30 August 2018

la passion du non-savoir
It's about time.

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.
Climate change, population explosion, mass extinction. Three nice, juicy problems for our children to contend with.
Love is not a given, it's a state that we work toward and experience gradually.

My wound existed before me.
The teacher’s there to tell you what to look out for, what's important and what isn't.

Ignore the self – thoughts and feelings – and listen to energy. This is the work.
Meditation. Imagine sitting under a hot shower. Water is crashing down onto your head and running over the body, image of gravity. At the same time steam is rising from your body, image of lightness, spirit. Find the mind that happily keeps these two in balance.

27 August 2018

where the wing is fully alive 
but has no mind or body

I can only teach if you are prepared to meet me halfway.

26 August 2018

A controlling mind compensates for a lazy body and a slack spirit.
The fundamental fact of modern life is repression. Repression of a past screaming to be looked at, and repression of a future begging to open up and be lived. And then what chance does the present have? It can only be a shadow, divorced from the flow of time.
The more grounded, centred and together the body, the more the mind can open and the spirit can fly.
The real future arrives when your past catches up with you. All else is preparation.

The teacher is simply someone who can help you change.
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.
We're petulant, arrogant cowards. Why? Because we willingly retreat away from the world and into our own minds without a second thought.
The ugliest thing on the planet is the human ego; the most beautiful the human spirit. So, whether to be ugly or beautiful? And it is a choice, the only choice. All other choices reduce to this.
The master becomes slave, and the slave becomes master; but master of a much reduced (domesticated) world. The price of peace.

25 August 2018

Spirit bestows life. Life carries spirit.
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

You are, in microcosm, the whole human race. Now there's a responsibility.
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

Rooting in work is crucial to any accomplishment. Rooting in mere enthusiasm will in the long run force illusory measures to keep the fires of empty enthusiasm going.
The technological turn – a shift from an energy based life in harmony with nature, to a life dominated by the man-made: artifacts, religion, culture, a rapacious need for progress and expansion, and the cult of the individual.
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.
Follow the voice of your heart, even if it leads you off the path of timid souls.

16 August 2018

Sit quietly, patiently, faintly amused by the absolute shit that's flowing through your mind. Try and stop it and you'll just get tense. Eventually, given time, it'll cease. Then the real work—real life—starts.

15 August 2018

What we fear most is our own power, and the responsibility that goes with it.

14 August 2018


Arouse the way-seeking mind.
The work requires a sea change. Judge the value and quality of being not by how you feel but by how good your energy is. Not by what you take but by how much you have to give.
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.
There might be an order or structure in the world which we are incapable of capturing.
'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


Move, guided by Divine Providence.
Regularly overhaul vocabulary.
The effort of my heart is my prayer.
Life without work has no meaning (where work is simply a productive engagement with life, supplying a sense of progress, spiritual movement). But also, life without meaning has no work, doesn't work.

12 August 2018

And the miracle of practice is that, regardless of how I feel at its prospect, once I start, it becomes, in its own time, not only worthwhile, but enjoyable.

11 August 2018

Practice. It matters little how I feel about it, what matters is that I get it done.

09 August 2018

The enemy of man is his own mind.

06 August 2018

My attempt is to hold it as one might hold a living bird.
impure & deeply nuanced

05 August 2018

The work is about learning to give your best – your all – regardless of how you feel. It's what the samurai call being ready to die.

I am not looking for clarity. I am looking for emotion.

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

Going back to the beginning again; going back to the beginning again; going back to the beginning again; going back to the beginning again. I find this strangely inspiring.

when you practice, the other shore arrives
The word quick originally meant alive, sensitive, raw (the quick and the dead, cut to the quick) – spirited.
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.
The spirit of endeavour.

03 August 2018


unconditional faith in an unconditional meaning
taiji   vita duplex   body/spirit   heart/belly   internal/external
A dogged persistence despite inevitable failure.

The reason we do not understand time being is because we think only of time passing.
Changing oneself often means rising above oneself, growing beyond oneself.

A relaxed body sinks because it's heavy.
A relaxed mind opens because it lets go (of itself).
A relaxed spirit rises because it is light.

02 August 2018

Things fall into place.
Taiji: a practical philosophy. Philosophy in practice, revealed through practice.

01 August 2018

I'm not sure that I have a destination in mind. I'm on a journey. I don't expect to arrive. I'll do it as long as I can do it—until I fall over. And then it'll be done. And that will be what I've done.
Bodhisattvas return as artists.

Burn the gauze of goodness and be bad. This constitutes the next step (the step after good). And by bad we don't mean mean or cruel, we mean uninhibited, spirited.
Like a dragon swimming in the water or a tiger prowling on the mountainside.
The stranger the stranger the better for all.
Non-attachment, non-separation.