31 October 2018
A few years ago I had a student who came to me for three years for private lessons (being a terribly successful psychotherapist he couldn't consider gracing my public classes). He was very bright and quite talented, which he traded on, never once practising (but people don't anymore so nothing new there). When he finally decided to stop, which I was quite relieved about (he eventually revealed himself to be a rather smug bore) I asked him why. "Oh you're on a warrior path, but I'm on a Consciousness Path." He meant it as a put-down but I took it as a compliment. For me that whole consciousness trip, from Mindfulness to Prosperity Consciousness, is reactionary bourgeois nonsense. Spiritual materialism at its very worst.
It all hinges on quietening the mind. Taiji insists that the best way to achieve this is through body and spirit. Using the mind to tackle the mind we consider a bit dumb and doomed to failure, akin to using ego to battle ego or capital to fight Capitalism – too open to corruption. We find, in Taiji, that for the mind to think it needs two things: security and stupidity. Security is produced by introducing tension to break natural connexions, particularly tension in the shoulders which wrenches the arms out of the heart in order to knit them directly into the anxious head, and tension in hips and legs which breaks the connexion between lower and upper body, effectively pulling the groin back from its natural position, maybe only a millimeter or two but enough to give the mind the feeling that it has time and space to calculate before committing. Stupidity (simple-mindedness) is the mind's need to simplify reality in order to cope with it, either by not listening or by calling on past experience – model-building. This, in the body, is double-weightedness (the fusing of joints) and is achieved by locking both sides of the body together by tensing the sacrum, hardening the heart, and/or making up the mind. This prevents cross-energy expressing itself, prevents the separation of yin and yang, in other words prevents Taiji and staunches energy. The mind we seek to quieten is the one that simply cannot embrace opposites without the need to synthesize them into some clever well-behaved whole, the mind that can only function when two (us) is reduced to one (me).
Necessity is the mother of invention. In other words, the (re)invention of self in the light of spirit (rather than ego) cannot happen by design. It will only happen by entering situations that impel the spirit to rise to the ocassion. Such situations are dangerous, difficult, tedious, painful, terrifying, shocking, unexpected – anything that confounds abilities, disrupts aplomb, shatters cool, upsets balance. So Taiji, ostensibly all about balance, is really all about testing balance in ever more upsetting situations.
30 October 2018
At the beginning the student is riddled with both tension and anxiety. Tension is under-activity (blockage, stiffness, tightness, immobility) and anxiety is over-activity (nervousness, incessant thoughts, hypersensitivity). The work enables the novice to start to relax – release tensions and calm anxieties – by seeing these for what they are – external alien institutions rather than anything intrinsic to themselves. A sense of space, of distance between things, then pervades, and the student is overcome with clarity. After a while of wallowing in this clarity, which may be months or may be decades, the student, with the urging of their teacher, begins to suspect that this clarity is a luxury they shouldn't really afford themselves, and they again throw themselves into the fray, but this time as warriors rather than fools.
29 October 2018
I asked my teacher once where he felt his root. He pondered a moment and then tapped the top of his head. For him the root was not something of his extending down into the ground but something of the ground extending up into him. Yielding mind, when practised assiduously over decades, yields complete porosity.
28 October 2018
27 October 2018
The problem with a Form, an art, a discipline is that there's so many places we need to go it can't take us. But it's a start. Eventually though, the best part of us, the part that initially fell in love with the Form, should be straining at the leash, and escaping, regularly. It is a martial art, after all.
22 October 2018
Mind in dantien is a statement of fact as well as a literal instruction. Sensory information collected by especially eyes and ears is taken down to the belly for processing rather than into the brain. There is a sense of rumination and digestion, which gives rise to feelings, imaginings, energies rather than thoughts.
Ignorance is a state of resistance – a blockage, a stupidity. Knowledge is a state of assistance – a reinforcement which swiftly becomes a coercion. Awareness is a hovering, in-between, egoless state – not yet knowing but certainly not ignorant. Awareness does not think and so has no desire to profit from intelligence or advantage. It resists its own processing. Awareness is negative capability. That's its deep intelligence.
21 October 2018
If our environment was more dangerous, if everyone we passed was a potential assailant, if we lived in the ghetto or the hood, then our minds would naturally be in the dantien, our spirits would naturally simmer and we would naturally house just the right amount of connected tension. If not then we would probably be dead.
Philosophy lost its grip when, for the sake of consistency, of making a living, it insisted on taking a position, of digging itself in, inhabiting a hole. When it lost its ability to appreciate the multi-faceted, multidimensional nature of the human being, the fact that a Parmenides and a Heraclitus can happily coexist in the same space if not the same breath, though in different dimensions, then it stopped being either interesting or useful to the practical man, the man that actually lives and works, with and in, practice.
20 October 2018
19 October 2018
18 October 2018
The intelligence that opposes stupidity must be intelligence used against itself. It incessantly tests its instruments and means. It never stops doubting itself. Instead of sitting near the warm hearth, it distances itself from it. It is the hyperboreanism of thought. It implies the cold fever of martial intelligence.
17 October 2018
Why is progress so excruciatingly slow? Because the habits we're trying to break are so ingrained. It takes years to acquire the clarity and humility to confront them as such, and then many more to let them go. And then, when you finally feel you're free, something happens and up they pop, uglier than ever.
