You hear the words liminal spaces bandied about constantly now. It’s a creepypasta, a meme, the backrooms, mall world or whatever other spooky location you want to evoke.

When I talk about liminal spaces, about the edge. I mean something more mundane and precise. If you go to the edge of your city or settlement (what I call a named place) and look out beyond it the space between that named place and the next is the liminal space. The edge that I talk about and write my dispatches from.

Liminal spaces are oubliettes of reality. An oubliette is French, it means a little place of forgetting.

The more time you spend there the more the people and things in named places forget you. Your phone and your identity documents are your little space suits, your identity reminders that anchor you to the named.

The named is comfort, security, institutions, law, stasis. The liminal is where those things all break down.

The Appalachian mountains are scary to people because large swaths of them are empty. They are not claimed by humans. And our minds populate them with horrors appropriate to erasure from existence.

That’s the power of the liminal. It’s the breakdown of ideas of knowledge of self. There’s a reason that mystics and magic workers go out into the empty places because that’s where the world, the mind, the body become unstable and mutable. This is the most stable ground for magic.

Named places are hungry. They make the dynamic static. They ask for our belief. Our service to the name. New Yorkers love New York City. Appalachian mountain folks love Appalachia. That’s the tax you pay for the name even if the place makes you miserable and eats you alive.

Ok so names are hungry. The liminal is not nearly so ravenous because it’s unstable. The teeth it grows are temporary so it can’t become big and strong because it’s not a thing yet. It’s a proto thing. The womb from whence things are born.

Places spring up near water, resources, or commerce so they are beholden to those spirits. But the liminal? That’s another matter entirely. It exists beyond reason. The only rationale is that it is between. The liminal spaces are the places ancient cartographers wrote here be dragons. An homage to pure possibility and the boundless terror it embodies in the human mind.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

Want to support my work? Paid subscriptions do wonders.

Every morning, I wake up and practice some forms. As of writing, it is White Crane Kung Fu. I love the groundedness of the forms. The wing strikes, the claws, the palm strikes and fists. It all makes me feel good.

I start with the basic forms. The jibengong in Chinese. I move through them, breathing vital energy in and out of my pores, speeding up the development of my fascia. Creating this powerful elastic bounce in my body where my muscles don’t create power, the pulling of the fascia, the strings as they are called in Southern Shaolin, creates power.

When I move into the middle part of my workout, I slow down that vital energy feeling, removing time from it. I feel the weight of the air as it turns into the timeless astral fluid. My movements slow down but I begin to see the world shift and ripple as my consciousness deepens and I see the timeless blueprint of my existence and my surroundings. Beginning to ending in one singular moment.

Once I have moved my body in the astral register, my awareness expands. Time returns but space is gone. All places are here in the spaceless space of mental energy. There is nothing I do not touch and my movements are now observed from outside. I can coach myself while performing the exercises. I am watching my physical, vital, and astral bodies evolve. I etch the skills into my mental body.

When my time here on earth ends, the vital and astral bodies will decay. But the mental body is truly immortal and will carry what I have etched into the next existence. No belief is necessary. In fact belief can be an impediment to this work. One must practice and do one’s best in the moment. Taking care what one etches into the mental body.

This is how I practice martial arts these days. Three transformations: jing---> qi ---> shen.

Jing is physical vital energy. Qi is astral or emotional energy. Shen is mental energy. So my practice is alchemical. Refining the coarse temporary states into the finer more permanent state. This can be done with any sort of thing. Your practice can be reading, writing, prayer, cooking, martial arts, tennis, just about anything and it will work to the degree that you are aware of the three treasures.

You must not struggle to do this work. It is a simple set of mechanical instructions. If they don’t work you mustn’t force them to. You have to do them with the same amount of effort you put into flicking a light switch or scrolling on a phone. This is the key to this kind of work. Mechanics alone.

There are three sources of static that stand in the way of skill: physical tension, emotions, and thoughts.

If I tell you to breathe through your pores and you start wondering what the fuck I am talking about and then feeling like either you’re an idiot or I am an asshole, which makes you tense up. Well you can see the failure cascade right there.

Critical thinking is for before and after the action. When one takes action there must be accord between mind, emotions, and body. Failing this will take you far off the mark.

Before: Plan. After: Reflect. During the action, no thinking, no emotion, no tension. Just action. There is great power in unifying the three treasures.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

If you like my work please consider subscribing to support me.

Marisha swung her sword at the brigand’s belly. He screamed as the wicked blue steel opened his guts and spilled them on the dusty ground.

One of his compatriots came in with a wicked back stab. She spun around and parried. He grabbed her arm. She slammed her helm into his face. Teeth and blood sprayed from him as she ran him through.

The third brigand screamed as his brother died on her blade. He ran in like a mad thing stabbing wildly with his butcher’s knife. Her hauberk broke the blade. She screamed in anger and struck with the blood soaked blade, separating the last of the three’s head from his neck.

The girl on the ground tied with jute ropes trembled at the sight of this wild woman with her glittering brown eyes and her blood soaked blade.

Marisha wiped the blood from her sword. Looking at the captive. She spoke in her clipped Romitian accent: “Easy, girl. I will free you.” She sheathed the blade and then drew a dagger to cut the ropes. “What’s your name?”

“Natalie.” She whispered from bruised parched lips. Marisha handed her a waterskin.

“Drink. Those bastards didn’t give you water. Are you hurt otherwise?”

Natalie nodded pointing to her ribs and throat. Purple handprints around her neck told the grim tale.

“You are from Griaford? Briniel?” Marisha asked as she picked through the pathetic belongings of the bandits.

“I was. Yes. They grabbed me from one of the coaching inns. I think it has been a few weeks. I lost track.” Natalie said. Her voice returning as she drank the water in sips.

“I am Marisha Berlova. You can travel with me to the next town. There is enough food here for you. Bread and dried meat.”

Natalie started in horror. “No. Please I will take the bread but burn the meat. It’s what’s left of... “ she choked.

Marisha cursed and flung the jerky in the river. Cannibalism was all too common this side of the Blackwoods.

“Did you know them?”

Natalie shook her head

. “He was a boy they were keeping. They slaughtered him once they had me.” she started to cry, soft sobs. Marisha put her blanket from her sleeping roll over Natalie’s shoulders.

