Ra Plain Chant and Song Juju!

Sunday 9:50 p.m.
The sister is trying to check the auld maw's hearing aid. "Where do you keep your money?". "Under the bed," says the auld maw without looking over. You have to have seen it. We are quite funny sometimes. Everybody's well passed grown up as well.

Someone I know gets into the chorus, and the plain chanters are amazing singers ...

Too many people are coming to thisbloggie! I wasn't counting the page loads. I counted the unique visitors. I hadn't read the text, of course, and just assumed the middle column was .... anyway, don't tell anyone you come here. This is a police surveillance bloggie trying to catch paedophiles .... before you know it, the schoolgirls will be after me again, and I'll have to decamp once more. ...

It's my perfect night out. You show up in one of these churches somewhere in the beautiful city, places you'd never normally be in. The closer they get to the catholics, the more gorgeous they become. Last night was austere, in theCannongate Kirk, but it doesn't really matter if you're going to close your eyes anyway.

Meditating in churches ... it's the least embarrassing place. You can hide your half lotus under your jacket. Nobody needs to know. Closing your eyes is fine. You don't buy a programme and you don't really listen to the music, but it's there. Fabulous background noise. Beautiful, beautiful noises. Oh, ra bliss, ra bliss, ra bliss!

I'd like to convey something about the happiness in the emptiness and how wonderful this past week and a half has been since I was last lashed and held fast to my jobbie. Everything just becomes more and more wonderful.

Ra Horrorshow!

Saturday 00:40 a.m.
So the nightmare starts with you slotting the video into the machine....then you're in the video .... then the video changes to a computer game, and the josephine in the back of the motor is telling you about the nine levels and she's only on level seven ... if eleven policemen get killed during the riot/vampire/zombie gameshow then it will all stop. And it stops. Then you turn to the josephine and she's wearing the horrorshow mask for the twist at the end ... also, with the wake up scene when you haven't wakened up at all. That was this week, sometime.

And today I was so happy. Anybody could see it. Once when I was sitting in the lobby ...so blown away with ra bliss! It came in there. We flew. Not literally of course. But it felt wonderful today sometimes. The wonderful breathings, the breathings. Boom, Shiva!

Rat Deity Yoga Again!

Thursday 10:14 p.m.
Last night, feeling exhausted from the diggings, I was lying in the bath with the Scotland versus Croatia game on the radio. I'm doing ra bliss.

Once at the beginning of all the meditations, I remember getting somewhere and thinking hurrah, I'm getting somewhere, and then it dissipates immediately, destroyed by a thought. These days with the breath sheath thing, or whatever it is, you can do ra bliss and half listen to the radio, and close your eyes and try to visualise the image of the Medicine Buddha from the postcard. Last night, it seemed to be there, kind of emerging from ra bliss, or from within ra bliss context.

Is anyone still with me here? Yes, Hotboy, the spam robots are listening!

So it kind of seems to be there in the whiteness, in ra bliss, the Medicine Buddha. It's not 3D, but at least the arms are blue, and the head, etcetera.

Once I read somewhere that the biographies of the 84 Mahasiddhas were all the same. At some point the deity appears. It's from one of these 84 Mahasiddhas, Tilopa, that the juju I'm trying to practise comes from.

St Teresa of Avila got to speak to Jesus Christ in his glorified body, who said he would do things for her because he knew she loved him, and she started with the hands. The thing I read said you could start with scanning the image from the top to the bottom kind of thing. You just sit for as long as possible and stick with it for as long as possible and see what you can get.

Was it really Jesus Christ, Hotboy? Of course not, Jack. There is no real Jesus Christ. There is no real moi. There in maybe only projection and motivation. There is only vast emptiness. This is the mind game. The mind game is the only game in town.

But did she do miracles, Hotboy? Of course, she did, Jack. Among the flatheids with the placebo effects and the hysteria and with their heads stuck right up their bums, if you can get Jesus Christ to speak to you ... any miracle has got to be easier than that!

Maybe some miracles you could do and maybe some you couldn't.

The biographies of the all the 84 mahasiddhas is the same. The deity appears.

Nothing exists in the manner of its appearance. Tsongkhapa.

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

Who are you? says the emperor to the wee fat baldy guy. I don't know, replies the wee fat baldy guy.

