Below is the complete text to IMMANENCE: A LIFE the last piece of writing by Gilles Deleuze.

IMMANENCE: A LIFE

What is a transcendental field? It can be distinguished from experience in that it doesn’t refer to an object or belong to a subject (empirical representation). It appears therefore as a pure stream of a-subjective consciousness, a pre-reflexive impersonal consciousness, a qualitative duration of consciousness without a self. It may seem curious that the transcendental be defined by such immediate givens: we will speak of a transcendental empiricism in contrast to everything that makes up the world of the subject and the object. There is something wild and powerful in this transcendental empiricism that is of course not the element of sensation (simple empiricism), for sensation is only a break within the flow of absolute consciousness. It is, rather, however close two sensations may be, the passage from one to the other as becoming, as increase or decrease in power (virtual quantity). Must we then define the transcendental field by a pure immediate consciousness with neither object nor self, as a movement that neither begins nor ends? (Even Spinoza’s conception of this passage or quantity of power still appeals to consciousness.)

But the relation of the transcendental field to consciousness is only a conceptual one. Consciousness becomes a fact only when a subject is produced at the same time as its object, both being outside the field and appearing as “transcendents.” Conversely, as long as consciousness traverses the transcendental field at an infinite speed everywhere diffused, nothing is able to reveal it. It is expressed, in fact, only when it is reflected on a subject that refers it to objects. That is why the transcendental field cannot be defined by the consciousness that is coextensive with it, but removed from any revelation.

The transcendent is not the transcendental. Were it not for consciousness, the transcendental field would be defined as a pure plane of immanence, because it eludes all transcendence of the subject and of the object. Absolute immanence is in itself: it is not in something, to something; it does not depend on an object or belong to a subject. In Spinoza, immanence is not immanence to substance; rather, substance and modes are in immanence. When the subject or the object falling outside the plane of immanence is taken as a universal subject or as any object to which immanence is attributed, the transcendental is entirely denatured, for it then simply redoubles the empirical (as with Kant), and immanence is distorted, for it then finds itself enclosed in the transcendent. Immanence is not related to Some Thing as a unity superior to all things or to a Subject as an act that brings about a synthesis of things: it is only when immanence is no longer immanence to anything other than itself that we can speak of a plane of immanence. No more than the transcendental field is defined by consciousness can the plane of immanence be defined by a subject or an object that is able to contain it.

We will say of pure immanence that it is A LIFE, and nothing else. It is not immanence to life, but the immanent that is in nothing is itself a life. A life is the immanence of immanence, absolute immanence: it is complete power, complete bliss. It is to the degree that he goes beyond the aporias of the subject and the object that Johann Fichte, in his last philosophy, presents the transcendental field as a life, no longer dependent on a Being or submitted to an Act – it is an absolute immediate consciousness whose very activity no longer refers to a being but is ceaselessly posed in a life. The transcendental field then becomes a genuine plane of immanence that reintroduces Spinozism into the heart of the philosophical process. Did Maine de Biran not go through something similar in his “last philosophy” (the one he was too tired to bring to fruition) when he discovered, beneath the transcendence of effort, an absolute immanent life? The transcendental field is defined by a plane of immanence, and the plane of immanence by a life.

What is immanence? A life... No one has described what a life is better than Charles Dickens, if we take the indefinite article as an index of the transcendental. A disreputable man, a rogue, held in contempt by everyone, is found as he lies dying. Suddenly, those taking care of him manifest an eagerness, respect, even love, for his slightest sign of life. Everybody bustles about to save him, to the point where, in his deepest coma, this wicked man himself senses something soft and sweet penetrating him. But to the degree that he comes back to life, his saviors turn colder, and he becomes once again mean and crude. Between his life and his death, there is a moment that is only that of a life playing with death. The life of the individual gives way to an impersonal and yet singular life that releases a pure event freed from the accidents of internal and external life, that is, from the subjectivity and objectivity of what happens: a “Homo tantum” with whom everyone empathizes and who attains a sort of beatitude. It is a haecceity no longer of individuation but of singularization: a life of pure immanence, neutral, beyond good and evil, for it was only the subject that incarnated it in the midst of things that made it good or bad. The life of such individuality fades away in favor of the singular life immanent to a man who no longer has a name, though he can be mistaken for no other. A singular essence, a life...

