One doesn't wait for a revolution. One becomes it.

—Carl Safina, The View from Lazy Point, 2012

Beware Buddhist drowsiness

MEDITATION

Mind sinks down to dantian
Spirit floats above the head

There is a foreign land within

資訊不等於知識
知識不等於智力
智力不等於智慧

Information is not knowledge
Knowledge is not intelligence
Intelligence is not wisdom

I am a little world made cunningly
Of Elements, and an Angelike spright

—John Donne

A passion for work

Estrangement from the mainstream

Practise like crazy : tap the Primal Well

Deep down inside what do we really desire? Death. The death of self or Ego certainly because that's the part of us that keeps us separate and ultimately unhappy, but also physical death because it's only then that the Ego truly is gone and the Spirit free.

When one keeps quiet, the situation becomes clear.

—Albert Camus

When I first came to Israel I tried psychotherapy. A few weeks in, my therapist (whom I admired) asked me to write a list of the five things that were most important to me. 

"Like what?"

"Like happiness, money, family..."

So I sat for quite a while thinking & compiling. 

When I had finished I handed her the list. 

"Now this is very interesting," she said, "Number one is Softness and number two is Intimacy, and here you are in a country where you are not going to find either..."

Once, wallowing in the doldrums, I asked my teacher why, despite all my work, I was making such little progress. He replied: Because you're resisting the teaching with all your might.

touching & moving

When someone you know passes mildly away, after a good, long life, it is no time for mourning. Just sit quietly, close your eyes, and remember their spirit. Its lightness & sparkle, humour & mischief, and you'll feel that spirit now soaring free.

Not a state, of affairs or otherwise, but an ongoing process. 

Not an object, discrete or otherwise, but a bundle of connexions.

So let us melt and make no noise…

No matter what the age declares of itself, no matter how absent of spiritual truth and tendency you operate, there is beneath the loquacious level that your rationalism inhabits a deeper level to your nature where intuitions and occult convolutions gather and where, even deeper, a darkness emanates the material of creation. It’s poetry that narrates and demonstrates that dark energy, an unconsuming fire in which our imaginations come most intensely to life.

—Peter O'Leary, Thick & Dazzling Darkness: Religious Poetry in a Secular Age, 2017

It's not what you do with your body that makes it qigong but what you do with your mind.

The most important thing in life is to go beyond where your talent takes you. This requires grace.

Depression is an excess of gravity / lack of levity.

Madness is an excess of levity / lack of gravity.

Turning allows us to give and take simultaneously. This is yielding.

Distraction & depression – the chief conditions of our time. (They are related.)

Let the Taiji carry you away. Otherwise you're going through the motions.

The teacher provides a Form.

We provide the content.

Softness is natural – of nature and of our nature – our natural mind. Ego, being an unnatural man-made construct, is never really soft, though it is good at pretending (lying).

If you so wish you can become aflame.

—Abba Joseph of Panephysis

Look softly – eyes unfocus and swivel inward.