"As you get deeper and deeper, it gets more interesting."

Most of us seem to subsist as overfed yet undernourished automata: chronically exhausted and periodically frazzled. Both safe and sorry, we have traded in the edge of our warrior spirit for a cozy comfortable existence. We are the worst form of slaves: willing slaves, without even the energy to imagine an alternative. And this is the tragedy: our imagination is now refuge rather than forge: a place to flee rather than a place from which to create vibrant viable alternatives.

Get back to Earth. The sorceric imperative. A path of intent. Mind investing life. Animism.

"Silence is so accurate."

An overwhelming desire for new connexions. This is what should get me out of bed in the morning, not some awful sense of duty.

"When you don’t know what to do, do nothing. Sit and wait. While you wait, work on yourself. This is art."

Tense shoulders effectively shorten the arms and make the hands more easily controlled by the manipulating mind. The hands then become excellent tools for moving things around but lose their true function which is to transmit energy through touch. When the shoulders relax the hands will feel distant and alien – as though they don't belong. And in fact they no longer do, not to the same mind anyway.

Only one thing holds back the good student: force of habit.

Artists are people driven by the tension between the desire to communicate and the desire to hide.

Become insignificant. This is a process of losing the substantiality of self, and becoming instead a bundle of excitement and fascination: spirit.

Leave your thoughts and sink into your energy, and try not to drift back into the mind.

Back in 1980, against the advice of all who knew me well, I started a PhD. After doing all the necessary work I got bored and, like many research students, struggled to write the thesis. By 1984 I had pretty much resigned myself to not completing. Then I got a bossy girlfriend who convinced me that if I didn't finish I would spend the rest of my life regretting it, so I buckled down and wrote up. About ten years later my teacher took me aside and we had a little chat:
"Finishing that PhD was one of the worst decisions you ever made."
"Why's that?!"
"Because it's put you on top of something you may never climb down from."

Every thing represents a vain attempt to express an ever fleet and fugitive truth.

Some things have to change. The most fundamental being the way I relate. I can't expect life to come to me. I must learn to stalk.

Understanding changes as my energy improves with the work.

Happiness is not a right or an entitlement but an engagement. It's what I feel when I forget to be unhappy.

Empty the mind and fill the heart.

Meditation is a time to sit still and let Nature come to you. The image of Milarepa or St Francis sitting in the forest, singing their silent songs, surrounded by listening animals.