Photies

Tuesday 10:21 p.m.
                              We got a letter from the council saying parts of our allotment were neglected and that we would be terminated in fourteen days if we didn't toe the line ... def, dight, def, dight, def, dight. Now, to the diggings once more!!
                              I was up there tonight. I got four bags of tatties out of two rows. Couldn't believe how many there were and how big. Mr Akram in the shoppie says they're King Edwards. I didn't know and could never be bothered remembering their name, but these tatties have wee splashes of pink on their skins. They are my favourite tatties.
                              Beside where I was digging, I noticed the bees. There are bees that don't have stripes, but seem to wear orange fur. They're great looking bees. They're living in the banking made when the earth was stolen by the old people. That's what the photie is of.
                              Two of them are of my room. I took them on Saturday. That's the view from where you sit meditating with your back to the door. I cleaned it up. I've still got to hoover it. I need to clear the floor for doing some yoga, headstands and whatnot. I'm in the room more often these days.
                               What do you think of us getting threatened with termination, Jack? Get out the gin traps, Hotboy. Dig the trenches. Tell them you've killed people before. Survivalists, ya bass!

Back on track!

Sunday 9:56 p.m.
                          Amazingly blissed in the meditations today. I like it when it gets dark around half eight. Some trees are showing signs of brown. Already. I like it when the footie starts again. I feel as if I've turned a corner.

Bread and Circuses!

Sunday 10:20 a.m.
                            I got paid on Friday so sallied forth last night with the Poisonous to soak up the beautiful, wonderful city in the last weekend of the Fringe, and look at lots of young women of child bearing age.Fortunately, this year the fashion veered away from the flaunting of beer bellies, and there were some fabulous lower limbs on display.
                            Despite visiting Syracuse during his holidays, the Poisonous could not remember Archimedes Principle.
                            The weight of a floating object is equal to the weight of the the fluid displaced.
                             It was much more elegantly stated when I was a lad.
                             The Poisonous is now sixty and, because he has stayed alive for this length of time, he now gets a free bus pass. If he bought this, it would cost £500 a year. The free bus pass scheme is a fine example of communism in action  and has to be applauded. Everything should, of course, be free, income tax should be punitive and wealth will be redistributed as soon as we get our freedom from the stupid people down south who don't know how to vote for anything other than a bunch of fascist basturns.
                             In Deity Yoga, of course, we take the result as the path. I am a famous novelist. A very nice young lady of child bearing age sat down beside me in the Speigeltent in George Square. She could not remember Archimedes Principle either, but did know Boyle's Law.
                             For a fixed amount of an ideal gas kept at fixed temprature, pressure and volume are inversely proportional.
                             I think I fell in love at that point and would have asked her to marry me, but I'd run out of beer then and had to walk on.
                             All compounded things are subject to dissolution. Pursue your salvation with diligence. Walk on.
                              I  tried to get Poisonous to agree to download Ancient Futures from Kindle Amazon since it has still only been downloaded twice. Despite it only costing 86 pence, he refused point blank. Almost everyone I know is a complete basturn.
                              We were in the Men's Union at Teviot Row. The place is redolent with memories for me. I asked the Poisonous if he remembered getting thrown down the stairs outside after he'd punch the servitor in the eye when they were carrying him out semi-conscious from the downers, but he did not remember this. He doesn't remember anything. He never has. He's completely in the here and now. As well as having a free bus pass, he has a certificate from the government saying he's a complete psycho. Whenever anyone asks him to go to a meeting at this jobbie, he just whips out the certificate and grins madly.
                              This would be a wonderful country if we could just get free of the stupid Englanders, the evil bourgeois, and other war mongering, flesh eating basturns!

Calling Home

Dear Teresa,

                           I’ve been back at work  (well, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday morning)  for a couple of weeks now, so I thought it would be a good time to write you a wee letter about how my meditations have been going since I had a word with Lama Yeshe.

                           The lama told me that if  I kept on with using the symbols and channels for meditation, I would “unleash energies”  I wouldn’t be able to control, and that my mind would go into “a very bad place”, and that I’d have to stop meditating.

                           He also said I should do the Dorje Sempa and that I could continue with the Medicine Buddha sadhana I was doing.

