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!!

             

Back to the Samye!

          Whilst awaiting to sign in:

           I brought me netbook thing down here and I've told myself it would be far simpler if I meditated all morning and most of the evening, but wrote for a bit in this cafe during the slow time for meditations, which for me is about three till five in the afternoon. But I'll probably just meditate during that time, as usual.

           I guess I stopped weeping for a wee while every day at the start of October, so I'm well over the worst of the grieving, and I've now got to settle down and find out what I want to do with the rest of my life. The Domestic Bliss's estate hasn't been settled yet, but once that is done ....

            I've been playing the guitar most evenings recently. Before I was living on my own, I hardly played it at all. This is partly because I could never get it in tune (now I have one of those electronic tuners) and when I did, someone would always walk into the room. I don't play my guitar in front of people, which is lucky for them.

            Now that I come to think of it, I don't know anyone else who plays the guitar now, or anything else. This is despite the fact that most of the folk I know were the progeny of the evil bourgeois, and you would kind of expect them to be sent to piano lessons when they were young. Anyway, there's even someone I know who claims to have perfect pitch, but can't play a note on anything.

            I realised there was not much point in me investing my life in music when I realised I couldn't tune the guitar. I have a terrible sense of pitch, but this did not prevent me from learning to play the guitar a bit. I've been playing it enough in the evening these days to miss it down here.

            None of my friends being able to play a musical instrument of any kind at any level should have alerted me when I thought they might be interested in meditating and getting into the bliss. Learning to meditate isn't all that different from learning to play a musical intrument.

             I guesss being brought up among the evil bourgeois makes one think that one is born to be comfortable. None of them, as far as I know, have ever learnt to do anything outside school unless they were getting paid for it. All that marching up and down they're subjected to as children .... no, they're just lazy basturns. Born to be comfortable. Dearie me.

             Anyway, I guess the reception will be open now, so ....

Back to the Diggings!

         Someone bought a copy of Alma Mater this week. This doesn't happen every week, but books like that are what makes Kindle and such like special. It took me six years to write it in all, but I never sent it out to publishers for one reason or another. But you can get it on Kindle for 77p!

         The last photie is of the last batch of potatoes to come out of the allotment this year. Kerr's Pinks, I think. I didn't plant or grow these. They arose spontaneously in the composty spot.

          The second photie is of the soup I made a few days ago. From the allotment, it contains tatties, onions, turnip, cabbage, kale, brussel sprouts ... plus broth mix and beans from the shops. Having sampled some deep fried green peppers from a sushi joint last Wednesday, I've decided home made soup and breid is the way to go!!

Andre Migot. Candler. YOung-Husband

          Due to staying down at the Samye Ling, and the Holy Isle earlier in the year, I've had access to some old and, no doubt, out of print books about folk exploring Tibet. I've read about six or seven though I can't remember all the authors or titles.

           The most sympathetic books seem to have been written by the French. Andre Migot's "Tibetan Marches" is particularly good. It was published in the 1940s. The boy was trying to get to Lhasa when Tibet was the forbidden land, and he didn't make it. But it is a wonderful account. The best thing about it is that Migot becomes a Kagyu (like me!) and has a real interest in the culture of the people.

           The joe who acted as the interpreter for the Young-Husband expedition by the Brits to Lhasa in 1903 is quite good as well, O'Connor, I think. He'd learnt Tibetan and obviously deeply regretted the massacre of the Tibetans at the Hot Springs.

            A better account of this is written in The Unveiling Of Lhasa, which is by a Daily Mail correspondent, Edmund Candler, and  very well written, especially considering the circumstances. ..."written mostly in the dry cold wind of Tibet. often when ink was frozen and one's hand too numb to feel a pen." Unfortunately, you can see all the justifications for imperialism shining through. He says to one point that the British are more evolved than anyone else!!

            The Tibetans had built a defensive wall across a valley and the British forces (Indians, Gurkhas, etc among them) just walked up to the wall. They were supposed to only return fire and the Tibetans didn't open fire. When they'd walked up to the Tibetans and crossed the wall and surrounded them, the Tibetans were supposed to give up their arms. Candler points how how this part was bungled, shots were fired and then the British forces mowed them down, just as they mowed them down whenever they encountered "natives" with great courage but primitive armaments.