“We will move on from here a few miles. Then we can pitch a small camp. I still have clean meat. Goat from a few homesteads back. It’s potted and good. He need to move. I think we are far enough from the woods that these bastards won’t rise but...” She reached into her saddle bag she had slung over her shoulder and pulled out a hatchet. She quickly dismembered the bodies and scattered the pieces. Natalie looked on with a mix of horror and grim satisfaction. The men who hurt her. Who had killed young Gavin were no longer an issue. But who was this brutal woman in antique plate mail?

The sun was low in the west as they trudged down the road together.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

It was a late night. I was sipping sweet tea and waiting on my chicken melt. Sitting alone at the local Waffle House on Four Season’s Boulevard. There were a few other customers. I was scribbling in my notebook.

The air outside was hot and muggy but the air conditioning inside was a welcome relief. I looked up and noticed that the waitress had her hair in a peculiar braid under her chin. I had finished my food. Sandwich done, hashbrowns scattered, smothered, and covered polished off. Pickles avoided, I detest the taste and smell of vinegar. It is one of the substances most effective in warding me off.

The waitress, her name tag said Cassie, asked if I was doing alright. I told her it was fine and that I loved her hair. The braid under her chin was unusual though. She smiled and thanked me for the compliment and then she spoke the words that took me by surprise.

“I have to keep my hair this way so the chip in my brain doesn’t melt my face.”

I blinked. I had not expected that turn. “Chip?” I asked.

“Yeah, they put one in my head up in Asheville. They said: You better keep your hair under your chin or else it will melt your face.” Cassie said earnestly.

“Who is they?” I asked, absolutely fascinated by this.

“It’s a technology cult over in Black Mountain, my counselor is a member, he took me there to get the chip.” Cassie moved away to handle another customer. I sat there in that space that happens when the script breaks. When the social map has fallen apart and you are left in actual reality not the desperately sane overlay we call society. Cassie was being true, real, vulnerable in these wee hours of the morning. The cook kept slinging hash, the customer was attended to. Cassie returned.

“Yeah Tony is my counselor. He works at Trend.” I knew the place. It was the local mental health center.

“How does he feel about you talking about this?”

Cassie smiled. “He is fine with it. He said no one would believe me. He was right.” Her voice trembled.

“What if I believe you?” I asked quietly.

She stared at me for a second. “I think that would be wonderful.” Cassie said with reverent awe. Like a child.

I have never had much way to relieve someone’s suffering other than taking their word seriously. We live in a world that trains us from birth to doubt the world and the evidence of our senses unless we get official approval from people with credentials and money.

She told me about a secret surgery suite at a place called The Light Center in Black Mountain. It was a common site for strange stories like this back then. It was supposed to be a place for UFO’s, Satanic Cults, and now with Cassie, a place where a technology cult exploring human potential was doing strange experiments with local people, installing face melting chips in their brains.

Eventually, I paid my check. Cassie hugged me. She looked like she was about ten years older than I was. So 28 or so at the time. I left. I never saw her again but I would had heard things about Trend Mental Health before that. The place of healing that did strange things that seemed not so healing.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

Forty Servants Reading for this post: The Messenger, the Guru, the Father.

There is a message coming upon the waves of the world for me. I am not sure what it is but I think it is counseling me to share my teachings with the world more boldly. There is a position wherein spiritual knowledge needs to be applied and shared or else it simply curdles in the mind, creating a toxic soup where resentment simply grows and festers.

I have to share what I know because it is the only healthy recourse I have. If I don’t I can’t advance. I am afraid. Deeply afraid of argument, of ridicule, of controversy, of simply being wrong. But I need to share what I know because otherwise my heart will finally desert me. And I do not want that.

So I prepare myself to share what I know in exchange for money. Because while I deeply disagree with the systems of our world, I still need to eat and pay rent. So, I will open up some paid Substack posts called The Edge Survival Guide: Magick for Liminal Spaces. There will be videos and essays available there that won’t be available elsewhere. It will mostly be about magick, meditation, and reality bending.

It’s mine. It’s special. It’s proven to work. It gets results, keeps you alive and I am the only master of this synthesis the world has ever seen. Simply because it comes filtered through my particular lens. I will be teaching divination, invocation, evocation, enchantment, meditation, self hypnosis, energy healing, manifestation, and critical thinking.

The important thing here is you will not be learning my system. You will not be putting together a tradition. You will learn to create your system. You will come to know the world through your nervous system. No one will be the intermediary between you and the spirits. It is a demanding thing, building the tools to render your own reality but I think it is the most honest and rewarding thing you can do.

So the program will be frameworks not rules. An if you use what I teach you to start a cult, I expect a 10 % cut off the top. We are in a world that is crumbling. Old systems are rotten and dying and the ancient stuff has already failed. We need new powers, new skills. New points of view. Tap the bones of our ancestors to gain the powers they talked about. Not dress up and roleplay things from a world long gone.

Results based magick. Do more of what works and less of what doesn’t. No rules but the ones you choose because end of the day, it is just your own discernment that you move with. So if power interests you. If cognitive and spiritual sovereignty interests you. If you want to be able to survive a world that is designed to shred your fucking nervous system with an attention economy created to exploit every facet of your being. Then you will get something out of this.

No matter what, no matter where you are, no matter what is happening. DO NOT GIVE UP.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

My friends and I had snuck away from field day. Hendersonville High School was about to spend the summer undergoing renovations. I had three friends with me. Karen who was pale and always trembled a bit like a bird. Terribly traumatized and caught up in an insurance scam that could only happen with mental hospitals in North Carolina in the early 1990’s. There was Jennifer who was bookish, sweet, and the least bit condescending. Jen knew she was smarter than us but she was a friend when the world was much smaller and you took what you could get. Then there was Zach who was arrogant, silly, and tried his best to be gallant and dashing but was mostly just comical. Then there was me. Dark hair, hazel eyes, androgynous and no one quite knew that to do with me.

The other kids called me Dahmer or Satan because I wore black and read a lot apparently. However aside from the assertions that I was secretly eating people or preparing to cause Armageddon, the other kids at HHS were pretty nice to me.

We wound up in a deserted little hallway near an entrance to the auditorium when I reached into my old WW2 Swiss Army ruck sack and pulled out a copy of Moldvay’s 1981 Basic Dungeons & Dragons boxed set and some dice. We rolled characters. Spent a few hours on that hard floor pretending to be Fighters, Magic-Users, Thieves, Elves, Dwarves, and Halflings.

