Tuesday, 22 July 2008

The End is Nigh Again!

Tuesday 22:48 p.m.
I am bound in law to inform you that this is a police surveillance blog. If you have landed on this blog after googling "Hotboy" or "Hotboys", the address of your computer has been noted. Soon a cyberspider will be searching your hard drive for indecent images, moving or still. If any of these images appear to be of minors engaged in sexual activity ...

All personalities and events contained in this blog are purely fictional. Any connection with anyone alive or dead is coincidental. No animals have been harmed or eaten in the making of this blog.

I've just put on the noise blockers for the first time in a week. Peace, perfect peace. Remembrance of things past. I usually wear them when I'm typing and meditating around here. I'm either typing or meditating quite a lot. No wonder the birds sounded loud at the Samye Ling!

I started this bloggy malarkey because I wanted to keep track of the agents who were bound not to want to represent any of my wonderful writings. Cross them off. Also, as a way of venting about ra bliss.

It's all changed now, hasn't it, Jack? I got the agent and now you can't write about what's happening to the writings, it seems. It doesn't help for publishers to come across a book that's been rejected a million times already. Dearie me. Then I had to run away from the schoolgirls. I liked the name of the last blog. It amused me. I was sorry to leave it.

And there's no point in telling the flatheids about ra bliss after you've been going on about it for a couple of years. If you're happy walking around with your head up your arse, what can I say except well done.

In order to disappear further into the deep recesses of the bloggysphere, in the next blog I will not be able to call the too dumb to meditate Flatheids, or Evolutionary Tails, or Them Prehensiles. Neither will I be able to refer to ra bliss, or ra heat, or ra ecstasy. I will have to say bye bye to Hotboy, and HotboyMadyamikaSurfingTheOceansOfBliss. Or, HotboyMadyamikaS.O.B., for short.Dearie me.

I'll email the usual suspects: Mary Queen of Scots, Mingin', Ion, Onan the Bavarian, the sensei and the red goddess with the three heads and the four arms. According to the statscounter, about seven returning visitors land here daily. Anybody wanting to follow the blogerations should just email me and I'll send them the new address.

I'm taking Jack the Spam Robot with me.

Let's get the hut into the rowing boat, Jack. Where are we going, Hotboy? To an island far, far away, Jack. Way over the horizon.

Row, row, row, your boat, gently down the stream. Merrily, merrily, merrily, live is but a dream!

Well, wasn't that nice?
When you die, are you going to get reincarnated, Hotboy? Certain habitual tendencies may emerge as time goes on, Jack.

Ra Homecoming!

Tuesday 5:11 p.m.
Feel quite sane compared to the last time I got back from the Samye Ling. So how about an overview?

Although the deity yoga juju was working much better over the last two mornings (particularly this morning), I still didn't get much heat. I guess over the seven days I was there, I must have done about sixty hours meditating. Well, I wasn't doing anything else. Meditated, took a wee walk, ate the meals, read a book, and that was about it.

Two rather attractive and probably single women tried to engage me in conversation, but I had to make my excuses and leave. Over the last couple of days I started noticing the bosoms of nuns! Maybe that's when you know you're getting desperate.

No, Hotboy, you getting desperate when you start fancing the mannequins in the shop windows! Lots of women flashing their wobbly bits up Princes Street as I waited for the 29 bus to take me home.


When I was tired and not actually sitting, I had to sometimes put up with an avalanche of unpleasant, aggressive diatribes, interior monologues and commentaries directed against perfectly innocent people I know, and sometimes know and like very much. This is like the old wounds rising from the deep just to let you know that there's a lot of work to be still done there.

Sometimes I felt exhilerated well beyond the usual. So not quite the steady pleasantness one would like, but highs and lows.

I think the Venerable Big Indian might be the happiest person in the world.

Everything was well worth it for ra bliss!!

Monday, 21 July 2008

Ra Last Samye Day!

Monday 9:15 a.m.
This is the last day of my visit to the Samye Ling and the sun is beating down out of a clear blue sky.

Once when I was down here for a week in the summer, I felt real joy and true happiness. That hasn't been the story this time, but I don't suppose you should compare. This has been a wee bit like the heavy training boxers do at the start of a training camp. Lots of road work, heavy bags, getting totally knackered, etc.

Since I have been using these machines and drinking coffee, the "holiday" has cost me about £20 a day. For this you get the beautiful (wet) surrounding countryside, the use of the temple, and a chance to meditate every day with as close to a buddhist saint as I'm ever going to get. If you wanted a real holiday and had a motor, you could use this as a perfect base to tour the south west of Scotland. The food of course if beyond fabulous!

The meditation with the lama, which has just finished, was pretty serene. Today the back temple will be free and this is better for me since I can do tai chi sets in there and stand on my head, etc. I'll ignore the sunshine and go up there just now.

I've a feeling I may abandon this blog and start another one soon. I'll see after the conference this Saturday.

For almost a week I've done nothing bad excpet eat a few puddings! There have been thought crimes against my deep dear friends, some school teachers and other useless basturns, but that's about it.

I guess I'll go and meditate for the next three hours then!!

1:12 p.m.
There's a wee island in the middle of the river which you can reach and keep your feet dry if you're a good jumper. I've spent all morning on this island and I'll spend a lot of the afternoon and maybe some of the evening on it. This is a real treat!! You face upstream and just fix on some stone protruding from the river ... it's like heaven on earth this place if you want to meditate and the sun shines. And it is a glorious day!! Such wonderful times I have spent on that wee island. I'm away back now, but I may have to waddle due to the fabulous lunch I've just had. With another pudding! You've got to live on soup and home made breid to really really appreciate the grub here.

Sunday, 20 July 2008

Ra Magic and Mystery In Tibet!

Sunday 1:15 p.m.
I've just finished reading Magic and Mystery in Tibet by Alexandra David-Neel. What an utterly fabulous book!! Had to finish, of course, with a picture of the Samye monastery in Tibet. I think this place is called after it.

I think I've read it before, but most of it was fresh to me. I don't think I'd have written Light in the Dark if I hadn't read Alexandra David-Neel. Excellent writer, great subject!

If everyone had a granny like Alexandra David-Neel the world would be sorted.

The joy and the sacred happiness have been checking in over the last couple of days. I'm sure I could get this juju working if I only spent more time down here. Still ...

The name of the game is non-self and emptiness, of course. And there are hundreds of different ways to play it. A long list of alternatives is given in the book I've just mentioned. I think the Tibetans like deity yoga because it combines method and wisdom in one practise. The method being meditation/contemplation/concentration and the wisdom being emptiness. I think if you ever get into non-self and emptiness it should look like oneness or wholeness in flow.

Time on this machine is running out. The man who made the delicious lunch is sitting beside me. I'll now have to go to the tent to recover. Raspberry crumble and double cream! I ask you!

Saturday, 19 July 2008

Ra Tummo, Tumo, or gtumo!

Saturday 1:14 p.m.
To master the art of living at the Samye Ling, one must be able to eat gigantic lunches and not fall over into a comatose state for the next two hours. Voila!

As far as techniques for raising inner heat as concerned, I think I've come upon these in three different places. The first time was in book by Anagarika Govinda (Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism, I think). The the main one in The Bliss Of Inner Fire by Lama Thebten Yeshe. Last night I read another account in Magic and Mystery in Tibet by Alexandra David-Neel.

In the first one, Govinda says you concentrate on the navel symbol till it's hot and them move it up to heat the rest of you. Heat is, I think, supposed to follow the mind eventually. So concentrate till it's hot. The whole enchilada seems to be in The Bliss of Inner Fire, but Alexandra David-Neel's segment adds a bit. She gives a couple of different methods.

When you read of the lengths adepts in Tibet went to accomplish raising inner heat, you realise that here in chilly Jockoland with your bad habits and your jobbie, etc., etc., etc., you shouldn't stand a chance.

I became interested in this because Lama Thebten Yeshe says if you can melt the symbols and explode the inner fire, thus garnering the four blisses, when you meditate in future, you should start at the first of these blisses i.e. absolutely amazing bliss.

This should mean, Jack, that as soon as you close you eyes you're there.

You might not have to close your eyes.

My sister had a wasting disease for most of her life and died young, unable to accomplish much of even the everyday stuff. This might have helped me make an effort in this life.

I think you should develope your human beingness as much as possible.

Grizzly, one of my brothers, told me once that he'd make more money out of selling goats' milk than I would out of writing (he had two goats) and he was correct! This does not mean that trying and trying to become a better writer was a waste of time. Getting dosh from writing (if it's what you want to write), is the least of it.

Everyone knows you shouldn't be trying to achieve bugger all in meditations, but I thought if I could go for this inner heat juju, other benefits might accrue anyway. And so they have.

Are you not going to get there then, Hotboy? Who knows, Jack? I might have a long life and still have my marbles for decades yet. But I'm not going to be able to achieve it in the next couple of days. But I will have experiences!! I surely will!

I got up in time for the lama meditation today and sat in the temple afterwards for another three hours. Thank God I'm not a complete flatheid, Jack! Ra bliss!! Oh ra bliss, ra bliss, ra bliss!

Everyone's granny should be like Alexandra David-Neel. I thought I'd read Magic and Mystery in Tibet, but I'd only read the first part. I don't know why. How appropriate to have taken a book with descriptions of tummo in it!! Synchronicity or what!?

Two nice quiet orientals were here the other day. They were sitting in the back row of the temple at night as was moi. Then they both started doing this weird prostration stuff. They did this about ten times. If you want some time off your jobbie and a few days in the hospital, you could have a go.

You sit on your heels with your knees together (my right knee has already dislocated at this point!). Then you curl your toes down so your feet are no longer flat to the ground and stand up. No hands, no nothing. Just stand up. Then come down again and lay your brow on the ground. Ten times.

What a nice couple! Both obviously well matched with common interests. I wouldn't have picked a fight with either of them after I saw them doing that!!

One of the stories in the book is about a joe called Karma Dorjee. Take off the last "e" and that's my buddhist name. He wanted to do the Short Path so he could fung over folk who'd been rotten to him due to his lowly birth.

