Just stuff.

          I don't like this blog because it's in my own name.

          Nothing is true. So all you have is view. A lot of folk have a horrible time because their view is a view of horribleness. Surely this is not necessary. It could be a view of complete wonderfulness. I think this must be the essence of aspiration. To get the right view.

          If you got the right view right, just once, you should die right then. There can't be anything better than the right view. The way things are, as opposed to the way they appear to be.

         I live the wonderful life. I think my life is wonderful. I really do. Sometimes, when I'm speaking to folk like today, I feel that being them would not be so good because they are not living the wonderful life, and it wouldn't even occur to them that it might be wonderful.

        I there was a god, I'll like to offer up my hands and feet, and chop them off, and the other bits as well, which you wouldn't really want to get chopped off, and offer them up to .... if there was a god, thank God for giving me the chance to meditate!!

       The great undercurrent of the opening up of the channels, or whatever the hell is going on, is ongoing. The undercurrent of everything turning into wonderfulness. This undercurrent is always there, pulsing on .... as I have all the bad feelings and thoughts from behaving in an unskillful way.... but the great undercurrent goes on. This is the force. It's an addition. Who knows what that is for? If I could be bothered being a proper blogger I could blog about that, but only two human beings read this, and some robots.

After the Froggie!

          The only problem is with me being crabbit and so I should stop that. Torn between. Thinking I should always be as clean as a whistle and almost every time I see some of my chummies ... well, this is not renunciation as we know it should be. But I have always been like that. Perhaps this is my tao. Just relax into doing some things some times and stopping them some other times.

          I'm not nice to my deep dear friends. I call them flatheids though I am surely a complete flatheid myself. But if you're a flatheid and you don't recognise that you're a flatheid, what chance have you got?

          Anyway, I repeated the mumbo jumbo to myself for a long time. Sussquehanna. That's all you have to do. Twenty plus odd years later, you're are back on the cushion  after the Froggie has left. It's later than usual. Half eleven! Straight into amazing bliss! Here we come upon the paucity of description. When so many times before you have thought you have not felt anything as wonderful as this before, once again you think ...that. But was there a qualitative difference? It did feel as if there was and I hope this isn't wishful thinking.

          This is interesting, but it may not be a good thing. I do not know. If you were going to start unleashing forces you couldn't control, this might be a way towards doing that. But, what the hell? Sitting in the lobby is sometimes very interesting.

          I think I would like to go to the mental hospital now. Three meals a day and a padded cell. What company that would be!

After the Fringe

         
          I was so pleased that yesterday I didn't have to see anyone! I meditated all morning then went to the allotment in the afternoon for some more meditating and a wee bit of allotmenteering. I transplanted some leeks. The photie at the bottom is what you could see from where I was meditating, sitting outside my hut door.

         If I could just put in four or five days in a row like this every week .... the bliss is still cranking up ... but my nephew, Froggy McDuck, phoned to tell me he was coming to see me this afternoon. I know the first thing he'll want to do is sit down and meditate for a couple of hours. That's why I love seeing flatheids! All they want to do is meditate!!

          If I'm lucky, I'll be back to where I am right now by Thursday afternoon. A dead rat! Ah, what company that would be!

The Perfect Crime.

          So I was chatting to Poisonous about going to Laos. One of the problems with going to Laos is that nobody knows how to pronounce it, so it's difficult to tell folk where you are going. Another problem is that you have to go in November. And November is a long time away. I mean, next November. At the current rate of attrition, almost everyone I know will be dead by next November. So I says what about Ecuador? Didn't you want to go to Ecuador before Laos?

          Dear reader, I must say that my first choice was Sikkim. You could find a cave in Sikkim where Padmasambhava meditated. So you could.

         We can get a flight from Germany into Bogata, in Columbia. Then get a plane to Quito. The taxi driver should be able to get us the kilo of coke to smuggle. When they show the video on the Six o Clock News, I have to be standing there with my Jimmy wig on, shouting and bawling about how I'm as guilty as hell, and I only did it to publicise my books on Kindle, and that I'd love, just love twenty years in solitary confinement, please! Unfortunately, I'd snorted up all the coke before I got to the customs post and we know that they love Scottishy folk abroad. I'll have to get a kilt.

Bench photies

           I took the photies from where I was meditating yesterday on the bench in the allotment. I had no festivalling to do yesterday and didn't see anyone for the first time since last Thursday, I think. The meditations were wonderful yesterday, and unbelievable. I tried to tell someone about what was happening to me on Monday, but flatheids just don't get the bliss. What a shame!

