darkness is not closed but open

What happens once you've mastered the art? Gradually discard it and enter a state of formlessness – a cloud of unknowing. Otherwise the art, which should be a vehicle for spirit, becomes a mausoleum.

Now we no longer have souls, the only thing that's sacred is the self.

This task of dismantling the false self to arrive at some truth lurking beneath is truly herculean and it cannot be tackled alone. Firstly you need a teacher to tell you what to do and then to correct what you do. Left to your own devices you will always pick and choose unwisely and end up doing things your own way rather than the right way. And secondly you need companions (what my teacher called comrades in arms) – fellow travellers for support and inspiration when things get tough, otherwise the chances of you continuing, let alone progressing, are very slim. The teacher (it must be one rather than many otherwise again you will pick and choose) will set a work regime which, if you are serious, you will follow religiously. My own teacher told me to practise at least three hours a day on my own and as much as possible with others. He was adamant that class work, either as student or teacher, does not constitute practice. Then it's just a matter of perseverance. The only other thing that needs to be said is that if you are serious then you cannot expect to live a normal life. Normal lives are for people dedicated to preening and bolstering the false self, and are governed by principles of acquisition and accrual. Our lives are dedicated to the opposite and are governed by principles of reduction and sacrifice. This requires real courage – to willingly live against the grain of society. It means everyone you know who isn't a comrade in arms will be disappointed in you, and you shouldn't expect anything else.

going beyond our own condition to finally express naturing Nature

The only talent you really need in this game is the ability to happily get on with the onerous task at hand.

Relax into stability. Sounds obvious doesn't it, but it's really quite a radical proposition.

encourage change

Activity must issue naturally from stillness otherwise it's just a fearful avoidance of pure being.

the commanding force orthogonal to all the tentative, laterally spreading, webs of my mapwork

Think Oneness rather than One and Twoness rather than Two. It's all tendencies in this game. Everything slipping in and out of focus.

As soon as a thing is established it acts as impediment to further creativity. We all overstay our welcome.

It's like I'm carrying a really heavy overcoat, pockets filled with crap, draped over shoulders deliberately slumped to prevent it slipping down my back.

Try meditating on even a half-full stomach and you'll understand why the desert fathers fasted so.

attention to the local invites wonder at the universal

When meditating imagine your whole being a smiley face. One face, two eyes, one smile.

reduce your footprint by softening the footfall

Put aside neuroses and allow yourself to bloom. It's dying to happen. We don't realise how little of our inherent beauty we really share. This our selfishness.

Meditation is time to unburden the heart, let it fill with the lightness of pure love and lift heavenward in natural adoration.

true knowledge was attained through self-purification and the illumination of the heart

The two merge into oneness and the one separates into twoness. Without this most natural of processes there would be no movement, no life, no time.

meditation: making yourself presentable

lay your burden down

Seems silly to call nighttide meditation lucubration, especially since it's usually conducted in darkness, and yet sometimes the heart can be so reluctant to lift it's real hard work!

Are you the defect in your objectivity, the vulnerable centre?

Why is being so terrifying? Why do we endlessly fidget with our bodies, minds and gadgets rather than settle into simple presence? The only reason I can fathom is that Being is Divine, Being is God, so when we come into our own being we at once become realised as divine but also subsumed into the Divine, and this is just too awful for most. Hence our constant escape into busyness.

abandon to gravity

a dangerous wayfaring

Homework: the only thing you have to be religious about. It makes the good student.

Poetry is the antagonist of denial. Complicating the familiar world purely with the evidence of eye and insight, it insists upon the Spirit of things, even as life desolates our spirits with coarse familiarity.

if the work is not self-sacrificing then it is self-serving

get in touch

Don't resist; don't assist. Resisting is saying I don't want to play the game. Assisting is saying I'll play the game but only if I can be in control.