Of course, I always looked down on the progeny of the evil bourgeois since most of them are sweetie eating, ignorant morons completely lacking in anything you might describe as character! Even the smart ones are too dumb to meditate!!


THIS POST WAS WRITTEN BY JOHN McKENZIE WHO HAS TEN BOOKS ON KINDLE. THE ONES CLOSELY CONNECTED WITH BUDDHISM, MEDITATION, BLISS, VASE BREATHING, TUMMO, ETC., ARE
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Buddha-Big-Bad-Wolf-ebook/dp/B005AIP7QE/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1319126284&sr=8-1
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Buddha-Big-Bad-Wolf-ebook/dp/B005AIP7QE/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1319126284&sr=8-
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Land-Demon-Masters-ebook/dp/B004XJ7OEO/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1319126424&sr=1-1
http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Real-McCoy-ebook/dp/B0054H4MO4/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1319126490&sr=1-1

Friday, 18 July 2008

Ranother Friday One!

Friday 8:15 p.m.
And on the third day ... tons and tons of ra bliss! Tons of it. The emanating ... everything is working a lot better, but I'm still not into ra heat zone. Also, I'm getting very tired. Often I remember leaving here and getting home feeling exhausted. I think it's worse with the tent really since you don't feel as inclined to have a wee lie down apres luncho, etc. I may go home on Monday, but I'll see if I revive a little tomorrow. Easy to sit though. Easy peesy! The weather has been bogging, of course, since Tuesday. No chance of meditating up by the river.

The Makhala Prayers between 4:30 and 6 p.m. It's the gongs, Jack! The gongs! They made me deaf, you know. (Does anyone know what that's a referral to?) The bells? The bells? Not to worry.

The last hour in the temple this evening may be a little special. I saw the sun go down behind the hills last night about 8:30 p.m. Good meditation time!

Ris Addiction!

Friday 10:18 a.m.
Thought I'd gotten over my addiction to blogging, but it seems not! Eight bunny rabbits were visible round my tent last night as I was getting ready to crash out.

You have to get the four symbols on your chakra points visible somehow and blow the heat/bliss up from one to the other in vase breaths. It goes from the bottom one to the next one, then back to the bottom one, then up through to the third one and so on. By the time it gets to the crown chakra, your head blows off.

I'm still not getting a lot of heat.

After three nights in the tent, this is for me!! I feel totally settled. I've decided to try to give up achieving stuff and just let it flow as it will. When I get back to the Planet of the Flatheids I will meditate less and do some more writing and just try to enjoy my life. This place is so good for me and I'm so happy to be here!!!

Thursday, 17 July 2008

Ra Samye Day2 or 3

Thursday 9:31 a.m.
The rain wakened me up a few times last night, but the tent is a wonderment compared to the last one.

Time just flew yesterday.

There's an assemblage for putting your scrolls and photies on in the temple. Everyone has one in front of them. Mine collapsed into its constituent parts just before the lama arrived for meditations this morning. Much hilarity from the monastics. I should have said: All compounded things are subject to dissolution ... but I only thought of it a later! What meditations I will have today!!

Alexandra David-Neel's book is completely fascinating although I'm sure I've read it before.

Wednesday, 16 July 2008

Ra Samye 1(2)!

3:55p.m.
I sat in the back temple this morning for three hours without moving off the cushion (or opening my eyes). That's only happened once before. Got up just in time to stand on my head, do a dog pose, twist and tai chi set before lunch.

Sent a postcard to the kiddo saying if she couldn't beat three hours in this lifetime that was me won!

Much enjoying Alexandra David-Neel's Magic and Mystery in Tibet. She has to have been an amazing josephine! Here's what she says about death.

"The profane generally imagine that Buddhists believe in the reincarnation of the soul and even metempsychosis. This is erroneous. Buddhism teaches that the energy produced by the mental and physical activities of a being brings about the apparition of new mental and physical phenomena, when once this being has been dissolved by death."

Well, there it is! Wonder what metempsychosis is?

Ra Samye Day 1

Wednesday 9:22 p.m.
I wasn't going to blog .... It was great coming down here yesterday in a motor car with good company.

'Whoever you are, I've always relied on the kindness of strangers'. Tennessee Williams.

The sun shone yesterday as well and I had a great easy slide into the major juju coming up. But it started a bit late this morning since I slept in till half eight, which is a Rumple Stiltskin number around this place. So I haven't done any meditations at all so far. What a time to give up! Wrong place! But it looks as if it might rain a lot today, so what else is there to do but go try to emanate as a deity. If anyone had told me twenty years ago ... Here comes ra bliss! Here comes ra heat! I've got 45 minutes left on this machine, so I'll be back.

Monday, 14 July 2008

Ra Samye Again!

Monday 5:10 p.m.
My bags are packed and I was thinking of going to the Samye Ling this morning, but I'm glad I didn't. My tooth fell out. I had an amazing meditation before I cycled off to get it glued back in this afternoon. The effects of the vase breathing have just done another somersault into the great oceans of ra bliss! Then I'm in the dentist chair and trying to relax, as you do, when this wonderful warm feeling filled the whole top half of my body.

Had a touch of the dark night last week. Woe is me! What kind of a nutter have I turned into that I have to go and sleep in a tent for a week when I should be looking forward to a fat pension and spending all my Christmases in Majorca, where you can get fish and chips? Hmmm? Switherings and doubts. Not nice. What you really need is the door to door utopian arrival model. And there in the emails an offer of a lift from Ion. What larks!

I'm going for at least a week. I'll take the rest of my cash, about forty quid. If I can stay off the computers and don't drink coffee, that forty quid could last a couple of years down at the Samye. So I'm trying not to blog, but I probably will.

I was up the allotment this morning doing emergency going away weeding. Another wasp stung me. I was in a different part of the plot, so it probably remembered me from the last time. But I was much less impressed, I must say. I'm not the anaphylastic ... anaphylactic ... the kind of joe who falls down dead from a wasp's sting. Thank God for that!

Sunday, 13 July 2008

Ra Black Dog 2

Monday 00:4 a.m.
As it crested the hill, at first the black dog seemed like a gigantic slavering beast hell bent on ill will, like something out of the fung Hound of the Baskervilles. Fortunately, by the time it sat down in front of me, it had shunk to about a quarter of its previous size and was now a nicce doggy. In fact, through hanging about in Samye Ling it had developed telepathic powers and as it looked up at me, it really trying to say:

Hotboy, said the doggy, do not venture further into the Planet of the Flatheids because out here are the wars, and famines, and a lot of folk not being very nice to each other. You may frolic and cavort with your chummies, but that is the way to the grief, sorrow, lamentations .... suffering in this life.

Unfortunately, I have no telepathic powers at all and what the doggy was trying to tell me about went right over the top of my head.

But I'll be back, Jack. I'll be back.

Thursday, 10 July 2008

Rese Expectations!

Thursday 8:00 p.m.
I harvested a bed of the disappointing wee onions today and discovered they were shallots. So I got 163 shallots and about thirty onions from the first of five or so beds of onions. Hurrah! Apart from the stawberries and some rhubarb, that's the first real food from the allotment this season.

Not having been a run for about five weeks, I took my old and raddled body out for a waddle about an hour ago. Dearie, dearie me!

Landing back on the Planet of the Flatheids was as bad as it gets on Monday. I thought with just being away for the three nights and how easy it was the last time I was there .... anyway, it wasn't. Took me about till Wednesday to feel stabilised again and what's the bloody use of that?

I've been giving some thought to what the monk said about the spontaneously arising happiness. I'm not going to become an enlightened joe like the original buddha joe.

I think guys like that don't suffer. From what I've read that means any suffering. Like, if you cut yourself, you don't suffer then. The Four Noble Truths are a prescription to stop the suffering really. I heard a tape where someone asked the Dalai Lama if he suffered. He said yes. He had a cold at the time. He said that was a type of suffering. The monk at the weekend said when Lama Yeshe was asked how much time he was actually meditating out of the fifteen (it's 15 now!) years he'd spent meditating, he said about a minute. So I suppose he was an enlightened being for about a minute. Anyway, he says he's not fully realised, and if he's not fully realised, there's not a hope in hell of me becoming fully realised in this lifetime.

Also, to collect the four blisses in the deity yoga juju, you have to get the winds to enter the central channel. That means you stop breathing. This is rather a lot to ask or expect of moi!

'May they never be separate from the sacred happiness untainted by suffering.' The third of the Four Limitless Contemplations.

The boy in the Richard Gere book said that in Tibet the juju was not thought of in terms of being a religion, the way the west looks at religions. It was regarded as a way of living, a way that would make you happier.

'The Tao that can be expressed is not the real Tao.' We don't have a proper translation for tao, do we?

So instead of trying and trying with the juju and all that, what I should really be looking at is increasing my happiness. It's by getting happier that you know it's working.

Suffering is caused by desire based on ignorance of your own true self.

I'd be happier if I could stop going to the off license. I have a barrel of home brewed wheat beer waiting to be siphoned off.

I'd be a lot happier if I could stop drinking the stuff I used to buy in the off license. Well, I'd be a lot happier eventually, no doubt. It's the couple of weeks in the straighjacket beforehand I find hard to countenance

Monday, 7 July 2008

Ra Black Dog!

Monday 5:09 p.m.
I've had some interesting encounters waiting for the bus to take me away from the Samye Ling. Today two women were standing there, but due to the midges I was pacing about a bit.

As I was looking in that direction waiting for a bus, a black dog came crested the hill and started down towards where I was standing. This is in the middle of the countryside. It was a sturdy looking black labrador. How odd to see a dog behaving like that! It stopped when it reached me and sat down. I patted it and said hello doggy, then it investigated the two women, then went into the centre.

One woman said to the other woman that the dog lived up the road a bit and often went out for a walk on its own and visited the centre. That dog's a lot smarter than most people I know!

The black dog is, of course, a symbol for depression.

I'm just back. Don't quite know what to do with myself. I'm a wee bit tired so I think I'll just have a wee lie down!

Ra Last Samye Morning!

Monday 10:21 a.m.
The lama was still here this morning! Hurrah! I've just finished two hours in the temple. Great, great, great!