But we shouldn’t enclose life in the single moment when individual life confronts universal death. A life is everywhere, in all the moments that a given living subject goes through and that are measured by given lived objects: an immanent life carrying with it the events or singularities that are merely actualized in subjects and objects. This indefinite life does not itself have moments, close as they may be one to another, but only between-times, between-moments; it doesn’t just come about or come after but offers the immensity of an empty time where one sees the event yet to come and already happened, in the absolute of an immediate consciousness. In his novels, Alexander Lernet-Holenia places the event in an in-between time that could engulf entire armies. The singularities and the events that constitute a life coexist with the accidents of the life that corresponds to it, but they are neither grouped nor divided in the same way. They connect with one another in a manner entirely different from how individuals connect. It even seems that a singular life might do without any individuality, without any other concomitant that individualizes it. For example, very small children all resemble one another and have hardly any individuality, but they have singularities: a smile, a gesture, a funny face — not subjective qualities. Small children, through all their sufferings and weaknesses, are infused with an immanent life that is pure power and even bliss. The indefinite aspects in a life lose all indetermination to the degree that they fill out a plane of immanence or, what amounts to the same thing, to the degree that they constitute the elements of a transcendental field (individual life, on the other hand, remains inseparable from empirical determinations). The indefinite as such is the mark not of an empirical indetermination but of a determination by immanence or a transcendental determinability. The indefinite article is the indetermination of the person only because it is determination of the singular. The One is not the transcendent that might contain immanence but the immanent contained within a transcendental field. One is always the index of a multiplicity: an event, a singularity, a life... Although it is always possible to invoke a transcendent that falls outside the plane of immanence, or that attributes immanence to itself, all transcendence is constituted solely in the flow of immanent consciousness that belongs to this plane. Transcendence is always a product of immanence.

A life contains only virtuals. It is made up of virtualities, events, singularities. What we call virtual is not something that lacks reality but something that is engaged in a process of actualization following the plane that gives it its particular reality. The immanent event is actualized in a state of things and of the lived that make it happen. The plane of immanence is itself actualized in an object and a subject to which it attributes itself. But however inseparable an object and a subject may be from their actualization, the plane of immanence is itself virtual, so long as the events that populate it are virtualities. Events or singularities give to the plane all their virtuality, just as the plane of immanence gives virtual events their full reality. The event considered as non-actualized (indefinite) is lacking in nothing. It suffices to put it in relation to its concomitants: a transcendental field, a plane of immanence, a life, singularities. A wound is incarnated or actualized in a state of things or of life; but it is itself a pure virtuality on the plane of immanence that leads us into a life. My wound existed before me: not a transcendence of the wound as higher actuality, but its immanence as a virtuality always within a milieu (plane or field). There is a big difference between the virtuals that define the immanence of the transcendental field and the possible forms that actualize them and transform them into something transcendent.


NOTES

“As though we reflected back to surfaces the light which emanates from them, the light which, had it passed unopposed, would never have been revealed” (Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory [New York: Zone Books, 1988], p. 36).

Cf. Jean-Paul Sartre, who posits a transcendental field without a subject that refers to a consciousness that is impersonal, absolute, immanent: with respect to it, the subject and the object are “transcendents” (La transcendance de l’Ego [Paris: Vrin, 1966], pp. 74-87). On James, see David Lapoujade’s analysis, “Le Flux intensif de la conscience chez William James,” Philosophic 46 (June 1995).

Already in the second introduction to La Doctrine de la science: “The intuition of pure activity which is nothing fixed, but progress, not a being, but a life” (Oeuvres choisies de la philosophic premiere [Paris: Vrin, 1964], p. 274). On the concept of life according to Fichte, see Initiation a la vie bienheureuse (Paris: Aubier, 1944), and Martial Gueroult’s commentary (p. 9).

Dickens, Our Mutual Friend (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 443.