16 October 2018
15 October 2018
14 October 2018
13 October 2018
12 October 2018
11 October 2018
10 October 2018
09 October 2018
We don't realise it but we spend the whole day pushing the world away (warding off) to protect our own space – the only thing we hold sacred nowadays. It's a way of ensuring that life is always on our own terms. This is the habit we need to break. We need to stop being repulsive and become attractive, not just every now and then but moment to moment.
You know how sometimes, when it gets a bit chilly, you simply drape a jacket or cardigan around the shoulders without slipping the arms into the sleeves? Then, if you're moving around at all, you need to hunch the shoulders slightly to prevent the garment sliding down the back to the floor? Well, each time we retreat into the safety of self – into our own private world – its as though we slip on a jacket like this, which, unless we really concentrate the spirit, we never quite discard. So we end up going through the day wearing thousands of invisible jackets; shrouded in self.
08 October 2018
Wherever he goes, this winter, I will follow him. I will share the fear, and the exaltation, and the boredom, of the hunting life. I will follow him till my predatory human shape no longer darkens in terror the shaken kaleidoscope of colour that stains the deep fovea of his brilliant eye. My pagan head shall sink into the winter land, and there be purified.
A material approach increases, a spiritual approach decreases. So what about spiritual materialism? This would be the accumulation of spiritual techniques without actually practising them. What my teacher called the weekend workshop syndrome. The whole idea of spiritual work is to learn a simple technique and then practice it daily. The practice is done not to get better (at something) but to gradually diminish the ego.
07 October 2018
Attention is an energy the spirit directs into the world. Physically it manifests as extension in the spine: the lower spine extending into the tail as the upper spine extends up and out into the senses, into perception. The spine effectively stretches out and away from its centre. Now the self, or the ego, is a tension that gathers into the centre of the spine, and works against the attention, the spirit. Selfishness is inattentiveness to the world around you – a refusal to listen to anything but the self and its allies.
06 October 2018
05 October 2018
Intelligence and sensitivity are great for developing technique (trickery) : a smart person will generally get the better of a strong one (this, if anything, sums up our colourful history). But when it comes to tackling the self, the ego, the noisy noisome mind, these qualities are a severe drawback. Why? Because they add numerous layers of complexity and subtlety to the ego, so much so that the individual finds it impossible to see through their seductive wiles: the average, intelligent, well-educated, middle-class person really believes that they are their ego, that they are indeed as magnificent as they tell themselves they are – they begin to believe their own publicity – their own lies. This is the real bummer: intelligence and sensitivity bring one to the point of realising that the mind must be quietened, and yet those self-same qualities render the task well-nigh impossible.
04 October 2018
Intelligence, for me, is always aware of its own limitations. The same for consciousness and awareness. This is why especially intelligent or aware individuals are generally humble – awestruck by existence, by its never-ending ability to surprise. And this is why what we call negative capability – the ability to trust and work with spirit when we lack sufficient intelligence – is the tool to develop.
03 October 2018
02 October 2018
Funny how society does nothing to discourage excessive screen time. In fact it seems to encourage it at every turn, probably because said screens render one docile, passive and unimaginative – easily controlled, easily led. And yet mind-expanding drugs like LSD, mushrooms, ketamine, are still highly illegal.
Comfort is a space – a buffer zone – separating one from reality – the rude, raw immediacy of the here and now. This space invariably fills with words of reassurance from the self: opinions, judgements, commentary, chit-chat. Meditation attempts to empty this space, enjoy the peace and quiet, and slowly allow it to shrink to nothing. Probably the most difficult task anyone could embark upon.
An acquaintance asked me what meditation is all about. I told her that one simply sits and allows the mind to quieten. She asked me to explain.
—In our head we have a voice that talks all the time. This voice we endeavor to quieten.
—But that's impossible. That voice is the mind. It only stops when I sleep.
And I realised then that one must already have had concrete experiences of non-self or no-mind to entertain its possibility. Such experiences usually occur in childhood during moments of extreme stress, stress that modern parenting shields the child from. And this is my point: by shielding our children (what I call over-mothering) we deny them formative experiences that later in life could become transformative. Over-mothering is an insidious form of control ensuring conformity.
—In our head we have a voice that talks all the time. This voice we endeavor to quieten.
—But that's impossible. That voice is the mind. It only stops when I sleep.
And I realised then that one must already have had concrete experiences of non-self or no-mind to entertain its possibility. Such experiences usually occur in childhood during moments of extreme stress, stress that modern parenting shields the child from. And this is my point: by shielding our children (what I call over-mothering) we deny them formative experiences that later in life could become transformative. Over-mothering is an insidious form of control ensuring conformity.
01 October 2018
There comes a point in the work when you begin to suspect that what your teacher taught you, or rather what you learnt, was incorrect, incomplete, misinterpretted. It can't reach you, not deeply, because of fundamental differences, basic blocks in your own development, whatever. It will feel as though your foundation is shaky, as though you’re missing something. This is the point at which you start to be a real student. And unfortunately you're now all on your own. So time to grow up.
Once, after a particularly inspiring class in which we covered a hell of a lot of new material, I told my teacher that there was no way I would remember most of what we did. His advice: "Go home, forget all about this class and do your practice as usual. If what we did here today has any truth and value then it'll find its way in despite you, not because of you." And sure enough, that's exactly what happened, but only because he taught with energy and spirit, not with body and technique.