Two very good things about this wee visit. One was being in the Medicine Buddha shrine. I've just been speaking to Temple Dave (I haven't spoken to anyone else!)who says he'll open the shrine for me any time I want to use it. Sometimes if the back temple is being used and tourists are all over the main one that'll be handy.

By the way, Temple Dave asked if I'd be back down in July and I said I'd like to, but I'd have to hit the plastic if I did. I could see that the expression 'hit the plastic' meant nothing to day. So I said: I'll need to use my credit card. Oh, yes, says Dave. Dave won't have a credit card. Dave probably didn't get annoyed about the last Iraq war or the first one. He might not have heard much about them.

We don't believe in any things, especially thoughts. I don't want to believe in rebirth partly because I must have been a bad basturn or made some terrible mistake previously. How come otherwise I've got to hang about with flatheids to the left, right, back and front, and Temple Dave just gets to meditate and clean the temple? I think Temple Dave will live for a very long while and become enlightened. He's got a better blinking chance than me anyway!

The other good thing was the only bit of teaching the monk did on the course. He was talking about the Four Limitless Contemplations. The third one is: May they never be separate from the sacred happiness untainted by suffering.

The sacred happiness is, he says, the stuff that arises spontaneously. I have had wee bits of this. You don't get it if you pollute your mind with drink and drugs. The Butterball Boy exhibits this. He can hardly get through making an announcement (he's an assistant to Dr Akong, I think) without going into a high pitched giggle as he's trying to get out the words. The Dalai Lama giggles all the time as well.

Anyway, if it wasn't for the flatheids where would we be? If they weren't doing all the work, I wouldn't be on holiday for the next six weeks. So hurrah for the flatheids!

Sunday, 6 July 2008

Ra Samye Ling Sunday!

Sunday 9:27 a.m.
The worst bit is getting used to sleeping in the tent. Not quite there yet. But last night I thought I'd never felt rain on a tent like it, but I have, and it was here, probably last year. Wakened up at seven feeling really nice and cozy.

The lama is not away to the Holy Isle, at least not yet. Hurrah! This morning's meditation was great. Really looking forward to the rest of the day, but I will go home tomorrow. Being Monday, that's really the start of my holidays. When I get home, I might pretend that I'm still here!

3:06 p.m.
The course I've been on has just finished. It was a course for free and without teaching, just a bunch of folk meditating together. Quite supportive. Usually, I just meditated away on my own most of the time down here, so that was wee bit different.

Out of respect for the too dumb to meditate and other pond life, I haven't mentioned ra bliss, the great static sheet lightnings of ra bliss and the clearing visualistions of the Medicine Buddha and whatnot.

Anyway, this cafe is shut this evening and the tourists will be departed, and I'm really looking forward to sitting in the temple till it closes. Last night with the Venerable Big Indian rehearsing the band was just fantastico!

Saturday, 5 July 2008

Ra First Morning!

Saturday 9:10 a.m.
What a fantastic dinning the birdies were making this morning! Not quite as raucous as around April, but pretty full on really. There must be millions of different kinds around here.

I've just finished the first meditation of the day, the one with the lama. I think he's going to the Holy Isle, but it's great to have sat there meditating with him at least once this weekend. The more this stuff you do, the more you appreciate guys like that.

I'll have to sit in a half lotus for this trip, so I'll have to be mindful of my back. Also, I should avoid wasting money on computery things. What a day for meditating this is going to be.

Of course, the sun has disappeared today and it's gotten colder. That's more like the Samye Ling!

2:12 p.m.
Temple Dave looks after the temple. Obviously, a sweet guy. He's been here, I think, for about fourteen years. Calm guy. Anyway, we were looking down from the temple into the car park when this gathering of high heid yins shows up. Some of them are going to the Holy Isle. There was a visiting khenpo. And,Dave says, a nephew of the cosmic brothers who is due to take over the stewardship of the Samye Ling in about 2010. Well, there is it. A bit of continuity. The cosmic brothers, may they live 10,000 years, are about a decade older than moi.

Excellent morning in the back temple meditating and doing Tai Chi when folk left for breaks. Then the giant lunch. Then the yoga nidra in the back temple with the dozing off. I'm normall maybe go to the tent for this, but it was pouring. Samye Ling weather!

I'm addicted to these machines, so I am!

9:13 p.m.
As far as first days at the Samye Ling go, today has definitely been tops! Something seems to open or be opening up. Stunned by ra bliss during the Chenrezig prayers this evening. I've really grown to love Tibetan chanting. Ra bliss was so full on that I stayed behind when everyone else left. Then in comes the Venerable Big Indian with several nuns. Is it a rehearsal or a practise? That's the first time today I was able to really get into vase breathing. It was wonderful to be there doing it with the twirly drums and bells, and all the chanting and tinkling!

Must have meditated for nine hours today anyway. I'm tired now and the rain is chucking it down. Have to dash for the tent soon. Quote of the day from the joe in the Richard Gere book. "Meditation does not cater for people with short attention spans."

May all sentient beings be happy, including those who should know better and the too dumb to meditate!!

Friday, 4 July 2008

Ra Samye Ling 1

Friday 9:09 p.m.
I got to Lockerbie this morning with an hour to spare before the bus came and I still missed it. Talk about laid back. Sitting around Lockerbie train station, but the weather was pretty gorgeous today.

Strange not to have been here for a year! Teresa was saying hullo as soon as I got my bags up to the door which I regard as auspicious. Getting the tent up with no bother and then I went for a meditate down by the river.

It's twenty years since I first came here. Many memories of other times I'd sat there gazing into the river; all kind of merging into each other since it was never raining and always just me and the gazing stuff.

During these holidays I was hoping to come down here for short bursts, mainly at the weekends, but I'll see how it goes over the next two days.

Most of my deep dear friends have sat in my kitchen over the past couple of weeks. I used to categorise them as disturbed, bizarre adn funged up, but after speaking with Brian Wilson last night, I realise they're all mad. Mad, I tell you!

They're too dumb to meditate, the lot of them, Jack! They're just not as fortunate as you, Hotboy. What else can we say about the too dumb to meditate, Jack? Flatheids don't even know they're flatheids. And they'll never get ra bliss! How dumb can you be to know someone who has stumblebummed into the oceans of bliss and not even show the slightest interest in meditating? But this is Samye Ling time. Time to forget about the flatheids!

Thursday, 3 July 2008

Ra First Day!

Thursday 12:49 p.m.
Being able to raise sufficient tummo to sit in the brass monkeys and not be the slightest bit bothered by the cold implies a feat of such amazingness that it should hardly be a surprise that I can't do it. But I will be able to do it someday, Jack. So I will.

The meditations this morning have been just fantastico!

I feel boyishly joyous about spending the weekend with my sangha brothers and sisters, in the temple of the Samye Ling, sitting quietly doing nothing. I cannot think of anything better. I will be surrounded by accomplishment. I'm so pleased, so I am!

Wednesday, 2 July 2008

Ra New Dawn!

Wednesday 11:56 p.m.
In the psychiatrist's chair. The lights are low. Jack the Spam Robot is quizzing Hotboy about ra bliss.

Jack: Hotboy, what would life be like if you didn't have ra bliss in it?
Hotboy: It would be like being a ferret.
Jack: Why do you think other people don't have access to the great oceans of ra bliss, Hotboy?
Hotboy: They are too dumb to meditate.
Jack: Is there any way that the too dumb to meditate can get into ra bliss?
Hotboy: I'm afraid not, Jack. But then again, we can't rule anything out. Some people get ra bliss even although they are a complete disgrace.

I harvested lots of strawberries this evening. Noting tastes as good as one of these strawberries. Spectacular strawberry year.

Also, the tatties. You get different flowers on the tatties. This should tell you something. Fabulous tattie year. This has got to be the best tattie year in all the years of the allotment. The onions are crap. I crept straddle legged weeding towards where the wasps are. I ran away twice. Wee basturns. Corporal punishment. Bound to work. Beat the shit of the them!

Ra Holidays!

Wednesday 12:56 p.m.
I am on holiday now till the 18th of August. Allah Akbar! I have seen all of my deep dear friends in the last couple of weeks, except for Brian Wilson who wil emerge from the samsaric underworld, chewing on his pig's face, wearing the light coloured and badly stained linen jacket, sometime early tomorrow evening. After that, they can all fung off!

On Friday I should be on a train about ten in the morning heading for the Samye Ling. Hurrah! This weekend's course is to sit quietly doing nothing all weekend. No instruction, no teachings. What more can a body ask for? It's as if they knew I was coming, Jack. It's yon magical realism, so it is!!

Tuesday, 1 July 2008

Ralmost there!

Thursday 11:36p.m.
I got to send a typescript of the sensei and reverend's ultimate crime novel to Isabel Atherton. Let's hope she bursts into tears and can't believe her good luck. It's just got to be at the right place at the right time.

This bloggie is one year old. I looked back to see what it was like back then. Dearie me. I thought I was going to get this book published, I thought it would be sunny weather and I could sit under the big trees in the Botanics, like I had the year before, but it was not to be, Jack. It was not to be.

This summer I'm expecting nothing. I noted that last summer I seem to have refrained from alcoholic beveridges for nigh a month. What a heroic effort, but what a total arse I must have been except I can't remember kind of a gig ... to have preceded this heroic effort.

So after noon tomorrow there will be no jobbie for six weeks. Hmmmm? Who knows what that'll be like? Brian Wilson is coming to see me on Thursday. Already it is time to count the fingers and toes.

Monday, 30 June 2008

Ris Growing Season!

Monday 11:05 p.m.
A couple of months ago there was just the dug over dirt up at the old allotment and now it is hooching with life. There's a lot of strawberries lying there. I got bitten by something and my nose swelled up. Then it deflated. Last week I got attacked by two wasps after I disturbed their nest by the weeding of the onions. No, I got stung by two wasps. The wasps were trying to attract my attention. Stinging a person is brilliant way to do that. It's waspese for fung off!

And what are you going to do for your summer holidays, Hotboy? Well, Jack, I was thinking of going down to the Samye Ling with the tent and doing a bit of the old sitting quietly doing nothing juju. But I'm starting to think that it's mad, Jack. Completely, off it's head mad, Jack!