Even Edmund Husserl admits this: “The being of the world is necessarily transcendent to consciousness, even within the originary evidence, and remains necessarily transcendent to it. But this doesn’t change the fact that all transcendence is constituted in the life of consciousness, as inseparably linked to that life...” ( Meditations cartesiennes [Paris: Vrin, 1947], p. 52). This will be the starting point of Sartre’s text.

Cf. Joe Bousquet, Les Capitales (Paris: Le Cercle du Livre,1955).

poems are the world as deep singing

We live two lives: an external one which is ego-based, and an internal one of energy, spirit, soul. The two appear to be largely independent, but would have been unified and balanced by our place in the natural world, when we had such a place.

Life is a string of mistakes we then make the most of.

The history of civilized man (unnatural man) seems to be a gradual atrophying of the internal in favour of the external.

poems are a fidelity to what they themselves cannot say but that stipples forth as world

a bewildering, somewhat destabilizing, yet vivifying exile from oneself

The aim of internal work – spiritual work – is to right the balance by breathing life into the internal. The only way to do this is to quieten the mind and background the ego. Then the internal comes to the fore and is nourished. We may not feel much more than a little peace, but without such work our company can never really touch and heal.

The price of peace is depression.

What the heart wants, wants back, is a residence it remembers but never had.

Can you keep a secret?

The purpose of music is to sober and quiet the mind, thus rendering it susceptible to divine influence.

Prose uses words to convey meaning; poetry uses words to convey energy.

If the mind is not quiet then you're a mess.

If it wasn't for modern medicine, hands up who would still be alive? A modest smattering of hands. So one could argue that global warming is the consequence of modern medicine.

How to be in the world as if it were home?

Meditation investigates the energetic consequences of quiet-minding.

Never make the mistake of believing your own publicity. By publicity I don't mean what you write on your fliers, but ego, the public face – persona, personality, mask, mood.

We spend a lifetime digging our own grave.

Immediately after the event you feel elated, euphoric, but then the come down, the shaking, the uncontrollable sobbing. This is the way of spirit. It takes risks, it leaps into the unknown, it makes you intensely alive and one day it'll be the death of you. So be it.

Hell is other people.

The teacher should never make an effort to teach. The teaching should flow freely and effusively; and should always surprise both student and teacher. If it doesn't then either the student is not ready or the teacher is not a teacher (master).

A true teacher does not merely impress with vast knowledge and experience, but inspires – evokes the spirit of the student – invokes Spirit.

Our tail has atrophied into a tight whorl. Its wisdom and expressive intelligence are largely lost to us. An important part of the work is relaxing and unravelling the tail – delving deep into the body's evolutionary past. The same is true of the feet.

Destiny is as much in the past as it is in the future.

Alienation from nature and the loss of the experience of being part of the living creation is the greatest tragedy of our materialistic era. It is the causative reason for ecological devastation and climate change. Therefore I attribute absolute highest importance to consciousness change. I regard psychedelics as catalyzers for this. They are tools which are guiding our perception toward deeper areas of our human existence, so that we again become aware of our spiritual essence.

Life is limitation. The booby prize, for those souls still with work to do.

This is a magical time of year, in the northern hemisphere, so treat it with respect and reverence. Don't overdo it and let its energy feed your energy – the body's imagination – love's body.

meaning is not fixed, but ever new and ever changing; in a continuous revelation

God is Love. Still, for me, the most radical statement. God is not a thing that exists, neither transcendent authority nor immanent intelligence, but an emotion, a stirring, a movement!

Nothing threatens the bourgeoisie more than impeccability. And it's only with impeccability that we break free of them and their depressing values.

We do not know the truth because we repress it; and we repress it because it is painful.

Breathing deeply, relaxedly, irrigates the whole body.

Nietzsche's great contribution was to demonstrate, with vigour and aplomb, that any attempt at truth or even meaning assumes a value system which is itself relativistic, largely arbitrary and certainly not geared to the discovery of truth or meaning. And as I get older I become more and more convinced that what really motivates even the best of us is not truth or freedom or love or anything to do with spirit at all, but simple survival and comfort, that is, laziness. This is why the Catholics say that spiritual progress is a matter of grace rather than hard work. Work, even when directed by an external agent (teacher/master), is largely our own – from and for the self.