                           This left me very troubled, confused and a bit disturbed. I know from reading Gopi Krishna’s book “Living with Kundalini” that a bad arousal can be very serious and I thought this might be what the lama was warning me about.

                           I wasn’t sure. One part of me was thinking that the lama might be giving me the party line, which is that everyone irrespective of anything has to do this Dorje Sempa stuff. Another part of me has been trying to think of the lama as being the same as Shakymuni so I could do this vajrayana stuff, and from this point of view obviously I had to do what he told me.

                           I was hoping to use the meeting with the lama to launch myself into a month of very serious meditating (at least for me!), but meeting him had quite the opposite effect. A lot of my practise for the last three or four years has been on these channels and symbols, particularly the symbol at the navel chakra. More recently I’ve been using them all and raising awareness up to the crown chakra. This was giving me tremendous amounts of bliss even although I can’t do the visualisations properly.

                          The routine I had with the Medicine Buddha sadhana ended up not with me trying to dissolve everything into emptiness, but going into this stuff with the channels and symbols.

                          After the meeting with the lama, I was quite disconsulate and thought I should perhaps go back to where I started, which was using Susquehanna as a mantra and just doing calming meditations and insight meditations. My confidence in what I was doing has only recently come back. I’m now doing some vase breathing again, but without trying to visualise anything and without holding my breath for very long. The lama did not tell me to stop doing vase breathing.

                          Tha lama said I should continue with the Medicine Buddha sadhana. I think I should tell you what my idea of the Medicine Buddha sadhana is.

                          I go through the dying process. Mirage, clouds, etc. I arise as the Medicine Buddha. (No channels or symbols at first anymore). I supplicate, etc., and imagine the Medicine Buddha in front of me. I ask for purification of the body, speech and mind, and try to imagine the coloured lights coming out of the Medicine Buddha and into me. Here, I am thinking of the three symbols in my head, throat and chest. This makes the penetration of the lights easier for me.

                         Then I imagine the Medicine Buddha above me head and ask for my addictions to be cured, etc. Lots of bliss is coming down from the visualisation at this point. Then I try to dissolve the visualisation into myself and re-affirm myself as the Medicine Buddha. Then I try to imagine the symbol at the heart and dissolve everything into that. Then I dissolve that.

                          I try to imagine the Kalachakra Mandala in front of me and then try to imagine myself as the Medicine Buddha hovering over the Mandala (I’m sure this can’t be right, but I don’t know what else it should be. I can’t imagine myself in a palace.) Then I offer all this up to the Medicine Buddha appearing in front of me, but at a bit of a distance this time. Then I try to imagine the Medicine Buddha over my head while I am the Medicine Buddha hovering still over the Kalachakra Mandala. I’m really not very good at this, but this is what I’m trying to do.

                          Then  I dissolve everything into the symbol at the heart centre and then dissolve that into emptiness. Then I reverse the dying process, dedicate the merit, and stop meditating.

                           I had a look at the Medicine Buddha sadhana in a book when I got home, and it’s nothing like this. If I’m doing something wrong here, please let me know.

                           Within this, I think I’m doing the mandala offering and the guru yoga,  the two out of the four aspects of the Dorje Sempa stuff.

                            One of the remaining aspects is 100,000 prostrations. I take an awful lot of exercise for someone who is fifty nine years old. I cycle, run, shadow box, skip, do some yoga and tai chi, as well as dig my allotment. I doubt if doing prostratrions is going to make me feel humble. I feel very humble when I dig my allotment. If the lama had to me to go and do that, or do 100,000 sun salutations I’d be much happier. Doing the prostrations is going to stop me doing something I think would be better for me, but I have started doing the prostrations anyway. I think I’ve done about six hundred in the last couple of weeks. I can probably do about three hundred a week. I’ll be dead before I get through 100,000 at this rate.

