Discipline involves doing things you don't want to do in order to improve in some way. If you do it joyfully rather than begrudgingly then you'll discover it's not so bad after all.

Meditation opens up an ever expanding present

It's not so much that students don't listen, but that they're incapable of hearing. To hear what is being said one needs respect & humility.

Spirit resacralizes the world. This is why it is so important. Without spirit nothing is real.

coincidentia oppositorum

 

What strikes me about people I encounter on a so-called spiritual path is just how shallow is their understanding & commitment. Their spirituality reveals itself as a mere adjunct to a materialistic lifestyle.

All aflame

The bourgeois/capitalist model is inviable for the obvious reason that it is unsustainable.

Antediluvian if not prelapsarian

Prayer is the place of faith. 

Where trust & love meet honesty & humility.

Sacrament & Sacrifice
Gravity & Levity

Heft & Grace

What is Zen?
Simple, simple, so simple
Infinite gratitude toward all things past
Infinite service to all things present
Infinite responsibility to all things future

—Gotō Zuigan (後藤 瑞巌, 1879–1965), reported by Huston Smith

Maybe God is evolving too

Thinking you know is the worst form of ignorance.

The human spine, which I have seen referred to as the greatest engineering feat in nature, is a miraculous machine for transducing the down of gravity to the up of levity.

Gravity is the force of attraction between material bodies and levity is the force of attraction between spiritual bodies.

Wake up (to) dreaming

Never stop delving
Otherwise the spirit dies

Meditation: killing time

What lurks beneath the Ego?

Is this not the question (quest) that most piques your curiosity?

Unmake the self

Meditation: savouring the scent of time

Eyes hooded 

Neither closed nor open 

Unfocused 

Gaze directed inward

Humility is a relaxed state of not knowing.

Meditation reveals the need for God.

Consciousness is of the mind; awareness is of the spirit. This is why it is possible to conceive of a pre-conscious awareness.

The subject matter of any film you choose to make is doubly important because the process of filmmaking is such a relentless, tedious, and difficult experience that you have to be sure the theme is something that will sustain your interest. No matter how tough things get, or how discouraged you may feel, you have to be sure that morning after morning you’ll wake up to a subject that still fascinates you. It should preferably be a subject you don’t quite understand, even better if it’s based on a question you don’t know the answer to. Then the making of the film, which ultimately winds through several years, can provide an answer, which will be the film itself.

—Francis Ford Coppola, in his introduction to Mircea Eliade's Youth Without Youth of which he made a movie

In your quiet moments, admit the deep sadness in the soul, and let it show you where you need to go.

Dr Chi stayed in London with John Kells for nine months in 1975-6, teaching Taiji in the evenings. On one occasion, during a break in class, he was leafing through a copy of Iyengar's Light on Yoga that happened to be lying around. John asked him what he thought and he replied: Relaxed body, hard mind.

The thinking mind protects us from the spirit world.

I pray God to rid me of God.
—Meister Eckhart

A deep understanding of the second commandment: don't let the mind close around a concept.

Only through practice do we go deeper.

Never believe your own publicity.

What the scientist calls energy is very much of the material realm, best expressed by Einstein's  E=mc²  showing that matter is simply condensed energy. What we call energy is of the spiritual/ethereal realm and is really awareness. Energy becomes revealed as you wake up.

Meditation: lingering at becoming's bleeding edge

Thinking fills the mind
Meditating empties the mind

Meditation: release your grip on the world and look inside

Only when the mind lightens can the body be its true weight and sink.

To live well is to work well
To work well is to live well
—Thomas Aquinas

Practice is work done for the Love of God

Energy is the capacity to do work
Work is the expression of energy

Be suspicious. Develop pre-conscious awareness.

We dull our lives by the way we conceive them.
—James Hillman

This is why the Imagination is crucial & vital.

Let the Form tell you how it wants to be performed. This is respect.

The word psychology means literally 'science of the soul' (the Greek psyche ψυχή means soul, not mind). Most cultures admitting the notion of soul (especially ancient/primitive ones) describe soul as a pool or lake in the lower belly. Indeed the word soul comes from the Old English sāwol which originally meant 'from the sea'. So the instruction: Mind in Dantien doesn't mean put your thinking mind in the belly but rather Connect with your Soul.

The student must work sufficient to internalize the teaching – make it her own – or forever remain dependent. And remember: dependence → depression.

Swimming the stream of consciousness.

When we think with words then the mind stays in the head but when we think in images then the mind fills the whole body. And when we think deep deep images called archetypes then the mind fills the soul.

Most of what the teacher says you would find out for yourself if you did a tap of work. Then, and only then, has it power.

Surfing the wave of awareness.