Know thyself.

To progress, I have to stay straight and sober till at least half ten at night. I got paid today. Tomorrow I will begin the process of switching from eating soapbar (when I have it) to smoking the stuff that makes you schizophrenic, skunk. The soapbar is £100 an ounce. I can get the skunk for £70 a half ounce, so I won't have anything for most of the month.

Who made me, Hotboy? I don't know, Jack. Who made ra bliss? I don't know, Jack. But it's not mine.

Rallotment!

Wednesday 6:10 p.m.
I don't know how long the meditation lasted, but I watched a candle burn down about and inch and a half, then went outside to dig. The birds were giving it laldy. I don't know if any have booked the birdbox yet, but there were millions of them about today. I was pleased to see a robin! Or maybe two robins!

During the Christmas holidays, one day a robin was giving me a lots of attention. Later on, I wondered if this was because it was starving and took it up some Christmas pudding, but there was no robin about this time. Dearie me. So I was especially pleased to see one hopping about the same place today.

Sometimes you dig up white caterpillar things, grubs with white bodies and yellow heads. What are they doing under the ground? I presented one to the robin today and it gobbled it up. It was like us eating something the size of your leg, so it tweeked away good style after that. Then I wasn't sure if that was a buddhisty thing to do. Maybe like in Star Trek you're not supposed to interfere. At least, I didn't eat it myself!

There are now eleven uplifted rows of potatoes undulating down one side of the allotment. I might get about 450 tatties out of that lot, or enough for 100 pots of soup. But I probably won't, especially since I give bags and bags to the auld maw.

I've just had some soup then some toast and now I think I'd better have a wee lie down. Unfit for fung anything, so I am!

Ra Best of Possible Worlds!

Wednesday 12:11 p.m.
What a fantastic bit of meditation that was! Not having to go to the jobbie this week is a big help.

Oh, why should I work like other men do? Oh, why should I work when the sky is so blue?

In the best of possible worlds ... this year I start to see the light at the end of the tunnel of deep, dark gainful employment. I start to make some money from the wonderful writings I can afford to get a new hut able to withstand armour piercing shells, and become a Two Hut Hotboy. Unfortunately, I cannot see how I can go on a long retreat and will have to live among the flatheids until they all start to die off.

God preserve us from the soapbar, the bevvy, and the flatheids!

Ra New Dawn!

Wednesday 9:00 a.m.
Went to beddybys sober and straight last night, but only managed two meditation sessions throughout the day. Still, both of them lasted over an hour and a half, and the second session was as good as it has ever been.

It looks to me, Jack, that ra bliss and ra heat are well outpacing the ability to visualise oneself as a deity in the mandala, which is till rubbish. Do you think this is important, Hotboy? I do not know, Jack. St Teresa of Avila wasn't employing any of these strategies, but I read once that some medieval mystics had problems with the heat. I think it was called Incendium Amoris.

If you wanted to get some idea of the visualisation task, you could stick Kalachakra Mandala into Google Images. I reckon you're supposed to have a visual memory of that, and then be sitting in it (I try to do this as if on top of it) as a deity. The colours are supposed to be radiant. It's no easy, Jack, but you can see what an effort of concentration and how much mental calming might be involved at my stage of the game. I assume the more you do of it, the easier it gets.

I can meditate my socks off today. I don't have any meetings with flatheids scheduled till Saturday night. I get paid tomorrow. Hmmm? Be nice if I could stop pulling both ways at the same time.

But what a wonderful day I'm going to have! What a fortunate creature I am!

Ra Poisonous and Moi!

Monday 11:32 p.m.
You learn from your deep, dear friends. The Poisonous says he can't remember what the Megong Delta looked like although he was there. He can't conjure up the visual image. Because he can't. I wanted to take him to task with this because if you can't get the visual image, if you can't see it, how can you jerk off? But maybe some folk just can't do the visual image stuff.

He is my deep, dear friend. I've known The Poisonous for maybe thirty five years ... I saw us b0th today in a mirror and how old we loooked! We were in a lift in the National Gallery ensemble in Princes Street, with the baltic Easter outside... I'm very fond of him.

