The Bliss!

Sunday Noon.
                     It's a real waste of time talking to the too dumb to meditate about meditation. I don't do it so much with folk I know and meet any more since it has gone far beyond the imaginings of either them or me. But it was amazing this morning. Such a deathless delight of bliss! There has been something further going on for a wee while now.
                     All I've got to do is stay away from the Beer Monster and the Nicotine Dragon because they do have a deleterious effect on the way you think your thoughts, and even if I can't do that, the bliss is sometimes totally stunning anyway. And the process continues to develop!
                     What a fortunate creature I am, I am! What a fortunate creature I am!!
                  

Gerard Kelly

Saturday 6:50 p.m.
                            Shame to hear that the actor Gerard Kelly had passed away. Only fifty one. Dearie me. I didn't know him at all, but I met him when he had the main role in my first radio play, The Marijuana Kid. This was in 1982, I think, so he must have been only twenty three then. I think it was the first radio he'd done. He must have been not long out of drama school. But he was a stand out.
                             The other men in the cast were Phil McCall, Gerry Slavin, John Grieve, and Tony Roper. There was a wee part for a woman, but I can't remember her name. But that was some cast to have and Gerard Kelly was like a firecracker among them. Bags of energy and up for having a laugh. He was really enjoying doing the part. Since it was my first experience in radio, I didn't realise how good he was.
                             That play, had to be the first one of course, was the most successful really. It helps if you've no idea what you are doing. It was broadcast on Radio Scotland, and on Radio 4 twice, and on the World Service. Part of this was due to the great performance he put in as the amateur boxer. I never saw him in pantomime, but he must have been a godsend.
                              I should really go and listen to a recording of the play again. Be an excuse. I'd have to get drunk. I haven't listened to it for over twenty years. I think the last time I did, I put it on the stereo and put out the lights and lay on the floor of the darkened room with the volume way, way up. A lot of the play takes place in a working men's club so there was a lot of party-like background noise. The doorbell rang. I opened the door to see the two polis standing there. They'd heard the 'party' from the street and came to ask me to keep the noise down. I said there was no party here, though I was in my underwear. They looked puzzled. There was a party in this flat without any people at it. It's a radio play, I said. I'm the author.
                            

One-pointedness!

Saturday 6:20 p.m.
                              I got a book called Chakras by Harishi Johari about ten years ago.. I think it might be about Tantric yoga from the hindu side. Yoga anyway. Here's a bit:
                              - Until the mind is free of distractions and a permanent one-pointedness develops, the state of salvation is impossible to achieve.-
                              One Pointedness .... -is a state of mind wherein, on the fading away of one thought, another thought follows in succession with the previous thought; when there is a continuous succession of such thoughts, the mind is called 'one pointed'. ... when one-pointedness is mastered, one acquires super-conscious concentration. This samadhi (realised non-duality) is true yogic samadhi, leading to salvation. -
                               Well, there it is.
                      

Leprosy

Thursday 9:30 p.m.
                               I used to eat stir fry every night. Once I used to eat pasta every night. It went back to when I first used to cater for myself and lived on brown rice, vegetables, beans and sardines. What more could a body ask for? For years now, until this July, I've lived on home made bread, soup, cheese, butter, bananas and beer. I seemed to be getting leprosy.
                               So there's been less soup. I've been boiling tatties in their skins, then frying them with onions, and sometimes mushrooms, and maybe tomato, and two fried eggs. Or french toast. I stopped eating cheese and using milk. Fry-ups! Yummy!
                               And eating huomous ... what? ... and peanut butter with the bread, now rarely toasted.
                               Also, bought some vitamin B complex pills and some cod liver oil capsules. And ate some goji berries.
                               And the leprosy has gone!
                               I think it might have gone anyway.
                               Photies: the kiddos were on the machine and when I got back to it, this mandala was the screensaver. There are still raspberries to eat up the allotment. And it looked dank out the back, but I had a photie still to go, so. ..... This is the beautiful, wonderful city!
                              

Ra Night Before Liberation!

u

Tuesday 10:50 p.m.

