Bottie Photies

          Having the Botanic Gardens nearby is just wonderful sometimes!

           The seven weeks of prayers and gong bashing for Dr Akong will be finishing today down at the Samye Ling. Haste ye back!!

            I just blocked a "web crawler and bots" from the statcounter thingy. What are they? Anybody know.

The bottom line

         I got down to the bit where you draw the line on this play today. I had other things to do, but became pre-occupied and suddenly seemed to be getting to the end. Like a river rushing into the sea. Such exhilaration. It's not like doing tai chi, which should give you a lift and not leave you feeling knackered, and it's not like long distance running, which at the end is a completely different kind of satisfaction. And it's not like the best feelings from ra bliss, which are the best of feelings. But it is a yahoo feeling! A wonderful yahoo feeling!

        Of course, you will give it to a dweep, and they won't understand it, but that feeling is a great feeling. God alone knows what it might be like if you were Michelangelo and you did the last chippy chippy bit on the statue of the Madonna and Christ, the one when you look right at St Peter's. Well, you can just look at that and ... Ars Longa Vita Brevis.

Another Lovely Day

          I'm really loving working on this script!!

          The sky was lovely over at the allotment this afternoon. I don't sit in the hut much since the kiddos put a bench on the plot, and it's not too cold usually, but I sat in the hut for a bit today. I don't really need the hut so much these days since there's no one else in the flat usually, but it is a great place to meditate.

           A friend of mine showed me the video which I hope is in the previous post. It's about six or seven years old I think, and he told me it had gone to data heaven years ago, but it seems not. The lotus is lousy partly because I was just getting over a knee injury, which I think occurred when I tried to get into a lotus whilst in my cups!!!

            This morning I had two or three lucid dreams in a row. When I wakened up, I was most keen to fall back asleep so I could dream again. Lucid dreaming is when you know you are dreaming. I knew I was dreaming in the first dream because I was dreaming that my partner had come back into the flat. So I thought I must be dreaming. We walked down the lobby and I changed the colour of the wallpaper in the dream and then we went into the kitchen. With some other folk we looked out the window there to the heavenly view. Wish I could dream like that every night. Lucid dream will, I hope, some day turn into dream yoga, one of the Six Yogas of Naropa. Talk about help from beyond the grave!!!

Hotboy interview

Making connections!

          Just noticed on the statcounter thing that just over 50,000 folk (or spam robots!) have hit my blogs now. I seem to have been blogging since June 2007. Most of the folk hitting my blogs through their numerous name changes have been wasting their time, of course, but the posts on vase breathing get as much hits as anything else. I like that! This is the bliss! This is the bliss! This is the bliss!

           I sent a letter today to the head of the drama department of Radio Scotland. I've got mixed feelings about making any connections about writing since I really want to concentrate on the meditations, but I think now I can write and meditate. I'll probably get nowhere with the drama stuff, but I'll finish the script anyway and then go onto writing prose again. Prose is harder!!

The Light

          The light was better in the morning, but I meditate in the morning. In the afternoon when I went for a walk through the Botties the wisps of cloud sometimes obscured the sun, but sometimes not. The bottom photie was taken before I started meditating in the allotment. Marigolds at the end of November? Who would have believed it? The allotment makes you notice stuff like that.

           I think the photies are better now that I cannot see through the viewfinder. Takes a bit of the ego out of it somehow.

            I got the second act sorted out this afternoon when I got back from the allotment and the Botties. Last week when I started work on the play, I realised that writing is really quite hard work sometimes, particularly when you are starting. |You'd rather be doing something else some of the time, but some of the time it just feels like the thing you should be doing. When it's like that, it seems silly to have stopped to concentrate on the meditations. Maybe I'm better at compartmentalising stuff now, but I think it's probably that it is easier editing and re-writing dialogue than it is inventing prose. Maybe not.

          Tomorrow I'll write a letter to the folk in radio drama, the folk whose names I heard for the first time last week. This might be a mistake. Never was a team player really. Always more of an anarchist than a communist and that's okay if you don't mind writing books that will never be published, but with drama you ... anyway, it looks like the play will be brilliant, so I should test it out on whoever. I think there's a fifty fifty chance of this being a really bad idea!!

In between times

          What you have got to do when you have to deal with a bereavement situation is be able to meditate. If you cannot meditate and do not understand anything about non-self and emptiness, well, you might as well just blow your brains out. Clinging to an idiotic view of self whilst trying to navigate the emotional maelstrom ... well, since I am not enlightened, I've had to do that, but not in the way the other joes do. The old joes. Don't be one of them.

           I'm in an intermediate situation now. The massive grief has diminished. I miss my friend. I have to move onto other things.

