Rem Skandas

Saturday 8:10 p.m.
The cooker man didn't turn up and the trains were cancelled today. Kind of felt like doing something or seeing someone. I went for a short but faster run to improve my speed.

The presenter on the Horizon programme on Monday said they had to set the clocks in the satellites to run faster because time doesn't run at the same speed as it does on earth. Time goes slower/faster on earth because of the greater gravity. To keep the clocks at the same time must take a lot of sums.

Anyway, to get my speed up I did a shorter run. Usually, you might not notice the Pentlands from Inverleith Park, but when I was running through it today they were a bit of a stand-out covered in snow.

Apart from the Domestic Bliss, the only person I've had a conversation with since leaving work at noon on Wednesday has been our friend with the MS, who is in respite care at Liberton Hospital. I saw her on Thursday afternoon and I'll see her again tomorrow afternoon.

In Extreme Pilgrim when the boy was with the Shaolin monks, they showed him the cave where the joe who kicked off the zen stared at the wall for nine years. He probably got up every once and a while, but he might not have.

Tilopa, the joe who originally compiled the Six Yogas of Naropa, had himself chained and is supposed to have sat there for twelve years staring at the wall.

If your MS is at the stage of our friend's, you can't go anywhere if you just feel like it. You are doubly incontinent and you can't make yourself understood because you can't get the words out properly anymore. The woman is an advert for coping with this, but when I go there I have to talk about upbeat stuff. I have to talk for about an hour or so. Tomorrow I'm going to talk to her about self.

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

You can tell yourself the self isn't in any of the skandas. I'm not the body; I'm not the senses; I'm not the perceptions; I'm not the consciousness; I'm not the mental formations (which include volitional impulses.)

Volitional impulses are what tend to interupt the meditations. They can arise like jagged intruders. Sometimes, when I'm sitting quietly doing nothing, I get a bit fed up and get up and move, do something else. If you've got MS the way our friend has, this is not an option. You can't get up or do something else.

' What then am I? What is the self? It is in the body. It is in everybody. It is everywhere. It is the ALL. It is Self. I am IT. Absolute oneness.' Sufi poem. The Wall.

You can tell yourself that your false self occurs in the mental formations, ideations. You can tell yourself this and try to dismiss this false self, but when you have done all this, it'll still be there!

Tsongkhapa suggests you should investigate whether your sense of self is separate from or part of the psychological aggregates. You're supposed to come to the conclusion that it's part of the psychological aggregates. It's part of thoughts. Unfortunately, it seems to be part of almost all the thought you have. It's not there when you're in deep sleep, or doesn't seem to be. Apart from that ... it's everywhere.

After you have dismissed this false sense of self and settled down again, it's still there.

'However, the conventional existence of the self arises as an object of the mind. This is to say, we have the appearance of human beings as irrefutable conventional phenomena.' Tsongkhapa.

So you might find it a help here to get into dependent origination. The boy recommends looking at the mirror. The reflection in the mirror does not exist in the manner of it's appearance. It is not what it seems. Also, it depends on the mirror, the operation of the photons, and person standing in front of the mirror.

You can see how deity yoga fits in here superbly. You try to imagine yourself as a deity. You know this is one big mental formation. It isn't really real. It does not exist in the manner of it's appearance, for sure. But you might be able to convince yourself otherwise. It's just a false sense of self. Much like the other one you've convinced yourself about. Unlike the deity of course, you think that one's real.

You can wrestle for hours with stuff like this, but from whence does the serenity descend? The muslims might have an idea here. You might want to surrender .... your self. If God is willing. You have to think things are moving along just as they should. Don't worry because there's nothing to worry about. Go with the flow.

Hotboy, she's still going to be lying there when you go with the flow out the door and back home. Tell her about ra bliss! You might be right there, Jack! I'm the only joe she knows who could tell her about ra bliss. I'll tell her about ra bliss and say there is more than one way to stare at a wall.

That'll be ten pecent off the top, please.