30 September 2018
29 September 2018
28 September 2018
27 September 2018
Mind's reference (and hommage) should be body – the centred body. It rarely is though, unless you're an athlete or a yogi. Instead we refer ourselves to externals: environs, plans, worries, and simply use the body to navigate a course through them. This effectively locks out the wisdom and knowledge of the body (and energy) and replaces it with what the mind sees and what the mind thinks.
25 September 2018
24 September 2018
23 September 2018
One of our problems is that we conceptualise time as some sort of fourth dimension of space – another axis. We then assume that there is a vantage, an origin of coordinates, from which reality, and the passage of time, is observable. This is basically making ourselves a detached, remote (transcendent) God, a control freak, instead of a creature so firmly embedded in time and space that we define it. We don't inhabit time, we are time.
22 September 2018
21 September 2018
20 September 2018
19 September 2018
17 September 2018
15 September 2018
If you look at the great men in history: the leaders, artists, thinkers, then they'll all have fantastic spirit, they'll all be at least a little bit crazy, and most of them were probably poor fathers. If they were busy being good fathers then the chances are they wouldn't have had the energy – the undivided attention – to do their job.
Students nowadays demand private lessons, something that in my day we wouldn't have countenanced (and couldn't have afforded). They feel that if they have the undivided attention of the teacher then they will make better progress. This may be so, but they would have to do a hell of a lot of practice to make any sense of it, whereas most now take private lessons in lieu of practice. Without practice, private lessons simply feed the ego.
13 September 2018
People object to what they consider my misuse of the words 'bourgeois' and 'bourgeoisie.' (They feel that maybe I have a Marxist agenda. Heaven forbid!) So I looked the words up in my dictionary and this is what it said: The middle-class, especially with reference to their materialistic values and conventional attitudes. And this is precisely what I mean.
12 September 2018
11 September 2018
The work, in most cultures, is likened to a path, a way, a journey. The teacher puts you on the right path, but it's your own efforts, your own practice, that takes you along that path. No practice, no progress. It's really very simple. The obsessive drive of the good student – the compulsion to work at every opportunity – is an expression of the love affair they have with destiny – their enlightened being. It is also the teacher’s job to give you a sense of this by awakening the best part of you – your fearless spirit.
10 September 2018
09 September 2018
Good tension is what produces body-as-one-unit. It could also be called connectivity; not just connexion but connexion as one. This, of course, requires vision – the ability to 'see' the one whilst still bits and pieces. A musician hearing the note before he plays it. A sense of before, a sense of after. The bleed of time.
08 September 2018
06 September 2018
The early hours of the morning, for me, are meditation time. The quiet between 3 and 5 is so conducive. This was brought home to me 3.30 on Wednesday morning. I was about 20 minutes in when there was a power cut – the whole village went out. And suddenly I go deep into a quiet unlike the usual – more akin to desert quiet or the peace of Sinai. After about 30 minutes the power came back on with a bang: the light in the bathroom, the fridge, modem, printer all whirred into action, the overhead fan started its insistent rhythm. And I was pulled out of my depths. It made me realise that the environment we have created for ourselves constantly conspires to maintain our superficiality, our nervous anxiety, and deny us any deep peace.
05 September 2018
At last, the work commences. Hallelujah. Progress now seems assured. Until one day, after three years, five years, ten max, you hit a wall. The work takes you to that wall; that's what it's meant to do. The wall is your wound, your blind spot, your refusal to be whole because then life – your responsibility to spirit – to spiritual life – would be unbearable. It's then a matter of banging your head against that wall each day until one of you breaks. The worst thing you could do is give up because you feel you've reached a dead-end.
04 September 2018
02 September 2018
01 September 2018
We inevitably harbour bad karma, demons, locked doors, family curses, faulty DNA, kinky spine. And we have intimations—shudders—from earliest childhood. The longer we ignore it, the more difficult the work will be. And if we wait until we have no choice then its already too late. But, as we say, far better too late than never.