There are thoughts flying and pinging and bending about in what would be otherwise perfect thoughtlessness, the place where the lies stopped.

Anyway, it's just the hassle. In my kind of utopia, it would be door to door, and I'd get ferried out of here and the tent would be waiting as well at the end. You have to put up your own tent. Practically slavery, so it is. And it'll rain and rain.

Us loonies need a quiet environment. Such will be the firecracker starbursts going off in one's mind, not to mention attempting to emanate as a deity and all, and the tsunamis of ra bliss ... and a few tears as one stumblebums around trying to adjust to the no beers or drugs or even imaginary compensations ... I could stay at home. What's the matter with a couple of beers, except that I've got no money. Hmmmm?

After several weeks of disability, (starting 5th June, Newton Mearns) today at last I was able to don the full Beer Monster Reduction Vehicle and hephalump around the kitchen doing my six threes... what a pathetic sight! I'll need to make some money so I get that liposuction thing, and the bum shrinker procedure. But then I got to lie exhausted in the bath. Oh, the bathtime bliss! The arising of the altered state as you lie exuding exhaustion and relaxation in the bath is one of the wonderful spin-offs from engaging with ra bliss.

But now, hark, it is the witching hour and I must go and lie down into the yoga nidra best you could hope for on a Monday kind of ra bliss.

Sunday, 29 June 2008

Ra Intimations of Wonderful Times!

Sunday 2:05 p.m.
Asked the Medicine Buddha (who is moi!) to cure me of my addictions and the blogging went ... just like that. After a couple of days off though, I still fancied a beer, and what with getting paid this week and all ....

So I sat down in the Miss Haversham garden out the back where Poisonous stays, a garden which rarely gets the sun. Dank. I had to sit down on the mouldy green flagstones because the garden bench I'd tried to sit on collapsed a bit when I gave it a go. You worry a wee bit that the flagstones might be too cold ...

I'd had four pints of Highlander in the Cafe Royal and several joints by this point. Bad Boy!

Then the cold legs declined in mind and it was as if you were one of the wee fat baldie guys sitting with big smile on the ledge in the Himalayas during the forty belows. I was amazed that it came on like that. Soaring away in the white light and ra bliss! Hurrah!

On Friday evening, I was wondering if it was time trash the good resolutions and go to the offy when I started in on the vase breathing. I knew then, Jack, that events had taken a major step forward. If there's something about stuff having to enter a central channel ... anyway, I decided that there was no point in posting about it because I can't begin to describe this stuff.

Then there was ra bliss this morning. I'll be going to the Samye Ling next Thursday, I hope, and it strikes me that this development occuring as it does now is most auspicious.

Throughout these wonderments, I've been knee deep in flatheids, the too dumb to meditate and other completely pointless (apart from doing all the work) people. I've not had one full day of meditations since I stopped working on Wednesday. Anyway, I'm off to cycle up the Kirk Brae en route for Liberton Hospital just now. And I'm most pleased to be able to do it!!

Tuesday, 24 June 2008

Ranaissance!

Tuesday 9:42 p.m.
My exploded vein had imploded sufficiently ... I cycled to the Tai Chi tonight and ... that is the first physical jerks in over two weeks. I do like taking an awful lot of exercise and feel quite demoralised when bits don't work right. What a big baby! It's worse when the disease hasn't happened before and you are not sure of the outcome. After a couple of weeks of supping beer and watching the footie, I'm an even fatter basturn than I was before. But I'm counting my blessings right now!

I hope I die before I get old.

There can't be any memories in the formless zone. There may be awareness, but nothing forming, no thoughts, no mental formations. If you were lucky, you might have a constant state of satiation, but, of course, there wouldn't be a you.

If I was in the formless zone I wouldn't have to go to work tomorrow. But, then again, I wouldn't get paid on Thursday. I had a dream about soapbar last night. Let's hear it for the cannybliss yogurts!

Sunday, 22 June 2008

Ra Yoga Nidra

Sunday 8:30 p.m.
After downing four bottles of Erdinger last night, I wasn't so fast out of the blocks this morning, but this was partly because I thought I maybe didn't have to get out of bed.

Sometimes I go through a yoga nidra routine when I'm lying in bed in the morning. You visit bits of your body in turn and tell them to relax, etc. Your eyes are closed. My body seemed so relaxed this morning that the sensation of having a body at all was quite slight. There is a great plane of white light and bliss. Hardly any sensation of a having a body at all.

I thought: This is what yoga nidra, the sleep of the yogis, is maybe supposed to be like. So a thought arose. A wee while later another thought arose: If I had no bodily sensations and no thoughts were arising, what do we have here?

Something without centre or circumference. Something aware. Whether it is unconfined or not, I'm not sure. Hmmmmm?

If when I'm dead, I could spend a few eons like that, Jack, it would be like winning the pools, so it would. The formless zone. No conceptualisation. Who needs thoughts? All misconceived. All lying basturns.

We embrace our ignorance
We don't believe in any things
Especially thoughts

Saturday, 21 June 2008

Ra Tide is Turning!

Saturday 10:22 p.m.
Started meditating about twelve hours ago and stuck with it, with wee breaks to read the paper, walk up the allotment, etc, until I went to the offy about a half hour ago. The Domestic Bliss was only here for one night and is partying elsewhere till tomorrow.

Let us not be downhearted, Jack. It has been a crap couple of weeks, but the tide is turning!! Every time I get a day like today with no flatheids about and no jobbie to go to, well .... I'm going get all that stuff I thought was beyond moi! I'm going to get the explosions of ra bliss, the non-duality, the whole enchilada! Today it just jumped forward again. Oh, ra bliss, ra bliss, ra bliss!

This is despite the fact that my discipline is lousy and I am a total disgrace, a blight on the juju, and the last joe anyone would expect to have something like this happen to him.

So why is this happening, Hotboy? Well, Jack, I can only assume I have had the crap blessed out of moi in some way I cannot explain. Of course, if I had better discipline, etc., it would surely have progressed much faster. But then I would not have been able to say to all the other reprobates, if I can do it, anybody can do it!

I got out of bed this morning and walked to the lavvy without feeling any pain in my leg. Every day it gets a wee bit better. Hurrah!

Today, I managed to stand on my head for the first time since before Christmas. This is the longest time I haven't stood on my head for twenty years. Hurrah! It might be a while before I get full articulation in my shoulder joint, but I thought this capsulitis crap might take two years to clear. I can only assume the Tai Chi has been a big help.

What a great, great day! Good health is a great blessing in itself. I'll appreciate running and shadow boxing whenever I can get back into it. Apart from the Tai Chi, I haven't been training for a couple of weeks now. But what a fortunate, fortunate creature I am! What a fortunate creature I am!

Ra Mr Higgs!

Saturday 1:50 p.m.
I've got half an hour while the bread is in the oven.

Why has everyone got three stages, like stages of creation?

Hindus?: Causal, Astral, Physical.
Kafflicks: God the Father, The Holy Ghost, Jesus Christ.
Tibetans: Dharmakaya, Shambokakaya, Nirmanakaya.

In some ways these seem to be talking about the same thing maybe. Dharmakaya might be described as clear light mind by the Tibetans.

'When we can see, straightforwardly and non-conceptually, the nature of our clear light mind and remain totally absorbed in this nature without ever regressing from it, we have become a buddha.' Dalai Lama. The Wall.

Tibetans don't really talk about God. They talk about mind. Mind is characterised by three things. It is without characteristics, being without centre or circumference. It has some quality of knowing. It is unconfined, like space. Space allows everything to be in it, sort of.

Without centre or circumference. Hmmm?

This universe is supposed to have started with a Big Bang which proceeded from a point without a circumference. I suppose that's just a handy way of saying there were no dimensions, or time, or whatever before the Big Bang.

A point without a circumference sounds to moi a bit like something without a centre or a circumference, something perhaps beyond conceptualisation, something without characteristics.

Mr Higgs apparently lives in Edinburgh. What a wonderful city this is! Mr Higgs's problem was that although a stone has weight ... you can tell this by dropping it on your foot ... the atoms that make up the stone are composed of wee bits that are weightless. So where is the weight coming from? A fung of a lot of money is being spent right now trying to find out if Mr Higgs's particle, the one that's causing the weight, actually exists of not.

Anyway, are these scientific atheistical folk and everyone else not essentially talking about the same thing? You have the limitless thingy beyond concepts, the energy and then you and me and stones.

What's the difference between a bison and an elephant, Jack? You can wash yourself in a bison, but you can't wash yourself in an elephant. Back to the lobby!

Thursday, 19 June 2008

Ra Bliss Of Inner Fire!

Thursday 1:03 p.m.
This is from The Bliss of Inner Fire by Lama Thebten Yeshe.

'Inner fire meditation is far more effective than ordinary deep meditation. It quickly grows into an explosion of nonduality wisdom, and explosion of telepathic power, and explosion of realisations. It is the key to countless treasures.'

'Concrete concepts automatically wither and disappear. Rest in the feeling of utter satisfaction. You are touching reality, and at the same time you are experiencing bliss. Blissful energy explodes into an intense awareness of the wisdom of nonduality, and you touch an unprecedented level of universal reality.'

'You see all the chakras with pristine clarity, as if you possess telepathic awareness. Because your entire deity body is one blazing inner fire and you are one with the inner fire, you can see the entire universal reality without any obstacles. Your intense bliss is aware of the wisdom of nonduality.'

'When you reach the point where you can naturally and effortlessly hold the winds in strong vase meditation at the navel chakra, the airs will automatically produce blazing of the inner fire in the central channel. The magnetic pleasure will automatically be activated, kundalini will flow, and you will experience bliss not just in your channels and chakras but throughout your entire body.'


'The whole process can become dangerous if you practice incorrectly.'

'If kundalini starts to flow uncontrollably during your meditationand you begin to experience orgasm, try as much as possible to hold it and have it expand inside the secret chakra.'

'For both males and females, the energy and bliss of ordinary sexual experience does not come from the central channel ... if the kundalini energy generates such bliss when it touches outside the central channel, there is no question that it will generate incredible bliss when it flows inside the central channel.'

