Meditation: waiting for the murk to clear and the spirit to sparkle.

If you truly listen, you will be amazed. You will realise that the space you inhabit is transcendental (of spirit) and that your mind, being (of) that space, is also transcendental.

We only become free when we let go. This is why relaxation is crucial.

The rational mind is not a creative tool (that would be the Imagination). Is all it can do is give a trivial reason for something that really has no reason. Like saying that the reason behind your existence is that your mother and father once copulated.

the disturbing
reality of

rampant
consumerism

political
corruption

moral
degradation

eating
away

at the
nation’s soul

FOUR CONDITIONS OF HAPPINESS

Life in the open air
Love for another being
Freedom from ambition
Creation

—Albert Camus

Before we can begin to even contemplate living at peace with each other we must first stop waging war on the natural world.

Alive in such a way that the world is always new.

Reduce the External as much as possible so that the Internal can expand into the vacated space. This is the Void. Empty of things but full of spirit. What Deleuze aptly called the Transcendental Field.

Give & take 

Give attention 

Take care

Letting go of everything: fear, anxiety, control, knowledge, expertise, opinions, values, judgements …

The modern mind grips things so tightly, with its anxious need to control, it reduces & strangles them. The enlightened mind is the opposite. Ever letting go, it shrinks to nothing, allowing the world to expand into fullness.

What fuels the noisy mind is the critical eye

Daily practice sheds anxiety, generates good energy, and gathers peace of mind. We are then better prepared to engage the world and give to the world.

soft eyes
invite

the world
rather

than push
it away

Imagine walking down the street minding your own business. You notice someone ahead looking lost. As you approach they politely ask directions. You graciously oblige. They thank you, exchange a few pleasantries, and head off with a new confidence. You continue on your way with a fuller heart. This is what life is all about: creating good feeling.

Anxiety, which is really just a need to know, inhibits the outflowing of your energy.

An empty depth

The Void

If you wish to experience levity, simply sit and watch the sunrise. You will realise that the sun rises not only over the hills, it also rises up through you.

The deeper the Form takes you, the longer you'll need to recover. 

Think of it as slow digestion or rumination.

Whenever I type    meditation    my spell-checker corrects to   medication

a modern episteme marked by disenchantment

soft  =  of energy

Reject the spiritual paucity of modern life.

An inner life rich enough to resist the need to conform.

Good people are givers.
Bad people are takers.

Avoid the latter.

Love does not make you weak because it is the source of all strength, but it makes you see the nothingness of the illusory strength on which you depended before you knew it.

—Léon Bloy

each foot a
stethoscope

auscultating

subterrene
grumbling

If the work you have decided to devote your life to is not making you a better person then you have either made the wrong choice or are working in the wrong way.

Fetishes of the Floating World

Scientists have found that sitting in meditation slows heart and breathing far more effectively than sleeping or relaxing on the sofa.

Once again I should like to start with the wound.

—Joseph Beuys

Would you rather be a sheep – a conforming subject – or a lone wolf?

The only time I feel lonely is when I'm in the wrong company.

Words cannot speak the truth. The best they can do is point beyond themselves towards the truth.

SINK & RELAX

First principle of Taiji. Both imply letting go (desist resisting). Let what needs to happen happen.

Physically: let go tension and gravity will pull the body down to ground.

Mentally: let go self (importance) and the mind will expand (recede) into the back/ground – the ground of being – the ocean of consciousness.

Spiritually: let sparks of vitality emerge from the ocean and animate everything (you do).

Develop a weather eye: an eye quick to observe coming changes (in the weather). A constant and shrewd watchfulness and alertness.

The incessant chatter in the head serves one purpose: to reinforce the sense of self, of separation.

Mind in dantian gets us out of the head and allows the self to slowly dissolve.

Natural mind is a site of awareness (connexion) rather than thinking (separation). The more energy you bring to that awareness the deeper you delve.

You pour coffee from the finjan. As you wait for it to cool, grounds slowly settle and steam swirls upward. A perfect image of gravity/levity. Central Equilibrium.

Mind in dantian is easy. Just imagine you're pregnant. The growing embryo, delicate & fragile, needs all the TLC (mindfulness) you can muster.