Walkies

          It's a bit like when you go on retreat to the Samye Ling. There's always a couple of hours in the day when you don't really know what to do with yourself. This is usually, for me, around three o clock or so. Anyway, I'm sometimes getting it here and this is because I am now on my own here, but mainly because I haven't settled into a routine yet. This will be my writing/training/meditating regime. The regime I'm on at the moment is the meditation/binge drinking/falling over regime.

          You can always go for a walk. This is the beautiful, wonderful city and it wasn't even raining. It is a bit odd to be just walking about on your own, but it is much better than all the open graves your deep, dear friends invite you to fall into.

           None of them are safe any more. The last debacle was the result of a total miscalculation as regards the drinking capacity of my old friend, Georgian Gill. She's drinking the big glasses of the white plonko collapso and I'm sticking to the pints of Guinness. No contest. Then you find yourself falling all over the pavement and it's still broad daylight.

          So that was Poisonous with the bottle of brandy, and Brian Wilson at three in the morning shouting and bawling about the creekit, and falling around in the road with Georgian Gill. What is the matter with the old people these days?? I must say that the common denominator here seems to be me, but I suspect they're practising for these debaucheries on your liver where no one can see them, like the evil bourgeois always did.

          Drinks cabinets were something they had on the telly, in America. Would you like a drink? That must mean something different there. Here, it means would you like to forgo the next day to misery for about five hours of drinking, and you say yes. Yummy even. So it's not a drink. Certainly not if they're offering you whisky. That might be an English thing.

          The first contemporary  who had a drinks cabinet was working as a prostitute at the time, but she didn't drink on her days off. It might be a bourgeois thing then, this drinks cabinet stuff. I told our friend with the drinks cabinet that I could not imagine having something like that since I would want to just drink it all. But that's what you did. You drank the carry out. Thank god I've given that evil poison up now, lordy, lordy.

          I saw a show called Ciara, a one woman show with Blythe Duff. It was quite something. I wanted to tell her how wonderful it was in the bar afterwards, but you're just going to get that all wrong. But it was. Fabuloso!! Brilliant writing. Brilliant, once in a lifetime acting, and it's one of the things that make you feel really great about the festival being here. I sat in the front row and closed my eyes for the first bit since it was a one woman show. A bit like radio. Had me gobsmacked by the end. It was something amazing really. I'd like to go and see it again, so I would!

          I'm going to a Japanese restaurant tomorrow. I went to one on Friday. That was the first Japanese restaurant I can remember being in. I had a slice of green pepper on a stick. There was a bit of half melted cheese stuck onto it. I understood all this. These Japanese people were having a laugh. Uncooked food and some greasy noodle crap. It's satire. Once I understood that it was satire I felt much better. Anyway, now restaurants are free so it really doesn't matter if they're taking the piss. As long as they don't try to poison you because they didn't realise that you weren't really one of the evil bourgeois, but just had to hang around with them since they were the only ones you'd met with any money.

          A restaurant I did like was the one attached to the mosque in Newington. Churches should feed people. Don't the Sikhs feed people? That might be the place to meet my binge drinking chummies. A safe place. Allah Akbar

The Hotboy Escort Agency First Gig. Irony.

          She'd bought us tickets to go and see a writer. The evil bourgeois were everywhere. The writer was great. Her haircut was perfect. The wummin who bought the tickets didn't know that I was a writer as well. Or used to pretend to be one. The only time I've had tickets for the book festival was when Hunter Thompson was supposed to show up, but didn't. This writer did show up, which is all you need to know. But if she stands for parliament, I'd definitely vote for her. Denise Mina. Her hair was perfect. Being in the audience really put me off writing for good.

More allotment stuff

         The last photie is of the onion crop this year. I harvested them this afternoon. The transformation of the bottom half of the allotment is a bit eye-popping. A bench has appeared. So I can sit in the hut, or sit on the bench, or sit on the grassy bits. It's warmer in the hut and you can't open the window, but it'll be warm enough in the winter. I'm looking forward to sitting in it when the cold comes.

One Day Free Book Promo

          Since this is supposed to be a blog something about selling books on Kindle .... yesterday I put all the books up for free for one day. I put one message into each of the Meet Our Authors fora of Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk. This resulted in approximately 170 downloads. The Buddha and the Big Bad Wolf downloads far more than any other of my ten books.

Allotment stuff!

          I made the first soup today using allotment ingredients: tatties, cabbage, turnip,  and onions. Only the spices and the lentils were bought. I also had a dinner of tatties, cabbage, fried onions and a fried egg, with only the egg being bought. I'm so bourgeois now that the money for food doesn't really matter, but the allotment food tastes better!