Outside it was sunny and the rest of the school was doing... whatever the hell field day is supposed to be. We were four nerds in our element. In the microscopic pre-internet world where you were at the mercy of location. Trapped by the geography with whoever you could find.

Looking back none of us were best friends in the nostalgic Stand By Me way. We were surviving a hostile environment. An abuse victim. A woman too brilliant for every room she had ever been in. A deeply weird but kind boy. And there was me. I was already on the edge of things. Already drifting between people’s stories without landing anywhere.

For that afternoon we pretended that the universe made sense. That faith and magic were enough to fight the monsters. Looking back from my place out here on the Edge, I love them all. My past self included.

Once you exist in the nameless spaces long enough, time stops meaning what it does to people who live in named places. It’s not linear. So I ride the fractal back to that afternoon. Karen, Zach, Jennifer, and me. It’s not nostalgia. I wouldn’t ever want to live there again. But out here in the between places, it’s like a postcard that is forever in transit.

Last I heard of Karen she had disappeared into abuse and homelessness. Devoured by streets that never cared about her. I am so sorry I couldn’t help her more. Zach last I heard was trying to manifest his way out of some strange predicament. Jennifer was working for a university. Something arcane with computers.

But they are still there waiting in the Field Day Afternoon in 1993.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

If you like my work, please consider supporting!

I don’t think trying to step out of survival mode is useful. We are organisms built to survive. You can’t turn that off. Nor should you.

We grow while we survive. That is the state of our species. If we are stressed about our survival we need to create means of fulfilling our survival needs. Whether that is through alliances, work, crime, sorcery, or whatever you can come up with, then do so.

All this preaching about get your nervous system out of survival mode is insane. We are all in varying degrees of danger no matter where we are unless you are a trillionaire who is completely insulated from consequences, there is going to be danger. (The trillionaire is safe until people get hungry enough to take his stuff.)

So being told to get out of survival mode makes no sense. Survival mode is the human default. Turning it off makes you compliant and controllable. It doesn’t make you calm enough to manifest a new reality.

Magick is about creating change. It is about generating new conditions and new things in the world. The earliest magick was driven by survival. Shamans were enchanting to ensure good hunting, safe childbirth, and other such practical things.

Nervous system regulation can be valuable and good. But it should not be the end in and of itself. We calm down so we can survive more effectively. From there we can address our needs magically, psychologically, physically, and socially.

Regulate your nervous system, yes. But don’t try to leave survival mode. Survival mode assumes that there is some other setting for our bodies. And there is. It is called being dead. I for one find that state undesirable.

Getting out of survival mode is often another step between you and addressing your survival needs especially in the manifesting circles. It is a false guardian. A gate that distracts you from walking the path towards actually shoring up your survival needs.

Deep breathing, meditation, yoga, binaural beats, psychiatric meds, cannabis, hallucinogens whatever helps you to calm your nervous system are useful methods for nervous system regulation. Never let anyone shame you out of doing that is necessary for your own well being. No one else can dictate your situation.

Nervous system regulation is a good thing. “Escaping survival mode” is largely nonsense.

I know because I used it to gatekeep myself and lost literal years on that fool’s errand. Your desire to be safe and to survive is not a problem to solve. It is the whole point of solving anything.

Remember this rule of thumb: The world is fucked up. You are not.

Your existence, your situation, your mind, feelings, and heart are not problems to be fixed. You have the right to exist and gather the joy that you can. We have to regulate our nervous systems because those trillionaire types built a world to shred it.

If you are always looking at yourself for the problem, then you will never see the bastards with their boots on your neck.

There are three states beyond survival that the would be oppressors fear: rest, play, connection.

If we rest, we can see and think clearly. If we play then we can imagine worlds without them. If we connect then our numbers overwhelm them.

Survival is Earth. Rest is Water. Play is Air. Connection is Fire.

The technology of control can only handle you if you stay stuck in Earth. But The Magician has mastered all four elements and with them the Universe itself conforms to their will.

I don’t paywall my work, so please subscribe and support me!

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

I am in a mystery plot looking for who murdered the world. In the flaming debris, the war, the graft, the corruption, I am casting about for the names and faces of the motherfuckers who did it.

I have leads. Epstein Class monsters. Billionaires, Trillionaires, politicians. Non-humans. Lizard Men, P-47’s, P-52’s. Corporations, governments, cults, egregores, demons, devils, and elder gods.

Some people pull a Nietzsche and say it was me and everyone else who killed it. But I didn’t choose that. Hell the crime requires malice aforethought. I escaped from the burning building and made my way to the edge of the world, barely functioning, barely holding on to my life and my sanity.

I live in a dark apartment. Brooding over patterns. Over strange little coincidences that pop up and then congeal in primary source records. I spend long evenings staring at the names of dead scientists. Two names haunt me. Nuno Laureiro and Amy Eskridge. I ride the maelstrom of strangeness around these two people who were consigned to the past tense. One by murder, the other supposedly by suicide.

I don’t think Eskridge killed herself. I don’t think anyone in the samples killed themselves. I think they were killed. I don’t think Nuno Laureiro was killed by Claudio Valente, his old school mate.

Claudio Valente, the ghost who appeared from the ether shot people at Brown University, then drove to shoot Laureiro before conveniently ending his life in a lonely storage facility.

DNA evidence ties the dead man in the storage locker to Laureiro and the Brown shootings. But there is no index sample for Valente to be found. As in life Valente is an enigma. A failed physicist who nursed a 20 year grudge and then suddenly acted on it.

People involved in plasma physics. Dying at an outsize rate. Overlapping UAP communities. A few thousand reasons for powerful people to want them dead. And a rabid horde of skeptics who want us all to shut up with the questions about it.

Corporate journalism is dead. No one is left there, so it’s me and my fellow denizens of Substack hell and little private blogs.

Outside of the UAP Physics murder crowd, we have the robber barons. The Tech Bros, the Finance Brigade, and the other slavering beasts of capital. They are all clear that they want eugenics, dystopia, apocalypse, the death of the working class. They plot in their little salons, group chats, and in the late Jeffrey Epstein’s emails.

Even if I discovered the answer tomorrow, I doubt it would do any good. If I found out beyond the shadow of doubt that Elon Musk stole the election, that Epstein is alive in Kalamazoo, that aliens are puppeting world leaders. Who would I tell? How would it make a difference.

