Softness

Softness, as we know, is non-resistance. Allowing things to be and to develop not as separate entities or events, with us as passive observer, but as parts of ourselves, because everything we witness is part of ourselves – is taken inside in the act of witnessing. This is yielding. The enemy of this perfectly natural process is the thinking mind (which is also the fearful mind – the mind only thinks because it is afraid). The thinking mind cannot experience, it can only think (fear), and as such it constantly filters the present moment through the gauze of past experience and future fantasy, reducing and distorting it enormously. The thinking mind records the moment or the event or the experience so that it can replay it and repeat it at its own leisure, because one thing the thinking mind cannot do is operate in real time – it is far too slow and disconnected. But this is like analysing a painting or a photograph of a scene instead of experiencing the scene itself: it completely misses the fine texture of the experience – that part that cannot be faithfully documented. This is the softness of the experience. It is the part that does not resist and so cannot be recorded. It is elusive and will only present itself to our softness, which is why hard people just cannot comprehend that it exists at all. So when touched by a soft person there is no flow of energy – no passage of information – no communication as such. Instead I am transported – I am taken into a different reality to my own. And this is why we push hands. It isn't to test each others rootedness or yielding ability, it is simply to wake up to the fact that each of us is a unique creature – a living entity with a unique heritage and a unique place, and that that uniqueness is in the softness of the person, not in their mind or body or spirit.

Spirit in the service of the mind is willfulness – it cuts through life like a machete through the jungle – carving a path but reducing the environment enormously.

Yielding

Yielding, for me, has nothing to do with evasive action. Yielding is simply letting the other person into my body. Then through that body into the Earth. To let the other in I must make space, which means I must leave, or at least my tension, my self-image, my thoughts, ideas, opinions, criticisms, my noise, my sleepiness, my shit, must leave because there simply isn't space for both of us: I block their flow into and through me. It is my spirit that both invites – entices – and then clears the way through. It does this by calling to the spirit of the other.

First rain

For the love of it.

Photo: Yotam Arad-Adar

Tension

Chronic tension in the body/mind becomes an anchor – a reference point – about and around which we construct ourselves. This is why when such tension finally releases we feel lost – flailing in space – and must reinvent ourselves – refind ourselves.

The Religious Fallacy

That it is noble to suffer. This is such a difficult one to cleanse from the system because it is everywhere: our societies and cultures are built on it. Governments, religions and teachers control people with it. It tells us that we are not good enough and must constantly strive to be better. It encourages a completely wrong relationship to everything, especially time. In fact, in a way, it creates time. Without it future and past need not exist.

No time.
Like the present.

Robert Grenier

Perfection

I used to be of the opinion that “perfection” was a man-made conceptual ideal, rarely, if ever, attainable or realisable in practice. I now see that perfection is, in fact, the norm; it is imperfection that is man-made. We see what we are – we see ourselves – our mind – reflected everywhere. It is what we bring to the world, and what we imprint on the world. To make it perfect we just need to say Yes, and nothing else.

There is a beautiful phrase I heard somewhere: If I am afraid it is because I see something that isn't there.

Abandonment of a phenomenal centre constitutes the only 'practice', and such abandonment is not an act volitionally performed by the identified subject, but a non-action (wu wei) leaving the noumenal centre in control of phenomenal activity, and free from fictitious interference by an imaginary 'self.'

Wei Wu Wei, aka Terence Gray

the meaning is not behind the words but in the words as they unfold, and refold, in the ear

Charles Bernstein on Louis Zukofsky

Central Equilibrium

If you want discipline then try disciplining yourself to be happy.

Photo: Leah Lev, China