          This evening I went to meditate in the hut and put up some buddhisty pictures. Outside the kiddo and her partner were working. The kiddo worked for twelve hours in the allotment today. This is because she had a garden in the colony flat she stayed in and when she moved, she wanted to move the garden, so she moved some of it anyway to the allotment. I never heard of anyone moving all the plants out of a garden before. Anyway, we now have proper beds with wooden sides and all.

          The sky was beautiful on the way home.

          The lama told me yesterday to come and see him again when I wanted to start meditating. Some cats got it and some cats aint.

Back Home Again!

         
          Just got back home from the Samye Ling. I always feel completely knackered when I get home from there no matter how I feel when I go out the gate.

          I spoke to the lama today for a wee while. Afterwards I had a truly wonderful meditation in the back temple as the gong bashing went on through the wall. Then I got up and did the best Tai Chi set ever. I think you really get something extra from Tai Chi and hatha yoga if you do them between meditations. I'm sure these things fit together.

           I went down to the river to meditate for the first time a couple of days ago. I meditate at the part where the kiddo threw some of the Domestic Bliss's ashes. Someone had written Thinking of You exactly on the spot. You couldn't make it up. What kind of wild coincidence is that??? Later on, I noticed that someone had joined me on the river bank and this reminded me of a Rab C Nesbitt episode when he goes on holiday to Spango and is raving and ranting on a rooftop when he sees the Spanish version of himself on another rooftop doing the self same thing!

          The lama looked a wee bit disappointed when I told him I couldn't do a three year retreat. I won't try to speak to him again till I can see Dorje Sempa on top of my head clearly. This may take some time.

          I was going to ask if the buddhists had any objection to someone starving themselves to death once they were handed the black spot, but I didn't bother. Let's jump these hurdles when you get to them.

Conversation

          Since I've got ten minutes to go on the time paid for on this machine, I thought I'd tell you about the one conversation I've had here.

          A guy came and sat beside me at lunch. He was a guy I'd met, but of course had hardly spoken to, on the Holy Isle. He's twenty five. He's French of Madagasgar extraction and lives in a Dzong in London. (If I have another conversation, I'll ask him how he got there!)

          Anyway, after meditating for only forty minutes a day and in group meditations, he signs up for three months on the Holy Isle in the middle of winter. You had to sit on your own for six hours during the day there and go to two services at either end. He said the first two weeks were very hard!!

          The boy in the programme Amateur Pilgrim went into solitary in one of St Antony's caves in Egypt and the first two weeks were murdering him and then in the last week he started getting into it. You should remember this is they through you into jail and leave you in solitary. After two weeks you'll be fine.

          Towards the end of the retreat, (I didn't find out how long!), the power cut on Arran hit them and there was no heating. He said they made hot water bottles from heating water on the wood stove. The heating came on thirty minutes before they left!!!

            I know how hard it is to sit there saying mumbo jumbo to yourself ..... e

Born In Tibet

          I expect folk who hold high positions in religious institutions to be saintly. Looking at what's been going on in the Catholic Church ... well, I don't like hypocrisy. If you put on the uniform, you should behave yourself.

          There are two aspects to juju practitioners, the internal and external. If you spent half the time whoring and dope dealing and murdering folk, it might still be possible to go on a retreat, meditate, and make real progress in working with your energy body, which is the internal aspect.

          I didn't like it when I found out that the top meditator in the Karma Kagyu was humping his taxi driver on the first trip he did to Europe, along with his attendant. At least, when he was asked about this, he did not deny it, and said that he's had trouble with a woman in a previous incarnation and did a spell that killed her.

         Kalu Rinpoche was a far more developed buddhist than I'll ever be and I still imagine him over my head every day when I'm doing some guru yoga stuff. You can't really adequately judge someone like that. I don't know what I'd be like if I came out of Tibet and found out that European women took the pill and  .... well, the question is whether it did any harm and what the motivation was. The Rinpoche doesn't look too good here, but I'd have been much worse!!

          Born in Tibet is a very well written book. Much of it is about the escape the folk who came to Scotland to set up the Samye Ling. I had thought that the Abbot here should get a book done about his escape from Tibet, but this book is it.

          I was expecting the story to be worse in terms of death, starvation and such like, but it must have been a helluva journey to make. They were eating yak leather and lying down sometimes in the snow, etc.

          There is an added chapter at the end about what happened later. I don't know the ins and outs of this, but this chapter should be taken with a pinch of salt. I also wondered about the boy mentioning that Akong Tulku Rinpoche asked him to be his guru at one point. I don't think this is unusual among Tibetan monastics. You can have hundreds of gurus. It's just someone who teaches you something and often they do this to form karmic links.

