Don't let trauma define you. Neither your own nor your clan's. And Ego is a trauma – it's how you conceive and therefore construct yourself when spirit / connexion has withered.
I was suddenly
required to be
like my soul
Throughout Chinese history, there have always been people who preferred to spend their lives in the mountains, getting by on less, sleeping under thatch, wearing old clothes, working the higher slopes, not talking much, writing even less—maybe a few poems, a recipe or two. Out of touch with the times but not with the seasons, they cultivated roots of the spirit, trading flatland dust for mountain mist. Distant and insignificant, they were the most respected men and women in the world’s oldest society.
—Bill Porter (Red Pine), Road to Heaven, Counterpoint Press, 1993
Spirit as first principle – arkhe ἀρχή – apeiron ἄπειρον – chaos χάος – substrate – dark energy.
Wisdom is like water. It resides in the lower meditation field, the belly. The head is for thinking; the heart for willing and desiring. The belly is the place for wisdom and contemplation. We ‘return’ to Dao’s gestating presence from this inner womb of intuitive awareness.
—Master Zhuang (quoted in Michael Saso: The Teachings of Daoist Master Zhuang, Oracle Bones Press, 2012)
Ultimately, awareness / consciousness / spirit are the same.
Every artwork worth its salt is created with spirit and can only be understood with spirit.
Fascism is a refusal to admit critique.
Pain is a challenge to be in the world differently.
To free the spirit you must first unburden the heart-mind.
In a nutshell, the work allows you to transition from control – the way many of us seek to organize our lives, to trust – the foundation for creating a fluid relationship with time.
—Paul Loomans, I've Got Time, Watkins Publishing, 2024
Listening, as ethics and ecology
The slowness of a hunting animal on the prowl.
G r o u n d b r e a k i n g
Trying to find a better way of being in the world. Not morally better, necessarily, just more awake, more aware, more responsive.
The teacher's words are meant to inspire practice, not replace it.
There is a saying in the martial arts: Timing is everything. And timing (the ability to thrive in real time) is always a matter for spirit. Spirit doesn't just find the right moment, spirit makes the moment.
We all have a world view and we believe anything that reinforces that view and we deny or disregard anything that contradicts it. We create the world before we encounter it.
The only real religion is animism. All those that have come since (except maybe Daoism, which isn't really a religion) are far more to do with social control than truth.
Confucianist in public but Daoist in private.
Brief habits — I love brief habits and consider them an inestimable means for getting to know many things and states, down to the bottom of their sweetness and bitternesses. My nature is designed entirely for brief habits, even in the needs of my physical health and altogether as far as I can see at all— from the lowest to the highest. I always believe that here is something that will give me lasting satisfaction—brief habits, too, have this faith of passion, this faith in eternity—and that I am to be envied for having found and recognized it; and now it nourishes me at noon and in the evening and spreads a deep contentment all around itself and deep into me so that I desire nothing else, without having any need for comparisons, contempt, or hatred. But one day its time is up; the good thing parts from me, not as something that has come to nauseate me but peacefully and sated with me as I am with it—as if we had reason to be grateful to each other as we shook hands to say farewell. Even then something new is waiting at the door, along with my faith—this indestructible fool and sage!—that this new discovery will be just right, and that this will be the last time. That is what happens to me with dishes, ideas, human beings, cities, poems, music, doctrines, ways of arranging the day, and life styles.
Enduring habits I hate. I feel as if a tyrant had come near me and as if the air I breathe had thickened when events take such a turn that it appears that they will inevitably give rise to enduring habits; for example, owing to an official position, constant association with the same people, a permanent domicile, or unique good health. Yes, at the very bottom of my soul I feel grateful to all my misery and bouts of sickness and everything about me that is imperfect, because this sort of thing leaves me with a hundred backdoors through which I can escape from enduring habits. Most intolerable, to be sure, and the terrible par excellence would be for me a life entirely devoid of habits, a life that would demand perpetual improvisation. That would be my exile and my Siberia.
—Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 295
Spirit is a scalpel that nicks open a vein, allowing energy to flow.
Civilization is the enemy of spirit and so the enemy of soul and so the enemy of man.
Performing Taiji, you are not an object moving, you are the movement, the energy.
