29 September 2020
28 September 2020
27 September 2020
Spiritual work is all about cutting through the ego – the false – to encounter the real. The ego is just layer upon layer of accumulated conditioning, so thick and crusty that any sense of an underlying truth has been largely lost. The only times that truth gets a chance to peak through is when the ego momentarily cracks during trauma, and such events we spend most of our energy avoiding. We have become so successful at manufacturing an artificial 'good life' that we have no idea what a natural 'real life' is.
26 September 2020
25 September 2020
Belly is hearth and home, root and anchor: a gloomy day beside the fireplace watching movement in the flames.
Heart is horizon, compassion, expanse and inclusion: a lazy afternoon picnic on a warm English meadow.
Head is beacon, crown, responsibility: the bright light of a lighthouse piercing the night, saving ships from foundering.
24 September 2020
The teacher must protect himself from the smilers and the nodders – those that claim to understand. How can they possibly understand when there is no chance in hell of them ever doing the work that's required to understand? This is why my teacher retired from public teaching at 57: he was sick and tired of casting pearl before swine.
23 September 2020
22 September 2020
The rational mind, which originally developed as a tool for cutting through superstition and finding the real and true, has become the means of robbing the world of poetry and magic and instituting information and depression instead. This is because it is now in the hands of people unqualified to wield it. Any tool of such power and potential is dangerous and requires a deeply humble egoless mind to properly put to use, otherwise it serves he who wields it rather than any objective truth.
Into this world we're thrown like a dog without a bone. Apparently Jim Morrison penned this lyric after attending a lecture on Heidegger whose concept of thrownness (Geworfenheit) resonated with him. The secret to living a worthy life is finding your bone, the one destined for you. And, in a sense, you don't find it, it finds you: it suddenly appears as though from nowhere, and if you have the balls you grab it, hold onto it, and spend the rest of your life gnawing away until it's given you what you need to slip to the next level.
21 September 2020
The prevailing culture privileges the myths of the majority, and in doing so blinds its members to the injustices at its core. I saw this in South Africa in 1981 and I see it now in Israel. This is largely why we cannot acknowledge those things that we need to acknowledge, and is why exile is an absolute necessity. This structure is also at play at the level of the ego – the ego prevents us seeing the blindingly obvious flaws in ourselves.
20 September 2020
19 September 2020
18 September 2020
Work on dualities. They are everywhere – at every turn. Clearly and cleanly distinguish. Then get the components working together. This means in constant contest and strife. But a strife that is understood to be generative and productive. Like two loving brothers scrapping heartily for the love of the fight.
17 September 2020
16 September 2020
15 September 2020
The most important part of you is your word. More important than your desires, your opinions, your satisfactions, your comforts, your pleasures, your pains. Without a reliable word – the ability to make and keep promises – you have no symbolic function, no place to either be or go – no relationship with the future – and so nothing of real value to offer the world.
14 September 2020
The bourgeois lifestyle denies or dampens spirit to keep things exactly as we like them. It can be seen at play in classes as students constantly take little breaks for a sip of water or to check their phone or simply to glance around. It effectively means that we have tiny attention spans for anything remotely difficult. Exactly when we really need to buckle down and concentrate – bring our attention and intention to bear – is when we chose instead to wimp out and take a break.
13 September 2020
People are controlled by fear. And it's been going on so long that we have become addicted to fear. When you are frightened you become passive – spiritless – and eventually you can't become active except in moments of anger. We each have a responsibility to tackle our own innate fear otherwise we'll never be able to fight back.
My teacher studied advanced Buddhism with a couple of highly qualified Tibetans. They taught him mantra, which he practised for a few years. He later told me that the only mantram I need bother with is the one he used: "I am not afraid." Like he always said, the only real enemy, in our game, and in life, is fear.
12 September 2020
11 September 2020
10 September 2020
Science has been vastly transformed from the simple impulse to understand the natural world around us, into a kind of hellish marriage with instrumentality, technology, capitalism, and the military-industrial complex.
It does feel that even if the virus hasn't been engineered, then the panic response certainly has been. I suspect that the invisible powers-that-be, who, for so long, have been getting unbelievably rich from economic progress/growth (from the population explosion), are beginning to worry that soon there will be no planet worth inhabiting, so they are setting in place measures to check that growth, starting with global economic collapse. Let's hope this works otherwise next on the cards is the cull.
Drugs are useful only if you learn from them. By that I don't mean taking on board the inevitable insights they yield, but learning how to induce that fluid state at will, without the drug. Absolute non-dependence. And beware: you don't get something for nothing: if they give something then they also take, and what they take may be very precious – it may be something that you'll need later on – and it may be irreplaceable.
09 September 2020
People ask, "Why are you going to the same place every day?" But that's when you see the subtle differences. And that's when you get to know the wild.
08 September 2020
07 September 2020
What matters is the work we do, not how we feel or what we think about it. I love the Carthusians. When they join the order they lose their name – they effectively die to the world – and when they actually die they are buried in unmarked graves. Forgotten. All that survives is the invisible resonance of enduring prayer they have created. Long energy.
06 September 2020
05 September 2020
04 September 2020
Find a tree, stand or sit beside it and meditate. Feel it helping your heavy energy down into the earth and your light energy up into the heart, head and beyond, energies that usually cling together in fear and disquiet. (If no tree then use a wall – zazen and the wall.) Trees are the best teachers.
03 September 2020
The mind's disease is that it cannot quieten down. In taiji we have discovered that the mind is only noisy and neurotic when we lose our conscious connexion with the ground. So in each lesson and each practice session we re-establish an intimate awareness of that connexion through legs and feet, and, as if by magic, the mind settles and quietens, if only a little.
The mind looks for physical stability so that it can go walkabout, so that it can think to itself about absent or imaginary things. Nothing entertains it more than itself. It is the archetypal narcissist. Our work struggles to bring the mind back to the body by setting it the task of finding and equilibrating the energies in each situation it finds itself in.