After we had walked around the four galleries from Jeffrey Street till we got to the room with the Van Goghs in it, we counted the money. There's a billion pounds of art in the Van Gogh room and it's all for free. You can sit down there and .... the blossom shot is wonderful and the other one when the boy was in the hospital is obviously mad. Is this socialism, being able to go in there and sit down and watch the Cezannes, the Monets, and the Van Goghs? If it isn't socialism, I'd like socialism to be something like that.

As I was about to go home, he asked if I'd like a beer. I could have said, fung off, you flatheid, I'd rather do that thing you will never do, ra bliss, but instead I went to the pub and watched him spend money on getting me pissed, and I gave him the whole missionary works.

I was superb. The beer was weak. For the first time ever, I think I expressed it, the Tao which cannot be expressed. So it was missionary work. I have read the books. I can somehow do this juju, if not very well.

If you can't even begin to see the picture, you can't do the visualisations. But buddhism is so gigantic, you can go for something else. All the joes and josephines I know must be saints in some way. Maybe he can't visualise, but there is something a bit zenny about ra Poisonous. Maybe that's why he is my deep, dear friend.

If you carouse and drink with flatheids, well, you lose a bit. You lose the calmness which will have been attained by not drinking and just waiting for the desire to go away. But it's not just about moi! Even if he doesn't ever meditate ... who else can tell him about ra bliss? I don't know anyone who meditates around here. Only moi gets ra bliss. Oh, ra bliss, ra bliss, ra bliss! Oh, ra bliss!

Ra Springtime Will Come!

Saturday 10:18 p.m.
Like long, thin shallow graves, the eight rows of potatoes now undulate down one side of the allotment. There are ten holes bored down in each row with half a tattie in each hole. If you get four tatties from each half, you've got ... 360 tatties, about one a day for a year. I need at least four times that. Even then, I'll have eaten them all by the time the Xmas santy bastards start winding me up again.

Having only been digging, etc., for about an hour and a half, I fell asleep in the bath listening to Sportsound, then fell asleep on the couch for half an hour after having some of my delicious soup.

Hotboy, you are unfit for manual labour. Jack, I need this stamped on my forehead when I finally spit out the dummy and have to sign on the dole again. This boy is unfit for manual labour and disabled by ra bliss!

There was a wisp of snow in the air today as I talked to a neighbour about the passing of the joe from the allotment to the north east.

They don't sing. They don't dance. They don't laugh. These are the dour,greetin' faced basturns who compose a sizeable proportion of my compatriots, the product of four hundred years of calvinism.

Just about when I started meditating, I told a friend of mine that my ambition was to be a nice old man. I reckoned by meditating I could maybe improve my disposition by about two to five percent a year. Improve by little increments. Of course, the progeny of the evil bourgeois having been spoon fed and bubble wrapped would not imagine that they required any improvement. Now, they sing even less. They still don't dance. And you've got a better chance of hopping up Everest than you have of getting a belly laugh out of these miserable, Scottish basturns.

Meditation will make you happier. You should meditate because you will inevitably inflict your presence on other joes and josephines even if you'd rather not. It's not all about you. The miserable, greetin' faced Scottish basturns just get worse and worse. The grooves of habitual crabbitness just get wider and deeper.

Fortunately, the boffins will be allowed to create hybrid embryos soon and old joes like moi will be able to sit and fan ourselves while the subhumans do the digging.

Give it to Julia! Give it to Julia! Even with a dodgy shoulder, I could run and skip, and cycle. You can see why the ranchers thought they were above the sodbusters.

The replacement to the north east is a woman. As she bent down today I had an indelicate, agricultural thought. Perhaps she'd find that complimentary for she is an old doll. It's when you feel like umpteen the waxworks in the shop windows that you know it's getting desperate. Maybe it was the springtime, the rising sap and all that, even with the inkling of snow.

When the springtime will come, Oh, won't we have fun! We'll get out of jail, and we'll go on the bum! (Hallelujah, I'm a Bum. Joe Hill (?) . Wobbly Songbook

Ra Passion!

Easter Saturday 1:39 a.m.
Since I started doing juju with the photie of the boy in the Turin Shroud some years ago, I can consider myself a Christian.

This is not really a religious bloggy. I'm really a pragmatist. I want to see what works.

What is a pragmatist, Jack? Well, Hotboy, it doesn't matter if the cat's black or white so long as it catches mice.