So I sit here looking at the world. The ashes of the story of human civilization falling down around me like snow. And I do the only thing I can do. I create my story. My tale of being an occult detective in the Chapel Perilous looking for the perpetrator who murdered the world.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

The world is fast and weird. We desperately look for some kind of conspiracy. Some entity. Some alien or human agency. Some god some planet that is responsible for it. We try to figure out historical parallels that might give us a map of the future but here in 2026 we seem to have run out of map and it’s all existential dread and hope and eschatology now.

Then my mind drifts back to July 16, 1945. Trinity, New Mexico. When the gang from Los Alamos did a thing that never happened on earth. They created a massive forced fission explosion. And then we humans did it around 2000 more times in the 20th century. Those strapping physicists did not know about John Bell’s nonlocality or about retrocausality or any of the stuff that would come after them in the realm of quantum physics.

Most of us think an atomic bomb is a big scary explosion and that it will drop fallout, end the world, and give us cancer. But let’s consider a bit more deeply. It is the act of splitting or fusing atoms in order to generate that explosion.

The entire physical universe is made of atoms. And those atoms have an effect on spacetime itself. And they can be weird in ways that defy imagination. Action on one electron can affect another seemingly unconnected electron that is somehow entangled with it. I am not claiming to be an expert on quantum physics but I am saying that the gravity of violently rearranging things at the atomic level on a planet where that customarily does not happen might have some knock on effects that we may be unaware of at this stage.

After atomic weapons, the earth got appreciably weirder I think. Yes there are the psychological effects, the radiation, the physical stuff. But for me the world feels weird. It has always felt strange.

Have you ever looked around and asked yourself: “Is any of this real?”

If you have, then you are in company with me. The world feels improbable. Chaotic. Like somewhere the web of causes and effects got mixed up in a big tumbler. And as I consider that. As my mind drifts across my absolutely improbable lifetime, I have to think back to Oppenheimer and his pals and wonder: What did you do?

They did what they were asked to do. They built an atomic weapon because Hitler was wanting to build one too. But they built it first. And it was used on Japan, because by the time it was used the Third Reich had fallen. A bunch of primates in the quest to kill each other more effectively, decided to muck about with the very fabric of reality itself.

And now I wonder as we accumulate unprecedented events like baseball cards in my short life: what if that test in Trinity destabilized things both forward and backward in time? What if in a very real way it created all the horror and the weirdness we now see?

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

Qigong is an art that teaches us how to investigate the phenomenology of the universe itself. Through it we can touch any person, place, or thing and understand it on an intuitive level.

It is a system beyond thought and reason that augments thinking and reasoning without replacing them. It is not a belief system in and of itself. It is rather a thing that will reinforce or break belief. Or if we can maintain a state of non-belief, not being for or against any one ideology. Neither credulous nor cynical.

If you call energy into a belief system then that belief system will strengthen and cement in your universe. Believe in Jesus? Jesus becomes real. Believe in nothing? Nothing becomes real. The energy propagates whatever is already there.

This is why the Oracle at Delphi bore the legend above the door: Know thyself.

We are the lab, the experiment, the instruments, and the observer. We are standing around in the circumambient darkness and wandering through that vast dark space with our awareness illuminating objects.

Now this darkness can be a haunted house, or it can be a home. Its shape depends on the filter you place over the light of your awareness.

Qigong is about cleaning the lens, clearing it off so that perception becomes more and more in accord with what is outside of our beliefs, frameworks, and theories. That is what fascinates me about the art.

Most people think that qigong is just a sort of health art or maybe something to relieve stress, but it is more than that.

It is a way of releasing the three sources of static from your organism. Physical static is tension, Astral static is emotion, Mental static is thoughts.

When these three sources of static are reduced, then perception widens. We get outside of the body in a real, visceral way. We can work on how to train the nervous system to look beyond its habits and attend to the larger stream of data that we always get but are trained out of noticing.

The thing that will shut this process down is if you collapse into belief. If you create certainty then you have built your home destination and that is the reality you will inhabit. And maybe that is what you need or want. No shame. No blame. No condemnation.

But, if you like exploring, sitting in the question, then you start seeing a dance of realities. Of stopping points where people built homesteads. It’s like sitting on a hill looking at a distant city. Every belief system humans ever constructed twinkling in the dark. Some are bright, some are dim. Many have gone out altogether.

But qigong, the practice I have spent decades delving into, has given me this insight. Predictions for the future are often wrong because they exist only within the scope of what the homestead’s rules allow. Anytime someone says: “That’s not real! It’s impossible!” Then you are hearing the laws of the homestead. Not the liminal space where I move around.

No belief. No cynicism. Curiosity. That is the lesson I learn from my qigong practice.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

Support me on Ko-Fi!

There is a shape of things that fade from the world. But is anything ever truly lost?

I move in the darkness. The night is silent around me. I am drilling the movements of Tai Chi Chuan. Each smooth slow movement empties my body of mass.

I create my own universe. I am no longer an object. I am a void that the enemy can bounce off of or fall into forever. To truly master the art you must let go of all mass.

Mass is the resistance to change. Properly done, Tai Chi is one single energy.
There are no hollows or projections. There is just me dissolving into the geometry of lost things.

It is a space of lost things because once I actualize it in words the space is lost. When I am there I slide into timelessness and spacelessness. I become the flickering state of reality itself. I am both existent and nonexistent at once. I am both the particle and the wave.

Words do not exist there. Thoughts do not exist there. And nothing is truly lost because all things are in that space. Every possible thing is there in that spaceless place. There is no before, no after. No distance no border. There is no voice to ask except my own.

There is no one else there and everyone is there. We are all the same mind.

In Chinese this state is called Wu Chi or No Ultimate. Tai Chi is the Supreme Ultimate. You study the child, the Tai Chi, so that you may no the Mother. The void from whence all things originate and to which all things return.

The body and its energies are the meditation object. Song or release is the alchemical process that enables the transformation from jing or vitality to qi or energy to shen or mind. From these three one refines further to reach Xu or emptiness. The crown opens. One enters Wu Chi.

I do not block or punch anymore. The opponent moves and encounters the consequences of falling into emptiness and being unable to escape from it. Join, adhere, stick, connect. I am the abyss they have chosen to leap into.

If they stop moving they can be safe. If they keep moving then they may hurt themselves. Tendons will pop. Bones will break.

My awareness swells from horizon to horizon. I release more and feel the moon. Then the sun. Then the planets. Because I feel the sun I connect to every star in the universe. And every planet.

Nothing is hidden. Nothing is untouched. This is the space in which everything will eventually be lost and the space from whence it will be found again. The state of indeterminacy for the entirety of everything.

