You know that sensation of seeing something you recognize and then the light shifts or you shift and you realize it's actually something quite different? The mind prefering the familiar to the strange? Well, I suspect, on some level, that is happening all the time. We live in the midst of a reality our lazy conditioned minds refuse to see.

The beauty of practice is that you never know where it's gonna go. If you let it, it will always take you somewhere amazing, somewhere you could never have imagined nor got to any other way.

Knowledge. Put it into practice. Otherwise it will only ever be theoretical.

Free to do what has to be done. Such a person does not feel free – they are totally bound to their destiny – but they do create freedom – they inspire others to break away from societal strictures and seek their own destiny. We need more freemen.

Nothing more nauseating than Buddhist smarm.

The pursuit of happiness. What a disgustingly selfish agenda. Pursuit of justice, maybe; justice for those whose souls, lives, habitats have been ravaged by human ignorance and greed.

The real heroes in any society are the outlaws – those who refuse to be controlled by outside forces.

Who's got your back?

Free thought is a passion; it is much rather the thoughts than ourselves that are free.

More than anything, my daughter loves me to read to her. And the only books she's ever taken to were first the Enid Blyton books written in the fifties and now the first Nancy Drew series which was written in the thirties. And I can tell that what appeals is that the children from those times had a degree of freedom from their parents that children don't have now that we keep tabs on their every move. In those days children didn't just have adventures but everything was an adventure. They were open to the unexpected because they were largely free of expectations. And it's interesting to me that she refuses to watch movie versions of the books: "I prefer the version in my imagination."

In meditation we still the body and mind not to freeze rigid but to open up as a site of pure movement, a site of energy.

The path is straight and narrow, but only if you stay with the heart. Mind always leads a merry dance.

Fish are symmetrical but only until they wiggle. Our effort is to measure the space between the fish and the wiggle. This is the study of a lifetime.

God never said life would be easy, he just promised it would be worth it.

One of the most important things I learnt as a child was just how readily boredom would transform into fascination. Looking back on it now I realise that happened because our boredom was open and our fascination closed. As they should be.

When you lose your way – and you inevitably will, this path is so tortuous – always come back to heart.

Anyone who cannot see that weak, vulnerable, suffering people are more real than strong, comfortable, happy ones are blind, or heartless.

Will social distancing leave people craving touch or realising that they can just as easily live without it?

The older I get and the more I watch people, the more convinced I am that it's just all about belonging to a club...

Truth is the unintended consequence of faith. It develops, deepens, reveals in time.

A more reverential way of living.

A life governed by fear is the life of a victim.

Exploration is very important. There is complexity in where we get to, by not staying where we are.

Meditation: tracing the passage of time with the breath.

Deeply rooted in our humanity is the idea that there is no real distinction of work from holy works, and no necessary opposition of profane to sacred activities.

Relaxation and tension belong together. A pair of complimentary opposites. Relaxation without tension is flaccid, dispersed and collapsed. Tension without relaxation is rigid, frozen and brittle. They inform each other and balance each other. They work together, and this work we call play. Play expends energy but also generates energy. At its best, play is elastic and ecstatic. Together and connected yet flexible and free – unpredictable.

Freedom arrives as the result of systematic disciplined work. This our paradox.

Pray you're a black sheep.

We start life with spirit: a spark of uniqueness, a singular vision, a destiny, but then we trade it for what everyone has instead. We sell our souls to the devil.

Center of attention.

Quarantine. Forty days. Moshe's fast on Mount Sinai before receiving the Ten Commandments. Christ's fast in the desert prior to his temptation. A cleansing, of body, mind and soul, in readiness for a great trial and test.

Self-isolation. Isn't this precisely the spiritual imperative? Lock self away and let spirit out?

Pay attention.

Social distance – a beautiful oxymoron. A respectful distance. Distance as awareness.

Lockdown the front brain so that the back brain can open up. This is the opposite to usual. It's what's behind Ward-Off.

The world is made up of givers and takers. Takers learn to mask their selfishness and ape generous to lure in victims, and givers learn to hide their generosity behind a protective ward-off so as not to be taken advantage of. This is the human universe: fraught with cleverness and deception.

Struggling to prevent the hip of the front leg rising in eagerness as I move into it, I feel the hamstring and buttock gravid. This strangely allows spirit to manifest in the region around the opposite shoulder/arm/wing/cowl.