Since I was in Bellshill today ... anyway, the Good Friday bit kind of passed me by, but I started in with the Turin Shroud image a couple of hours ago, and I've been feeling quite affected by it.

My god, my god, why hast thou forsaken me?

The tims don't give diddly squat about the bible. They invented the bible, so they know it's just a book. But I read the New Testament once and I thought the story was amazing. It's way better than any scifi, a totally fabulous story really.

My god, my god, why hast thou forsaken me?

I doubt if anyone has ever written a better line than that!

Anyway, it's slightly embarrassing being affected by The Passion when you should be fast asleep ... when I know that only a spam robot and Onan the Bavarian, and one or two perverts looking for hotboys ever come to this bloggy, but there it is. It is finished. In a couple of days, we rise again. Thank God for that!

Ra Panchen Lama

Thursday 23:32 p.m.
Once I had a room in Purelands, a retreat spot just up the road from the Samye Ling. This image of a kid kept coming into my meditations. I must have had a good look at his photie down at the centre, but when the image kept coming up, I'd forgotten who he was. A somewhat puzzling image. Today I sent an email to the literary agent, that man of great taste and perspicacity, about the Tibet connections in the two books he's trying to sell for me. I told him that I'd wanted part of the dedication for the kidsbook, if it ever gets published, to be to the Panchen Lama, Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, who was ripped out of Tibet with his family when he was six years old, making him probably the youngest political prisoner in the world. That was 1995 and nobody knows where he is now, or even if he's alive. So I googled him and got the photie again. I'd kind of forgotten so it had a wee bit of impact.

Marxist Leninism, I have not such a problem with. My grandfather had to work down the pits. When we've got rid of the flatheids, obviously there will be socialism. The Chinese Communist Party is no longer even pretending to promote socialism. The Chinese Communist Party are self serving fascist basturns. They are materialists without any ameliorating scepticism. They just stole that kid and his family. They are basturns.

They will not endure, Jack. The great Fidel said that four million honkies in South Africa could not maintain apartheid forever. And was it not so? They are engaging in globalisation. As soon as we start boycotting their goods, they're funged. I don't give them another fifteen years. I just hope the Chinese people don't have to go through what happened in Russia.

If you want to see what the photie looked like, clicky here.

Ra Petition!

Thursday 10:05 a.m.
If you type www.avaaz.org into the computery thing, you can sign a petition supporting the Dalai Lama. Only take a minute.

Yesterday I worked an afternoon of overtime and was so .... anyway, had four bottles of Erdinger to celebrate the return of my credit card, then drank half a bottle of wine. Bad boy! But I won't be going to work again till a week on Monday. Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah! I haven't meditated today yet, but right now I'm off to spend the rest of the morning in the lobby.

Ra Bliss!

Thursday 00:06 a.m.
Say you were the flatheid who was offered some more money to go and work in another place and then found yourself in the middle of a race riot, and were stoned, shot, stabbed, or strung up in some way ... first of all, you cannot glory in anyone being killed during the problems in Tibet. This is not supposed to be a political bloggie and so I probably shouldn't say any more than that.

If the Chinese government(s) weren't such a bunch of stupid, self serving basturns, moi would not have had the opportunity to practice the great juju of jujus, the wonderful vajrayana because it would all have stayed in Tibet. It is worth engaging with Tibetan culture because the skillful means in the 6 Yogas of Naropa are a priceless joy. There is nothing moi can say about this because the too dumb to meditate are too dumb to meditate, and that's all you can say about the flatheids really. Just too dumb to meditate.

I have developed in my mind the idea that the Dalai Lama might be my guru. What a fortunate creature I am, I am! What a fortunate creature I am!

Ra Status Report

Tuesday 7:55 p.m.
As I was resting on the spade and looking over towards the sun going down behind the spire of Fettes College, the sky was very light blue, the streaks of cloud crimson and pink. I was digging and it was chilly, but very good to be there.

My capsulitis isn't bothering me much. I haven't been shadow boxing full out, but the only real nuisance is that I cannot stand on my head. It's no happy with the hand going behind your head like that. Going up with straight legs, then going into a lotus and sitting down had perhaps a bit too much vanity in it for me anyway. The tai chi seems to be good for it.

I've re-written the first 120 pages of The Real McCoy and I'm really enjoying working on it. Of course, it'll make me rich. Rich! Rich, I tell you!