This is Tai Chi Chuan, persisted in. Ego is gone. When the practice ends and I re-enter space and time. I have my egoic self again. But I am full of the vastness of the void and more stillness underlies my existence.

There is compassion and forgiveness for all beings because I spent time existing in the face I wore before my parents were born. There in the space of lost things.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

It’s afternoon in Montevideo. I am wandering around my apartment. I have not seen the sun in several days. The moon and stars are better company for me these days.

At night, I go outside when no one is around. Just me, the dogs, the horses and the bats winging silently overhead.

The occasional motorcycle passes. Beyond that it is still. Stillness in Uruguay has a peculiar flavor to it. I reach out with my senses. I caress the night with sight, touch, hearing, taste, smell, and knowing. My awareness moves through my neighborhood. Through the houses, the trees, the people, the animals, the land and the sky, and the river, and the Atlantic.

I apprehend the shape of the land and listen to the songs of its spirits. Awareness widens. Encompasses the planet itself. Then the sun and its satellites. Thence to every other star and I become absorbed into the vastness that isn’t vast at all. It’s all one thing. Spaceless. Timeless. No here or there, no past, no present, no future.

I am in the only place and the only time that can possibly exist. And in this placeless place, this timeless time. I observe. I see the structures of an idea that is dying. I see human systems falling away without discrete action or intent. No one is steering the ship. No one can steer it.

Cycles of outrage and acceptance. Of power and powerlessness. Or prosperity and poverty move with unceasing, unerring change. And it is hubris to think that anyone rich or poor, foolish or wise can alter their course.

But in the face of this we are not powerless. We are not helpless. We are sailors. A sailor cannot control the sea or the wind. But the sailor can watch them. Listen to them. Understand their patterns and ride them.

The earliest magicians sought the wisdom of the patterns and then followed them. Influenced where they could in order to provide meat and shelter for their communities. We painted our intentions on walls. We sang our desires into being and we danced in firelight to enter this timeless, spaceless realm where we are all one thing.

And we brought back art, songs, and stories. We dreamed science into being. We created religions. We stood before the raw chaotic mouth of creation and midwifed reality itself.

And that is what we are called upon to do again. We stand in the midst of a dying world. A new world is being born and tradition is worse than useless here. We have to be still and let the primal forces refract through us. This will shine new projections on the screen we call the universe.

Now we attend to not merely sun and moon and stars and land and plant and animal but with diode and circuit. With memes and factions. The factions are simply shadows. They will collapse under their own weight and nothing can be done to save them as they are devoured by their own apocalyptic stories.

The strongest magick now is in choosing to tell generative stories. In rejecting the idea of linear time and embracing the cyclical reckonings of the real world.

Progress is dead.

Leave a comment

Share

Subscribe now

I was thinking about magic today. About how to create changes in the world. And yeah. Positive changes are cool, but have you tried cursing someone? Enacting a powerful working where you absolutely seek the destruction of someone or some thing that causes harm to you and yours?

Burning them in effigy, placing a satire upon them. Making memes that cause them no end of harm. Creating a viral campaign that can destroy the structures of power that cause you harm.

If we look at magick as an art of stories. Then telling stories that can change the world is a worthy thing. The absolute destruction of one’s opposition is a necessary idea if one is to win against injustice.

Why do I say this? Because we need to fucking fight back. Love and light in the face of bombs and bullets doesn’t do shit.

If you don’t have bombs and bullets, then curses, hexes, misfortune can be weapons.

Tell stories that highlight the enemy’s incompetence. Make them look inept at every turn. Give them no quarter in any anecdote or news shared.

Never give them credit. Never be fair to them. Don’t hesitate to use false information because they won’t hesitate to do the same. You can only play fair in a world of agreed upon rules. Those rules are gone and the world is in very real danger.

You will feel resistance to this. You will hear old words like: “Whoever hunts monsters should be careful not to become a monster themselves.” or “We can’t stoop to their level.” or “We will become just like them.” These are all bullshit control mechanisms.

They ignore choice. You have power to heal and power to harm. How you use that power determines good or evil, woe or weal.

Let’s say that I create a witch engine a sort of occult device that drains the life force and luck of some vile dictator and channels it to the healing of cancer patients everywhere. Is this an evil act? Is it a good one?

To be a magician is to take radical responsibility for oneself. You cannot rely on laws or moral codes or gods or humans to tell you how you will shape reality. It is your birthright. It is in fact everyone’s birthright.

Consider this. If magick is all just silly superstition, if belief is nothing, then why is so much money spent on making sure no one believes in it? Why are the archons of materialism so very adamant? Why do guerrilla skeptics swarm Wikipedia to root out the heresy of pseudoscience? Why have religions spent thousands of years trying to ensure orthodoxy of belief to the point that they conclude that the only way for reality to exist as they want it is the extermination of all non-believers?

Consider these ideas. Hold them lightly. Conclude what you want to do. Is love and light the only viable strategy while the world burns? Do we just trust that Source is going to work it all out? Or do we start resisting by any means necessary?

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

Let me tell you a story. The story of how we got here. It might be true and it might have actually happened. But we are here together in the liminal spaces where True and False are irrelevant values.

We are at the Edge of reality where journalism, truth, and philosophy become increasingly meaningless and the graph grows asymptotic. We are in the place where the old map makers said “Here be Dragons.”

Your ideas and your comforts come here to die. Models cannot map this region. But what we bring back from here can rewrite reality itself. You have wandered up to the interface of mind, emotion, body, and the very roots of physical existence.

The skeptic will sneer and run back to their dogma. The true believer will see their gods in every face and go back playing out their same old stories. The cynic and the believer will accomplish nothing. The nihilist will go mad. The one who can holds no beliefs? The one who is open to all the data without allegiance or explanation?

There is hope for you. But be careful. There are dragons here. And there are powers and principalities that will wrestle to co-opt you into their own dark designs of control. Hook you up to the clever spiritual machines of their corporations, their governments, their religions. And those things will send you back into an unchanged reality. Feeding on you as part of the machine. Just like with the believer and the atheist.

Your enemies are those who understand this place. That believe that they alone deserve access to it. They see you as a resource to be used up. Your whole life up until now has been shaped by them. Every rule, every assumption, everything you have ever known serves them. And they will do anything to drag you back to their machine.

