You dig in the ground because you want to see.

Find mystery, excitement, danger in even the smallest things. Conjure spirit and invest spirit with faith in spirit.

Texts that attract me the most are those resisting comprehension.

HUMANISM = NIHILISM

You dig in the ground because this starts the long path to virtue.

forsaken by being and abandoned to egotism

The saddest thing, for me, is watching friends, students, teachers even, missing their chance – admittedly the slimmest of chances – to blossom into spirit, and instead slowly but inexorably becoming a product of their conditioning. And all for want of faith in imagination.

the steward of stillness

One thing after another. That's progress, but only if you deal with each thing as it crops up. Ignore or brush off, and not only will progress be hindered but those things will come back to haunt you later.

approach things with slowness and patience

move as often as possible, huff and puff sometimes

Keep your word. Keep God's word. It's not written in a book, it's deep inside. It needs uncovering. This is destiny. For each and all.

Each of us an infinitesimal.

Searching for the zone – that place we've all experienced where we effortlessly reach beyond ourselves because we've somehow connected to a mysterious power. Great performers (artists, athletes) seemingly get there at will, albeit with a little chemical assistance.

Without noticing it, all mankind suddenly left reality.

The most valuable experiences are the belittling ones – the ones that make us feel small – not the ones that confirm our magnificence.

Sternum (thymus) lifts, sacrum drops.

our consumer-crazy, mega-visual world of limitless, yet utterly limiting material ambition

When the belly is firm and solid, and the head is bright and empty, then the heart – the human breast – becomes a spiritual site where spiritual dramas play out. Meditation cultivates this and quietly watches, always a bystander (by-sitter). A breast full of spirit rather than a chest full of self.

I tried to unite the earth and sky; painting the landscape without anything except two halves meeting each other.

A wall has started to fall in you, it will take years to land.

Impatient? Anxious? Discontent? Resentful? Then the chances are the jaw is chronically tense. Relax the jaw. Separate the teeth slightly, imagine the face widening, a smile of contentment, not just in the mouth but also the eyes – they soften and accept.

The fragility of goodness.

Sinking, for most Taiji students, amounts to perching atop a bent leg – like a bird on a wire – ready to take flight at any moment. This is not it at all. Sinking is melting into the Earth through the leg. You sink down through the leg and the leg extends up through you – into the opposite arm.

I paint the mountain with myself. I paint myself into the mountain. I paint the mountain from my mind.

The Taoist glows with a Contained Light, the Dark Light of Spirit.

The corruption of privilege.

It is life into which he composes his body.

At every turn the average person sees a reflection of self whereas the enlightened person sees an image of the divine – of Otherness. They live in the same world but different realities.

there is clamour
is there silence 

Taoism distinguishes vitality, energy, spirit. I tend to conflate them.

There is just as much skill to resting well as training well. Together they constitute work.

Carrying vitality and consciousness
embracing them as one
can you keep them from parting?

The problem with mindfulness is that it makes us observers rather than participants. It assumes we have the luxury of time: to consider, to choose, to make adjustments, to mend our ways. This is important practice but it is the death of spirit. Mindfulness should be a prelude to mindlessness – emptiness.

come into the shade
of the word
willow

Ageing, when you get it right, is also a relaxing. A slow letting go.

The gentleness must remain.

Images are always provisional. Without them the work tends to be aimless but with them the work ends up becoming forceful – too mind directed. So we must be careful. Images, visualisations, are used to get things going but then largely abandoned as the work takes on a life of its own. Then the insights, discoveries, that spring forth take us by surprise and lead us on our true path – our destiny.

Only when you know how to move well does your stillness mean something, and vice versa.

heart of ice

Tu aimes tout cela et voilà pourquoi je puis vivre auprès de toi.

Stillness without movement is stiff and frozen – it needs to breathe. Movement without stillness is anxious and frenetic, and it needs to relax.

Depression is lack of movement.

a purity beyond the reach of pride

A teacher – a real teacher – wakes up your slumbering spirit and makes EVERYTHING different. Even if he only manages this for a few seconds, it haunts you forever.