            Candler is unable to give an explanation as to why the Tibetans started to walk away as they were getting massacred. They didn't run. They walked.

            The magic charms didn't work against the British bullets. Both the French and British accounts of Tibet paint a picture of a place that was completely medieval. Nobody washed. There were no wheeled vehicles at all. Most of their beliefs to us are superstitious crap, such as illness being caused by evil spirits. They thought the earth was flat and shaped like a shoulder of mutton, or that's what one lama told O'Connor, the boy who interpreted for Young-Husband.

             The interesting thing about Andre Migot is that he realised something else was going on here with all this juju about gods everywhere, magic pills and whatnot. I think folk like moi need to cherry pick our way through this stuff. What's useful and what's not? I'm not interested in what I can't see and don't know, but there is something wonderful about Tibetan buddhism. I don't care what anyone believes or thinks, but the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and some of these joes and josephines really know how to meditate.

             This is my first day off smoking after smoking for six days. I'll be fine so long as I can keep the too dumb to meditate at arm's length.

No More Open Graves!

          I really enjoy drinking. Sometimes I think it would be nice to go to a pub on a Saturday afternoon, place a few bets on the horses and have three or four pints of Guinness. Or sometimes meeting someone in a bar around eight o clock and having a nice chat, a few pints, and getting home around eleven still compis mentis. But the actuality of drinking these days fills me with despair. It's the usual story. It's three o clock in the morning and Brian Wilson is trying to flush your head down the toilet. Or Poisonous is pouring vitriol into your ear along with glasses of brandy. It's got to stop. I'm not having any more ruined mornings!!!

          So I've decided to take the advice of One Chopstick Harry, who knows all about buddhism, and said buddhists don't drink. I'm not really a buddhist, but I'm not going to drink either, at least not with Brian Wilson or Poisonous. In fact, I'm not going to drink with anyone except me.

           You can hide from hangovers in the bliss, but it's not as good, and you don't settle because your nerves are frayed. Without the hangover what a time I would have had this morning!! I know what I'm missing.

            In the afternoon I went for a walk round the Botties. The sun shone for a while and the colours were sometimes gorgeous. Then I went over and meditated on the bench in the allotment with the sun shining on my face and my newly bare scalp. I ate some raspberries.

       

Random photies

          Someone told me the gas had come out of the viewfinder of the camera, so that's why I can't see what I'm taking photies of. Doesn't matter. I'm no getting another one!

          Amazon sent me a tenner today. That's about ninety quid so far, but I must admit I was a bit surprised since the sales never got back to where they were before I went to the Holy Isle at the start of the year.

          The play is coming along so very well! I really like working with dialogue and I can do that for an hour or so a day and make real progress. Great.

Really Starting Now!

          I started digging the allotment this afternoon. The smudged photie is supposed to be of raspberries. Of course, since you can't see through the viewfinder anymore, who knows what you're taking photies of?

          As soon as I post this, I'm going to start re-writing Jock Tamson's Half Hearted Transformation. It will now be called Samsara. God knows what it was supposed to be about before , but now it's going to be about the results of selfish motivation in a tranformative, almost revolutionary social context.

           It was originally written with the stage in mind, but I'm going to cut it down to forty five minutes from an hour and a half and try to have radio in mind, though I don't think there's any chance of me getting anything on the radio. It's only twenty odd years since I wrote stuff for the radio and they probably won't have forgotten about me yet!!

            Today is the end of mulling stuff over. I'm going to try and cut the first twelve pages down to four.

Start to write again!

          I really stopped writing with any serious intention about six or seven  years ago, when I got an agent. I thought getting an agent might mean I could hustle him my old books and then I could concentrate more on meditating. Then Dave become my agent about three years ago and ....

          I went to Costas yesterday and read the notes for the play, the ones I made a month or so ago. So I'll see if I can get it down from one and a half hours to forty five minutes. This will give me something else to do. I've got lots of time to do it in these days!!

Awful Shame!