What opinions could be dangerous today when nothing falls "into deep wells" anymore!

Water is life. It is precious, and if you are lucky enough to have it come easily out of your faucet, treat it with gratitude and respect.

Out for a stroll with Tai this morning – catching the blissful Winter sun – she asked:
—Dad, what are your Seven Wonders of the World?
—The pyramids, the Grand Canyon? Things like that?
—No, anything. The most important things – for you.
After pondering for a few seconds I said:
—Existence, God, Nature, Spirit, Life, Connexion, Love-Soul.

φύσις κρύπτεσθαι φιλεῖ. Nature loves to hide. Hide from us anyway, because we are no longer in any way natural. If we want nature to unconceal herself then we must hide away, turn away, look away, all the while listening, ostensibly with ears, but actually with our energy, and, in particular, our spirit.

Around year 35 the energy body begins to reveal itself.

don’t get angry 

don’t chatter 

don’t be greedy 

walk slowly, walk steadily

As my weight fills a leg the thigh muscle tightens and the hamstring slackens. The relaxed hamstring becomes a refuge for the mind, allowing energy to suddenly appear in the opposite region of the body. So, weight in left leg, mind in left hamstring, energy in the region around the right shoulder/ear. Castaneda said that one's personal history resides in the hamstrings, and that they must be worked to loosen the grip that history has on us.

We react against the bad that went before, forgetting that we are riding the good, and that maybe these belong together.

A glittering gadget-filled world. No better than primitives duped by worthless baubles.

I have been expecting something like this since I was taught pathology. The only surprise is it's taken so long…

Tragically estranged from Nature, and hence our own natures.

A sad indictment really that, at every level bar the human, the planet is presently breathing an almighty sigh of relief.

Most think as deeply as cultural conditioning allows. Our task is to wrench ourselves out of the mainstream and plunge into a dark ocean.

A life with prayer at its center.

We have become so weakened by choice-ridden lives that there is no longer any sense of knowing, let alone doing, what must be done, what needs to be done.

Abraham has to lose his son as a given in order to receive him back as a gift; he has to abandon Isaac as possession in order to welcome him back as promise. Isaac is not Abraham’s (as extension, acquisition, projection) but another’s, another, an Other.

I come from a long tradition that pooh-poohs qi and champions spirit. And eventually even spirit is discarded as disruption and distraction – wilful spirit, that is. One could say that the work is a quest for will-less spirit or unwilful spirit. What Chi Chiang-tao called Nothing.

I have my suspicions.

Watch in wonder as time unfolds.

bamboo shoot
on its way to becoming bamboo
how honest of it!


Today again, must get myself in shape, make preparations so I’m ready to die any time. 


boiled tofu
eating it alone
it wobbles


got this far
drink some water
and go on

Energy appears where I don't look, never where I do.

Without stillness silt will never settle. Without movement stagnation sets in. Strike a balance, a happy medium.

Mind how you go.

Wild geese—
between their cries, a slice
of silence

We slow down, shut up, sit still, let the dust settle, to face that deep fear and anxiety fueling constant agitation.

Active depression is the agitated struggle to assuage guilt by always staying on the surface of life, always active, doing, tense.

Patiently I taste the mountains.

What is it that compels us to work? A guilty conscience. And this is what the bourgeois life is designed to mask, either by putting us into zombie stupors or distracting us with nonsense.

ἕνωσις

Our first intention was to capture the wonder of childhood boredom, when you are left on your own, doing nothing.

Softness is an ache, a pain – persistent, enduring. It's what you are first thing in the morning before you shower it off and don your armour, your outside, public face. Softness is pure intimacy. It takes a lot, yet gives so much.

When a small child my nightmares usually involved terror at being found out for a heinous sin I had committed but could not for the life of me remember the details of. A strong sense that I could only proceed to wholeness once I had first remembered and then earned forgiveness.

a dynamic and open-ended process of emergence

Conscience : with knowledge : in the know.

Questioning builds a way.

Nowadays everyone wants it served up on a plate, not realising that it's the very difficulties that lend value; everything is a test. This again is a matter of spirit.

Whatever thickens the plot.