Become dancer, become nomad – at home in movement.

but reality keeps breaking in

People think I make all this shit up, but no, I'm not that smart. Just insights gleaned from work.

Our minds have become so hard and harsh, so greedy and grasping, that reality flees from us, and we end up having to make a simulation instead. This is why Buddhism emphasises a compassionate mind rather than a comprehending mind. Compassion effectively means 'with heart' whereas comprehend means 'with grasping.' In Taiji we talk about a yielding mind – Keep to a yielding mind – a mind always melting and giving way, always allowing – in fact encouraging – the Other.

The struggle to discern and bring to fruition what is best in our nature.

Love is in the air. And so is death. Feel them, work with them, play with them. This is yielding.

The Real always eludes capture. The best you can do is create a propitious environment and hope for the best.

There was a time (before we became so pampered and domesticated – so civilized) when every action we took would have had significant spirited or spiritual content. But not now. Now we have minimised risk and maximised certainty and profit, and spirit has largely gone out the window.

Each of us a miracle, a portal, an outpouring of life, consciousness, energy.

The mind is a dream where a thousand people talk at once, and nobody understands each other.

Men tire me when I am not constantly greeted and refreshed as by the flux of sparkling streams.

To spend a life dedicated first and foremost to self? How paltry, how demeaning, how meagre, how vulgar, how selfish, how ugly.

Truth is in the touch not of the mind.

The most important thing in life is to find one's work – something to devote/dedicate oneself to which is not the self.

Death is not the biggest fear we have; our biggest fear is taking the risk to be alive.

I do not consider my approach exclusive but sustaining a thesis required a certain purity in the matter of exposition.

See through things.

Most of us expend our best energy maintaining an illusion – polishing a veneer – when we would be far better off just letting it peel away and fall, which it would of its own if left unattended.

Spirit is the ability to face death square on at a moment's notice.

Love is the beginning of advertence to higher things.

See things through.

Every so often even the best of us needs a dressing down. And no one could do the honours quite like my teacher.

Unfortunately, saying something does not make it so. In fact our work demonstrates, time and time again, that as soon as something is voiced – stated – it is already a falsehood – mere wishful thinking. Most people go through a whole life never twigging this.

The lucky ones are those who have either never learned to get their own way or who have learned that getting their own way is a sure path to disappointment.

Empty yourself, be alone.

When I found Taiji, or rather when I found my teacher, I knew almost immediately that this was my path and that I'd be doing it pretty much full time for the rest of my life. I've never felt that way with another person, which is why, I guess, I've never married.

Go gently.

Nothing is hard and fast with energy – there are no guarantees – you just have to take a chance – a flying leap.

Wax lyrical.

I wonder if there is a school of unlearning.

Rather than becoming, consider unbecoming. Undoing, unravelling, unbecoming. The Earth will do this if you let her. Just bend down and put your hands on the ground and you'll feel all pretence and artifice draining out of you.

I'm all undone without his grace.

Life has shown me that I always have enough but never more than enough. I'm not sure I'd want it any other way.

An apple a day keeps the virus away.

Wealth does not mean a person who owns a lot, but refers to someone who has enough time to enjoy what nature and human collaboration place within everyone’s reach.

We have forgotten how to think.

The work improves spirit. This is its function, first and foremost. The Classics say: If you concentrate on spirit then you will be strong, but if you concentrate on qi then you will be weak. What does strong mean here? It does not mean big muscles, or great energy or masses of wealth and health, it means freedom, in particular the freedom that comes with vision, with being able to see, sense, suss the truth. Spirit cuts through veils, through lies, and exposes what's beneath. This is why, when your spirit is intense and burning, you don't feel happy – happiness does not come into it, happiness is for the herd – you feel eminently capable and you feel suspicious, as though you're starting to sense the forces, sinister or otherwise, underlying what you took to be reality. You start to sense depth. This depth is the beginnings of the Internal; and it's a never-ending process, as whatever your spirit exposes becomes external, and a new deeper layer of the Internal appears.

We have forgotten how to play.