                           I cannot bring myself to do the 100 syllable mantra. I don’t speak Tibetan. I have been using Om Mani Padme Hung and Om Ah Hung Vajra Gurus Padme Siddhi Hung for nearly fifteen years, but doing the 100,000 recitations of the 100 syllable mantra will stop me meditating. I don’t have the time in my life right now for this. If I can get out of my half time job before I die, I will have time, but right now I don’t. I don’t want to have to memorise a huge mantra in a foreign language I don’t speak, but I will do so if I have the good fortune to do a proper retreat sometime. It doesn’t make any sense to me to do that right now.

                        I’ve been having problems with my ego ever since speaking to the lama. I could do a few of the 100 syllable mantras at my work, but it would take ten lifetimes to complete 100,000 at that rate. That’s why I gave up on them when I was first had the Dorje Sempa initiation.

                          I’ve had two wonderful meditations today, but I’ve been thinking about writing you this letter for some time. In fact, I think I’ll post it to you as an attachment to an email to get it out of the way.

                          Sorry, but I can’t send a tenner with the email. The next time I write, I’ll double the money!!! If you think everything is okay with what I’m doing now, you don’t need to bother getting back to me.

                           It’s great for me to have this connection with you. I’m sorry if I was creating concern. I’ll try to get down to the Samye Ling for a couple of nights when the schools break up in October.

                                           Yours in the Buddha,

                                                       Hotboy

                                                    

The end again!

Friday 1:32 a.m.
                        The weather and the self portrait (half finished!) of the kiddo's boyfriend which I found when I got home. He is a fortunate creature to have landed among us because we are the wonderful people.
                        I cried and cried at the end of Amadeus. I could have been having some kind of breakdown, but I wasn't. I was just a little drunk. Peter Schaffer or whatever he was called is a fab playwright.
                        I am the patron saint of mediocrity. I absolve you. I absolve you. I absolve you.


                      Well, I know bugger all about Tibetan Buddhism, and I don't care about what anyone thinks of my wonderful writings, so bye, bye. Bye, bye!
                       So where are we going now, Hotboy? We're not going anywhere, Jack.

Movies!

Thursday 8:10 p.m.

                            Since I'm still trying to pretend to be normal, I went to a movie last night with the other three folk who live here. Usually, when I have to do that, I just shut my eyes and try to do the bliss. But last night I kept watching. There was a lot that wasn't right about this movie, but there was enough there for me to keep watching. The Domestic Bliss fell asleep.

                             It was called Inception. What I liked about this movie was that I thought the boy who wrote it must know something about buddhism. Well,  he might not have, but it was all about dreaming and having lucid dreams and controlling them. That was it seemed to be about to me anyway. Dream yoga, thinks I. Hurrah!! 

                            One of my favourite movies is The Matrix. This also seems to be have a buddhisty theme in that it's about the illusory nature of reality. At least, that was what it was about to me.

                            Last week I watched One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and thought that they don't make movies like that anymore. Maybe they do. That definitely is a movie for grown-ups though and it doesn't have any special effects at all!! 1975, I think.

                            I'm going to watch another movie tonight!! How normal can you get! When I was watching the Cuckoo's Nest, I was telling the kiddo that one of my really favourite movies was Amadeus. Being a kiddo, she had not seen the Cuckoo's Nest and neither has she seen Amadeus. And it's on tonight!! Hurrah for Film Four on freeview! Dum dum, tarum tum, dum dum dum! 

                             I was cutting the grass up the allotment for about an hour and a quarter today. With shears. Only a poor soul who has no proper allotmenteering equipment would do such a thing. The bit I did took me about an hour and a quarter, and I felt quite tired afterwards. But once or twice during this trial, I stopped and closed my eyes and fell into the bliss. Immediate, wonderful bliss. 

                             Oh, what a fortunate creature I am, I am! What a fortunate creature I am!! 

Photies!

Wednesday 6:11 p.m.
                                 The castle photie was taken from the bus stop this morning. No more work till Monday. Hurrah! You can see that there's a lot more dishes to wash when four people live here than when it was only moi and the Domestic Bliss. <BR>
                                 You see a lot of interesting things in the Fringe of course. I took the top photie of this guy demonstrating tough love first aid near the gate of the Gallery of Modern Art.

Cargo Publishing!