           It's a wee bit like getting shingles when I was about ten years younger. I couldn't believe how horrible that was, but was thankful that I wasn't old. Right now I am old, but not that old. The auld maw told me once that your body just falls apart after you are sixty, and I can see that she was dead right about that as she was about so many other things. But although my partner has died, I am not ready to die yet. 

          So now that the grief is diminished, and I am not ready to die myself, I must somehow recreate a life. This life is bound to be slightly different from previously. I had minimum wages money before. Now, I'm loaded comparatively. I'm not loaded the way the evil bourgeois are, but they're surely bound for hell. I've got enough money to travel, if I wanted to. I do not feel that I need to give the money to anyone else when I am dead because I am not bourgeois. Buddhism gave me rebirth. Dynasties are for other folk.

           I did an hour and a half's work on the re-write of the play today. That's an awful lot for me these days! There was a time when eight hours a day was normal.But I need the time to meditate. We'll see. 

          

Really working now!

          Yesterday, I went for a coffee with Colin MacDonald. I knew Colin when I used to write for radio. He's been writing scripts and whatnot for most of his adult life, I guess. I mean, making a living doing that kind of thing, which I never did. Anyway, he told me the way they organise radio drama now is far different from in my day. If I wanted something on in 2015, I'd have to be talking to someone now. Apparently, they put together all the ideas in February and pick the ones they want from a hundred word precis. He says there are still a million folk in the audience listening to Radio 4 drama.

           Anyway, I thought I'd better look at the second act of this play and actually did an hour and a half this afternoon. I should have a fair idea if I can get it to work by the end of next weekend.

           Today I went for a walk in the Botanics before doing some digging, the day was so bright and clear. The first time I get to see the photies is when I put them on the blog.

Samye Photies

          I didn't realise I'd taken this many photies!!

Ramblings!

         I'm into the third bottle of Erdinger and my exhaustion dissipates. I'm always completely knackered when I get back from the Samye. I'm going to get pissed and sleep for the next two days!! Tomorrow I might have to delete this post since it's under my own name and I may not be restrained.

        I saw the stuff about the typhoon in the Phillipines. 175 mph. What will it be like when the wind never stops and stays at around 100 mph.? The media is soothing on this problem. We are completely funged!! Within a generation a hurricane will blow all the buildings down in New York. Is there anything we can do about this? Well, the only thing I can think about doing is not eating meat. What can you do personally? At the end of the day it won't matter a damn, but it might make you feel less responsible ... as you drive about in your four wheel drive, etc. We are completely funged! It's greed. I want. I want a helicopter. For me, personally, it would be much better to have a helicopter to get around in. We had a bad storm here a couple of weeks ago, bad, that is, for here. October. It's only October! Well, it's November, but it happened in October. Wait till January! We're funged! Completely funged.

        My generation ate the planet. The flatheids shouldn't really want to have grandchildren. They'll get blown away. Get into the idea of rebirth, even although it isn't you that gets reborn. If folk believed they'd have to live in this horrible place where the populations are moving and starving and the big bombs are still extant ... dearie me. Thank god, I'm hoping for no rebirth for moi! If I have to have a rebirth, I'd like it to be on another planet, one full of nineteen year old hippies!!

        Terry Butcher is my favourite Englishman. I think it's great that he came to live in Scotland. I hope when we are independent that a lot of great Englishmen like him come and want to live here. Hope he does well at Hibs.

        I've read a lot of books about Tibet this year due to having to read something since in some places I've been there has been no telly, but lots of those kinds of books. Patrick French's Tibet, Tibet was very good. I finished it about five this morning. This noble boy who was into the black juju got his eyeballs taken out in 1934 in Lhasa. The holes were cauterised with hot oil.

        What matters about Tibet is that it was there a thousand years ago when Buddhism was soon enough going to disappear from India. The Six Yogas of Naropa went into Tibet about then. This juju is the best thing ever for the human beings. Human potential. I'll probably never get near to be able to do any of the six yogas, but even at the stage I'm at you can see far, far above you, how wonderful this must be. The Chinese invasion did not destroy it. You can now practise this juju in Scotland. How wonderful that is!!

        el guia, Wine of Spain. Blanco. Refreshing dry white. 2012. 11.5%. You have no idea how hard you have to search Waitrose for this. Why don't they have the plonko collapso lined up on the shelves according to strength. Librarians? They need librarians in there!

        I think I have found my spiritual friend. I think you need one of those. Mrs Palmo spoke to me down at the gong bashing. She said she'd dedicate the merit from the juju she'd be doing on the sub-continent to the Domestic Bliss. If rebirth occurs, this will cover the time for that. This is like inviting the Queen of the Fairies to your son or daughter's christening. I am doing, and have done, everything I should be doing with regards to the demise of the love of my life. Mrs Palmo says with a relationship that long the consciousnesses become interwoven. This is exactly what your spiritual friend should say.