          The photies are of a wee shelter down by the river. I like sitting by the river when I'm down at the Samye Ling, but it sometimes rains. Over the last nine days or so, I started sitting in the wee shelter rain or not. No traffic noises. Just natural sounds really. The river.

           The first time I stayed overnight at the Samye Ling, in 1988, I was speaking to one of the guys who worked in the office about writing The Real McCoy, a radio play, over lunch one day.  I told him I wouldn't have written it if I hadn't started meditating. He wanted me to have a chat with Dr Akong, the guy who was in charge of the place because of this. He said I should call him Rinpoche. I asked what that meant. He said Precious One. I said why should I call him that. He said it's just polite. I didn't, as it turned out, call him anything.
           The Domestic Bliss's brother had been down there before me and told me he'd spoken to this guy and found him to be crabbit, but I jokingly thought to myself that maybe he didn't know how to speak to a Living Buddha and I'd have a go.
            We are the northern ice warriors and we're not crawling up anyone's arse. All this stuff that gave having a guru a bad name is Indian, hindu. It's devotional. It's servile and I really don't like it. I don't think it suits our temperament. We're all Jock Tamson's Bairns in this neck of the woods, as far as I'm concerned, and that accords with my kind of buddhism. Everyone has a buddha nature, and it's just that some of us have realised it more than others.
             He asked me if I'd come up from London, and I thought that's cool, he's not clairvoyant anyway. I told him I'd come from Edinburgh. He got up and walked about in this dowdy, dingy shambles of a manor house front room and I told him I was pleased that I could be there and not smoke fags since you're not supposed to smoke there. (You can, down by the river. I didn't know that, just as well!) He turned from slowly walking towards the window and gave me this really strange popeyed kind of look, which was a bit weird, but I ignored it. I told him I was pleased he'd come to Scotland and that was that.
             I must have a fine conceit of myself. I'm not impressed by famous people and I didn't know who he was. I only really knew much about him when I read Born In Tibet by Chogyam Trunpa. I'd avoided reading this because of Chogyam's future career. If anyone was mad, bad and dangerous to know, but what do I know? The Chogy boy displayed all the signs you are supposed to when you die apparently. Days and days with the heart still warm and all. I only read Born in Tibet this year. Still, drinking yourself to death is okay if you're Brendan Behan, but a Rinpoche ....
             When Chogy left the Samye Ling, it was down the Dr Akong. After a while, his wee brother got himself sorted out and became the Abbot. Being from here, I thought he was the man.
              I got interested in Tibetan Buddhism by reading Anagarika Govinda. One of his books is The Way of the White Clouds. His guru was Tomo Geshe, a Tibetan he met when he was at a conference as a Theravadin monk. There was an abbot in that monastery where Tomo Geshe stayed, after spending twelve years meditating in the wilds, but when it came to giving initiations, Tomo Geshe got wheeled out. This was the kind of thing that was happening at the Samye Ling. I had four empowerments there and they were all given by Dr Akong.

              After speaking to some of the nutters who washed up around the fringes of the Samye at the time, I was happy to go down there and speak to no one. I wanted a place where I could practise meditation and would check in with The Gatekeeper (Jurme) and not speak hardly to anyone else till I left, maybe a week later. I loved it. Nobody asked you any questions. You were left alone.

             I took refuge with his wee brother and waited to see if the meditations got any better. One day I was sitting meditating in the temple when this ceremony started up. Dr Akong was giving refuge. During his wee talk, he said you didn't have to get a new name, etc., and since I just happened to be sitting there, I took refuge with him. This should give you some kind of karmic connection. The only other person I've taken refuge with is the wee nun on the Holy Isle.
 
            One night about seven or eight years ago, he gave a Medicine Buddha initiation in the Royal College of Physicians here in Edinburgh. Beautiful setting, beautifully set out. He was a Medicine Buddha man first and foremost, I think. After that, I started using the Medicine Buddha instead of Dorje Semper, which is the deity yoga juju I was supposed to be doing at the time. Loved that night. I'll never forget it.

