I shall never know who I am if I am not loved.

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.

Fragility is an ontological attribute of reality.

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).

Nature is always calling us into greater gestures of bravery.  And as we accept those invitations to our personal edge, we lose the ability to shrink into falseness.

Depression is a modern response to meaninglessness.

If people don't have to work they won't. If they don't have to think they won't. If they don't have to fight they won't. Spirit is what makes you do these things.

Harmless and meaningless are synonyms.

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.

The history of mankind is one of technological progress married to an ever reducing attention span.

An event is what tears the horizon of expectation. It is the unexpectable. As the unexpected, it is strictly necessary, but its necessity does not follow any causality.

This is as good a description of spirit as I've found.

What we put inside ourselves – our diet (food, company, culture) – is as much an exercise in stupification as it is in nutrition. This is why the average person, when it comes to energy, is a dullard.

Harmlessness is the extremism of the cowardly.

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.

The term truth identifies the abyss.

Body both cauldron and crucible.

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.

logos lies like a diaphanous veil over its mythical core

It's not a matter of what we want from life, but whether we have the courage to live up to what life has in store for us. This we call destiny.

Where the work wants to go, we need to go.

Actions speak louder than words.

Depression means the fight has died.

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.

the greatest peril to the soul is that one is likely to get precisely what he is seeking

It never gets any easier, it just seems to.

Are we not all questors?

Understanding is always provisional, and says far more about my own level than the reality I claim to understand.

Form is what I am, energy is what animates me. Both governed/married by principle. Principle is spirit given form, spirit is the purest form of principle. We quest for First Principle – first instance/insistence of spirit – the finding of which liberates us from life.

Much flesh walks upon the earth void of heart and warm liver,  for it is the spirit that dies soonest.

It never gets any harder, it just seems to.

I don't trust people who fit in…

…demonstrate the inconsistency of facts by opening to consistent dreams…

Occidental wisdom is the consequence of thinking. Oriental wisdom is the consequence of not thinking.

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.

We live in an age of inflated ego and deflated heart.

Once the world was full of wonders, but it belongs to humans now.

Just finished working with a student who was bemoaning the unreality of her life: "My whole life is just so flat and unreal that it's got to the point where the only part I really value and treasure and look forward to is my dreaming. My dreams are now my reality."

Something is alive only to the extent that it contains contradiction within itself: indeed, its force is this, to hold and endure contradiction within.

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.

The problem with humans is that they're naturally lazy. If there's an easy way on offer then they'll take it, even if a more difficult way offers richer rewards.

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.

The only thing worth mastering is your own mood.

a high-tension contact between the world’s inconsistencies

The problem nowadays is that the intelligent and sensitive lack confidence (hence depression) and the stupid have all the confidence in the world (hence the present state of affairs).

The Academy (as actuality and as symbol of the privileged position of thought) is the place where it is possible (in fact, necessary) to be pretentious without appearing so. All a sham.

There is nothing more important than the leap.

Philosophy, etymologically at least, is the love of wisdom. So when was it that it shifted instead to the justification of thought? That's a radical shift, to a completely opposite position.

Faith is a lonely business. Keeping a vision alive which no one else has the heart to share.

The meaning of life is not to cheat death but to deserve it.

And the irony is: we spend a lifetime learning to ignore the mind and trust the spirit to command the body, lead the life; and then we die.

The skill, the knack, is not just doing the work but doing it well, doing it in such a way that it takes you somewhere new and worthwhile each time.

Faithfulness is a form of decision and conclusion that introduces an eternity into time.

Invest the work with enthusiasm, imagination and grace and it will come alive, rewarding you, in the process, with spiritual insight.

Effectiveness of practice depends largely on how deeply you sink into it. Just going through the motions – skimming the surface – is better than nothing, but barely.

Spirit owes its liveliness specifically to the capacity for death.

Taiji teaches that to get energy into something I must first open up and let that something into me. This we call the Principle of Reciprocity. By calling it a principal we suggest a suspicion that it operates on all levels all the time. That is, it is a universal law.

Literature is not primarily a place for truths, it is the space where truths play out.

And the irony is that direct relation, direct communication, is only possible when mediated through a third party, through some commonality, be it ground or God or simple mutual respect.

Have you noticed how Enlightened masters don't make old bones? Once you've got it right, why stick around?

