In order to bring inspiration to people I must not be concerned with applause by the audience. I must stand erect, tall, and straight. I must be of a clear head and pure heart (no stimulants).

—Sonny Rollins, The Notebooks

we enter time’s fullness not by clinging to it but by cutting ourselves loose from it

Rid your life of journalese. The antidote is poetry.

I have always felt that I am an empiricist, that is, a pluralist. But what does this equivalence between empiricism and pluralism mean? It derives from the two characteristics by which Whitehead defined empiricism: the abstract does not explain, but must itself be explained; and the aim is not to rediscover the eternal or the universal, but to find the conditions under which something new is produced (creativeness).

—Gilles Deleuze in Gilles Deleuze & Claire Parnet: Dialogues II, Columbia University Press, 2007

Gravity & levity : stillness & spirit

Practice: time spent engaging the principles of Taiji

prais-
ing

this
mo-
ment

with
all

of
his
heart

gave
him
heart


—Robert Lax

time speeds up in the presence of levity
(time flies when you're having fun)

It's not what you do that counts but the passion – the enthusiasm – with which you do it.

time slows down in the presence of gravity
(a watched kettle never boils)

linked through social media yet disconnected from real people

OBSERVE SHABBAT

rest & worship

(gravity & levity)

Kindness creates connexion.

Soul is not essence, self or identity, but the sum total of all our connexions.

Practice is an act of kindness. Kind to your soul and kind to your world.

Progress in Taiji (and there must be progress otherwise you're not travelling a path, you're just standing still) is a slow (think decades) process of getting closer to the ground. Sinking, sinking, sinking, which requires stronger legs, more flexible hips, more open groin. When I encounter old students who have kept up their daily practice but without a teacher to spur them on (fire their spirit), this is what they lack: their Taiji is all upper body with no root.

shining eyes (levity) & a quiet mind (gravity)

quiet
is always
quiet
rejoined


(Thomas A Clark)

All spiritual work, internal work, real work, boils down to one thing: trying to quieten the mind.

When you meditate and watch the noisy mind, what's it actually talking about? It's usually grumbling: going through a litany of complaints and resentments in order to reinforce its sense of self-righteousness. This is what Nietzsche called slave mentality. The slave silently grumbles at the master – he's full of resentments. The master, in contrast, has a quiet mind because he doesn't need to grumble – everything is under his control.

Hegel had a master/slave story. The master decides he shouldn't have to do menial jobs anymore so he buys himself a slave to do them for him. Because the master is not working he is getting weaker as time goes by, and because the slave is working, he's getting stronger as time goes by. So there comes a point when the slave overthrows the master. Now Nietzsche's big insight is: okay this happens, the slave may overthrow the master, but he will still have slave mentality, he will still have the noisy mind.

And this is what we are basically. We are masters of our lives in the sense that we have enough income not to have to worry about starving and other unpleasant things – we appear happy & content – but we still have the noisy mind. And you can see that to break this is different than just having more money to make life more comfortable. That sort of excess doesn't help at all.

The difference really between the slave mind and the master mind is that the slave is looking at the world and desiring. It's the whole market economy – capitalism is the slave mind in action. The master wants for nothing, so he can be himself, looking out and commanding his world. The slave is always looking at a world that is beyond it, moaning to itself because it can't have it. The slave thrives on envy. That's what we need to do something about.

Become a peacemaker. Always see both sides.

輕 則 靈
靈 則 動
動 則 變

Lightness leads to agility
Agility leads to movement
Movement leads to change

It's been obvious for a long time now that we can't go on like this…

God breathes through us so completely...so gently we hardly feel it...yet, it is our everything.

—John Coltrane

動 中 求 靜
靜 中 求 動

Seek stillness in movement
Seek movement in stillness

There are many paths. What they all have in common is practice.

To some degree we are all crippled by fear, conditioning and culture. Endeavour to step aside from each. This is the work.

Nature is solar powered. Burning fossil fuel is our big mistake. Reintroducing all that carbon, which had been conveniently locked underground, back into the atmosphere was bound to cause global warming. We only have ourselves to blame.

move with restful cadence

Imagine how you'd feel if you ventured into this church. The mind would likely be stunned into reverential silence, and the heart lifted to the vaults above. Awestruck.

When we meditate with erect posture then we become our own church or temple.

On a wing and a prayer

ATTENTION

Sacrum and manubrium align allowing sacrum to sink and manubrium to rise

Seek knowledge — increase daily
Seek Dao — decrease daily

Meditation: the practice of emptying