          I think anyone who has any authority over anyone should keep their zips up.

Samye stuff

          I feel as if  I've almost completely recovered from the debacle that occurred as soon as I saw some people. My weekend became a disaster scene as soon as I agreed to go for 'a pint' with Poisonous. Of course, it's nobody's fault but my own.

          If you want to drink, you can buy an 11% bottle of collapso from the coop. Drink that slowly while you're watching the telly and you can go to bed remembering everything that happened, and feel fine the next day. I quite like doing that sometimes. Odd as it may seem, what I really need to do is stop drinking with other people!!

           I put my name on a list of folk to see the abbot. This might not happen this time since there are a lot of folk down here.

          I'll say something about Born In Tibet in the next post. I've almost finished it.

The Disasterous Re-entry of the Flatheids!

          On Thursday I was supposed to start talking to flatheids again after the kiddo and her partner came back from a holiday in Croatia. That was fine except that they normally come to see me on a Friday and the next day when it was Friday, I thought it was Saturday.

          Now I knew I had to see Brian Wilson on Saturday. Poisonous was phoning me since he'd just got back from China, so I thought I'd fit in Poisonous after the kiddo went home and before I saw Brian Wilson, thus killing two birds with one stone, or getting all the flatheids over with in one fell swoop.

         So the kiddo goes and I phones Poisonous. We had a cup of coffee on a pavement. So far, so good. I just about to escape afterwards and saying the bye byes when Poisonous wants to go 'for a pint' now. Well, even that is okay since I knew I'd escape in an hour to meet Brian Wilson and his crowd.

         On the second pint I phoned up Brian Wilson to confirm arrangements and he then told me it was Friday then, and not Saturday. So the Friday night ended with Poisonous buying a bottle of brandy to take to my bit. Of course, I couldn't get out of seeing Brian Wilson's crowd on Saturday, and I did try. About five phone calls and several emails. But try as I might I ended up with Brian Wilson bawling and shouting about creekit in my kitchen till half three in the morning.

         And the meditations had been going so, so well. It's why you have to go on retreat. Sometimes you just cannot get away from them any other way!!!

A dead rat? What company that would be!

          I'm due a visit from the kiddo today. She's back from her holidays. So it's about fourteen days since I last saw her and since then I've had one conversation. A friend of my nephew's came up and spoke to me in Costas the other day.

         Having been off the tobacco for six weeks, I started back again, but I haven't been drinking too much too often anyway. I don't think I've spent an evening without something, which is my wont.

         I'm saying this because since the last time I saw my daughter, the meditations have taken what seems like a  profound turn. I'm still not getting big amounts of heat (which I'm quite pleased about!), but the bliss sometimes feels quite ecstatic. I know I always say things have moved on, but this stuff is dynamic and it does move on if you attend to it.

         I wrote this on facebook a day or so ago.
         'Someone was hoping yesterday that I wasn't too sad over the death of the love of my life four months or so ago. Well, if anyone is interested, I'm not the slightest bit sad. Neither do I feel the slightest bit sorry for myself. I'm living the life of the truly fortunate who practise the Great Yajrayana This means that this morning I've spent about three hours dipping into and out of what feels like the source of all pleasures. My meditations have taken a giant jump forward over the last ten days. This is the bliss. This is the bliss. This is the bliss. It's the poor basturns who are too dumb to meditate who are up shit creek without a paddle.'

(THE REST OF THIS POST ISN'T FROM FB)

         Of course, I'm still dealing with some grief! Grief is very interesting. You watch arising, abiding and declining. Some days are worse than others, but from it's peaks, it is always declining. It's the same as anything. Seeing your grief decline isn't something to feel any guilt about. I accept rebirth. I assume my bonds with the Domestic Bliss are eternal and I meditate for her. 
         What will you do, Great Lord, when old age and death come creeping in? Do good works and practise the juju, bikkhu. There's nothing else you can do.
         Stability is returning and I'm starting to motor on all fronts. I've worked out what to do with my play now and I'll start work on it properly after this year's gong banging festival, which I'll be attending next week. I've got about 83,300 prostrations to go and I'm far fitter and healthier than I've any right to expect.
          I've felt at ease being on my own over the last few days. It's as if something just seeped in, a kind of contentment maybe. I'm really looking forward now to the rest of my life.
          I did a lot of work (for me!) in the allotment yesterday. The shot at the bottom shows where my allotment is. Yes, it's the one with the smoke coming from it. This demonstrates that if you shout for me from the bottom fence I'm bound to hear you if I'm there.
          What a fortunate creature, I am, I am! What a fortunate creature I am!