30 August 2018
29 August 2018
It's a study, how mind and body map each other—their tensions. And there's a sense in which the energies they intersect and harbour have an existence—insistence—independent of either. We each give something—a singularity, a glow—expression, for a time—a moment. Beyond that, we're redundant—old news—and the world is better off without us.
27 August 2018
26 August 2018
My daughter has (at last) discovered the joy of sums. My job now is to compile lists for her to do. Yesterday, hard at work, she called out: Dad, you must make them harder or I'll never get any better!
And it made me realise that God loves us according to the difficulty of the problems he sets us, not the comfort and pleasure he bestows.
The Chinese say the same: when the master is strict and critical it's because he cares, and when he praises and compliments then he's sick of the sight of you.
25 August 2018
We are what we eat. So it stands to reason that if we eat domesticated animals and hybridized vegetables then we take on that subservient, unnatural, spiritless energy ourselves. This, for me, largely answers Nietzsche's famous conundrum: Why do human beings embrace slavery as though it were their salvation?
22 August 2018
The meaning of life is to be alive, to wake up, to live. We all have our own ways of going about it, and it's difficult to argue convincingly that one way is better than another; we just have to find what suits us individually and then get on with it. Some, however, sense that they're getting it wrong, that something inside should be surfacing but never does. These people seek out a teacher, and suddenly life is different. It's no longer simply a matter of living, surviving, but of changing. A whole new ball game. Life has suddenly got serious.
17 August 2018
The human race is sick. We have an infection. An insufferable voice in the head, endlessly chattering away, which doesn't belong. A sickness made far worse by the fact that we identify with it; it never seems to stop so we think we are that voice. The voice constantly reinforces a fantasy – a neurotic image built on resentment and the need for social acceptance. All spiritual practice, from worship and prayer to meditation, chanting, charity work, yoga, martial arts, endeavors to simply cut through this voice and uncover, discover, recover the true, rational, energetic reality beneath.
16 August 2018
15 August 2018
14 August 2018
If I am alive then I am moving, if only involunatrily (breathing, heartbeat). Meditation is an attempt to be attentive to this movement rather than to the internal chatter in my head. Someone who is successful in this takes great delight in simple movement, and consequently moves with grace, dignity and obvious mindfulness.
'Living in the moment' just means not daydreaming – a mind attending to what I'm doing rather than idly thinking about other things. The people who do it best, in my experience, are the elderly. They are in pain from a failing body and in fear of a failing mind and so have no choice but to give the present their full attention. As long as the pains and the boredom don't turn them into moaners then I much prefer their company. We all live in the moment when we are being entertained: an exciting movie, sport, sex, a natter with a friend, a massage (of body or ego). The skill is to be similarly engrossed in the simple now (this moment bleeding into the next) whilst doing something as tedious and boring as seated meditation. It doesn't mean that I never think. It just means that I don't have to think. I have it perfectly in my power to turn off my thinking mind and listen deeply to the present moment when that is appropriate. And that, it turns out, is most of the time.
13 August 2018
12 August 2018
11 August 2018
09 August 2018
06 August 2018
05 August 2018
The mind is like a mansion of many rooms. In each room there is a different reality. Thinking is one such room. To explore other rooms we must learn to cease thinking. The trouble is that ego barricades us in the thinking room so well that that room effectively detaches itself from the mansion and becomes a paltry outhouse – a garden shed – from which the mansion is impossible to access, and so forgotten. It then takes life-threatening trauma, stress or danger (the very things we strive to protect ourselves against) to thrust us, unsuspectingly, into a different mind-state, and thereby reveal that there are other realities available to us. Mind-expanding drugs will also do this, and as such are invaluable, but in my experience those that use them regularly become lazy.
It should be something that is happening all at once. That's inhabiting you, and that you are doing… And there's an angel on your shoulder. That's how you should make art. If you're plotting art and trying to make something to get something, you're not in a state of creative innocence, and you're not making art, you're doing something else.
Every thing has an external component and an internal one. Rational analysis overlooks the internal no less than imaginative dreaming does the external. In fact, the external could be renamed the rational, and the internal, the imaginative. A thing’s internal component we sometimes call its otherness because it is unavailable to the external. In some crucial way, external and internal are incommensurable – of different realities. The Work slowly moves us from the external to the internal. And ironically it is a shift that requires us to become eminently rational creatures, in the sense of being in control of our minds and our emotions – egoless. Without such detachment our own internal cannot function in the world at large (ask any artist about the discipline and probity required to be consistently creative) and would lead us astray.
04 August 2018
Choice is the ruination of spirit. Spoilt for choice. When you have choices then actions are late and half-hearted (should I or shouldn't I) and so end up without power – arbitrary. We have grown so used to this powerlessness that we now take it for granted – enjoy it even. It means we can safely choose without the frightening prospect of real change, and allows us to avoid taking responsibility.
The teaching admonishes us to forget thoughts and sensations, and follow spirit and energy. Spirit sparkles, energy flows: they are of the present – they wake us to the present and they enable us to join with the present by flowing into it and having it flow through us. Thoughts and sensations ruminate inside and quickly lose track of time and reality. A private unimaginative world. Interior & inferior.