Ra Holidays!

Wednesday 4:15 p.m.
Just spent a wonderful hour and a quarter meditating in the lobby. Oh, how ra bliss has moved on again. Don't ask me how. Bugger all to do with moi!

I went to Waterstone's to get the auld maw another CD and I found what looked like a really good one: The Way of the Bodhisattva. Yes! Damnation, it was by the same boy as the other one! So the auld maw will have to take her chances with the Dorje Shugden worshippers.

In the Amazing Bloggy Church of RaBadBoyBlissheid the only belief is that you should have no beliefs. I believe in ignorance, confusion and befuddlement. Since I don't believe that I'm here the way I think I'm here, how can I believe in re-incarnation? If something does get re-incarnated, it certainly isn't going to be moi. Moi is ordinary, misconceived and yet unique. Of course, I'm not saying that some kind of rebirth doesn't happen. I'm not saying that it does happen either. It probably happens and doesn't happen at the same time, or simultaneously. In fact, it could be happening and not happening right now. What does it matter anyway?

The bit I really liked about the accounts of the rebirth of Tomo Geshe in The Way of the White Clouds by Anagarika Govinda was that the kid was recognised by his old dog!

They have a bodhisattva thing in Tibetan buddhism, of course, which seems to be about getting re-incarnated for the sake of flatheids. Re-incarnation is not really looked on all that kindly though. In a way, Tibetans don't seem to view life as being much use due to the suffering, old age, death, etc. Really something to be avoided. This is maybe why they seem to have such a low opinion of what goes on the womb.

Geshe Kelsang, the boy who's lost the plot, and Kalu Rinpoche seem to subscribe to the idea that foetuses are having a very moody time indeed. Like, when the mother drinks something hot, the foetus gets scalded, etc. (Wait till they're ripping you to bits with forceps; tearing you limb from limb!) Anyway, my understanding was that in the womb we were all in smack heaven, immersed in a sea of natural painkillers.

I suspect Onan The Bavarian and Ion might know something about this. So what's the story then?

I read a great line in a book by Nyaponica (?) Thera once. He's a Theravadin. He said that, "with respect to our friends in the North", if you reach a certain stage of enlightenment, you can't be reborn. I think I read somewhere else that if you wondered what rebirth was like, just look around you at the other folk on the bus in the morning. Did I write that?

Great article about Kyoto and Bali, global warming, etc in the Times today. The view from Georgia. The woman says they have no public transport. The trains don't run anywhere. Lee Ann, I think, said she'd never been on a train before and she's from Alabama. Have you ever been on a bus, Lee Ann? It all sounds weirdly primitive.

The world is funged, Jack! Totally funged, Hotboy. Growth, greed, consumerism, capitalism ... we ate the world!

Of course, if you believed in re-incarnation, you could get re-incarnated on a planet far, far away where everyone is a fully realised blissheid and there are no flatheids.