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