                             There was this one time when we were extremely cool. Tony came to see me unexpectedly. You could do that in the days when hardly anyone had a telephone, and you just showed up. So Tony came to see me when I lived in Grant House, maybe the first term I was at uni and living in Pollock Halls. I think I was down in the common room. Anyway, he didn't find me. I was in the bog when I heard him outside approaching the mirror to wash his hands and comb his hair. He was singing a wee song to himself and I recognised the voice. I comes out of the stall and he's looking in he mirror combing his hair, as was his wont, and I sidled up from behind him, and said: How's it going, Tony. He says, It's fine, Hotboy, and manages hardly to miss a beat. I loved that. 

                           A lot of my uncles went to Australia during the 30s, and two of them unexpectedly saw another two of them coming along this outback main street. So they pretended they hadn't seen them and walked on  by. This is super sophisticated taking the piss!

                            The photies were taken over the last couple of days. Edinburgh fans will know where they are from.

                             Tomorrow I get paid. Will we walk out of the lonely financial zone, Jack? No, Hotboy. But you can pretend you have choices for a couple of days. I should embrace poverty. It didn't do St Francis any harm. Embrace poverty and ignorance. That's the way to do it!!

More Tony!

Monday 10:15 p.m.
                              So it was just before Christmas in 1968 when Tony got off with Teresa. Probably the other way around. He'd gone off to some debating thing, and I wasn't there for some reason, probably because I'd no money, and this girl has come up to him and said something like don't I know your cousin? Lame lines. So he got off with Teresa Biagi, and this led to our only contretemps, which was about going to the Bellshill YMCA this Saturday night, as we always did, and me getting someone from there to go to the Christmas dance at the school. It was a single sex school. The very nice looking girl who eventually agreed to come with me to this dance ended up in the school hall with just me, and everyone had left, and we were still sitting there winching on our ownio. She was a very nice girl. The next time I was due to see her, she was supposed to get off the 44 bus, and we were supposed to go to the George Cinema in Bellshill, but the 44 bus never came, and such is life! I was stood up by the bus company, not her, but that was okay to say, well, let's move on. She really was very nice though and had a funny sister who didn't look anything like her. She looked like a sturdy, happy Dane, and good looking, but not really my type.
                           Tony asks me if I want to go on this blind date with Teresa's best pal from school, St Margaret's in Paisley, and I says okay.
                           Teresa's old man had been given a chip shop in Renfrew when he married his wife, and he worked in there three or four nights a week. This other joe did the other nights, and you should wish for a father in law like that. Teresa worked in the chip shop sometimes and I think I saw it the on this blind date, but we were taken back to the house. It was a redbrick, sandstone job, and probably the first bought and owned house I was ever in. It had sitting rooms. I think Teresa was a younger kid and all her older brothers and all were smart, the kind who did university degrees. I met one of them that night, but I don't think I saw her parents though I might have. We, the four of us, were led into this kind of drawing room, and the girl I was with sat on my knee and all us us spent the next two hours winching, or snogging as it might be known to folk who don't know what winching is.
                           Where did all that go, Jack? Teenagers are wonderful for this. Spontaneous snogging. It's really far more sensual than any of the other shenanigans you get into later. It really is!
                            I heard later that the girl who was Teresa's best friend wanted to go out with me again, but I told Tony to tell her that I couldn't afford a girlfriend. By then, I'd been sacked from my Saturday job in Galbraiths in Parkhead, and got a pound off the auld maw for my pocket money. This was because I cycled to school in Motherwell and the pound would have been the cost of the bus.
                            For some reason,  my sister wasn't able to get me a fraudulent bus pass for school. I had been getting these for a couple of years. I lived in Bellshill. My garden was in Mossend. If you came from Mossend and stood at the same bus stop as me, you got the bus for free, but being from Bellshill meant you weren't the statutary three miles away from school to get it for free. Anyway, my sister worked in the County Buildings in Hamilton and had a word with the wummin who looked after such things, and a bus pass appeared for a while. But for some reason, not in sixth year. The auld maw gave me a pound for my pocket money anyway, and a pound in those days would have bought you about eight or nine pints of beer. So I could go out to the dancing a couple of times a week and buy a coca cola during the interval, but not much else.
                             It's great when you're a kid and don't have to carry around money. You don't want much. There's nothing to spend it on anyway. It's like being free, so it is.
                              So I tells Tony to tell the girl that I'm flattered, but can't afford to take her anywhere. Like, some guys, those who left school and had jobs, took girls out and paid for everything. I never understood this. It was a wee bit like prostitution without the sex really. Anyway, I said thanks but no thanks and the word came back that the girl would pay for herself. For some reason, it was called going Dutch.
                             We went into the Bellshill YMCA with two girls. Walked across the dancehall, gymhall with these two girls and sat down in the seats around the hall, the ones we used to jump up on to watch the fights.
                              It's a completely different gig when you've got a girl with you. You spend a lot of time paying attention, and a lot of time snogging. Maybe I'll come back to this. I'll be doing the juju for Tony till just about the end of November.
                             I asked the auld maw, who is ninety two, if she thought he'd had a good deal with the heart attack, and the short illness and the death, and she said she thought he had. This is comforting. I think he scored on that too! There are far worse lives to live than the one he did!