My auld maw sent me £20 in the post today so I could go and see her this week since I've lost my credit card. It's hard to know what to say about that.

I've got four wee Polish kids helping me at my jobbie. They were falling about today as I was trying to pronounce their second names. In my grandfather's day, the Poles came to Bellshill to work in the pits and the story was that they walked down the main street and called themselves after the names on the shops. Joe Chemist. I'm sure that's apocryphylinksiwcz. Won't have a word said against the Polish kids. They're better than ours.

Sunday 00:17 a.m.
Waitrose were selling 12 cans of Guinness for only £9.99. Today there were only two cans left. I am absolutely crap at being a flatheid. Why other flatheids put up with me I do not know. They're much better at being flatheids than moi. My flatheid is right over the top!

A little fashed and bashed, I went into ra bliss about eleven fifteen. What a disgrace! But during the hour and a half of sumptiousness, I felt so eternally grateful to all the joes and josephines down at the Samye Ling for their support, especially the lama. Especially the lama.

This has to be the end of the beginning.

Then I went up to the allotment, meditated and dug, then planted some tatties in three uplifted rows. I'm still carrying the baggage of getting pissed the night before, but everything is coming up roses, the longer you wait.

Tomorrow I'm back to where I was before the Christmas santy basturns started upsetting me. No money. No drugs. No nothing. Be a wee bit tricky for a couple of days then .... I'll be happy!

Ra Big Sit!

Friday 6:08 p.m.
I was waiting for the train yesterday to go and see the auld maw and it was cancelled. Today I got as far as the end of the ticket queue then discovered I'd lost my credit card. So I spent the afternoon in the hut instead.

A couple of posts ago, I wrote that somehow these days I seem to be able to sit in a lotus for an hour and a half with no great pain, ache or aggravation. I don't know why this has happened. Today I sat in the hut in a simple cross legged position and didn't have to move. I was sitting there for nearly three hours.

This is a wee bit bizarre, Jack. Previously, I couldn't sit in the hut in any position without moving for an hour and a half without the stiffness and soreness setting in. It was nearly three hours. I asked the first joe I met on the way out what the time was. He said ten past five. I checked that in the supermarket when I was buying the carry-out. There was no difficulty in getting up and untangling my legs, which is normal when you've been sitting for a bit. I was sitting in the lobby in a lotus for an hour and a half before going to the train station and it was same: I just got up as if I'd been sitting for a few minutes.

I used to wonder how the juju boys and girls would could sit up at night in the meditation boxes for the three hours sleep they were allowed by the lama. Well, I'm still wondering. What the fung is going on here, Jack? If anyone has an opinion on this, I'd certainly like to hear it!

It's just getting dark here in chilly Jockoland. It's Friday night. Here comes ra heat! Then here comes the Guinness!!

Ra Culminations!

Thursday 9:25 a.m.
This morning it was as if something wonderful but only half remembered was happening as I came awake. The reverberations of this continued through the meditation I was doing sitting up in bed. And I took a vase breath .... the amount of heat and bliss!

The scientific flatheids did an experiment with the wee fat baldy guys where they got them to sit out on a ledge in the freezing cold. The wee fat baldy guys all dozed off without huddling or anything else that would indicate that they were bothered by the cold. I felt like one of them this morning. I thought: I'm just like one of those wee fat baldy guys! I'd freeze out on the ledge at the moment, but the heat is coming through pretty strongly now.

It is weird, Jack. And it seems other powered. It has its own dynamic. I think I've been doing the medicine buddha sadhana now for about a year. And it's working, Jack!! What a wonderful state of affairs! This is by far the best thing that could have happened to me. What a fortunate, fortunate creature I am, I am! What a fortunate creature I am!

Ra Vajrayana Joe!

Wednesday 4:50 p.m.
You sit here having a wee think about what you'd like to blog about and you're already off in ra bliss. Oh, ra bliss, ra bliss, ra bliss!

Now that I am free of the jobbie once more till next Monday, I thought I'd set the scene for the next few days of juju.

I seem to be able to sit in a lotus now without too much bother for an hour and a half. There's been a suddenish jump, Jack. I don't know how or why, as usual. Interestingly enough, I think a recommended routine is one and a half hour sittings six times a day. That's nine hours. It will be a help to be able to sit without having to adjust your legs over the hour and a half.