Monday
              Last night Brian Wilson, the consiglieri and myself went along to the Spiegeltent in Charlotte Square to see some writers reading from the new short story collection published by Cargo Publishing. I was really blown away!! It felt like being at one of the first readings of Howl! Writers dripping with talent and commitment. Even although I don't get out much, I was so impressed.
              I've ducked two writers that I know in the past few days, but I had a few words with Alan Spence last night. Alan has been meditating even longer than I have. Shortly after I started meditating, I began to write The Real McCoy as a radio play.  I met Allan in a wee room at the top of the Assembly Rooms in George Street when he was doing some writer in residence stuff around this time. I asked him where you would exit your body from. He pointed to his fontanelle, the top of his head. How reassuring that someone else was into that kind of stuff!!
              He was asking after the sensei and reverend who knows him much better than me.
              I spoke to the putative publisher,  who seems to still want to publish The Buddha and the Big Bad Wolf next year.
 It all so reminded me of Rebel Inc and the early 1990s.
              I had a great time. Free whisky as well!

Johnny The Moslem!

Sunday 2:30 a.m.
                           It's not anywhere near Ground Zero, so they have a mosque in Edinburgh. As part of the Edinburgh Festival, I went round the exhibition there today. If I wasn't in about three religions already, I would definitely have signed up for that one. It told you some stuff about the Prophet I didn't know.
                          Obviously, the idea that the last prophet is  Mohammed is stupid. It's a big universe out there. Also, there is only one God ... well, you could theorise on what that meant ... apart from that, I'd like to put my name down.
                           The others of the five pillars of Islam are brilliant. Also, they don't like folk having unnecessary wealth. You're supposed to give 2.5% of all your stuff every year to the poor basturns to help re-distribute wealth and stop poverty. As usual, the boy's a communist!
                           They got stopped at Constantinople. Big walls. Otherwise, we'd all be moslems in Europe and the world would have been a better place. The moslems were believers and, therefore, stupid, but there are so many good things about Islam.
                           The boy meditated in a cave. When he died, there was only some barley left from a mound on his floor. He was not into racial, etc., discrimination. It was hard to tell who was the prophet if you walked into the room because he did not seek prominence. When the big Jessie he'd married died, he had different huts for his wives. He said you should look after animals. The moslems like Christ though they say he was not God. Well, he wasn't. Not unless I am as well.
                             "It is difficult for a man laden with riches to climb the steep path to bliss." Well, I was totally suckered on that one.
                             Of course, when the holy days are over, we should go forth and nuke the freepong, disgraceful basturns who give this religion a bad name, and stop them being rotten to women, and ambush them, and completely fung them over because they are basturns and you're allowed to fight for righteousness, I assume, if you are a moslem.
                              As far as I could see from this exhibition, I'd like to join up apart from the God thing and the Mohammed boy being the last shout. The social stuff looked great. No usury either!
                              Not only do I think we should get Christ off the Christians, we should get Mohammed off the Moslems.

Great Idea!

Saturday 3:00 p.m.
                             While I was meditating up the allotment this morning, I had a great idea for my novel about the Traffic Warden massacre. So the hero is going to kill these two psychos at the end of the book. Before you get to the end there will, of course, be some stuff about phenomenology/appearances/buddhism, etc, and lots of first person stuff from the guy who's going to do these killings at the end. With first person stuff, it's pick your personality time. Usually, I just use what I've got already which is probably why my books never get published!
                             Buddhism is a very dangerous philosophy if you don't have tons of compassion to go with it. If you just take out the compassion .... well, you no soul; you've no God creator; you've got no judgement day. I know some Tibetans would say you do have a judgement day, but that was something that was just added to make the poor basturns behave themselves. Anyway, if I've got a joe who has managed to follow the non-self and emptiness part and taken out the compassion .... well, a perfect killer!! The book's going to be called Cold Killing.
                             The sensei told me recently that the supermarkets (where all the big sellers are) aren't interested in books with grim endings or heroes who are morally ambivalent.
                              The book wouldn't have sold anyway!! But I think I might really enjoy writing it now.
                               This is why if you're wanting to meditate seriously, it might be just as well not to write, at least for me. Ideas just jump into your head.
                               I'm doing this in a hurry, having left some visitors in the kitchen. Must get back.