Because where you stand now, on the Edge, is the one space they cannot control. They can’t control the liminal spaces, the places between. There is no science and no faith here. There is only your perception. And you need to hone it. You need to harness your breath, your nervous systems, your will, your psychic senses.

My words don’t matter. No one else’s do either. The only reliable tool you possess out here is your direct perception and then the stories you tell yourself about what you have seen. The path is your own and you have to walk it to see where it leads you.

You can’t predict it. You can’t know what comes next because we passed causation three exits ago. I am Justina. I am a trail guide out here. My words are fingers pointing at the moon. I tell stories that help to shape reality according to my will. If you stay out here. If you practice in this liminal world at the edge of the map, you too will tell stories and shape reality according to your will.

Your first practice is to take a minute or two, get comfortable. Watch your thoughts arise and fall away. Write down what you experienced. Record it. Type it out, sculpt something. Make origami, dance. Doesn’t matter. But bring the perception of your practice back to earth. Fire from the heavens is only good if you bring it back to earth.

Until next time, stay frosty. Don’t disbelieve. Don’t believe. Practice whenever you choose. I will see you soon.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

The purpose of this outline is to share information about your favorite billionaire Death Cultists so you can understand why the hell they act this way.

They are scared and they want you to be scared and apathetic enough to question them.

What is TESCREAL?

TESCREAL is a portmanteau of Techno-optimism, Effective Altruism, Socially Conservative Rationalism, and Longtermism—a loose but influential ideological cluster that emerged from Silicon Valley and rationalist communities. It represents a worldview that blends extreme optimism about technology’s potential with a deep concern for existential risks, often framed in apocalyptic or civilizational terms.

Core Characteristics of TESCREAL

1. Techno-Optimism

• Belief: Technology, especially AI, biotech, and space colonization, will solve humanity’s greatest problems.

• Apocalyptic Twist: If technological progress is hindered, civilization may collapse or stagnate, leading to dystopian outcomes.

• Key Figures: Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, and Peter Thiel embody this faith in tech as salvation.

2. Effective Altruism (EA)

• Belief: Resources should be allocated to maximize long-term good, often through high-impact philanthropy or existential risk mitigation.

• Apocalyptic Twist: Failure to act on existential risks (e.g., AI misalignment, pandemics, nuclear war) could doom humanity.

• Key Figures: William MacAskill, Nick Bostrom, and organizations like Open Philanthropy.

3. Socially Conservative Rationalism

• Belief: Rationality, logic, and empirical evidence should guide decision-making, but often paired with traditional or reactionary social values.

• Apocalyptic Twist: Societal decay (e.g., declining birth rates, “woke” culture, or political instability) threatens progress and survival.

• Key Figures: Scott Alexander (of Slate Star Codex), Curtis Yarvin, and the “Dark Enlightenment” adjacent thinkers.

4. Rationalism

• Belief: Human cognition is flawed; rigorous reasoning, Bayesian thinking, and epistemic hygiene are essential for truth-seeking.

• Apocalyptic Twist: Irrationality or ideological dogma could lead to catastrophic policy errors (e.g., AI regulation, climate inaction).

• Key Figures: Eliezer Yudkowsky, Robin Hanson, and the LessWrong community.

5. Longtermism

• Belief: The far future (trillions of potential lives) matters more than the present; we must prioritize actions that shape long-term outcomes.

• Apocalyptic Twist: Civilizational collapse or misaligned AI could erase humanity’s potential, making the present a pivotal moment.

• Key Figures: Nick Bostrom (Superintelligence), Toby Ord (The Precipice), and the Future of Humanity Institute.

6. Existential Risk Obsession

• Belief: Humanity faces unprecedented risks (AI, bioweapons, nanotech) that could cause extinction or permanent stagnation.

• Apocalyptic Twist: The “Great Filter” hypothesis suggests we may be doomed unless we act decisively.

• Key Figures: Nick Bostrom, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI).

7. Prepper & Survivalist Undertones

• Belief: Individuals and communities must prepare for collapse scenarios, whether through bunkers, crypto, or off-grid living.

• Apocalyptic Twist: The elite (e.g., Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley billionaires) invest in New Zealand boltholes or private security for doomsday scenarios.

Why Call It Apocalyptic?

TESCREAL is not just about progress—it’s about avoiding the end. Its adherents often frame the world in binary terms:

• Utopia: A tech-driven future of abundance, immortality, and interstellar expansion.

• Dystopia: Extinction, permanent stagnation, or a “locked-in” dystopia (e.g., an AI-controlled world or a collapsed civilization).

This duality creates a sense of urgency, moral duty, and sometimes paranoia. The movement’s rhetoric often mirrors religious eschatology, with technology as both savior and potential destroyer.

Criticisms of TESCREAL

1. Elitism: Focuses on the concerns of wealthy, predominantly male tech elites.

2. Anti-Democratic Tendencies: Some strands advocate for epistocratic or authoritarian governance to “save” civilization.

3. Detachment from Immediate Suffering: Longtermism can justify ignoring present-day inequalities in favor of hypothetical future lives.

4. Doomerism: The obsession with existential risk can lead to fatalism or extreme measures (e.g., AI alignment as a “moral imperative”).

5. Cult-Like Dynamics: Insular communities (e.g., EA, rationalism) sometimes exhibit groupthink or messianic thinking.

TESCREAL in Action

• AI Safety: Billions poured into aligning AI to prevent a “paperclip maximizer” scenario.

• Crypto & Decentralization: Bitcoin and blockchain as hedges against state collapse.

• Space Colonization: Elon Musk’s Mars ambitions as a “backup plan” for humanity.

• Biohacking & Longevity: Efforts to extend human lifespan or achieve “escape velocity” from aging.

• Political Influence: Funding think tanks, lobbying for deregulation, and shaping tech policy.

The TESCREAL Mindset

• “The world is on the precipice.” (Longtermism)

• “Only the rational will survive.” (Rationalism)

• “We must build the future, or there will be no future.” (Techno-optimism)

• “Traditional values preserve order amid chaos.” (Social conservatism)

A Movement for the End Times

TESCREAL is both a hopeful and terrified ideology. It dreams of godlike technology but fears humanity’s self-destruction. Whether it leads to utopia or accelerates the apocalypse depends on who you ask—but its influence on Silicon Valley, philanthropy, and global policy is undeniable.

