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?