I can't really recommend my practise to anyone since I made a lot of it up, or adapted it from stuff I'd heard or read. I haven't done the 100,000 recitations of the hundred syllable mantra and neither have I completed any really of the 100,000 prostrations. These are foundation practises. So a lack of foundations really. Also, I've been drinking about 12 bottles of Erdinger a week and eating a half ounce of soapbar when I've got it. Bad boy!!

But ra bliss is going into ecstasy. The idea of breathless ecstasy is no longer just an amusing idea to me. I might not be able to emanate as a deity, but the breathlessness is, I don't think, beyond me.

Happiness? If you were to think that the computer (and everything else!) arises in mind just as your thoughts and feelings arise in mind, you would feel less ownership of your thoughts and feelings. When the sense of self goes outward to include everything, then your feelings and emotions must seem lessened in importance.

Almost all your thoughts are lies. Almost all of your feelings and emotions are misplaced. Almost all your heads are jammed up your bums.

I don't have a day clear of flatheids till Saturday. I'll go to see the auld maw tomorrow since we're having some younger people round for their dinner on Friday night, and I don't want to miss a whole day. With younger people I may not be able to become as debauched as with my contemporaries, but I can only see my peers growing older, getting stupider, becoming decrepit .... grief, sorrow, lamentations .... suffering in this life! Fancy missing the whole point of human beingness! What a bunch of morons!

Time for the hut now!

Rassault on Precint 13!

Friday 8:15 p.m.
All names have been changed to assuage the guilty. Everyone involved went on to become bastions of the community and heid bummers in the various eschelons of local government, except for moi.

This is for all you pill poppers in the bloggiesphere.

Throw them away! It is not ra bliss!

I came to myself standing there in the middle of the car park outside the polis station the middle of Glasgow. I'd just been thrown out of the cop shop by two big Glesga polis who had then turned and walked back into the cop shop. Dazed and confused, so I was. Then I didn't know where I was. Recollection came to me and I stumblebummed back into the cop shop and demanded to know what they were doing with my friend. Ding, ding on the bell. Fuckin' you again, says the polis. Three times I got thrown out of the jail.

Then I was sitting there on the bench waiting. I'd been thrown out of the jail, but I hadn't searched myself before. So I found a handful of valium, laughed like a drain and ate them all. Then the polis came through the swing door and ... fucking you again! ... dragged me inside the inner temple and got this D.S. joe to search me. What a laugh I was having! Then I got booked and went into the cells for fourteen hours total sleep.

I was a month before my final exams at uni. We had tickets for the cup final. Around this time I was very friendly with a joe who had a bit of paper which said he was a valium and mogadon dependent with schizophrenic tendencies. Two cars were heading off to Glasgow.

I was going to the cup final to see the huns getting put to the sword, but the ticket is for the Rangers end.

Ireland is calling. It calls to you and me. Ireland is calling. It's calling to be free. For Ireland's sake, abandon all your fears. Ireland is calling. Calling for volunteers.

So I thought having some valium was perfect.

I only write this stuff for Ion, but if I was to do the subject justice, I would have to try writing, and I've more or less given that up.

I'd like to remark that the polis involved in this particularly arresting scenario behaved with fantastic professionalism. They were mocked and verbally abused, but no kickings were dealt out although they were deeply deserved.

When we got bailed, I went home to Bellshill to get my suit for the court appearance. The progeny of the evil bourgeois, who all went on to become pillars of the community, didn't want to tell their mums and dads. Whited sepulchres, they get it with their mother's milk!

Ra Hut Management Course!

Friday 7:51 p.m.
I was reminded of the wonderful, beautiful city today as I walked around it with my wee brother, Popeye. After meditating all morning ... then we were looking at the town from Inverleith Park, and it was blowy and rainy, but that's the summer time in Aberdeen, where he comes from ... and I was thinking of the heavenly vision you might maybe get one day. Well, it looked like heaven to me, just a wee bit.

Clicky McDuck, his son, was off doing the first part of the kind of interview you might have to do if you were going to get a jobbie in computeriness and artificial intelligence. Popeye said he was a lot like me, so when I got him in the kitchen I gave him the three turnings of the wheel of dharma, as you do.