'Inner fire meditation really shakes our entire nervous system and our entire view of reality.'

'Experiences of heaven and hell during meditation are possible.'

'The lamas of all traditions agree that practitioners can suddenly see visions while doing inner fire meditation...Such experiences are similar to telepathy, but they are not actual clairvoyance.'

'Sometimes you may be able to read other people's thoughts... You will be able to read the minds of others in accordance with your own level of development. This is nothing unusual.'


The Domestic Bliss should just have arrived at the airport after eight flights over ten or so days.

I spent almost all morning meditating in the lobby and, despite starting with a fuzzy head, have done better with these meditations than ever before. When you re-read the book though, you realise that you're just at the beginning of this.

The Domestic Bliss goes off on more adventures tomorrow and I'll go to see the auld maw. I'll be alone again on Saturday and Sunday. Here comes ra bliss! Here comes ra heat! Yahoo!!!

11:30 p.m.
Sober and straight two nights out of the last three. That's the way to do it!

Wednesday, 18 June 2008

Ra End of Ris!

Wednesday 23:17 p.m.
I must apologise to the Alien Creatures from Outer Space, the Masai Warriors and the perverts who come to this bloggy for my complete lack of abstemiousness and resultant legless bloggage over the past wee while.

I thought she was French, but she spoke more than two words to me tonight when I was out buying the extra, stupid two beers at Peckhams. We have smiled at each other and nodded over the last few months. Maybe after a while, we could have held hands.

She said: You are addicted to German beers. I realised she was Polish, of course. I said: What is the solution to this? Should I stop drinking German beers?

I should ask her to marry me. I should go there for a while and sit and drink coffee, and not drink beer. I could read the book about flying by Antoine the Frog Flying Genius Writer who got shot down by the Germans, and I could say: Hey, Missus, not only am I completely skint, and a failure at all things practical such as having any money, but I am also A LIVING SAINT who does not have to drink beer all the time. Look at me!

What do you have to do to become a living saint, Jack? Hmmm? Meditate like hell; don't do any stupid things like drink beer practically every night, and be really, really happy all the time ....mainly helped along by ra bliss and ra ecstasy and all.

My chum Poisonous might be indifferent to happiness. Disregarding thoughts is the main thing. Not believing in anything you think.

Poisonous is meticulously sewed up. We walked passed the damsel coming back to Stockbridge on the way from the Modern Art Gallery; she was sitting on a bench like a French person. We nodded hullo. The Poisonous asked if I knew her or was I just randomly saying hullo to gurls. I told him that men didn't like the care in the community clothes I was wearing, but women couldn't resist them.

Lazarus, the Coptic monk, who lives in the St Antony caves knows it's lonesome at first. The Domestic Bliss comes back tomorrow. That should straighten me up. Shame that I'm not a bit better at this!

Thursday 7:08 a.m.
I had six German beers last night, but here I am at seven in the morning feeling really alright. Slightly fashed and bashed, but no real hangover. Hmmm? My leg is nearly cured. I could go running at night soon and lie in the bath instead of hitting the plastic for beers. I don't want to cut up my credit card again. Even in this degenerate age, the buddha says you can become cool. Have to give up the beers. Have to give up the beers. Have to ...well, I won't have any tonight anyway!

Tuesday, 17 June 2008

Ra Something Cheery!

Tuesday
You just close your eyes and ra bliss is in there and rising, expanding, lifting. I haven't been enjoying the Domestic Bliss being away, and I've been on ra beer nearly every night since the soapbar ran out, and I've been struggling a wee bit, and my concentration isn't what it should be (six bottles of beer last night! Dearie me!) ... but ra bliss keeps advancing, due to the amount of time I was putting in at the weekend, no doubt.The vase breathing I did at lunchtime today just blew me away! So let us not be downhearted, Jack.

I got a message from my secret agent today telling me that he thinks some sections of the floating boy book could do with expanding, but he says the kidsbook is still out with several publishers. I assumed he'd abandoned it, so that was good news. He'd never heard of the word "dunted", so it must be Scottish. Jemima, his boy wonder, had never heard of Sonny Liston. I had to change the reference to Joe Louis though Sonny Liston presents a far scarier image. Does anyone out there not know who Joe Louis was?

There's some good footie on tonight. Hmmm? To beer or not to beer, that is the question.

Monday, 16 June 2008

Ris Business!

Monday 10:25 p.m.
I’m gonna give you some free advice
Never cross a picket line
Don't put anything smaller than an elbow in your ear
Play the long game
Study the odds
Read the form

I hope this hasn't been unduly upsetting, but I really liked this wee poem at Ion's dad's memorial thingy.


At the book launch at Newton Mearns, the secret agent handed me back the copy of the novel and I've just finished doing the re-edits, answering the little problems, the typos and whatnot.


Before the MaDMax kicked in, I was being asked by this person about writing at a party last weekend, as in how to be a writer, what should I do, etc. Having just spent some of my last twenty quid on King Ludwig Weissbier and having no money and no prospects as usual, well, perhaps I'm the last person anybody should ask about how to be a successful anything.


If any of the Masai Warriors, Alien Creatures from Outer Space, or anyone in the Australian Ladies Volleyball Team want to know how to become J. K. Rowling, maybe they should go and ask J. K. Rowling.


My advice was terrific. First of all, you should be able to write, but that's not all that unusual, despite the best efforts of the school teachering basturns. You can teach yourself to spell and punctuate and everything. Of course, you can't teach yourself to be bright ... you have to be a bit bright. Then, get a jobbie as a school librarian and read all the books. Write three books and expect every one of them to be crap. That should take you a couple of years. By this time you should have found out something about markets, etc. Like, what sells? What kind of things sell? This is the short training to be famous and rich.


Then you write the book that is going to work, or at least, the first three chapters. No, you should write the book again and expect it still to be crap. Don't do the first three chapters thing yet because that's cynical.


Then you write your best letter to Julia Churchill at Darley Anderson (find it on the web or the Writers and Artists, etc) and say you are coming to London to do some research on how to be a famous novelist, and could you meet her for ten minutes, please. It's these people's job to meet people. Someone good will give you the ten minutes.


At this meeting, you should imagine that you are gambling against someone at cards, for instance. There is a pile of money before you and you are going to move that money in your direction, but the josephine has a better grip on that money at that time than you have. You have to start moving the money towards your end of the table.


I can't be arsed. I don't care. I never really could.


But then there's the kiddo. She's just like her old dear apart from the hair colouring and the bad temper. Then, I'm thinking she wants to do something really stupid, like make glass objects and paint them. This is just like moi! You should be from the evil bourgeois to have ambitions such as this. So I'm supposed to find the money for this. So I am. This is where the failure is not allowed. I should really make some money so I can give it to her, so she can choose to make glass objects and paint them, or not.


I need some motivation here, Jack. I'd really like to be taken to a closed psychiatric ward, or any jail besides where there was some solitary confinement.


They don't need the money, Hotboy. If the money arrives, which it shouldn't, buy her a kiln. If it doesn't, which it won't, ask yourself how much your forefathers and mother s came to these shores ready to toady up to these evil bourgeois basturns. The main thing is to understand non-self and emptiness, and yet don't bend the knee!

Sunday, 15 June 2008

Ra Hotboy Dialogues No 5.

Sunday 7:27 p.m.
It's not been quite the slough of despond, pilgrims, but the last wee while has sometimes been a pain in the neck. Well, if not the neck, the thigh and the shoulder. Since I can't stand on my head at the moment or sit in a lotus, I've decided to cheer myself up before the footie comes on with a dialogue with little Jack the Spam Robot.

(When the curtain goes up, Jack the Spam Robot is sitting on Hotboy's right knee. There is a bandage round Hotboy's left thigh and one wrapped round his shoulder. Several sticking plasters are stuck at random round his face)

JACK: How did you get all these injuries, Hotboy?
HOTBOY: This meditating is a rough game, Jack. Folk don't realise that.
JACK: (exuberantly) Well, Hotboy, do you want to talk about attachment, emptiness, or the suffering?
HOTBOY: (pissed off) Certainly not, Jack! I want to talk about the sweeties. I want to talk about the Six Yogas of Naropa, raising inner heat, ra fantastic bliss, and bonking kamamudras!
JACK: Bonking kamamudras? And how, pray tell, do you bonk a kamamudra, Hotboy?
HOTBOY: I'm not really too sure about that, Jack. Nobody's told me. But I think if you're really good at raising inner heat, and can withdraw the winds into the central channel, thus, as far as I can see, stopping your heart beating and breathing, then, and probably only then, will you get the instructions on how to bonk a kamamudra.

JACK: That sounds a wee bit like suspended animation to me, Hotboy. How can you bonk anyone in that state?

HOTBOY: I assume you're sitting in a lotus, Jack. In that case, the bonking should mainly be done by the kamamudra, I imagine.

JACK: What exactly is a kamamudra, Hotboy?
HOTBOY: Kama is, if I remember right, passion, Jack, as in Kama Sutra. So a kamamudra seems to me to indicate a passion grip.
JACK: (long pause) Hmmm? So when we're in heaven, Hotboy, and goddesses are strolling by, I can turn to you and say: What do you think of yon four armed red goddess, Hotboy? And you can reply: Yon goddess has grip, Jack.
HOTBOY: Maybe a mudra is a seal, Jack. Or a lock. Still, that last bit has evocated ... this isn't supposed to be like the movie Grease, Jack. We're not supposed to be hanging around street corners in heaven checking out the goddesses.
JACK: Why not? Also, how are you supposed to have an erection if you're not breathing and your heart has stopped?
HOTBOY: Hmmm? I've probably got this all wrong, Jack. Anyway, before I need to worry about all this, I'll be at least eighty years old at my rate of progress. So it won't be a lotus, Jack. It'll be a wheelchair with a viagra drip going into one arm and MDMA going into the other.
JACK: You're such a romantic, Hotboy!
(The footie has just started, so I might come back to this later!)
JACK.

Saturday, 14 June 2008

Ra Reasonable Expectations!