             One day I was down there with the Domestic Bliss at an initiation and she said she'd take a blessing, which you can go up and get if you don't want the initiation. So there's a big line of folk for this as you wait to go passed the man and get the blessing and all. Folk have got the white scarves to hand over and all that, but we're not doing any of that. I was very surprised that the Domestic Bliss was going forward to get a blessing at all. He's sitting there on the throne thing and as we are just about there. She's standing in front of me and just as he came to the part when he was going to bless her, I shouted out spontaneously, mentally, Give her mine as well! He suddenly kind of jolted and stared at me for a moment and then went on ...

             Warm, unassuming, unpretentious .. he just went about his bodhisattva business. .

              Scotland has never had an immigrant like that before. It says something great about our karma that we got him at all. I almost missed him. I'm gutted for the folk who knew him for what he was. It's just dawning on me what a disaster this is for us and we don't even know it.

               We're like snow slipping off a dyke. Shame to waste the time, but I'm going to get drunk and stoned now!

           

             
           
           

Stopping Writing

         
          The bottom photie is where I was meditating this afternoon in the Botties. Couldn't not walk round the Botties today, the light was so good. An obscuration has appeared on the viewfinder of the camera and you can't see much of what you are aiming at. I'm not expecting this to effect the quality of the photies!

          I've been becoming happier and happier this week. I feel that I can really get on with the wonderful life now. All I have to do is stay well for a year or so and what a time I'll have!

          The meditation I started at ten tonight seemed really significant. The lovely warmth came on right from the start almost. I thought I wouldn't be able to get any heat unless I could visualise the three main channels, etc., but this practise is really far too far advanced for me. The Lama told me to keep away from the symbols and channels and that the heat would come on from the meditations otherwise. And so it has. I was feeling chilly when I sat down, but within a short time I felt like peeling off a layer. After about twenty minutes (?) something wonderful happened and opened up near the top end of my body/head.

          The meditations were going too well today to stop them for some writing. And I don't know if it's worth my while taking the netbook down the Samye. It'll be like going to the Holy Isle. I took the play there and never looked at it.

          I can't believe how fortunate I have been in this life! All because I taught myself to meditate. What a fortunate creature I am, I am! What a fortunate creature I am!!

Starting Writing

          I'm writing this on a netbook. I was going to take it to the Samye Ling. I thought it had no word processing on it, but someone must have done something to it when I wasn't looking. So if I take it down, I can edit Jock Tamson's. It's too wee to write on. Anyway, I'll continue this later on the other computery thing.
9.45 p.m.
          Yesterday I thought was going to be the end of the beginning. The beginning started twelve years ago when I read The Bliss of Inner Fire. The reason why it took me so long to get to the end of the beginning, if I've managed to get that far, is because my renunciation is, to put it mildly, a bit wishy washy. Also, I have no faith.
           Renunciation and faith seem to be bedrocks. In the Disbelieving Congregation we don't do faith. This is experiential mysticism. Knowledge through experience. Anyway, the boy said you didn't have to believe anything, just do the meditations and they would work. You have to take a pragmatic approach. Can you get this juju to work?
            Something has happened in the last fortnight that has sent me into the realms of the truly, truly fortunate. I'm starting to get a glimpse of how wonderful it will be if I just keep going. Not that I'm taking any credit for all this wonderment. I'm not going to crash and burn because of the lineage of Indian and Tibetan gurus who made the fantastic effort required to maintain these teachings.
            I'm a super-humanist. I believe in the human beings!
            "Wonders are many, and none are more wonderful than man." Sophocles.
           
             I meditated today in the lobby (in the morning as usual), and I meditated in the Botties and I meditated in the allotment. The first photie is what's in front of me when I sit on the new allotment bench. The third photie is where I was meditating in the Botties. What a great day I had today!

Hotboy Escort Agency. Second date. The Guru.

          The last time I wrote a post about the Hotby Escort Agency, I got a nice comment from a spam robot overseas with a link to a real escort agency. All of the girls were far prettier than moi. I'm celibate. It's a joke.