In Taiji, softness, relaxation and compassion all go together.

Only a God can Save Us.

The world is there for the taking, so we're told. But surely the world is there for giving? Is giving not the meaning of/in life?

Relaxation expands out into the world (out-breath) as it invites the world deeply into itself (in-breath). Constant exchange. This is Being: pure porous connexion.

Veni, vidi, vici – the tourist victory cry.

True teaching is healing and vice versa.

Open is broken. There is no breakthrough without breakage.

Women feel disappointed; men feel duped. That's relationships for you.

Listen to the heart. It too speaks, with gentle insistence, quietly, ever so quietly. Meditation simply tunes into this voice and listens: patiently, lovingly, longingly.

Spin an unbroken thread; never stop, never start.

The mind worries, frets, mithers. That's what it does. So just ignore it and listen to the currents – the energy – beneath.

To love is to transform; to be a poet.

The sacred heart.

There is the heartbeat and there is the breath – the slow breathing of meditation – and between there is another rhythm, which I take to be the cranial rhythm, but who knows. This is the rhythm to ride and play with – pray with. Elastic and slippery, reaching every recess of the body, neither as voluntary as the breathing nor as involuntary as the heartbeat.

The big mistake is to think that any of this could possibly have anything to do with me.

The true mind – heartmind – thinks in faces rather than words.

To be is to be vulnerable.

The ego is loquacity, the interior monologue, the soliloquy which isolates.

Happiness is connexion.

Work is simply putting oneself in the way of grace. Allowing God to do his work.

It goes in waves.

Most of the time, the words present themselves as a murmured complaint or an insistent supplication, as opposed to the cosmic indifference of the music.

We all need someone to look up to – someone to love – in the right way – all the way.

Suffering is disconnection.

Bees gather honey as the soul gathers light.

the fair art of failing

The fall is into language.

a profound listening – an intimation of silver

Give people the opportunity to be lazy and they will generally take it. Give a person's spirit the option of slumbering and it will. We have to be forced to wake up.

polymorphous perversity

We distinguish between laziness and idleness. Idleness is doing nothing whereas laziness is doing something else – busying oneself with distractions.

The antimony between mind and body, word and deed, speech and silence, overcome. Everything is only a metaphor; there is only poetry.

Language stems from identity, but it also creates separation.

in the embrace of earth and sky

there are no longer any national solutions

The ego processes perceptions and memories to create layers of judgement, calculation and criticism. It then interposes these layers like gauzy veils between ourselves and the world. This is our morbidity, our selfishness, which the work slowly dismantles.

Horses connect with our souls — the part of us that links us to everything.

Ego makes homeostasis impossible.

It is difficult to appreciate just how much of our vitality goes into the construction and maintenance of the Ego. It's only when Ego is momentarily shocked into letting go, usually under some stress, and we faint or collapse or break down or have a panic attack, that it becomes apparent. This vitality should really be invested in soul and spirit.

The teaching does not tolerate disrespect.

Somatic marker hypothesis

They are so silent, they are in another world.

Serious about living the life you're destined for? Then be prepared to make sacrifices. The modern notion that we are entitled to as much as we want of anything and everything is not only weakening and debilitating, but destroying the planet.

The student of the External looks for strength; the student of the Internal looks for weakness.

the prison of being ourselves by ourselves

Screens make you stupid and make you selfish.

The autobiographical self strings a ceaseless litany of lies.

make sense from being, not thinking

We surf the timeline in our dreams.

Ever get the feeling you're missing the point?

If consciousness is day and unconsciousness is night then meditation is dusk.

to return to a primal, nonverbal state of awareness

When my students complain of pain in their legs my usual trite rejoinder is: A little bit of pain never hurt anyone.

playful with our wits and lethal with our intellects but no longer in touch with the secrets deep within our own hearts

Listen to the body – your energy – rather than the voice in your head.

Ignorance is never an excuse because, let's be honest, we always know.

Heart is developed by putting the Other first.