       Everything happens just the way it should. Wholeness in flow. Cause and effect. I am living once again the wonderful life. My life expectancy was 52, the length of time my old man had. I've been ten years already in the gravy! I don't expect to be alive more than another three years, if that, because that is the best way to think about it. That's enough self cherishing for anyone of my age.

        Since I took refuge, I must have done about 15,000 hours of meditations. In the seventeen years before that, I was meditating a lot as well. Well, a lot compared to anyone else I know. About two hours a day, there or there abouts, for the previous seventeen years. More than that. It has made me happier than I would have been. I don't know what my bereavement time would be have like without it. The boy says that the road you walk will have stones along the way. You cannot cover the whole road in leather, but you can put leather on the soles of your feet! So you can.

        There will be still be grief, sorrow, lamentations ... disillusionment, disappoint and despair ... suffering in this life. But perhaps not so much. Or maybe it will not be quite so bad. I feel very sorry for the too dumb to meditate, especially with my deep dear friends growing old, but there's nothing I can do about that right now.

         Except become a recluse. Take advantage of your disadvantages. Being an old man alone is exactly what I need at this time in my life. If I could be an old man alone for another couple of years that would be fine. That would be wonderful. If I died tomorrow, I'd have to give myself to give myself a big round of applause. Because I have tried to make my life meaningful. I have tried to make it count. I told myself I would do this, try hard, when my sister died of MS just before I went to university. You have to try to find the thing you can be good at. Your tao. My tao is meditating. I am the HotboyMadyamika and I can surf the oceans of bliss!!!

     

       

New Prices

          It seems that Kindle won't let you give away your books for free sometimes anymore. They've got a new scheme whereby you can drop the price for a while and they seem to have set up a webpage for this. Anyway, all my unpublished (otherwise) books were at the lowest price they could be, so I've had to up the prices so I can get into this new scheme. I think. I'm doing this in a great rush just before my wonderful lunch down at the Samye Ling. But it's not only a nuisance, but a pain in the butt. Three dollars seems a lot to ask for something that's really just, at the end of the day,  a lot of noughts and zeros. Oh well. That's capitalism for you. Kindle must reckon they'll make more money this way. I'll need to check this when I get home and I hate doing anything with this stuff. What a waste of my precious time!

Fire Under The Sun

          I finished Fire Under The Sun last night. It's a very harrowing account of the thirty plus years spent by a Tibetan monk called Palden Gyatso in Chinese jails being "re-educated". Horrific really. Re-education in Chinese jails is something I read an account of earlier in the year. That time it was a British radio operator caught when the Chinese first invaded Tibet. But what happened to him was a picnic compared to what was dished out to the Tibetan monk.

          The west is currently trying to crawl up the arse of the Chinese as fast as possible these days of course, but the Chinese empire will collapse at some point as surely as the Russian one did in 1989. Remember how it seemed that the Soviet Union would go on forever? Well, it didn't.

           To bring a bit of cod Marxism in here, the dictatorship of the party is not the same as the dictatorship of the proletariat. The latter is supposed to eventually lead to the dissolution of the state, but the dictatorship of the party just sets up another thesis. Then we have a antithesis before we have synthesis again.

           I learnt that at school from a brilliant history teacher called Paddy Welsh, who was visiting Dublin in 1916 at Easter. What I thought of the history education I got at university is detailed in Alma Mater.

            Anyway, the communist party in China is in the same boat as the one in the Soviet Union. The Chinese empire will collapse due to its internal contradictions. First of all, it's not communist, run by a so called communist party, and is riddled with corruption. It will got the same way as the Kuomintang. All compounded things are subject to dissolution.

           The British empire, of course, collapsed from the end of the Second World War. Since then it has been increasingly pointless for Scotland to be part of a United Kingdom. The British state is only any good for the folk in London, the Home Counties and the aspirational, forelock tugging evil bourgeois. It's a shame when it splits it won't do so along the line of what used to be known as the Black Country, but the British state is funged and I expect it to break up sometime in my lifetime.

           Of course, independence is an illusion. Nothing exists independently. As someone with socialist leanings - now we are called social democrats, I think - I know that socialism cannot exist in one country (cf  the Soviet Union, China and Trotsky), but with globalisation I think there is a chance of improvement on a world wide scale eventually. Until then, I hope that Scotland can be like a light on the hill to at least the rest of the United Kingdom. No bedroom tax; no tuition fees; no Tory governments; and no free market economics as we have now.

          Marx did not expect socialism to come from peasant economies, by the way. You can't blame him for the Soviet Union or the basturns who are running China right now.