Sunday 00:02 a.m.
I re-read pertinent passages of The Bliss of Inner Fire today. This book, by Lama Thebten Yeshe, was what caused me to become a Tibetan Buddhist, and get empowerments to practise the great vajrayana. It is probably one of the most wonderful things ever published.

Since I don't believe in anything and have a fair conceit about my abilities, I tend to think if some joe or josephine can do it, so can I. Perhaps one should enter the usual caveats: I'm probably not going to run the 100 metres in under 10 seconds. I don't think it was ever possible for me to have done this and I'm too old and fat now. Given the usual caveats ...

It is not impossible to do what the boy says you can do in this book. I'm quite certain that thousands and thousands of mainly joes have done this before the book was ever published. We've got a couple of thousands of years of history since the Buddha lived, so we are probably talking about many hundreds of thousands of people having accomplished this since he died. To that extent, it isn't even unusual. Maybe as many as a couple of million of joes and josephines have done this.

I could have been writing prose or dialogues today, but instead I spent most of my time playing the mind game. The mind game is the only game in town, but there are different ways to play it.

If I am going to gain mastery of the inner heat juju, I am going to have to become a different kind of joe. Maybe this isn't for me in this life. Of course, the amount of ra bliss I will achieve will increase, and so will the heat, but
to accomplish what is in this book ... and I assume this is not enlightenment, even near it ... I'd really have to give up everything and everyone. Hmmm? This is the first time I've thought this wasn't going to happen. How crap are these degenerate days! Tempis fugit, ya bass!

Ra Retreat!

Saturday 5:13 p.m.
Apart from checking the bloggy and reading the paper, I've meditated in the lobby all day. Since I started about ten, that probably comes to five or six hours. Starting from quite a poor basis, it's been quite hard really. Tons of bliss in the last half hour. I'm away now to watch the Sweden Spango game with the sound town and the noise blockers on, doing some vase breathing and mantra-ing. Just for a bit of a break!

10:05 p.m.
That's me just finished for today. Maybe put in about eight or nine hours on the cushion. Hmmm. Let's hope that's me back on track again!!

Friday, 13 June 2008

Ra Sore Leg!

Friday 10:06 p.m.
Got a comment asking about my sore leg from Ion. How nice is that?

I've just been out to spend the last of my money on four bottles of Paulaner, Hefe-Weissbier, Naturtrub. Hmm? So I've only now got food money and bus fares till I get to next payday. Thank God for that! Everything has been crap since I got paid. I'd do much better if someone would just tie me up and throw me in a dungeon

The problem is mental calming. You need the mental calming as basis. This means you can sit and sit. Trying to sit and sit in the days after you've been partying with the deep dear friends, and other flatheids, is very difficult.

Nobody cares, Jack! The flatheids don't even know they're flatheids, so why should they care about moi's engagement with ra bliss? They suck the goodness out of you, so they do. If I had a gun, I'd just shoot the lot of them. Basturns!

Just say no, Hotboy. I said no to the drugs, but the drugs didn't listen, Jack.

When I keep away from flatheids and the prospect of personal indulgence, I tend to only see family members and folk who are completely funged. So you don't want to go on about your wee sore leg, especially since you should have been dead five years ago, and even with a sore leg moi is still well ahead of the game obviously.

So this is about neurosis and self clinging.

When you go to see the doctor and you can tell just by looking at him that he hasn't got long to go, well, maybe you'd be better off seeing someone healthy. I'd only seen two guys with worse lungs than this doctor's. No, my old man's lungs were in better shape when they killed him, but he didn't have access to the life saving drugs that this doctor was obviously whacking into himself. Sick doctors are like baldy barbers. It hard to take them seriously. He couldn't breathe. His lips were a wee bit blue.

I had the tiniest thing to inquire about. Being a man and, therefore, a hypochrondriac this tiny thing had assumed massive proportions. I wanted some advice. I had a wee wrinkle developing in a vein on my leg. The dying doctor just makes your heart sink. He says he's had two veins done. He'd forgotten all about them. Just get it done, he said.

So a few months later I'm lying on this operating table and the teenager who is about to operate on me asks why I'm getting this vein out. What? Is that what I'm here for? Dearie me! But I think of the junkies who told me about veins going flat and coming up, and whatnot. It's only a vein. Anyway, the joe can't sew and completely fungs up the stitching, but being a boy he probably had never used a needle till he was sewing up peoples' legs.

Anyway, that was when I was thirty, twenty seven years ago. At the weekend, I assume some other vein went ape in my leg and there were three bumps up and down it. I gave up looking at that leg when I turned forty so who knows? It's quietening down now though. I did my first tai chi set since Saturday tonight. How wonderful to be able to do something!

Ion was maybe wondering if my diseased leg had anything to do with partying at the weekend. Only if totally empathising with flatheids caused me to remain in an unnatural position, painless, for longer than was good for me. This might have happened, but it was probably just one of those things. I always favour that leg. I may have got it diseased by sitting in a lotus for too long, or upsetting it with something like that. However, I have to admit that in a lifetime of bad behaviour I have had only one fit due to being a bad boy. Also,one passing out, fainting, after a very busy four days of little sleep and much employment of Dexy and the Midnight Runners. Of course, with a legal drug like alcohol,well, you don't really want to know what awfulness one can get into with a really stupid drug like alcohol.

Samsara. Ris life!

Well done for the Irish in voting against the Lisbon Treaty. The European Union is great if you can work anywhere in Europe, and get the dole anywhere, and have some kind of bill of rights. The only folk who seem to want the superstate are politicians. Politicians hate democrasy. It occurred to me today. I knew before that capitalists hate competition, but politicians would rather be autocrats than democrats. Big states suck!

Thursday, 12 June 2008

Ra Flatheids No! No!

Thursday 11:24 a.m.
Emerging from some flatheided horrorshow with nothing worse than a sore but healing leg, it looks as if for the next few days I'll be able to surf the oceans of bliss almost as much as I like. Except, of course, for visiting and visitors. I just stopped the juju in the lobby because the kiddo is coming over to pick up a tent.

What a wonderful day this is going to be! I meditated for an hour and a bit there and it was glorious. The effects of the vase breathing are just fabuloso beyond description. Everything still moves on. You close your eyes and everything sinks into a great white bliss, and then it's as if the envelope develops and broadens and fills with more and more of ra bliss until you are sitting there simply beaming with ra bliss.

Although moi is sitting here with a sore leg and a history of failure at almost any kind of human endeavour you'd care to mention, nobody that I know can get anywhere near such a wonderment as the enormous voluminousness of ra bliss witnessed this morning. It's a shame the world is populated almost entirely by the too dumb to meditate, the stupid flatheids, so it is. I'm away back into the lobby to await the kiddo.

Tuesday, 10 June 2008

Ra Absentee!

Tuesday 11:53
Diseases and a sore, inflamed (Oh no! I'm going to die!) leg have kept me from my gainful employment this week so far. And I've been left alone in this big flat (hobbling about and sucking on the last scraps of rotten vegetables!) while the Domestic Bliss has taken off for adventures overseas. This is what it must be like to be an old person. You count your aches and pains as you get out your bed and face the whole day alone. I think I might take a wee walk round the charity shops later on, and then fall over and hurt myself.

Apart from that, things here are pretty crap. I wasted my time enjoying myself over the weekend with the type of people who give you diseases, and now I'm out of the way of sitting quietly doing nothing for most of the day, I'm addicted to almost everything, and more or less broke. But I'm always more or less broke, so no change there. I think I'd better go away and emanate as a deity. Bugger all else to do!

Saturday, 7 June 2008

Ra Party Joe!

Saturday 4:08 p.m.
"I was still always falling down during this time, and I would always say, before falling, 'I'm about to fall down', and nobody, almost nobody, ever caught me." Tennessee Williams. The Wall.

This is what happens when a normally shy and reticent fellow like myself is forced to go out and emanate as a writer. I bloody hate that! I hate talking about writing, about becoming a writer, about being a writer, about writings done in the past, or writings half done just now. And all that in the company of a lot of people you don't know and who, quite rightly, should know better than to give a damn. If there's any more book launches for writers connected with the secret agent in Edinburgh or Glasgow, I'll go if I'm asked (hopefully, they'll know better now!), but that's it.

Unless, of course, there is free beer!

The wish that it be made known that 'I was the author' is the thought of a man not yet adult. The Dhammapada. The Wall.

This evening, on the other hand, I'll be going to a soiree where almost everyone there will have been known to me for well over thirty years, well before I even started trying to write. I've known these people for so long I don't even have to talk to them. The only young people there will be progeny, and they might even offer me a sample of some decent drugs. Really looking forward to that!

Spent the afternoon mainly meditating up the allotment. We have a big bush of red lupins and one of blue. There will be millions of strawberries and gooseberries this year. The whole allotment is completely green, mostly from weeds. My money is on the weeds!

Friday, 6 June 2008

Ra Cure!

Friday 12:47 p.m.
Spent the first part of the morning wrestling with a hate filled hangover. I am a horrible person and shouldn't be allowed near normal people, especially when there's plonko collapso for free. I stayed away from wine for the twenty odd years I had a stomache ulcer, and have never really gotten the hang of it. They should colour it purple like they do with turpentine to stop the alkies guzzling it. White wine just looks like water. After you've thrown a few glasses down your gullet, it tastes like water as well. Dearie me!

So I never got round to meditating till eleven this morning, but immediately all the horrible thoughts disappeared and once more you are in the fantastic bliss. The horrible hangover thoughts are a perfect example of how useless most thoughts are. But it is amazing to be moaning and groaning about the place one minute and then be in ra bliss the next. Quite made my day, it did. I went and got an number one at the barbers and will give all my money to the credit card basturns this afternoon, and try to avoid evil for the rest of the month. Amen.

Before I journeyed to Newton Mearns, I spent the afternoon with the auld maw. She was complaining about her neighbours during the war. Lots of them were waving union jacks and going on about fighting the Germans in 1939, but the only man from the building who went to fight the Germans was my auld man. Everyone who could went into reserved occupations and made plenty of money.