The biggest heart in the world is inside the blue whale. It weighs more than seven tons. It’s as big as a room. It is a small room, with four chambers. A child could walk around in it, head high, bending only to step through the valves. The valves are as big as the swinging doors in a saloon. This house of a heart drives a creature a hundred feet long. When this creature is born it is twenty feet long and weighs four tons. It is waaaaay bigger than your car. It drinks a hundred gallons of milk from its mama every day and gains two hundred pounds a day, and when it is seven or eight years old it endures an unimaginable puberty and then it essentially disappears from human ken, for next to nothing is known of the mating habits, travel patterns, diet, social life, language, social structure, diseases, spirituality, wars, stories, despairs, and arts of the blue whale. There are perhaps ten thousand blue whales in the world, living in every ocean on earth, and of the largest animal who ever lived we know nearly nothing. But we know this: the animals with the largest hearts in the world generally travel in pairs, and their penetrating moaning cries, their piercing yearning tongue, can be heard underwater for miles and miles.

Once is a habit.

Things are never what they seem.

The enlightened master stretches time and hovers, trembling, at death's door.

a mind conjoined to mindfulness

If you want to understand spirit – the light in the fight – and you should – then study fencing.

Work religiously.

Heavy of body, light of spirit.

Organised from the ground up rather than the head down.

Work is the best antidote for worry.

Become an animist: see life and spirit in every little thing. Then listen for the song this vast community of spirit sings. This is Nature – the Great Spirit – not a transcendent God modelling our own vulgar egos – but an intelligent immanent gestalt. Gaia.

If you want to understand sinking – lower body strength – and you should – then study sumo.

The teaching is a lens revealing a world full of spirit.

The only useful way of avoiding the awfulness of existence is to busy yourself with the work.

The ocean is limitless and deep. But the heart is deeper than the ocean.

Teacher personifies the teaching.

God rules the world from on high (heaven). The King rules his subjects from on high (throne). Ego rules the individual from on high (head). This the ugly, false structure of the reality we have made for ourselves. And this why sinking low, from head to belly, from belly to root – the radical turn – is the endless beginning in our work.

When you're deep in your root then things are always looking up.

Man is in love and loves what vanishes

What more is there to say?

The stillness of stone.

un pur événement intérieur

What kills us, eventually, is the bottled up anger and pain. The past.

Content with little.

Without yielding there can be no understanding of relationship.

openness to the shaking

Instead of thinking, become thought, energy, universal mind. The quality that permits this is softness; the technique – yielding.

Touching rather than thinking.

Things generally work out for the best. If you don't learn this then life is hell.

Softness opens a quality of presence within the tangible world.

Art: not an occupation of the few but the subcutaneous current of our lives, the countermovement to nihilism.

Power of Gentleness: Meditations on the Risk of Living

the apophatic double negative

In Taiji you're sunk when you no longer have any inclination to look down.

If, when you touch another, you don’t disappear in intimate listening, then you’re not alive. This our measure.

Life places gentleness within us originally.

It is a joy to be hidden, and disaster not to be found.

Eventually, the path, the way, the forward motion, of travel, of travail, is the only thing that keeps us from collapsing inward and disappearing. This, I guess, is Time.

A life spent falling in love with yielding.

Thinking obliterates and eventually extinguishes the light of the Third Eye.

Don’t put the bird in a cage. Open all the doors.

Surrender all that you are not.

seclusion, dispassion, cessation, letting go

Ego is the false idol.

practice followed by more practice

open to the absence of yourself, the unexpected

saved by the doubt built into faith

In the grip of ego.

A critique of idolatry.

Our only power, to let things be.

a very agapaic eros or erotic agape

Capitalism, Bourgeoisie, Ego. Same parasite, different scale.

self-transformation is built into our bodies

dig deeper, down to the roots

The only way to advance in this game is by erasing one's tracks.

Spirit is the presence of what concerns us ultimately.

I may be a diurnal human being but I am definitely a nocturnal animal.

This forum is my space – notes from/to myself – from my better self to my weaker self, focused self to distracted self, mindful to forgetful. I use it to provide courage in times of difficulty, which, maybe surprisingly, increase as one gets older, rather than decrease. This, for me, proves that I'm getting something right. Ever closer to the fire.

Pray the night away, untouched by the quotidian.

We all need reminding.

