"Once we are taken out of our selves and the generalities we habitually impose on the world, we can perceive the world in its intensity, as a proliferating expanse of differences that we necessarily ‘forget’ in order to live with distinct persons and things."

The Bourgeois Fallacy, Part 4:
Propriety is preferable to passion.

If a plan is a possible future designed by the mind then destiny is a future calling to and from the heart.

Self can only develop when the heart is repressed.

"there is no fixed subject unless there is a repression"

The aim of spiritual work, contrary to popular belief, is not the immortality of the soul but the eradication and death of the soul. Any sense of individuality or self – that which makes us feel substantial and important in ourselves, that parcel of surplus energy that we endlessly and narcissistically groom – must be purged in the excess of our giving, in our submission to a destiny that will put us to full use if only we stop resisting with the fantasy of being something in and for ourselves.

"This isn’t reading as containment, or rollback, but as extension."

The Bourgeois Fallacy, Part 9:
Consume and conform and everything will be OK.

Maybe burn out is good too: to rise from the ashes...

Only a broken heart will search for God, yet only an unbroken heart can find God. It's the looking, the journey, the quest that heals.

The Bourgeois Fallacy, Part 2:
I am entitled to the best of all worlds.

Re poetry: I really feel that if you can find a way of working that generates material, almost mindlessly, then, in time, you'll realise that you've said what needed to be said – you'll have gotten to somewhere new. Then it becomes like the Taiji Form: repetition; not to create replicas but to create (differences). Working generates the meaning.

Strange how the event of poetry says so much...

Regular readers of this journal, if there are such creatures, should realise by now that my take on Taiji is idiosyncratic, to say the least; and very personal. For me Taiji has always been spiritual – a path to God. And you can take that how you wish. The path is long, at the very least a lifetime, and precarious, fraught in fact. But sure. A struggle to escape the horizontal plane of quotidian existence – all those delicious curlicues of energy – and rise, or rather extend, through the feelings, to something above and beyond. Similar, in fact, to the computer games my daughter loves to play, where she's rushing along a path, being attacked from all sides, and she must use her wits to both evade those distractions and gather enough lives to keep her going on the next level.

The Bourgeois Fallacy, Part 7:
Depression is preferable to madness.

When performing Taiji the arms and legs create a sea of activity and energy from which the head rises like a periscope, calm and aloof, solely to scan the terrain and keep out of the way. If the head collapses down and forward into the fray then my Taiji may feel more involved and involving but it will lack virtue, it will lack that vital separation of heart and head.

Meaning is in the quality of the affection, and the extent of the consequent transformation.