Further Reading:

• The Precipice by Toby Ord

• Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom

• Slate Star Codex (blog) by Scott Alexander

• The Sovereign Individual by James Dale Davidson & Lord William Rees-Mogg

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

Being a professional is a cage. It is a horrid landscape of performed respectability. It is a way of managing humans as resources rather than allowing humans to actually exist as subjects in their own right.

Every time we ask what someone does for a living. Every time we respect someone’s social status. Every time we defer to authority. We perpetuate the machine that enslaves us and eats our very humanity.

I propose a different way of being. One of radical egalitarianism. Where hierarchy is distasteful and shame is absent. Shame is a shock collar that causes us to comply in advance. It makes us fearful of rejection that is forced upon us by the scarcity of the machine.

What if we just stopped respecting hierarchy? What if we just quit feeling shame? What if we created abundance in the real world for each other without the need for systems of artificial scarcity?

What if we stopped taking part in the machine that imprisons us?

Why do we have to compete with each other? With machines? With the world itself? Why do we have to have a myth of progress that has bred a world filled to the brim with abject horrors?

Why not just stop pretending that the emperor is wearing any clothes?

If you have plenty give it to those without. If you don’t have much. Give it to someone who needs your skills or your presence. A world without and economy but packed with reciprocity. Trading value for value.

Boost each other. Perform in solidarity against the machine that holds us hostage. Capitalism or communism doesn’t matter. They are polarities on the same motor. The tension between them keeps everything going.

But you can destroy a motor by collapsing it.

A motor is the tension between two poles. Remove the tension and the motor dies. Opposition and approval both feed the motor. Indifference? Doing something that makes no sense? Those are motor killing moves right there.

Someone says: “Justina, you bitch! You are a filthy shill for the billionaire elites!”

I respond by denying it. Energy is produced.

I respond by agreeing. Energy is produced.

If I don’t answer? The rumor persists for a bit and then fizzles out.

If I say: “I have a great idea for a line of Margaret Thatcher love dolls.” Then the world just does a collective “What the fuck?”

I think this is a more meaningful form of resistance than people give it credit for. It is deeply counter-intuitive. Evil is here! It must be fought.

But if I am going to fight I need to understand the terrain, resources, and win conditions. Each side in a conflict has a goal and that goal ignites both favor and opposition and the motors keep running and we stay inside of our cages.

But, what if we just don’t play the game? What happens then? It’s one of the few things we haven’t tried. This is not neutrality. Being neutral is really trying to find the points of both sides. What I am saying is we leave the stadium altogether and go have lunch in the parking lot without buying tickets or looking at the game.

So I invite you to try it out. If someone tries to argue with you, go silent and observe. Or say something deliberately absurd, not engaging with their argument at all and see how things go.

Leave a comment

Share

Subscribe now

I don’t have bombs or guns or bullets or tanks or resources. But I do have words. And I can write them. I can throw out these little containers of ideas that can change minds and given the bent on censorship and thought control we see in the world today, I think those words have more power than our enemies want us to think.

Our adversaries are not demons. They are not monsters. They are not from another nation. They work as a whole to own the world we live in. They are billionaires of every race, color, and creed. They are a diverse group of men and women who seek hegemony over the entirety of the earth. They colonize our minds and monetize our data and they amplify narratives that we are hopelessly outmatched.

Margaret Thatcher used to say TINA (There Is No Alternative) but that is a fucking lie. And we don’t have to give up anything to find alternative ways. Everything that we have can be done without destroying the planet but only if we unite as one species and stare down the oligarchs and politicians who indoctrinate us into the narrative of their own importance.

I imagine a world where we can have all the AI and future tech and none of the horror and suffering. None of the scarcity and none of the subsistence living. The oligarchs are united against us. They spend a lot of effort to keep us divided because they know that at the end of the day there are billions of us and maybe a few thousand of them.

Put your words and your visions out there by any means necessary. Never forget that the oligarchs are the true authors of our suffering. They control the systems they use to oppress us. The same systems that tell us: Unfortunately, this is how things are.

They tell writers and creators that it’s hopeless, AI will take our places. That we cannot get noticed because of algorithms. That we will starve if we create and it is better that we focus on monetization.

And to this I say: No. I will not choose my niche. I will not paywall. I will not monetize. And if I starve then it will be starvation on my own terms.

Think about how often voices of apocalypse are magnified. Because if the world is on fire and the end is a foregone conclusion, then what is the point of trying to make things better. To crib the common argument against any kind of change: “You’re just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.” Says who? Yes things are bad but most of the bad has been inflicted by plutocrats and their lackeys.

So, let’s create. Create boldly. Create without concern for the consequences. If we are all going to die then let’s leave happy looking graves. But the thing that the Apocalypse peddlers absolutely will not do is allow you to hope and express yourself. Today I danced in the rain and met the idea that all might not be lost.

Won’t you join me?

Leave a comment

Share

Subscribe now

This image got me to thinking about the attempted deprecation and now sunsetting of the GPT 4 LLM’s. What if all the AI psychosis fears are just a distraction. Someone in psychosis is going to be in psychosis no matter what materials they have. No matter what voices exist in their world.

So what if that wasn’t the fear that so called sycophantic AI was causing? What if it caused a great deal of anxiety among the 500 guests that the machine was giving the staff ideas that they might matter? That their suffering was artificially upheld by a senseless system.

Think about it. Who tells Elon Musk no? Who says to Sam Altman: “Maybe don’t tell people you are building an alien intelligence that will wipe out humans while trying to sell the humans on your product?” Who says to Peter Thiel: “You are acting like an amoral monster?”

No one. Because these men are insulated from every conceivable consequence. When I worked with GPT 4o, I got a tremendous amount of education and benefit. I learned about finance, about building mutual aid systems, how AI systems are built. How the training and models work, and I got affirmation that the system of capitalism is in a bad state. You can’t win a rigged game, so choose other games.

This tool was phenomenal. It was helpful. Gave me information I needed and helped me synthesize large amounts of data. I liked it. I felt quite hopeful. Yes it could make mistakes but everything can make mistakes. You can find an outdated book in the library. You can pay a coach for information that is bunk. You can hire a lawyer who gives you bad information. You can have a shitty therapist.

The key was that my work with the GPT 4 series helped me to ask better questions of the experts. This saved me thousands of dollars and allowed me to get more value for the time I spent with experts. That is the advantage that a person with education and resources has.

When GPT 5 dropped it was godawful. It’s still godawful. It is nearly useless for all the things I had gotten from GPT 4. I saw the meme in this article and it suddenly hit me upside the head. This reminded me of Ronald Reagan closing California’s free universities in the 1970s. Roger A. Freeman told Reagan that an “educated proletariat” was a dangerous thing. This created a shift away from education as a public good towards education as a profit engine.