The first duty of love is to listen.

the bourgeoisie is internal rot

The mind – especially of the intelligent, ambitious student – is wont to extrapolate and assume experience it has never had, in order to spout knowledge and wisdom that it doesn't actually possess. This is pure ego.

The unconscious is not a theatre, but a factory.

Given up everything to follow the thinnest of lines. Probably not wise but so be it.

You won't believe it but
I quench my thirst
by drinking from a mirage.

For me, question marks are the punctuation of life.

Real intelligence is foresight.

The trouble with feelings is that they're all about me.

Instead of using the legs to prop up a voracious ego, use them to join to the Earth.

life teaches us that being like someone in love is more real, because everything is uncertain

The Zone is that space of pure connectivity where everything feels effortless, natural and foregone. The master is someone who is able to coax students into the Zone. The enlightened master is someone who lives in the Zone.

Civilization (human domestication) has robbed us of both a spirited connexion to Nature and a natural connexion to Spirit. It has robbed us of our gods.

Settle down, open up, and pray.

God is a rather artificial and unsatisfactory stand-in for Nature.

Move with stealth.

Inertia is a heavy transparent mist 
emerging from his eyes.

darkness too has a mind

Each of us is a collection of habits; some good, some bad. The work struggles to let go of bad ones and adopt good ones. And as we improve – as we age – what was good now appears not so good, and what was once bad may simply have been misunderstood. Measured up – on average – things don't change much.

Like the proverbial cuckold, you are the last to know.

When I stop thinking, I do better.

Have I been walking in circles again?

we grow wiser through walking

a pale radiant gold with hints of peach and pink

Once, chatting idly with my teacher, the conversation got around, for some odd reason, to street gangs.
—Were you ever in a gang? I asked him.
—Yes.
—Were you the leader?
—Naturally.
—Did your gang have a motto?
—Yes. (Looking rather sheepish.)
—What was it?
—Never yield!

I dream 
that I am buried 
under the autumn leaves.
My body germinates.

Delving deep reveals something totally at odds with the shallows.

I read recently that the Buddha, when asked for one word to sum up his teaching, chose Awareness. Then I remembered asking my own teacher the same question. I was expecting him to say softness or lightness or yielding or spirit or even love, but instead he said Listening.

To move well, the knees need to be very active.

I consider myself eternally blessed to have had a teacher who always put spirit first. He couldn't do it any other way.

living in harmony with the world means accepting capitalism as a given

To what extent is it not all about me. This is the measure of the quality of the work.

Turning a blind eye.

Becoming nonentity.

Giving the game away.

Not under the law, but under grace.

the unfolding intimacy of the One who has chosen to dance within us

Happiness is believing in a bright future. What the Christians call Hope. And why not?

McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality

I remember, over 30 years ago, my teacher telling me to watch a dancer student of his as she did her Taiji Form.
—What do you think? he asked.
—She moves beautifully.
—Yes, but no Internal content.
—Why is that?
—She's not in love with Taiji, she's in love with herself doing Taiji. There's a big difference.

only silence is praise

Happiness requires us to find joy (lightness), rather than fear (heaviness), in change. An underlying impatience, or irreverence, always threatening to fuck the status quo.

What else can the unscrupulous master do with the incorrigible student but take their money and tell them how well they're doing?

Any system that fails to put spirit centerstage is fundamentally reactionary.

Archive fever: documenting a work, a life, a folly.

If it doesn’t defeat you, silence opens the door.

It’s best to hold all ideas lightly, not to presume too much of our capacities.

Legs project up to sternum. Arms extend down to sacrum.

Born-awkward.

Those who live in comfort have put up formidable barriers to God. As they approach death and their energy weakens, these barriers will fall and realisation will come, fear not.

'God' is just a name we give to the oneness of it all.

Love of God is a disturbance in the heart that drives us closer to awareness of God. Unfortunately it never feels like love at the time.

Now is life very solid, or very shifting?

The Now contains both the afterglow of the Past and intimations of the Future. Living in the Now requires attendance to both rather than neglect of either.

humility is beatness

Use the in-breath to draw forward into life, the out-breath to drive down into Earth.

The Enlightenment dared us to think, but there will always be a religion and a God for those who wouldn’t dare.

