of difference, which is the world of energy. The more subtle the differences, the more refined the energy. The opposite of this approach is what I call the 'weekend workshop syndrome' – indulging a never-ending series of novel experiences and, if you're fortunate, slowly realising that beneath the surface glamour and excitement it's all the same because it's always the same selfish subject.

to exist is to be paranoid that you might be an algorithm

Think lightly of yourself and deeply of the world. 

You can only fight the way you practice. 

The purpose of today's training is to defeat yesterday's understanding. 

To win any battle, you must fight as if you are already dead.

Mind in dantien becomes part of the metabolism. Automatic, natural.

Sum ergo sum.

Any philosophical, spiritual, meditative inquiry eventually comes to the conclusion that there is a presentable, formal, structural aspect to things (the External, Real, Actual) and there is an invisible, mysterious, energetic content to things (the Internal, Imaginary, Virtual). The deeper one's inquiry the more different these two worlds are revealed to be. Certain models (scientific, agricultural, bourgeois) assume that there is either no Internal (what you see is what you get) or that the Internal is a trivial private subjective concern. To discover the Internal for yourself simply sit and meditate. As the mind relaxes into compassionate quietude you realise that that quiet is far richer than anything that could possibly fill it.

At every opportunity eschew the critical mind for a compassionate one.

A beautiful woman looking at her image in the mirror may very well believe the image is herself. An ugly woman knows it is not.

Nature is now a holiday destination, tucked safely "over there", only entering life when we choose it to. This is Adamic sin: the ridiculous presumption that we can tame, use and abuse Nature without any loss to our being, which, when you think about it, is simply an insistence that there is no Internal.

The most difficult thing nowadays is not to be part of the problem.

Not a self but a surge.

Satiation is the point at which you must face the existential revelation that you didn't want really want what you seemed so desperate to have, that your most urgent desires are only a filthy vitalist trick to keep the show on the road.

Imagine a sand castle at the beach. Grand and elaborate with merlons, turrets, moat and drawbridge, adorned with beautiful shells. Then a freak wave surges in from the sea and washes it all away. The castle (made of things – bits and pieces) is the small/false self and the wave (spirit and energy) is the big/true Self. The difference between them is total. Incomparable, incompatible, incommensurable. Of entirely other worlds. The modern mind, both lazy and fearful, is in the castle, whereas the heart, fundamentally primal and archaic, is with the wave.

In love with emptiness and silence – pure potential unburdened by actuality.

It is not my business to think about myself. My business is to think about God. It is for God to think about me.

Don't believe in (something), instead be in belief, like being in love, as though love/belief is a substance, like water, or air, which it is. The object of belief is always a false idol (how can it be otherwise?) my paltry mind being the limitation it is.

Until the spirit new sensation takes hold

Then you know

Don't confuse spirit with life. Life is overrated.

What pleases the mind is not dangerous enough.

Every modern convenience, by definition, without exception, improves life by reducing spirit.

This smörgåsbord of modern life, perpetually inviting me to exercise my bourgeois right to pick and choose. It doesn't take long to twig that it all tastes the same.

I've got the spirit 
Lose the feeling 
Let it out somehow

Says is all really: wake up, forget self, give.

Imagine. You find an injured animal and take it in. Tend it, care for it, rear it. Then it's time to reintroduce it to the WILD. That now becomes the project, the future, the possibility of future. Then, when the time comes, you let it go, decisively, fearfully, joyfully. No guarantees; only hope. This is exactly, EXACTLY, one's relationship with spirit.

The popularity of talent shows, from X-Factor to the Turner Prize, all to do with marketing mediocrity than real creativity, reveals just how limited and limiting talent actually is. No self-respecting artist would countenance such a route.