It matters little how good you are or where you're at. What matters is whether you're working or not. Work is hope – the possibility of change.

We work on humility as much by expanding and deepening context as by reducing self.

twelve colts so soft of hoof they did not bend the heads of the wheat as they galloped over a field

After being in Israel a year or so someone asked me how I found Israelis. "Intelligent, confident, talented, but not soft," was my reply. They thought for a moment and said, "Yes, all the soft Israelis have left Israel…"

Defamiliarize. Remythologize. Allow mystery back into world and life, at every conceivable level. This is what we call Respect.

Happy-go-lucky. If only…

In the world with an ever-unfurling sense of wonder. This is how we give, not by understanding.

modified by phronesis

It's not what you do, it's the quality of the connectivity that runs through it – the energy you invest it with.

Defamiliarize your world, and defamiliarize the self. Regularly find a state of mind that compels you to see the familiar as though for the first time. This is a matter for spirit.

Afterthoughts.

Only when we give the world our undivided attention are we truly in it, not as lordly knowing subjects but as obedient participating things, obedient to the call and charge of spirit.

I am not a religious man but I cannot help seeing every problem from a religious point of view.

You know that sensation when you come out of a body of water – bath, pool, ocean – of the water not wanting you to leave and actively pulling you back? I suspect that's our first memory: leaving the womb. In Taiji our sense of home – the long lost home – is that undistracted feeling of warm fluid connectivity and continuity that we had in utero, rather than any autochthonic sense of place.

those situations in which the ordinary appears in all its uncanniness

We have a large Self and a small self. The large Self is compassionate and connected whereas the small self is selfish and disconnected. The work endeavours to open up and develop the Self whilst getting a handle on – controlling and diminishing – the self.

Keep going and you'll get somewhere. Most give up too soon.

I have no confidence the book's ambition will be met, but hold a conviction that the effort it pursues must be taken up as a way of life.

There's a lot of bullshit flying around regarding COVID-19 – from killing it by drinking hot tea to flushing if from the throat to the stomach with fluids – so here's my take:

Whilst one can and should take preventative measures – washing hands frequently, avoiding crowded places – once the virus is in your body there is only one thing that can fight it and that is your own body, in particular your own immune system. So take sensible steps to tonify the body and its immune system:

• Externally, with exercise – running and walking being the easiest. And if you can exercise mindfully – without headphones, paying attention to the body, breathing, heartbeat – then all the better. Catch the sun: there is nothing healthier than the winter sun so get as much of it as you can. The sea: the salt sea air is naturally invigorating and strengthening so make at least one weekly pilgrimage to the seashore. 
• Internally, with diet – add foods that are bitter, astringent or a little pungent: garlic, ginger, lemon, grapefruit (all citrus), apples, lettuce, radish, cabbage, spinach, chilli (a little), aduki beans, spring onions, bitter olive oil, seaweed, green tea. Avoid foods that mask bitter and sour, especially sweeteners, salt and seasonings, and dairy produce. Avoid tobacco, alcohol and anything stronger. Take a good (expensive) multi vitamin/mineral supplement. 
• Spiritually, with prayer, meditation or any sincere selfless activity. How can prayer help the immune system? The centre for the immune system is the thymus gland in the upper chest just behind the sternum. So prayer, which lifts this area upwards, – ostensibly to God but that doesn't really matter – focuses the mind and energy in the thymus. 

Above all, stay positive, be cheerful, help others and don't be fearful.

The work – be it meditation, prayer, taiji – in its depth, at its soul – relaxes time. The teacher is still alive, the prehistoric past wells up, and I am already dead. Feel and enter long, deep time where lifespan is but a blink.

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Graffiti in town this morning.

practise a life of unbroken attention

If the thumb is the opposable digit to the fingers then what is the opposable digit to the toes? Not really the big toe. Consider the heel.

existence is an imperfect tense that can never become a perfect one

When push comes to shove.

First this not that, then that not this, but eventually – correctly – this and that. This is because work moves me – shifts both position and perspective – so that what was this becomes that as I inevitably steer towards what I struggle against. After years of this eternal oscillation we lose self and goal – enter no-man's land – and become the copula, free of both subject and compliment. Am is all that's left.

Turn to prayer. One prays not for self or for life but for soul – for a meaningful death.