People are constantly sheltering themselves under the umbrellas of their limited languages, and their worlds are written on the undersides of these umbrellas.

We have forgotten how to dance.

Eating the flesh of animals fattened in captivity and then slaughtered in fear? How stupid can you get!

(We all know you become what you eat.)

As our technology gets more powerful and we consequently (and necessarily) get weaker, all sense of the Internal disappears.

We have forgotten how to breathe.

billions of people all over the world are paying for this technological paradise

Have you ever met a like-minded person? I haven't. I think I must be unique. Makes for loneliness but what's the alternative? Conformity? Becoming a sheep? Wouldn't you rather die?

The vast majority of our finest energy – our psychic and spiritual energy – is wasted in endlessly talking to ourselves. This is why, in all spiritual traditions, silence is recommended – inside and out. When a degree of silence is achieved then the good energy freed up starts to be used by our true natures to create our energy body – our destiny – and we slowly become the angels (or devils) we have always known, deep down, that we were meant to be.

Those with money/talent make little progress beyond a certain point because their experience has shown them that things should always be easy.

It is only by confronting and working through difficulties that one's energy improves sufficiently to make breakthroughs.

Poetry is the excess which breaks the limit and escapes measure.

We alway know. But we are also experts at hiding from the truth. It's the thing we do best, unfortunately.

Stop the world. Stop the mind. These are the same. The only thing that doesn't stop is the work.

When you hit a wall, which you inevitably will, then you have three choices: turn back (the coward's choice), try to scale it or knock it down (the foolhardy approach), or just sit and face it, knowing that it's of your own making, and in time it will fall of its own.

Dawn is breaking. Time for bed.

All of us are infected today with an extraordinary egoism. And that is not freedom; freedom means learning to demand only of oneself, not of life and others, and knowing how to give: sacrifice in the name of love.

Money is like talent: it makes things easy, and everyone wants a bit more.

When I speak of poetry I am not thinking of it as a genre. Poetry is an awareness of the world, a particular way of relating to reality.

What I have found through teaching Taiji is that bourgeois freedoms are bad for the spirit. They make one flabby, self-centred, lazy and slow. They lead to what the philosophers call diversity – dispersion – rather than real creative differences. In order to be different one needs intense inner cohesion; one must be prepared to sacrifice the bourgeois dream for personal vision.

Faith is the prerequisite of grace.

to live in the spirit means that a person, first and foremost, does not possess but participates

Smile often. Speak gently. Be kind.

Language is a coarse tool, only suitable for voicing the vulgar and obvious. Real communication is empathetic and telepathic – silent.

In Taiji, humbleness is simply bent legs.

The lower dantien – belly – is the centre of mass, of gravity, of body. The middle dantien – heart – is the centre of feeling and emotion, compassion. The upper dantien – brain – is the spiritual centre, the centre of internal vision. Thinking and language do not come into it.

there is no situation in our lives which does not contain this latency, this possibility of genuine mystery

The trouble with being a control freak (which we all tend to be nowadays) is that things are fine when under control but break down horribly when out of control. The real skill to develop is the ability to function at our best when not in control.

Real family is not flesh and blood but heart and soul.

We use words largely to blot out energy – to blot out what's really there. Why do we do this, since energy is so blissful? Because with energy comes responsibility to something other than self.

35 years learning to bend my legs.

Moses entered the Thickness of the Cloud, and there the Rainbow dressed him.

the feeling that there is something incomparably greater than my own self

Increasing, one becomes hard and forceful; decreasing, soft and energetic.

Religion. Etymology unsure. The dictionary lists three possibilities:

• Relegere "to read again" – repeat over and over.
• Religare "to bind fast" – bind oneself to God through vows.
• Religiens "careful" (opposite of negligens). 

Combining: a careful practice binding one to God.

Suffering teaches. If you let it.

Taiji, Yoga, Pilates, Qigong, Mindfulness, etc. – all weak bourgeois pursuits, unless done religiously. What do we mean by that? For God rather than for self. A joyful sacrifice of our best intention, energy and spirit.