God, as an openness to imaginative possibility, is an absolute necessity.

the admission 

that one is living 

in the presence 

of a larger 

life

don't avoid the pain, follow it

Students complain that when they practice alone it never feels like it did in class. This is because their practice is intermittent at best. If they practised daily then gradually they would encounter and befriend the gentle delicate spirit of solitude and those sessions would take them far deeper than a class ever could. The work is not social, it is hermitic: deeply private and sacred.

Let the work take you where it wants (deeper always deeper) rather than where you want. Otherwise it will serve Ego rather than Spirit.

Rooting is about connecting to origins and sources. Not only Earth as physical and energetic ground but also culture, tradition, ancestry and above all the Divine as wellspring of spirit.

I believe I experience creativity at every moment of my life.

When meditating, allow ambient sound – fridge, traffic, neighbours, aircon – to swaddle and squeeze you into your inner silence. Like a monk pulling up his cowl.

Ego is the simulacrum. A passable stand-in for spirit but actually totally inauthentic.

do god's work

The longer you remain a faithful student the more immured against the teaching you risk becoming.

it is our unshieldedness on which we depend

make the most of what you have
it's generally sufficient

do up the top button

The grimmer life gets the broader the smile you need to produce to keep an even keel.

Each of us a wound, a gash, rent in the fabric of reality, through which something inexpressibly other seeps into this world from another dimension. It's our function as humans and as beings to bleed and to be aware of it, to communicate not with words or actions but with aware being, by being aware.

Spirit borrows from matter the perceptions on which it feeds and restores them to matter in the form of movements which it has stamped with its own freedom.

Spirit nags and niggles the establishment, whether that be depression, happiness, peace, worry. Always looking to break and make. The agent of change.

Unsettled by difference. This our optimal state.

the mind is emptiness or almost so

Relax into space; tighten into time. Spirit is that tightening.

beyond the state of experience toward the conditions of experience

Intuition operates in real time whereas intelligence takes a moment. Intuition is of the spirit; intelligence of the mind. Intuition puts us in things instead of leaving us outside.

Quiet mind must become our natural state, and for that we need to meditate.

Relax tension until springy and responsive rather than slack and impassive.

Peace of mind, presence of mind. These lend your actions a certain natural magic.

Wherever anything lives, there is, open somewhere, a register in which time is being inscribed.

'Bum in' is less a physical correction than a point of awareness. Sacrum as place of bifurcation: where sinking energy splits into the legs and where rising energy becomes the twine of spine. It is the most important bone in the body and we need to be aware of it all the time. Sit down into it and the heart lifts naturally.

Rise to the challenge of Earth, of gravity. Let it evoke a charge of spirit, a change of heart. 

the meditator rides time the way a surfer rides the wave

Science tells us we have slowly risen from the mud in a process of evolution. Religion tells us we are celestial beings who have fallen from grace, fallen into forgetfulness. These are the two realities – physical and spiritual – we marry together as best we can to make a life.

Nothing is more whole than a broken heart.

It's not a matter of personal preference but of where the work takes you. Follow where it will and don't get distracted.

Nothing more powerful, or active, than a quiet patient mind. It always finds its way to God, inevitably, inexorably, in time. Any other means misses the mark.

See clearly: clairvoyance.

The chest can only house a heavy heart if the bum sticks out.

being beyond beings we call transcendence

Being is ever blossoming out of itself, into itself. Solidity – any sense of knowing for sure – is anathema to this process. True being is absolutely groundless.

Listen to energy not to words. Be compassionate.

the energy-starved condition of our contemporaneity

Nothing more beautiful than a soft quiet mind. Nothing more ugly than a hard anxious mind.

Facing the possibility of failure and being okay with that. Befriending death.

spine plumb erect

I only wanted to do what made sense to my interior.

Ever aware of my amoebic flow through time.

Soften: let go the pain, anxiousness, suffering, and abide in the gentle becoming of your being.

The one who finds as his motivation the dynamism of his compassion has found the Grail.

It all hinges on a quiet mind.

Allow the teaching to inspire your practice and you will progress.