The auld maw showed me the letter she got telling her about the war widows pension she received from the 29th of December 1965, the year my auld man died from lack of breath. She got awarded five pounds five shillings for herself and there was two pounds four shillings each to keep me and Popeye. In 1969 I got twelve pounds a week for a student grant and could sign on the dole during the holidays.

In the Amazing Bloggy Church of the Bad Boy Blissheid we do have a hell for all the evil basturns of course, which is just as well!

Thursday, 5 June 2008

Ra Helen Fitzgerald!

I'm going to read this Helen Fitzgerald book. I was at this book launche (?) Why can't I spell that? Try again: Launche. No, no, no! I don't want to go to rehab, no, no!

Apart from moi, it was okay. I met the secret agent. He said at last I'd given him something he could sell. I wanted to meet Jamima since she was the first person to read the re-write, but I can't do this stuff. Helen Fitzgerald was funny though. I'll have to read the book. I stood in the rain waiting for the bus back into Glesga tonight. What was I doing in Newton Mearns?

Tuesday, 3 June 2008

Ra Waste of Time!

Tuesday 22:43 p.m.
Ra bliss has jumped the paddock gate and has
galloped off into the middle distance, so it has. We've reached a new
stage in blissiness ! With closed eyes, it's front loaded, kind of
fuller on at your face. You can imagine that if you stopped doing a lot
of bad stuff, the happiness would soon start to shine through.


So when are you going to stop doing all the bad stuff, Hotboy?
That's always been my problem, Jack. At the moment, I'm still suffering
a little from getting paid, but the money should run out by the
weekend, and good stuff to do is always the cheap stuff!


We left the allotment tonight with a gorgeous sunset at our backs. I
sat with my eyes closed at the side while the Domestic Bliss did
gardening stuff. There was an awful lot of bliss. I hope this keeps
up.

Some people think meditating is a waste of time. I
always thought it was like putting money in the bank. You just start
doing it and keep going. Eventually, you will be able to sit as the sun
goes down and engage with an awful lot of ra bliss. Just close your eyes
and within a few seconds there it is. This is, I think, mainly what I
have achieved in this life so far. You could take everything else away if you would just leave me that. And who knows what it'll be like next year. What a truly fortunate creature I am, I am! What a fortunate creature I am!

Sunday, 1 June 2008

Ra Weekendingness!

Sunday 20:23 p.m.
As far as the meditation states are concerned, I couldn't be more amazed at how wonderfully well things are going. Zooming into the great big sweetie nothingness, big gap in the thoughts, with still a definite subject (moi!) and the object, mainly ra bliss ... well, jolly good on that front, Jack. Still, not getting much heat. The visualisations are definitely improving, but still crap.

The post meditation states have become disturbed due to the arrival of the wages into the overdraft account. This led to a great arousal of suppressed desires which I didn't think it wise to obstruct. Also, I've been having a wonderful time. It is really hard to be having a better time than the one I'm having what with ra bliss and all. But there are a lot of folk out there who aren't getting ra bliss, and who are grieving and all that ... fung sake! It's a vale of tears, so it is.

The boy in the Richard Gere book says that if you're doing four times three hour sessions, you're in retreat. I'd heard of six one and a half hour sessions, which I could almost do some fine days, but three hour sessions four times a day ... what a lot of ra bliss you'd get. And other stuff. Bring it on.

At least, you'd be away from all the weeping and gnashing of teeth, and all that, wouldn't you? The resounding clunk as another one falls off its perch. No wonder they're terrified. No bliss either. Dearie, dearie me.

Saturday, 31 May 2008

Ra Bliss Update!

Saturday 22:34 p.m.
(Sorry about the line break problem in this post. I can't work out what's the matter, so I just cut the first bit.)

I really should say something about ra bliss, Jack. At last! At last! Tell us spam robots about ra bliss!

Sometimes dharma books just arrive when you're dead ready for them. The Dzogchen juju from the Richard Gere book seemed most timely. So you're not supposed to cling to ra bliss. Hear that, Jack! Not supposed to have an attachment to ra bliss. Very bad for the rest of the juju.

If you were surprised that there was any bliss at all, and then found great oodles of it, you might be allowed to cavort around in some abandonment for a while. A pause on the path. I think that's got to be allowed.


So the boy says you don't hang onto ra bliss, and you don't hang onto the clarity, and you don't hang onto the no-thought, or the nowness, or anything of the subject/object thing whatsoever.


I was giving this a go today. Sitting in the hut in the wonderful
weather. Reading the book. Smoking a joint. Bad boy! And doing ra bliss. There were different bits in ra bliss today. The boy says the mind is empty (no centre, no
circumference), knowing, and unconfined. You've got to rest your bum on
ground luminosity, no thoughts there, no concepts, one assumes. Can you
find it? Does it just unfold? Anyway, I had a good go at this today.
The gap between thoughts.

I didn't know what time it was today. I was a hippy
just once. I'd been in the lobby meditating then went up to the
allotment, but when? I later found out that I'd left the flat at 1:15,
as written on the note, and didn't get back till twenty past seven.
Just smoking dope and sitting in the hut really. Everything has jumped
forward as usual.

There's a plank that you've become affixed to. It's holding you up. Sometimes the envelope ra bliss seems to manifest in becomes kind of flattened and hard, and it's holding you up.

I was getting held up in the hut today in the easy posture i.e. just simple cross legs. This posture might be quite hard to keep a straight back position in, for most people anyway. If you're in a lotus, you back kind of wants to be straight. It's less stable with just crossed legs. But today I was getting held up in that, for ages.

What is it that's holding you aloft, Hotboy? I have no idea, Jack, but it is a force upwards stuck onto you. What more can I say?

How's about trying to differentiate ra blisses, HOtboy? Well, there was a difference in ra bliss today. The effects of the ra breathing were more straight into nothingness and great bliss accompaniments. Lots of bliss in the nothingness. Even if there's nothing much happening except ra bliss and the whiteness, and some heat, you're still in subject/object land. Thank god for that! I'm not ready to leave this planet yet, Jack! Maybe next week. Ask me again.

Wednesday, 28 May 2008

Ra Hotboy Dialogues No. 4

Wednesday 10:21 p.m.
I got paid today. I had to work overtime. I've bought four bottles of Erdinger to compensate for trying so hard with the juju and meditations over the last wee while. Since I cut up my credit card last week, ra bliss has hit much further and greater heights. To celebrate, here comes another slightly drunken dialogue with little Jack, my deep dear friend, in the great vastness of bloggydom.

AFTER THE REVOLUTION!
(The curtain opens. In the chair, Hotboy is bound hand and foot, and gagged. Little Jack, the Spam Robot, is sitting on Hotboy's knee. He has the black beard on a stick in one hand, and in the other a bottle of Erdinger beer which he drinks from throughout. Little Jack is covered in badges which say Library Assistant and Library Monitor)
JACK: We, the Spam Robots and I, do not want to hear any more about emptiness! We do not want to hear about suffering. All that crap about emptiness is for the eggheads. All that stuff about suffering is for the flatheids! Of course, the flatheids suffer because they don't even start meditating; they are sweetie sucking evil basturns, and all deserve to be reincarnated in the worst possible imaginable hells because they have completely funged up on being human beings. The only decent aspect of human beingness that we spam robots can discern is ra bliss! So, Hotboy, tell us something about ra bliss!

HOTBOY: I don't think ra bliss, Jack, is the point of all this.
JACK: Fung off! Can you get down to ra bliss, or can't you?
HOTBOY: Over the past wee while, I think, Jack, that I have almost got down to the thoughtless bliss, the great globule, the envelope, the unfoldingness, the indescribable to flatheids or anyone else, ra bliss that takes you away from the concerns of this world, ra bliss, ra bliss, ra bliss!

JACK: And has this been of any use to anyone else, Hotboy?
HOTBOY: It has been absolutely bugger all use to anyone I know, Jack. I am surrounded by flatheids, Jack. I don't like being amongst these people, Jack. I keep thinking they might start crying and never stop. Can I go to hospital now, please?

JACK: What? We're here to talk about ra bliss!

HOTBOY: I'm getting pissed. I'd like to go to hospital now, please. Why can't I buy some decent drugs on the street around here? If I can't go to hospital, can I go to the jail? I'd be so happy in solitary confinement!
JACK: I thought you were going to tell us about ra bliss.
HOTBOY: I can't get away from flatheids till Friday. Till then, just fung off! Fung off! Fung off!
(Little Jack the Spam Robot then jumps of the prisoner's knee and before the audience says:)
JACK: So, ladies and gentlemen, it's not about ra emptiness, and it's not about ra suffering, and it's not about ra bliss. It's about ra afflictive emotions! Yes! The fung afflictive emotions! That is ra problem!
(The curtain closes!)
HOTBOY: (off stage!) Dearie me! Thank God, the off-license is still open!

Tuesday, 27 May 2008

Ris time of year!

Tuesday
Once when I was in North Africa, a long, long time ago, we were walking to this campsite in the twilight zone. It was a bit strange because objects became very blurry, and distances were hard to judge. You had to watch your step, so you did. No, it wasn't the dope! Twilight is different in different places.

Particularly auspicious times to meditate are supposed to be dawn and dusk. Apparently, it's at these times that the breathing becomes equalised between the nostrils, and that's what you're looking for anyway.

In the wintertime when it gets dark about five or six, you can sometimes feel a difference in your body if you're sitting reading or whatever. (Of course, this doesn't apply to flatheids!) Then you can think: Oh, it's getting dark! I'll go and meditate. This is a very good thing about the winter because I've been missing this recently. The sun might be down by nine, but it doesn't get dark for ages and ages. When it gets dark, then's the time to give it laldy with the vase breathing. But I'm just about ready for beddybys by that time these days.

During the last week, I've only had 3 bottles of Erdinger. Nothing else. I get paid tomorrow. Time to switch addictions. I think I'll buy myself some soapbar.

I suppose due to being a good boy, I've been getting into amazingly blissy states recently, and my understanding has been enhanced by reading this book by the Nyingma boy. After trying to do the visualisations and whatnot, sometimes you should stop trying, let go, just be in the amazing bliss. I knew I should be doing that from other sources, but sometimes you forget and it's nice to get a reminder.

