To use the mind to work on the mind.
How stupid can you get!

One of the most difficult (and indispensable) assets to be developed in this game is a mind that works for you rather than against.

Simplify the life
Free up some time
Quiet the mind
Pray to God


A sacrificial presence

Develop intent. Use the mind to focus and direct energy. Like a magnifying glass focusing the sun's rays into an intense scorching point. This requires practice.

Meditation is prayer without words.

When Niels Bohr was knighted by the King of Denmark in 1947, he put the Yin-Yang symbol in his coat of arms with the Latin motto  contraria sunt complementa  – opposites are complementary.

The spirit should be excited (tail out) but internally gathered (bum in).

(This is a principle: working everywhere at every level.)

We don't take time off when doing our life's work.

Go so deep into yourself, you speak for everyone.

—Galway Kinnell

MEDITATION

Sit with a vertical spine, relax & be patient.
Let gravity & levity do their gentle work.
Nothing worthwhile can be forced.

In dealing with others, take nothing personally. In dealing with the world, take everything personally.

—John Kells

A listening ever prepared to be changed by what it hears.

This book title says more about meditation than many a long treatise:

LINGERING
WITH THE
SCENT OF TIME

(In the East sessions are timed by burning a stick of incense)

Relax the mind and feel levity as fine champagne bubbles tickling up you.

Do not let possessions possess you.

Most have no interest in Truth. They believe what they want to believe to justify and preserve their way of life.

Relax the body and feel gravity as a soft rain trickling down you.

Polite society requires we hold ourselves in (restraint, self-control) so much so we don't realise we're doing it and take that state as our natural state. But this is the tension we need to let go if we want our Taiji to be anything more than polite posturing.

An ethics

first & foremost

of balance

The barrage of words in the head is a firewall we erect between us and experience.

Meditation: letting go of all accretion until we are simply pure consciousness

A mature & developed heart is brimming with love & gratitude.

Live gently, frugally & compassionately.

The word frugal (not given to excess, temperate, sober, simple) comes from Latin frux meaning fruit. The sense of living within one's means and within the planet's means. And this is my major beef with the bourgeoisie – we consume far far more than our fair share.

Relax and you will find God, or, maybe, more accurately, God will find you.

Learn to stretch time

Learn to slip time

Meditation: coming back to base

Each stage we hope is the last – just another foothill