          So I went out on my second date tonight. I met her at Waverley Station and took her to the Burger King Bar, and gave her some money. It wasn't mine. I didn't earn it. I didn't save it. So I gave it to her. After a white coffee, we got a taxi and went to the newish restaurant across the road, and it was full. Then we went to a Buffulo Bill steak joint kind of place, and then we left without eating. She's like a model and doesn't really eat after lunch. She really seemed to enjoy the slice of my bread she ate when we came up here instead. I showed her my room and I'd changed everything on the bed, including the covers for the duvets, (!) in case she wanted to stay.

         She's a nun. I took refuge with her in January. She said: (aide memoir)

1) Enlightenment is not a state of mind.

2) She said she had no doubts about rebirth. We spoke about this for a bit

3) I asked her if everyone who meditated and did it for long enough got the bliss. She said it seemed not. (So that's all you flatheids off the hook. Maybe if you meditated ... anyway, you won't. Still, a flatheid then. Oh well.) Maybe it had something to do with how you were physically ordered. (So I was right. You are all a bunch of Neanderthals, so you are. Or you might not be, but too dumb to find out anyway!)

4) She told me lots of other things. I think I need a bit of help and she might be able to give it to me. What a fortunate creature I am, I am! What a fortunate creature I am!

Another appointment!

          There's a man in here touching up the painting on the windows that were fitted last week. I was hoping for the kiddo's boyfriend to do that since he is a painter as well, but surprise, surprise, someone from the window men has shown up.

          I'm still trying to maintain the view, though I don't know what the view is. I think it might be MIND. Everything is mind. I was trying that for a wee bit yesterday. Everything is consciousness works better. Anyway, I got here this morning hoping to find some comments to help ascertain where THE VOID has gone, but the two people who come here most are really only interested in talking about toilet training, so ... So where are the acupuncture meridians and where did THE VOID go?

          I expect to be meeting Mrs Palmo this evening for a wee chat. So it's a kind of nervous day. I had to make up a bed in case she needs some place to stay, and I'm having to sit here at the computery thing while the guy touches up stuff. But after tomorrow ... I won't have any appointments.

          I will not ask Mrs Palmo, who has been meditating on the Holy Isle for the last eleven years, where THE VOID has gone. But I suspect if you can see everything as mind, you're starting to crack this juju.

          Oh, since this is supposed to be concerned with writing ... I was going to start writing yesterday, but knew I'd have to stop today, so ... I couldn't get into the reports on my KDP account, but got great help on the phone yesterday from Amazon. My books have sold bugger all since the turn of the month, so I went onto the Meet Our Authors fora and tried to stir up some apathy before I came here. I sometimes wish I could forget all about these Kindle books!!

Where did THE VOID go?

 
          In the beginning, everything went BANG, and here we are fifteen billion years maybe later. Until the BIG BANG there's supposed to be no time or space, or space time, or anything. This is a state without characteristics, unless you say that going BANG is a characteristic.

          Until it went BANG, you might call it THE VOID. The question for today is where did THE VOID go? One kind of imagines that it was then space time and all that, sort of absorbed somehow. But I don't see where it could go if it didn't exist in space. I don't see how you can disappear when you haven't been anywhere in the first place.

           If THE VOID is somehow still with us, what effect does it have? You might say that it isn't anywhere, so it can't have any effects, but the acupuncture meridians aren't anywhere either, and we in the West have discovered somehow belatedly that they have an effect.

          I went for a walk this afternoon after lunch. Great. The apples in the first photies are from the allotment next door. This is the first day I've spent on my own since Thursday, and I think I only had Monday free before that. Dearie me. But it was a lovely day for a walk.

         I was going to start writing today, but tomorrow I've got someone in to touch up the windows and then I've got a very special appointment in the evening. And a lunch date on Thursday, and ....

Bliss diary.

11.04 a.m.
                I started meditating today just after half nine. Immediately it was obvious that things have moved on again. This seems to happen every day and the changes seem less subtle than they probably are. Whether this is stuff gathering in the central channel, the channels continuing to open up, or whatever ... something is definitely happening. And I am certainly not in control of it, this gathering force. I just have to sit and there it is.

                I can start meditating on Tuesday. That is the end of all appointments.
20.49 p.m.
                It was more or less a standard day. I meditated in the morning and went up to the allotment after my lunch. I had a lovely meditation there on the bench. Soon there will be hardly any folk going up there. Hurrah! Then I came back here and prostrated for a bit and had a shower. Meditated for a bit after that.