The future – destiny – is aching to open up, yet we prevent it by refusing to face what needs to be faced in ourselves.

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.

The Unknowable demands I wake up to hidden resources that surprise me as much as you, that force me to confront my own strangeness – a reality I know exists, but which, for the most part, eludes me.

There's little nowadays that requires us to be at our best, let alone our very best.

a feverish vector that leads into the unknown

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.

It is far easier to design and live a life playing up to strengths and avoiding weaknesses than willingly confront your shittiness each morning with practice.

…the Other in the strong sense, namely, what cannot be encompassed by the regime of the ego…

We work hard, deeply aware of how little, in the great scheme of things, it really achieves.

And the irony is that the more special we demand or expect to be, the less willing and capable we are of the selfless work required to become so.

Relaxed, but under tension: the conditions for spirit to manifest.

Ego is the consequence of the mind thinking to/about itself.

Only by way of being able not to be able does the Other appear.

Spirit rises to the challenge of otherness. So, in these times of excessive sameness, it is no surprise that spirit withers and depression (inertia) pervades.

The wisdom to listen to the body rather than impose with the mind.

The difficulty is to realize the groundlessness of our believing.

The shame in being human.

…a world characterized by compulsory happiness, decentralized control and overexposure…

Meditation stretches and inhabits the space – the No-man's Land – between wakefulness and sleep, consciousness and unconsciousness. A space of few, if any, words. The price of admittance is inner quiet and the ability to stay awake when most would nod off.

Mindfulness is a technique – a discipline – of breaking habits. Eventually it too becomes a habit, a particularly irritating one of pulling back from life, taking a moment, and deigning a measured response. It too must then give way to spirit-fulness or life-fulness.

…I actually had a peculiarly exaggerated weary dread of everyday reality, because it no longer seemed real to me, but ominous…

The work is to banish depression from our being.

Back to roots. Primitive roots, primate roots.

Homo sapiens: a flash in the pan.

The one quality which sets one man apart from another – the key which lifts one to every aspiration while others are caught up in the mire of mediocrity – is not talent, formal education, nor intellectual brightness – it is self-discipline.

Force moves solids; energy moves fluids. So, to become receptive to energy then become a fluid and allow yourself to flow. Go with the flow.

Spirit wakes us up. Makes us receptive and responsive to energy.

When, during meditation, the mind finally trusts the body, lets go of itself and soars. A glimpse of eternity.

Hunting is always preceded by some form of play.

The only way to make something knowable – ownable – is to kill it. Rob it of spirit.

Things seem rather than are.

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.

Rule your mind or it will rule you.

Don't give yourself time to think. This snatch is where selfishness starts.

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.

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.

Open the toes.

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.

Come clean.

God is not dead, just disappointed. Depressed.

return to town a stranger

Prepared to listen. Always.

First in the body, then in the mind. This, along with circularity, is the secret of softness, the secret to discovering true mind.

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.

Attentive receptivity (what in Taiji we call listening) is the purest form of giving.

Wandering flushes a glory that fades with arrival.

The soldier receives orders with attention and implements them with intention.

The body does not resist. Only the mind resists. True ratiocination is physical, not mental.

Assume responsibility.

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.

The truth is more important than the facts.

Character develops through suffering, not through experience.

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.

Depression: weighed down by a story without hope.

Meditation looks at the structure of mind rather than its contents. A little like going to see a movie and realising that the fabric of the screen or the projectional process are far more interesting than the movie itself.

What is it that gets you out of bed in the morning? Joie de vivre, duty, habit, urinary urgency, the brats? For the good student, it's their wound, which expresses itself as a neurotic, obsessive desire to work.

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.

Ultimately, what separates a winner from a loser at the Grandmaster level is the willingness to do the unthinkable.

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.

Yielding: the art of turning enemy into friend. With emphasis on the turning.

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.

People ask what my goal is. I don't have a goal.

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.

The work, once you get down to it, is about working through karmic debt – paying your dues. And this means, in some sense, going through hell.

A teacher should have maximal authority, and minimal power.

Double-weightedness freezes the world by grossly reducing the body's potential for turning.

Every moment we are presented with a choice: double-weighted or single-weighted, close down or open up, control or spirit.

Every superhero has a unique costume. What’s yours? And this is meditation: sinking into true form, inhabiting destiny.

Falling victim to mood, be it good or bad, indicates self-pity.