Think of moods as costumes donned for the occasion rather than spirits suffered. This is one of the good things about working with and for other people – one cannot afford to be in a bad mood.

Centre mind between left hemisphere and right, valiantly resisting the lure of each.

Let go of sanity.

Love motivates our work otherwise it veers off course.

Meditation cultivates a mood of contented peace and quiet. With practice this becomes our base mood – our foundation – which we can call upon, come what may. Once we realise that peace of mind is always within our grasp, other moods become a relatively simple matter to evoke. So, for example, a mood of cheerful playfulness is often the most appropriate for Taiji.

Love moves.

memory is necessarily lined with oblivion

Resentment at thwarted expectation. The root of depression and unhappiness.

The work demands, eventually, that I relax not only muscles and mind, but values and principles.

I'll take second watch.

Arrogance indicates you haven't actually started yet.

a noughting of self, intellect and language

Get the feeling that humanity has had its day?

The heroic impulse – a momentary willingness to die (for a cause) – is not as rare as you'd think. One often catches glimpses of it. But to live a life with that at its heart…

Never tire of telling Jesus how much you love him. We all have our own way(s) of doing this.

Strong but soft. (Strong and hard is worse than useless because it's well-nigh impossible to find the will to undo.)

From me flows what you call time.

A matter of passion and not of sympathy.

Become a hero: sacrifice self for the sake of vision. Die young.

Only at home when we open up and allow our haecceity, our divinity, to flow into the well of work.

Tears. Prayers and tears. The artist at work is a person in prayer, a person wrestling with their divinity, their destiny. Tears (eyes that well) are simply a sincere response to the beauty and awfulness of pouring into the world.

Eros. For us everything is erotic; and we are always eroticized. But never satisfied.

Should a bond not tear, 
you must try biting into it.

Time is not something that drags you along as it passes. Time is something that erupts and flows out of you like a volcano, or like an amoeba ever turning inside out. Each creative person creates, primarily, primordially, time.

Practice. Learn the ropes. Earn your chops.

Haecceity. This-ness. What is it that I, and only I, contribute to the world? What is my vision? Is not my singular uniqueness demonstrated most clearly when I attempt to copy something already made?

Inspiration & transformation.

It's ok to be human, but try your best not to be.

A spark of inspiration initiates the work, and this spark is all important because it sets the tone, but most of the inspiration comes through the process of work – the physicality of wrestling with materials and ideas. This is why we work, work, work; obsessively, compulsively.

We love life, not because we are alive, but because we are used to life.

The heroic impulse: choosing a meaningful death over a meaningless life.

silence as plenum rather than vacuum

Meditation creates time: breathing rather than thinking.

Forgetting self – self-sacrifice – is not an aspiration but a necessity. Without it this herculean task we have chosen is not possible.

Meditation uses stillness and quiet – relaxation – to sink into prehistoric time.

There are no answers, no easy answers anyway, only questions, interesting questions, endlessly engaging questions.

Compassion as danger.

Only one sin: cowardice.

There is more to life – and certainly more to destiny – than being a good parent.

The air clear, mild, bracing: just as we all should be.

The qualities we most despise in the world are precisely those we most need to quell or quash in ourselves, and the qualities we most admire in the world are precisely those we should strive to develop in ourselves. Is this obvious?

We do not see things as they are
We see things as we are.

It's amazing how squeamish modern people are about the G-word, especially here.

When I see someone meditating in full lotus it's clear that something quite different is going on. The posture, with strong lumbar spine and soles facing up, is like a springboard bouncing energy upward from the ground. And this, for me, is real meditation. Not going inside to find oneself but simply being an instrument for beaming energy up to heaven. Doing a simple job of work.

Next time someone brags about how smart their child is, remind them that far more important than a clever mind is a quiet mind.

Practice time is quiet time to yourself, away from the demands of family and work and the hubbub of daily life. It is time for you to come to that most precious yet elusive of states: peace of mind.

It's the impossibilities that keep me going…

the ordained darkness of the simple

Practice reticence.

Relax, not to become loose and flaccid, but to find, and cultivate, the natural tension that balances this relaxation. A subtle, involuntary tautness. A gathered centering. A withdrawing from things and into self. A solitude.

The Real is Not the Rational.

gather glow 
from the ground

Just enough.