The wandering mind, a wandering body. This neurotic penchant for travel, for experience, for grasping, for taking, for not missing out. The opposite to meditation. And not a complimentary opposite either. A contradiction – a saying against, a gainsaying.

meaning is in all likelihood nothing but a kind of surface effect, a shimmering, a froth

There's a certain poetic justice in the planet's most dangerous parasite (homo sapiens) being under attack by it's very own parasite (SARS-CoV-2). A very gentle warning as to what's in store if we don't mend our ways big-time.

The sheer extravagance of the Bourgeoisie, expressed most insistently in minds that cannot stop wandering. Such people are a burden to be with.

I do not think, I am thought; I do not speak, I am spoken; I do not act, I am acted.

Find something you really really love and then learn to live without it. The hankering keeps you taut – keeps the mind on something, at least.

virtually all of our consumption now is extravagant, and virtually all of it consumes the world

A practice driven by exploration rather than skill and design.

There are basically two approaches to life: change the world to suit the self or change the self to suit the world. The first we call avoidance and the second we call yielding.

Let the work draw you into the unknown.

A good thing about the threatened cashless economy is that people will go back to bartering to avoid surveillance and taxation.

CAVEMEN

The cavemen walk far beneath the sun.
There are miles on their walls so
no distance is far. They feel the sun
is only just beyond reach. They stomp
through signs of trees and enter their
caves in full.

A caveman opens his mouth and feels
the sun enter him. He never moves,
but stands there all day. A tree
grows. A rock ages. Cavemen
never bar their entrances.

A rock is the inside of a space.
A caveman thinks if a rock were
moved his life would be ended.
He wears the cave and decorates it.
Its stillness is a sign of life.


—Clark Coolidge

Nothing more beautiful than authentic acts of generosity; nothing more ugly than blatant acts of selfishness. Ethics is aesthetics, and vice versa.

If you see someone without a smile, give him yours.

CONDIMENT FOR IMMUNE SYSTEM

Garlic, crushed/grated
Fresh ginger, grated
Fresh turmeric, grated
Zest of lemon, grated
Dried red chilli flakes
Miso
Cider vinegar/lemon juice
Olive oil

Mix together well. Transfer to glass jar. Keep in fridge.

Add to soups, salads, stews, potatoes, etc.

Space is curved. Keep going long enough and you arrive where you started. Everything returns. This the essence of Taoism, and so of Taiji.

stake your existence

To be old is a glorious thing when one has not unlearned what it means to begin.

Modern bourgeois life cultivates a distracted, wandering mind incapable of sustained concentration let alone the nobler virtues of humility, dedication and devotion.

stability attained through constant change

The teacher speaks the truth, and truth is never welcome – it's too painful, too awful, too traumatic to be anything but dreaded. But in time, as truth is grappled, one reaches a place few find, and even fewer really desire. We call this place freedom.

Let go everything superfluous – everything. What's left is what Chi Chiang-Tao called Nothing.

the truth is always that which makes a hole in knowledge

like the last speaker of an extinct language

The effectiveness of what we do depends largely upon the willingness and enthusiasm with which we do it. If the mind wanders then there is somewhere else we would rather be, and we are immediately divided and less effective – dishonest.

When someone announces that they've started meditating I feel like telling them to report back in ten years.

Never believe what they tell you. Even if you know it's true.

A painting which does not take its inspiration from the heart is nothing more than futile juggling.

If the heart is a sun then the dantien is a black hole.

Keep it simple.

Bleak & desolate suits me – down to the ground.

Cross the border and you either become a refugee or you get home.

A person is able to understand only when he solves the problem by himself.

Every floor a dance floor.

My paintings are wiser than I am.

Cut off your own head. At least whilst practising. Inner feelings, inner movement, energy should override external sensation to such a degree that delirium is always on the cards; the head mere counterweight for the foot.

The bourgeoisie, despite their education and travelling – their indulgences – are remarkably narrow-minded and parochial.

Home is not where you live but where they understand you.

We are fully human only while playing.

Best have no idea what you're letting yourself in for.