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.
Thursday, 17 July 2008
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?
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.
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!
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.
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
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!
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!
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