F O U R F O L D

g r a v i t y
l e v i t y
v i t a l i t y
m o r t a l i t y

If we identify with our ego – a particular, dissociated set of ideas – we turn the universe at large, and even our own intrusive thoughts and unwanted feelings, into oppressive tyrants. They become external factors that constrain and coerce us. If, on the other hand, we identify not with particular dissociated ideas but with consciousness itself – with that whose excitations give rise to all thoughts and feelings – we attain unfathomable metaphysical free will. This arises not from the power of the ego to control the world, but from the realization that we are the world.

—Bernardo Kastrup

wit

wise

wizard

(same root)

For Heaven's sake keep your wits about you

ROOTING

A plant
extends down

into Earth
only to

gain the
support and

nourishment to
reach upwards.

When we think to ourselves we effectively stop the world by stepping off the wave of time which we rightly surf.

an egg
coddled

over a
candle

The Imagination is everything. Also Awareness is everything. How can they both be everything? Because they are the same. Awareness & Imagination amount to the same thing.

life

liege

lord

love

(same root)

unfinished & untitled – provisional

The word religion comes from the Latin religare to bind. So for me a religious person is someone who has bound up every part of life in their belief; someone who has effectively learnt to pray unceasingly; someone for whom life is, in a very real sense, all prayer.

Knowledge is the death of spirit.

Science deals in certainties; poetry in ambiguities.

being
belief
be life

The following realization rivals in its significance a religion: that once the background melody has been discovered one is no longer baffled in one’s speech and obscure in one’s decisions. There is a carefree security in the simple conviction that one is part of a melody, which means that one legitimately occupies a specific space and has a specific duty toward a vast work where the least counts as much as the greatest. Not to be extraneous is the first condition for an individual to consciously and quietly come into his own.

—Rainer Maria Rilke

Dantian is our Centre of Gravity about which we cohere.
Heart is our Centre of Levity from which we pour forth.

Meditation: presenting (gifting) the fulness of your being

Fear & worry hold you back

Dantian is where the descending aorta branches into the femoral arteries.

Sacrum in where the spine branches into the legs.

Awareness and Imagination amount to the same thing.

When with a teacher worth their salt, just listen. What they tell you is neither hearsay nor opinion. It is something they have either discovered for themselves or verified for themselves through hundreds of hours of practice. To either bolster or counter what they say with your opinion is both disrespectful and denigrating.

Between belief & suspicion : both critical & trusting.

The Imagination is the golden pathway to everywhere.

—Terence McKenna

Most of what passes for change is merely rearranging the furniture. Real change is next to impossible, and only becomes possible with the injection of grace. Our job is to work with the change so that we don't revert to old ways.

Mind with the movement so the movement can change the mind.

L I F E C O M E S I N F L A S H E S

When Carl Jung was asked if he believed in God he famously replied: I don't believe, I know. He could say this because he had done the work.

Humility comes when it dawns that grace is necessary to make any real headway.

Give me a savage mind any day

Ego is the proverbial big fish in a small pond. It's main activity is reducing the pond to enlarge itself.

I still take GOD IS LOVE to be the most radical utterance. Not because it illuminates God but because it tells me what Love is.

God is the aether, the aethereal

Mind in Dantian is a natural state if we remain ever hungry. Never eat to fulness. In Yoga they recommend always at least 25% empty.

m=E/c²

(matter is frozen light)

Meditation keeps the home fires burning

The best teacher lodges an intent not in the mind but in the heart.

—Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces, 1996

To learn anything worth learning we need passion & discipline.

If we don't embody the teaching then we don't have it.

Anything worth learning always presents difficulties only surmountable by change.

Real style is not having a program – it's how one behaves in a crisis.

—Frank Auerbach

Bring the mind to bear and a solution will present itself. Eventually. This is concentration and this is thinking. Good thinking.

Central equilibrium
A delicate poise
Hovering at the Point of Failure

Everything is psychosomatic

That for which we find words is something already dead in our hearts. There is always a kind of contempt in the act of speaking. 

—Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols

Nowadays we are all control freaks. We only allow into our lives what we can control. But spirit is not controllable so is banished, and ends up working against us. How does this manifest? The diseases of the burgeoning bourgeoisie: anxiety, depression, autoimmune disease, cancer.

I usually wake in the morning at the first signs of light. Even when the slats are closed the light is felt. So I rise, sit on my cushion facing East, and meditate to the sun rising over the distant hills. A perfect way to start the day. Real communication is always heart to heart.

There are points in the body where two or more threads of energy tie together. These points need a presence of mind to keep the threads connected otherwise they tend to separate and then we leak energy and weaken.

Crown
Third Eye
Tongue / Palate
Throat
Thymus
Lower heart
Solar plexus
Dantian
Perineum
Heels / Ground
Big toes / Ground
Touching thumb tips when meditating

Each time we practice we remind ourselves.

Maybe unmind would be a better word.

Practise as though your life depends upon it. 

Actually it doesn't but really it does.

The Daoist mind equilibrates rather than chooses.

Mind in the head is agitated
Mind in the dantian is still

How on Earth do we focus the mind on the task at hand, except fleetingly? This is the problem that plagues every student that has ventured a tap of work. And the answer is simple enough: through the heart. It is not the mind that focuses the mind but the heart. The key to staying undistracted is a loving heart.

The only way the work will get done is if you fall in love with it.

L I V E D A N G E R O U S L Y

Float with me in the world of ether.
—David Lynch

Makes a good mantra.

At primary school, in our maths class, we were introduced to the concept of Infinity. I remember the teacher explaining to us that Infinity is an abstract concept invented by mathematicians, and it doesn't exist in the real concrete world where everything is finite. Spiritual work reveals that the opposite is in fact the case. Every natural thing is infinite — there being no end to its unfolding detail — and the finite is very much a man-made condition of his fabricated, unnatural world.

Learn to keep secrets.

In the interests of spirit, make a point of breaking the law at least once a day.

Adulthood is the abdication of ecstasy.
—Simon Critchley

Make a list of habits in the day that cannot be avoided:

Arising
Toilet
Showering
Dressing
Practice
Breakfast (making & eating)
Washing-up
Driving to work
Etc etc

Then look at each one and try to find a way of doing it better: more relaxed, more aware/mindful, more in the legs.

This is bringing the practice (in)to life.

F U L L O F T H E J O Y S O F L I F E

Meditation: learning to bear the lightness of being

THE WAY IT IS

There's a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn't change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can't get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time's unfolding.
You don't ever let go of the thread.


—William Stafford

Beginner's luck is a consequence of beginner's mind.
No experience; no expectation.

Only natural fibres next to the skin.
Cotton, linen, hemp, preferably.

G E T O F F Y O U R H E A D

The root is simply the spine driving down through the leg and into the ground.

The price to pay for the safety of the herd is a mind-numbing conformity.

If you wish to feel energy then you need to pay attention. Listen to the world worlding rather than the self selfing.

Middle-aged spread smacks of complacency.

Spirit excited but internally gathered

The only way to become whole & complete is to push into those areas you dare not venture.

Artificial Intelligence is an oxymoron

A drug is something that helps in the short-term but works against you in the long-term. Most of the time we spend drug-addled in some way or another.

Bourgeois = shallow rationalism + selfish materialism

the alchemy of living

LOVE HAS TANGENTS


Fidelity to patience
is the theme
I have kindled
behind every effort

The apogee
The same thing
A different way
Day after day

My love has tangents
not resolutions

Times have changed
Time has changed

Passing into one another
The surface of gestures
An amalgam
of deepening touch

Abandon ideology
Abandon self-loss
The wager is visible

There is no difference
Between the damned and the saved

Pardon
An inseparable face
Inside you


—Pam Rehm

primacy of the spirit

We are dealing in infinites & infinitesimals. Everything is infinite in the sense that it defies full description, and eveything is infinitesimal because we are.

Meditation: the performance of emptiness

We practice not just for our sake. It is how we serve the present. We produce peace and thereby make the world a better place, if only a little.

我不思故我悟
—顾明栋

I do not think, therefore I understand.
—Ming Dong Gu