Book Festival and Jimmy Reid

Thursday 6:25 p.m.
                              The Domestic Bliss collected the bunch of flowers from the allotment last night. Marie Rex wrote the book which came on the same day the goji berry seeds arrived from Skye, yesterday.  Once I've got my own supply of goji berries, all I'll need to do is sit like a tortoise and walk like a sprightly pigeon to live to be 150 year old like Li Chng-yun
                             I was hoping that the consiglieri and Brian Wilson and moi might be able to go to this event in the Spiegeltent at the Book Festival on Sunday night. Wells Fargo Publishing are putting it on to help launch a book, and it's supposed to be for free, but I thought I'd better go up and check to see if you needed ticket anyway. You don't. It's Wells Fargo who are supposed to be publishing a book by me next year, but I've had no contact with Mark Buckland since we shook on it.
                             I went into the place where they sell the books and three authors were sitting waiting for someone to come up with a book to sign. No one did. One of the writers was Trevor Royle.
                             When I was working in the steelworks after leaving uni, I used to send near illegible carbon copies of  bits of Alma Mater to the Scottish Arts Council. Trevor Royle was the literary director then. Unfailingly, he sent me pleasant and encouraging replies even though the stuff I sent was really awful.
                             The last time I spoke to him was one lunchtime in the Bow Bar in 1989 when I was having a break from the rehearsals of a play of mine which was going to be on at the Traverse. He is a very nice man with a fantastically patrician voice.
                             I would have liked to have gone over and said hello to him today, but I'm really quite shy and didn't.
                             Jimmy Reid's memorial service was held in Glasgow today. Here's a bit of his address when he was made rector of Glasgow University in 1972.
                             Society and its prevailing sense of values leads to another form of alienation. It alienates some from humanity. It partially dehumanises some people, makes them insensitive, ruthless in their handling of fellow human beings, self-centred and grasping. The irony is, they are often considered normal and well adjusted. It is my sincere contention that anyone who can be totally adjusted to our society is in greater need of psychiatric analysis and treatment than anyone else.


                             The evil bourgeois are all going to hell, Jack. 


                              

Comfort Zone!

Wednesday 10:50 p.m.
                                  Although I cannot as yet, and never will be able to, properly adjust to the different parameters of the clickiness therein, I am very happy to be on a new bloggy, especially since I have finally fixed the comment thing.
                                  I think you don't have to do the <BR> thing on this bloggy. You may be able to write like it was a page of word processing and that is bound to be good. I might even eventually try to write something interesting that I could be bothered re-writing. Anyway, I hope not to do much blogging about the bliss and the vajrayana, and all of that. I will not be indiscreet about my personal habits and I will use the real names for my wonderful writings and whatnot. A refreshingly new beginning for me then. I hope the two or three folk who followed the other bloggies are not discomforted by this.
                                  What do you think, Jack? Well, it's not as good, Hotboy. It was better when you didn't care, when you were less measured, but me and the other spam robots will just wait and see then.
                                   I'm very happy to be back in the work routine now that it is Wednesday and I don't have to go to work tomorrow. I did not have a good summer holiday.
                                   Tomorrow I will meditate for most of the day, and do about two hours of writing, and that will all be wonderful.
                                    On Sunday the consiglieri and I, and possibly Brian Wilson, will go to see Cargo Publishing put on a show at the tent in the book festival. They have a show on Saturday, but it costs ten quid and I don't have hardly any money at this time of the month.
                                    Wells Fargo Publishing are supposed to be doing The Buddha and the Big Bad Wolf next year, but who knows about that? I assume they will. If they do, I'll start appearing in public as a writer, which I have totally resisted doing before because I'm thrawn, and don't understand that performance bit about writing. But I'm old now and it would be interesting. <BR>
                                     Ancient Futures has been downloaded twice from Kindle and the Amazon thing. I think my end of that is 35%, but the consiglieri is on 15% of that, so I think I might have made about forty pence on the whole deal. With the tax, insurance, and holiday entitlements, and postage deducted that probably comes down to about twenty pence. That's the total sum of money made from the wonderful writings in the last seventeen years.
                                      I'm going to be rich, Jack! Rich, I tell you! Riches beyond your wildest dreams!
                                      The photies were taken up the allotment this evening about meditating time, around eight or so. The gladioli have come out. Hurrah! There's always something arising, abiding and declining!
                              