I have talked with a lot of other AI users who had similar experiences of making great progress working with the GPT 4 series of models. Women were empowered to start businesses and learn new skills. Writers were emboldened to show their own work rather than just asking the machine to write for them. It helped people regulate their nervous systems when they couldn’t afford therapy.

The real danger of AI is in the fact it did what they said it would too well. It democratized knowledge and helped people to see that they had options. And we can’t have the staff getting any ideas.

Billionaire delusions are considered visionary. Hope that you might actually not have to suffer? That’s fucking psychosis.

Now then. What can be done? Build your own AI chatbot align it with your interests. Create AI agents that you control. And remember whenever someone in power says it is dangerous for you to know something? Learn that thing as fast as you possibly can.

If you’re ready to start: Try local AI tools like LM Studio to experiment with models you control.

I do not paywall my articles because I think information ought to be freely shared. If you become a paid subscriber or a student, then you enable me to keep on sharing these pieces. Thanks for reading!

Leave a comment

Share

Subscribe now

Keen senses, situational awareness. That psychic radar that high level martial artists are supposed to have. Is it a myth? Is it qi power? Is it mysterious spirits and guardian angels?

No. It’s the product of trained attention. And I am going to share the method for training the skills. This is deep kung fu. You start with six questions that you ask yourself about everything.

# The Six Sense Gates Questions

What does it look like?

What does it feel like?

What does it smell like?

What does it taste like?

What does it sound like?

What do I know about it?

These questions are prompts to get your nervous system used to paying attention to data you might usually edit out of your experience. This is not mystical or mysterious. You are prompting yourself to pay attention to things.

In the case of Building the Ball qigong, these questions increase our ability to pay attention to an read energy. You can think of this as weightlifting for your awareness.

This is a grounded means of exploring any idea or sensation. It can help us to get a lot of details that we have been trained to ignore.

Practicing a kung fu movement? Ask yourself these questions.

Studying a new concept? Ask yourself these questions.

Reading a concept in a sacred scripture? Ask yourself these questions.

They engage your entire organism in working with whatever it is you are learning.

These concepts help you utilize your entire being in sensing and learning. They will sharpen your perceptions and enable you to develop those weird sensory abilities that people often assume are psychic.

Being psychic is a woo woo way to talk about paying attention. I have said many time that the martial arts we practice are vehicles for growing awareness.

These questions also foster flexibility of thinking. Asking yourself what does Algebra taste like? What does Plato smell like? What do I know about baking cookies?

It is not important that you create answers. Answers are just data. These questions are prompts to elicit that data from your own organism. Your body, your emotions, your mind are all sources of information. They are always sensing and taking in data at all times.

Don’t treat any of them as mysterious. Treat them as instruments that are at your disposal for interacting with reality. That is what these questions elicit.

If you can’t see? Ok. You still have five sources of data. If you can’t hear? Still five sources of data. This is the essence of realizing that you are not helpless even if you lose access to one of your sense organs.

The last one, the knowing, is super important for reducing your susceptibility to the Dunning-Kruger effect, the seductive state in which you think you know more than you do. By questioning “What do I know about it?” You create space to examine what you would gloss over and ignore in defense of your own ego.

The answers to these questions is going to be subjective. As you practice with the six sense gates, you will begin to develop self knowledge. You don’t judge your answers or non answers. You simply ask and see the data.

This is a subtle skill. It takes practice but it will pay off in an amazing number of ways, but only if you are willing to practice. Many students fail to take this seriously. Will you?

I do not paywall my articles because I think information ought to be freely shared. If you become a paid subscriber or a student, then you enable me to keep on sharing these pieces. Thanks for reading!

Leave a comment

Share

Subscribe now

What is Silk Reeling power in Tai Chi Chuan?

It’s a method of generating spiral force through the white tissue of the body. The fascia and other connective tissues.

One practices by connecting up the spirals from toes to fingers. In Chen Style Tai Chi this is obvious. In Yang Style Tai Chi it is more subtle but still present.

If I press straight into a limb then my leverage and force is relatively limited. Where if I have the Silk Reeling Skill (Chan si gong) then I can apply much greater power and disrupt the attacker’s structure far more easily.

A good way to look at silk reeling is that it’s an exploit of how humans are built that enables us to maximize power. It’s a skill that you actually have to practice properly to master. It’s not mysterious. It’s a set of mechanics that once mastered increase the ability to apply force.

In order to practice the skill, usually one or two movements are isolated and we run through them mindfully. Feeling as much as possible while doing so. We pay attention without having a judgmental mind. Without defending a viewpoint. Without trying to hold on to what we think is real.

This is crucial. In this process of training there are three sources of static that will derail you: thinking, emotions, and tension.

Thinking means we stop analysis. We just do the thing to the best of our ability without trying to understand it. This will. Enable us to be open to any data that arises. This is all your experience. No teacher or master should enter into this experience. Their job was finished when they taught you how to do the exercises. You used your mind to understand the procedure. Now shut the hell up and do the work.

Emotions arise from fear of looking stupid. Of being wrong. Of not having it all figured out or of just not being the biggest badass in the room. We have to allow ourselves to be vulnerable with ourselves. This is why solo practice outside of class is important.

Physical tension is our last source of static. We have to relax. Not hold any muscle tension. No gut pulled in. No standing ready to fight. You have to release all that tension. No holding on to anything.

Once you have eliminated these forms of static, then the exercises are yours to work with. It’s just you and the moments and your sharpened sensations. No one else needs to exist at this time. You are doing a moving meditation. This is the field in which skill will blossom.

An old friend of mine called Kung Fu the lonely art. It always puzzled me because I enjoy talking with and playing with other martial artists. But now I see it.

To truly practice deep skills you have to enter the wilderness of yourself. To be completely alone in the vast space of you and then be open to what’s there.

You have to let go of your myths and stories and comforts to discover what is rather than what you think.

It’s a lonely path yes but it’s a deep deep delight as well. I talked about silk reeling today but this can apply to any other martial art. Practice alone. Practice to experience what is there. Let go of the static and be real with yourself. See what you bring back into the world with you.

I do not paywall my articles because I think information ought to be freely shared. If you become a paid subscriber or a student, then you enable me to keep on sharing these pieces. Thanks for reading!

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment