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