Raising Inner Heat

          It's about ten years now since I took refuge and became some kind of a buddhist. It's probably eight or nine years since I got the Dorje Semper empowerment and a few months after that I had a kind of inner heat experience.

          Heat - and it was really hot heat! - went up my central channel and fanned out into my lungs, or so it seemed. It was like a leaf pattern with the veins and all. I thought then that I'd cracked it right off. I even told two folk that I could raise inner heat. What a laugh! Even now I couldn't dry off a handkerchief. Sometimes I get warm and sometimes I can sit in the cold and it doesn't bother me, but that's not raising inner heat. Overall warmth and all is not the same as making heat go up your central channel.

          But I suppose optimism keeps you going!!

          The retreat I'm doing down here is going very well as far as the meditations are going. I'm probably not doing much more than an hour or so more than I would be doing in Edinburgh, but there are few distractions and I'm, of course, not getting wasted in the evening. The visualisations are coming on a treat. I suppose that means mental clarity is increasing.

          The longest I've spent down here is ten days. I've slept down here six nights so far and have six to go.

           I count the days. It's hard being on retreat. I miss my bed, my lovely bed. I miss being able to do hard training sessions and I miss luxuriating afterwards in the bath. I guess I miss being in my flat.

           I look at my play for half an hour most days. I do this to tell myself I'm not taking this too seriously and that I'm really on holiday, but I'm not. I know what I want to do with this play and it's frustrating not to be able to, so I should have left it at home.

           You have to do retreats to get ahead with this juju. Being here meditating does make a huge difference. But roll on next Tuesday

Retreat! Retreat! All my plans are simple! Retreat!

         There's always a slow fuzzy bit after I waken up from the doze I have after lunch, and I'm trying to do a wee bit of work then. But so far, having been here three days already, most of it has been trying to work the netbook! Even doing a wee bit of writing shows how relaxed I'm becoming. Normally when I'm down here I just meditate or read really; sometime walk around the stupa, stand on my head, etc. But not working! The afternoon is the worst time to meditate anyway. Yesterday, I put on the long johns and sat in the wee shelter for nearly two hours as the wind blew and the rain fell on the roof.

          It's usually on the fourth day that everything comes together. The Nicotine Dragon has been subdued and the meditations have started to become fantastic.

          Off now to do some tai chi in front of the stupa (cold hands!) and a bit of stretching before the first session for Doctor Akong. It's been very easy to visualise him since he passed away. Maybe that's a coincidence. Maybe not.

Cherry Picking the Juju and Guru Yoga

           It's just after nine and a sunny cold morning here at the Samye Ling on my first day back. This time I am going to try to pretend that I'm here to enjoy myself. Usually, I bring down something to work on writingwise and then ignore it. But this afternoon I'll bring the netbook thing in here and try to edit Jock Tamson's on it. Just work for two hours maybe.

           I was having a problem with guru yoga the last time I was here. If you are doing vajrayana, I've read that you are supposed to think of your teacher as being even more cosmic than the original buddha. (I was going to write guru there instead of teacher, but even the word bothers me a little!). It is your guru who is supposed to be helping you directly of course, unlike the original buddha.

           I don't like devotion. I certainly don't feel comfortable engendering feelings of devotion towards a living person. You have to build on these feelings. So I'm taking a big red pen and drawing a line right through that.

            Developing devotion towards a deity might be a bit easier. The deity is not there. The deity is in your imagination and I don't have bother developing emotions there. Developing positive emotions is okay, you'd think, however you do it.

             All human beings will have feet of clay at the end of the day. We're all Jock Tamson's bairns around this part of the world, or we should be. Grovelling and forelock tugging should be left to the folk who love the Queen. Stupid people.

              Anyway, I've never had a proper guru. The only person  who has sat down with me and told me stuff is Mrs Palmo. I saw her here in the refrectory last night and wanted not to. I don't like meeting folk down here. Anyway, I'm okay with visualising deities. As far as skilful means go, that's a proven plus. Also, the prostrations are out for the moment since my feet don't like them!!

               I'd like to find a way for an ordinary agnostic Scottish person to do this stuff and the way guru yoga is described to me might work in Tibet (well, it did), but this isn't Tibet and we aren't Tibetans.

               Sometimes I think it was a mistake to abandon Sussquehanna. Calming meditations. That plus the analytical ones should be enough for anyone!

                Having said that, it was very easy to visualise Dr Agong in the temple this morning. Of course, it's okay with him because he's dead. I've never had a problem with dead gurus!!!

                 So a bit of tai chi and back into the temple till lunchtime. The nicotine withdrawals are hardly even apparent. That's a Samye Ling effect. Just a little teeth clenching!!