He did not think that sitting for sixteen hours wearing a jimmy wig and accoutrements in the kid-on cave in the Unheard of and McDonald Islands was a bad idea. I said fifty fifty. I press the switch and sit. He takes the money and I give all the money away! Fantastic idea.

We are not what we think we are and it is not happening to us the way we think it's happening to us. This much is rational. We are bits of other joes and josephines who have gone before us. Clicky got the false sense of self alright. The negating the object outside was no bother either, but the what is the mind stuff is hard work if you haven't seen it. Still, fantastic to talk to a young person. Old people who cannot access ra bliss have just failed.

Ra Lark!

Wednesday 4:00 p.m.
When I haven't been falling by the wayside the night before, often I waken up an hour or so before my alarm goes off, and I usually feel quite happy. Sometimes I tell myself how wonderful existence is and what a great day lies before me. It was not always thus.

This morning as I was sitting up in bed starting my meditations my whole consciousness was filled with ra bliss, a great and awesome arising. I was trying to go through images of my gurus, as you do, but I couldn't go on. Visualisations were unsustainable in the face of such bliss. Oh, how happy I began to feel then! What a fortunate creature I am, I am! What a fortunate creature I am!

I think this is what's called being on the path, Jack. It's self selecting. If you haven't selected yourself for these deathless delights .... just give yourself a good slap!

How come I ended up surrounded by flatheids? If you believed in anything else about Tibetan buddhism .... well, I was conceived just as the Chinese invaded Tibet. I suppose I might have made a vow to help all sentient flatheids in a previous life, but I find that highly improbable. People who don't meditate are a pain in the neck!

The Theravadins say if you reach a certain stage in development, you can't be reborn anyway ... even if you wanted to, so there's hope yet! If something in moi has existed in a different form, I suspect it was in another planet far, far away where everybody meditates and there are no angry voices. Or I might have been a dolphin.

I read this in the National Geographic yesterday. These folk were training dolphins in sign language and rudimentary grammar. Dolphins follow your finger when you point. They understand messages even when they're shown on teevee. The researchers made up a sign for create and asked the dolphins to make a trick of their own. ...

"The two dolphins swim away from the side of the pool, circle together underwater for about ten seconds, then leap out of the water, spinning clockwise on their long axis and squirting water from their mouths, every maneuver done at the same instant. " None of this was trained," Herman (the researcher) says, "and it looked to us absolutely mysterious. We don't know how they do it - or did it."

I wonder what the dolphins were 'saying' to each other for the ten seconds they were circling underwater. I mean, they're taking the piss, aren't they, Jack?

Ra Capsulitis

Sunday 1:35 p.m.
As I was on the train to Bellshill yesterday to see the auld maw and Popeye, my brother, I thought I'd ask Popeye about my shoulder, which has been giving me a bit of aggravation since before Christmas. That's the advantage of being in a big family: you tend to share diseases. And it turns out Popeye has the same disease and has had it for a year. It's called capsulitis, which can take two years to go away. What? How ironic! Years of yoga and tai chi and you end up with a frozen shoulder.

Have you ever thought someone was taking the piss, Jack? I mean, this might be the end of my fantasy fighting career! Jack Dempsey can rest easy now alright. Ricky Hatton can go back on the Guinness and fish suppers. Marvellous Marvin can go back to sleep. Hotboy has now left the arena!

Popeye and I both had our troubles with helicopactor pylori and, of course, suffered from arrestitis at the hands of a cruel constabulary.

Popeye set off to get arrested when about a three day drive from Teheran. It was just before the Shah fled. Our Prime Minister said he was right behind the Shah, dropping everyone who was British and in Iran at the time right in the soapy bubbles. For three nights Popeye and his companion slept outside towns where folk broke the curfew dressed in funeral robes and hundreds of people were shootied. Then he reached Tehran and managed to get on the last flight to Blighty just before the shit hit the fan. What a relief! He was snowbound at Heathrow for two days and finally got home to Bellshill. So he went to the pub, as you do, and got steamboats, as you might, especially if you hadn't been in a pub for months. On the way home, he went for a piss up an alley and was arrested for that. You couldn't make it up.

I've not had time to write my book this week for meditating. The three hours today so far have been exemplary. Almost breathless bliss! Yippee!