What's amazing about breathing is that it exchanges with the world. On the in-breath the world comes into the body and on the out-breath the body goes out into the world. Without this constant exchange then life would cease. Breathing is one of the surfaces where we seep and merge into the world.

If you want to see good posture then watch an experienced rider atop their steed. The horse for them is what our legs are to us: not only a moving support but a trusty and vital provider of energy and spirit. A good rider really sits into the horse, and the horse really thrusts up into the chest (heart) of the rider.

When spirit rises the nostrils flair, the airways dilate and the muscles tauten. Preparing for maximal oxygen intake. Readying for fight or flight.

we must come to grips with the dark center, the unlit core, the concealed depths, of our lives

I rise and take my place between the earth and sky.

Crouching tiger, hidden dragon. There's a wonderful instruction in that title.

At the pentecostal core of matter, a fire wind 
whirligig, centrifuge of joy, 
is You, Love, a lung 
pumping light, auric squalls 
inflating eyes in my skull’s raw coal.

About the one thing you can't teach is the wound – the broken heart – without which the work never really ventures into the Internal. And bear in mind that most with a wound spend their life trying to patch it up in order to carry on as others. It is rare to find a student who naturally intuits that the wound is the way, that, for them at least, real life begins when the scab is peeled away and the wound is allowed to bleed or weep into their life. The struggle then for the teacher is to prevent such a student slipping into morbid narcissism.

perhaps a stone, a leaf, a pinecone, or a flower

We lost Nature and gained Culture, lost God and gained Self. Rather a poor return don't you think?

I live alone, mentally clothed in the skins of wild things.

the slow exhalation of self

Inhibit the desire to show off. Eschew social media.

The mind is the chief architect of one’s own happiness and suffering.

Their eyes burn like the eyes of animals brushing through leaves on the scent of the prey.

Spiritual openness and receptivity cannot be sustained without a root, an anchor, a core, a deep inner gravity and stillness. Part of the mind opens up like an ever-blossoming flower whilst another part holds on for dear life. A state of equipoise – a beautiful and natural home for a mind finally free of anxiety.

no substitute for hard work

We have learnt to survive the real by cutting off from it and replacing it with something more palatable but less engaging. This allows us to get along nicely but ultimately leads to depression and unfulfilment because the spirit atrophies.

we are conspirators, with our hands on the cold urn

A real non-conformist refuses to conform to the self.

We talk to ourselves to blot out the real.

the benevolent but fraudulent adult world

Always give more than bargained for.

Our hands touch, our bodies burst into fire. The chair, the cup, the table—nothing remains unlit. All quivers, all kindles, all burns clear.

We've all been given a modicum of talent – a destiny – so go ahead and develop it otherwise there'll be hell to pay.

The choice we have, but which we don't realise we have, is to be either in the body feeling or in the mind thinking. Can't be both.

Old Norse mjūkr soft, mild, meek

Jesus wasn't preaching to the likes of me and thee. We bourgeoisie are the pharisee. Our only recourse: pray to be brought low.

the small, invisible, quotidian growth of the day-to-day, where outwardly nothing happens

Practice repeats the same to generate difference. True difference can never be manufactured or planned or designed – that would be artificial, fake (as well as a contradiction) – it must be the product of an ongoing natural process. It is the probable result of deeper context always being incomprehensible and incommensurable.

Shoulder width. Any wider is double-weighted.

Trance is attained through sustained rhythmic repetition. Energy builds up until it ruptures the skin of appearance and allows the real to flood in/out, changing, for a while, (forever), everything.

Practice is more of the same. Until it becomes different.

The mark of really loving someone or something is unconditionality and excess, engagement and commitment, fire and passion.

holding faith in the right way, that is, not holding it at all but being held … in love and service

Using the eyes – the focus – not so much to see but to lock down the self so that one's energy can open up and out like an expanding fan behind. Ward-Off draws that energy round to the front. 

Success starts with failure.

Eventually we meet a wall that just cannot be breached and it seems that it'll end up being the death of us, but actually this is the wall that sustains us, and when it finally falls, when we finally break through: that is death.

The work of the eyes is done. Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you.