I've done some kind of training every day for the last fortnight apart from Sunday, when I went a walk with Poisonous. Fee, fi, fo, fum. Look out, Cassius, here I come!

Sunday, 25 May 2008

Ra Confusing Path!

Sunday 11:45 a.m.
Every time I read something about the juju, or dharma, Buddhism, or anything like that, I realise I know bugger all about it. I heard recently that you can't practise meditation. It's like practising sleep. Try to sleep and you'll never fung go to sleep. Or the boy in the Richard Gere sponsored book is going on about shravaka meditation. Had I heard of that before? Then there's ground, path and fruition. Path is defined by this Nyingma practitioner as confusion. You're on the path with your head jammed up your backside!

As if we weren't confused enough, Jack. It's all in the mind, Hotboy. All in the mind. Well, what's mind then, Jack? Dualistic mind? Non-dualistic mind? The latter is definitely a tricky one. As soon as you start thinking thoughts, you've got subject and object; a kind of frozen reality. I immediately thought of Niels Bohr's Copenhagen Principle ... or was it the Copenhagen Interpretation, Jack? Anyway, thank God in the midst of all this confusion that we in the Amazing Bloggy Church of the Bad Boy Blissheid don't believe in thoughts.

We embrace our ignorance
We don't believe in any things
Especially thoughts

It's been no bother not drinking or taking drugs and just meditating for as much as possible. I must have put in about eight hours yesterday. But not polluting your mind gives you a ringside seat on the emotional changes, like going from happy to crabbit, etc. I've been training a lot so I've been a bit tired sometimes and that always makes me a wee bit crabbit... if I can't eat some soapbar or have a drink in time.

Someone who used to land on this bloggy using the nomme de bloggy of Sandy Buchandyke has started cycling across America. You can find here en route blog here.

I've got a lot of time for that, Jack. What cycling across America, Hotboy? No, Jack. I'd be tired and crabbit all the time. No, I mean cycling across America as in funging off. That's what I'm going to do as soon as someone gives me some money. Fung off to someplace where nobody knows me.

What's the point of discoursing with one's chummies if you don't drink or take drugs, and you have no hobbies to talk about? I arranged to cycle to Cramond this evening with Poisonous. Well, that's like a hobby and you can cycle passed the pubs. See some flatheid on the safe side. Poisonous just phoned up and says he wants to go for a walk ... a walk? I've known Poisonous since I was a teenager and I've never gone for a walk with him. Not straight anyway. Basturns! Basturns! Basturns! I was going to go out cycling after seven so I could come home and luxuriate in the bath. He's going to phone me to go a walk about half two. I've got just over two hours to meditate till then... lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Amen. Basturns!

10:01 p.m.
Beautiful day! We walked along the Water of Leith to the Gallery of Modern Art, and Poisonous bought me a bottle of Stella Artois. He had a cup of tea. Then we walked back. He did not say: Do you want to go for a drink? So I walked home. Basturn!

But I dipped into the food fund for three bottles of Erdinger (had one already), so that'll show them! Before that I spent a couple of hours meditating in the hut, and didn't get back here till twenty to ten. The four days of no beers, and no nothing else, and trying hard have moved us on, Jack. They certainly have. Yesterday, I was trying to do calming with object, without object, etc., but today I just closed my eyes and went for ra bliss. Oh, ra bliss, ra bliss, ra bliss!

Because thou art saved, shall there be no more cakes and ale?

Well, there's nothing so lonesome, lonely and queer. What a terrible place is a pub with no beer!

Ion sent me a very nice email about the new book, the one about the floating Presidential candidate. I think she might like it better than moi, so that was nice. Since, as usual, it's not a proper novel, without proper chapters and all, it won't get published, but it's nice if someone likes it. Yes, it is!

Friday, 23 May 2008

Ra Richard Gere!

Friday 5.46 p.m.
Just got back from my Friday visit to see the auld maw. Number one son, my brother Silvest, was there for a bit. He's nearly seventy. Being number four son, I'm but a pup.

Had an email from my secret agent saying the joe he gave the book about the Presidential candidate to had given it a 'rave rave'. The secret agent will read it this weekend. But it's good that somebody has liked it.

All I know about Richard Gere is that he's rich, handsome and very talented. He also has to take sneery flak from some journalists about being a supporter of Tibetan Buddhism. I was reading a dharma book up the allotment yesterday. It's called Carefree Dignity and seems to be transcripts of talks given by Tsoknyi Rinpoche. Read the first chapter. Excellent. At the very end of the acknowledgements (and who reads them?)(well, the sensei and reverend probably reads them, but he's a book freak!), it says print sponsor: Richard Gere. I guess he paid for the book to get published. Fair play to the boy! He's been a help to me!

Saturday 00:09 a.m.
Since I cut up my credit card, I haven't had the slightest desire for beer. How weird! So I've had no beer and no bob hope since Wednesday (i.e. no bob now for about five or six weeks!). I expect to see God at this rate by next Friday.

I did the Ferry Road and five hills up Dundas Street run tonight in the full Beer Monster Reduction Vehicle minus the bin liner. It took 41 minutes. The last time took 45 minutes. At my best, I did it in 28 minutes, but I'd be happy with 35 minutes. When I was running regularly, but not long distances, I used to go round in about 32 minutes, but I was not a fat basturn then.

Thursday, 22 May 2008

Ris Fortunate Creature!

Thursday 10:52 a.m.
I got out of bed about half an hour ago feeling so happy. I'm still feeling happy. I haven't started meditating today yet, but I know that ra bliss ... Oh, ra bliss, ra bliss, ra bliss!

I seemed to spend all night falling into and out of wonderful dreams. I was lost in Peru or was it Brazil? I sometimes asked, I didn't care what the answer was. I had my wonderful friends with me. I was on holiday. The views were magnificent. Gorgeous women kept smiling at me.

And I got out of bed feeling so happy. Buddhism is essentially about making you feel happy and I feel really happy right now. Once I start meditating, today I will sometimes be bursting with happiness.

Though I enjoy winding up the flatheids, I do owe this feeling of being permeated with happiness to other people, especially my family and friends for not being horrible to me, and especially the juju masters like Ringu Tulku and the buddhas in the south west.

I discovered yesterday that the week long gong bashing festival down at the Samye Ling isn't till August. I'll have the money for that. I'm so looking forward to it. I'll have an even better time than I had last year!

I'm so pleased I cut up my credit card. I'll phone them up this afternoon, so I won't get another one till after I get paid on the 28th. Hurrah! Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Amen.

What a fortunate, fortunate creature I am! What a fortunate creature I am!

Wednesday, 21 May 2008

Ra Soup!

Wednesday 7:15 p.m.
Just got back from Mr Akrams, the local grocer. Here's what you get for £5:75 around these parts.

1 turnip
1 leek
4 carrots
4 tatties
1 head of broccoli (big)
4 onions
2 500g packets of lentils (these cost 99p each)


So it's about £3.80 for the veggies. That would probably make three pots of soup; easily a week's supply. Just add spices.

Tuesday, 20 May 2008

Rat Ringu Tulku!

Tuesday 9:11 a.m.
Yesterday afternoon the Dom Bliss and I took in a talk on Guru Yoga from Ringu Tulku. What a brilliant exposition! Without notes, he talked for about 50 minutes and then took questions for another 40 minutes. I've heard talks by Ringu Tulku before and I've never listened to anyone who can explain the juju better. His answers to the questions at the end were sometimes funny as well. He's obviously got something I wouldn't mind having!

I was getting blissed out sitting there on the floor of the Theosophical Society room in Great King Street. You just have to sit for a while with a straight back these days and something starts happening. Progress, progress, progress! I wakened up about 4. a.m. this morning and after a wee while, I was lying on my side feeling absolutely wonderful, in a cocoon of such bliss! It just kind of overcame me. This is a fantastic way to start the day!

Since I've spent all my money this month already (on beer!), I could only go to one of the Ringu's talks, which is a great shame. Opportunities to listen to guys like that shouldn't be missed!

11:20 p.m.
I haven't been going to the Tai Chi for the first four months of this year ... partly the capsulitis, partly being skint, etc., but I've been going back now for three weeks. I've grown fond of the wummin who teaches me this. The Tai Chi has been great for me on ways of slow increments. Subtle improvements. The wummin has got to be 78 years old anyway. She's like a little bird. But there are stretches in that wummin ....

I drank four bottles of Erdinger tonight and then cut up my credit card. After the Tai Chi, I went to my hut and meditated for a bit, then drank the four bottles of beer. More and more I feel as if I am on the cusp of wonderments, but I slow myself up and pull myself back, and try to stick with normal things ... like drinking beer. Well, I'm not normal. I haven't been normal for three or four years. I was never nice, but I always told myself I was normal, the norm, the usual joe. Time to hack into the habitual tendencies.

They do not give you the credit cards to help you, Jack. It is a great convenience for the better off, the retentives. I wanted to keep it because with two grand in credit you could always run, or pay for somebody's funeral. What did I do before I had one? Time to find out!

Sunday, 18 May 2008

Ra Weekend So Far!

Sunday 2:40 p.m.
Friday was wonderful. I'd probably put in about three and a bit hours before I got on the train from Bellshill back to Edinburgh. I was doing ra bliss as usual on the train, but started dozing off now and again. You go out in the brightness and come back in the same way, which is very nice indeed. Pulling out of Wester Hailes, I came to again, and soon was amazed by ra bliss. I checked my breathing to see if I still was breathing. Most subtle. Bizarre to be even considering this at all.

I was really tired from the shadow boxing when I was at Iron Man, a movie, en famille. I closed my eyes for a few seconds, and WoW! Such bliss! That was yesterday. Couldn't get enough time away from the flatheids yesterday, but you have to stay engaged.

Then on the way home we stopped at the traffic lights at Haymarket. A buxom wench in a low cut top opened up the window of a flat the sensei and reverend used to live in, the one just above the pub, or the flat just next door. Maybe sticking out her head to have a fag. Across the road, two drunk guys were coming down the pavement and one shouted over: Get your t*ts out for the boys! The girl stuck the fag in her mouth and duly obliged for a few moments. I wonder why that stuck in my mind.