                I'm watching Scotland versus Belgium on the computery thing. Half time. We're getting beaten, as usual. But hope springs even although the Belgians are cheating by being better at football.

The end of times

          The windows have all been replaced. No more will I hear them rattling through the winter. The working class joes who came to do this were scary. One was very fat. One had a Mohawk haircut and big muscles. Now I know why the evil bourgeois have always been scared of them. I was so scared I had to leave them alone to get on with it, and had to walk the streets till they went away. I should have backhanded them fifty quid, but I wasn't here when they left, so I didn't. Evil bourgeois don't backhand anyone. They have servants. Just seeing these joes arrive made me realise how much I hated the evil bourgeois, and my degeneration into that disgusting class of folk.

        So what has to be done about this? There will always be suffering since only Buddhas do not suffer, and I do not believe that, so we all have to suffer. Until we don't. In an inconceivable place.

       This is the end of something. The beginning of something else. My partner has been dead for about six months. I don't cry every day. The windows have been fixed. The estate will be sorted soon, I hope.  This is a last remaining tendril. The windows have been fixed. I'll see the Domestic Bliss's best friend on Monday and she had just gotten over a terrible, but curable, black spot. After that, I'm free. At last, I'm free! At last, I'm free!

       I should be able to sit here and not smoke and not drink. Forget the time. Forget what day it is. Follow the seasons. Dig when there are diggings to be done. Solitude. Solitude.

      Impermanence. Preciousness of human existence. Karma. Get out of this existence, this Samsara.

      So when am I going to start meditating? It would be great if I could stay here and do that over the winter, and then I could be here, and be doing it amongst my deep, dear friends, the wonderful people. But when I see them, all I want to do is roll around in the gutters. I really enjoy doing that. So it might be best for everyone concerned if I just got lost up the Cairngorms, or down the Samye Ling, or over on the Holy Isle with Mrs Palmo, or just anywhere where no one knew you at all.

     

When I'm fixing windows!

         The men didn't come to fix the windows yesterday, but they've shown up today. There has been some difficulties recently in keeping away from folk.

         Froggy McDuck turned up unexpectedly last week and he showed up again yesterday. A friend phones last week to get me to come over to watch the footie. The men has shown up to do the windows today. On Monday I get visitors from Lanarshire. Then, free at last!! Free at last!!

         So I'm taking exception to the supposed rationalists like Richard Dawkins. I read the Selfish Gene about thirty years ago and was very disappointed in it, so I haven't read anything else since. But to the press he is posed as a rationalist, scientificy person. In fact, just like me. However, I have meditated and Richard Dawkins hasn't. I know about the bliss and he doesn't.

          What is the evolutionary purpose to bliss, Richard? Bugger all!!

           The French boys did an experiment (they must have been scientists!!) on acupuncture, and by manipulating the needles managed to increase the work the lungs were doing in dealing with the alocohol in the body. So someone is sticking a needle into an energy channel and an effect can be observed .... to cut a long story short, where is the energy channel?

            The acupuncture meridians and the subtle body are really the same thing. Where do they exist? You can chop a body into bits as small as you like and you will not discover any energy channels. If they do not exist in space as we know it, then where do they exist? If they don't exist in our space, they don't exist. So if these so called rationalists can't explain that.

            I'm  an atheist. I think of myself really primarily as a humanist. I'm into developing my potential as a human being and that's partly why I meditate. Folk like Richard Dawkins can call themselves scientists or humanists, but at the end of the day such people are flatheids, part of the great mass who are too dumb to meditate.

Turmoil.

          They're coming tomorrow to take all the windows out, and then  put other windows in. This will take two days, they said. So four days. Of  huddling and hiding away.

         In the midst of all this ... the wonderfulness of the bliss cannot be described, and I would like to get over this bliss shit and get back into the non-self and emptiness. I guess the bliss is just like the grief, except you know which one you'd like to get. Of  course, if you're really cosmic, it shouldn't matter. Neither should you be bothered by the men coming to take all the windows out. Dearie me. Be cool.