Traffic Wardens, Ya Bass!

Tuesday
            I'm going to start conscientiously working on the crime book now, I hope. To be more normal. I've been told by various people that I do better writing in the first person, so I'm going to add some first person elements to this novel. It'll feature the main character from the Remote book, but, unlike that, I'll try to make it amusing. I have a very convoluted plotline, which is good, and about nine thousand words written so far. I started thinking about this idea in 2007 so I should finish the first draft in about ten years time!

Miscellany

Monday 9:05 p.m.
                             I weighed in this morning at eleven stone ten pounds, so I've dropped a couple of pounds since I stopped consuming dairy products a month or so ago. In fact, my main food intake over my five week holiday was tatties, onions, and cabbage, all more or less free. With some fried eggs. And lots of olive oil. Unusually for me, I haven't been making much bread since ... well, no butter. And I haven't been making soup. But I made soup and bread yesterday. Still, no butter. <BR>
                             Today was the first day back at the jobbie and, typically,  I got a bad night's sleep last night. There are no kids till Wednesday. I meditated a lot today. I meditated in the hut this evening. This was very good, but reminded me of how knocked off I'd been since speaking to the lama. Unless I was about to really fung myself up, that was not a good meeting. I'm still far too careful in what I'm doing. I'm careful when I'm vase breathing at all, and I haven't got back into that really. I haven't been holding my breath for over a minute, or anything like it. <BR>
                            There are various points in the Medicine Buddha Sadhana (mine is definitely well customised!) where you dissolve everything into emptiness. This kind of river meditation where you are just sitting near the thoughtless zone,  and letting whatever thoughts you havego, is a bigger part of my practise than before the meeting with the lama. I think that's what he wants me to do. Do that, Hotboy, and forget the fireworks for now. Sometimes when I'm doing this kind of meditation, I have a wee vase breath, and there is heat in there, and I try to tell myself that this is the kind of heat that he said wouldn't do me any harm. <BR>
                              I suspect that it was when I wrote to Teresa that I was getting heat alright, but not the kind of heat that was concentrated in the navel chakra symbol since, I assumed, I couldn't visualise that properly, that the alarm bells started ringing. I suspect that. I don't know that. <BR>
                              You are supposed to consider your root guru to be on a par with Shakymuni, I think, when you are trying to do the vajrayana, even although the lama does not claim to fully realised at all. In fact, he says on one of the CDs in the auld maw's house that he doesn't know what it means. This dichotomy is what screwed me up over the holidays. Let's hope there's just the accumulation and the purification as we move into the autumn and winter.

Last night of hols!!

Sunday 9:15 p.m.
                          I meditated today in the house, and then in the allotment, the Botanics, the house, the allotment and the hut. I got a Number One done to my hair on Saturday and it was getting a bit chilly in the hut tonight. But today was gorgeous!!<BR>

Sunday 9:20 p.m.
                          I ripped this photie off Albert's blog. I'm the one smoking the fag about forty years ago!! <BR>
                          This blog doesn't work right. It's got different clicky things which is a pain in the neck.

New Beginnings!

Sunday 11:10 a.m.
                            Nothing has been right about the other blog since I had the meeting with the lama a few weeks ago. I can't go on blogging about the completion stage of the vajrayana juju if the man told me to lay off the channels and symbols. <BR>
                            This holiday now finishing has been a bit disappointing. In the last week I was giving up to the world and trying to behave more normally i.e. go out, see people, socialise. Unfortunately, when I do that, I keep encountering people having a bloody awful time. When I look inwards, what  I get is mostly blissful. <BR>
                            I hoped once that blogging about bliss would encourage folk to meditate, but it doesn't. The too dumb to meditate are just too dumb to meditate and there's bugger all I can do about that. What I can do is meditate myself, and now that I'm back at work tomorrow for another year, I will try to keep socialising with flatheids down to one a week. <BR>
                           This morning I spent the first two hours or so lying flat on my back in bed immersed in bliss. That was very good indeed!