SUNDAY!

Sunday 8:35 p.m.
                           Since I stopped working on Tuesday .... I went cycling on Wednesday and I did a fair bit of digging before the prostrations on Thursday, and I did thirty minutes of shadow boxing on Friday, and I did no physical jerks on Saturday. Don't know why. Tonight I did the five hills run.
                           I thought I'd just mention this since folk landing on the bloggy might think I do nothing but blog and drink home brew. I do tend to drink a lot of home brew when I'm in the lonely financial zone towards the end of the month, but I've finished it now and should get paid sometime near the middle of next week. Hurrah!
                           I've really started to write the Traffic Wardens book now, I think, and will try to find time for that. At the moment, I'm reading Shutter Island by Denis Lehane, so this is me trying to be more normal now.
                           Despite that, the meditations continue to progress in the usual wonderful fashion. It's been a crap month one way or another, but you can always rely on the juju. All you have to do is sit and keep sitting and wonders will unfold.
          

Cormac McCarthy!

Sunday 00:30 a.m.
                            After some beers, but not as much as last night!
                            I've become a huge fan of Cormac McCarthy. I've just watched No Country for Old Men, and I think this is the worst thing by him I've ever read. I think it started off as a screenplay, and then became a novel, and then got made into a film. It's nothing like as great as All the Pretty Horses, the first part of the Borders Trilogy. The Mexican jail scenes in that are amongst the best things I've ever read. I could have fell back and died after reading that section of the book, I was so impressed. I'm waiting to stop drinking so I can read the next two bits of the Borders Trilogy, but I don't expect them to be as good as the first one.
                          He's like Ernest Hemingway with a wee bit of poetry. Almost nobody can stand beside Ernest Hemingway, and you can say that Cormac McCarthy is too mannered, and all that, but I found watching the movie this evening to be inspirational.
                           That's what you need! Inspirational writings!
                            Tommy Lee Jones is the sheriff in the movie. He looks just like the janny of the school I wrote about in RaBlissBook. Except the janny had better dead eyes. He'd been in the SAS. I was fond of him and if that book ever gets published, which it won't, I'll dedicate it to him. He died two years after he retired.
                          I don't like the first draft stage since my writings at this point are so poor. But I will persevere. I will remember that the end result is produced by writing it seventeen times in longhand, like Christopher Isherwood did with his first, wonderful novel. Great to have been inspired by Cormac McCarthy. His people must have come from Northern Ireland to have a moniker like that. Probably not tims either. He's replaced Arthur Miller (R.I.P.) as my favourite American. If I ever have any money again and can go to America, I'll try to see him (he'll drink whisky!) and the sensei!
                         Writing is great. You shouldn't despair because you are crap at it, or nobody wants to publish you, or anything like that. Reading great writers is very inpirational. They've all had their dog food years, and their baked bean years, and even when someone gives them money, they should tell them to fung off!

Some time ago!

Saturday 2:35 a.m.

                            We're at the start of sixth year at school. Some folk were going to be made prefects and some people weren't. The boy in charge of this was the priest. Father Burns. He was the boy who got us all to say that contraception should be okay just as the evilness came upon us, circa 196 ... when the only good Papa passed away and it all went down the tubes.

                             We pledged that we would not be prefects if we were asked, but Tony got asked and I didn't. So I wasn't allowed in the wee prefects room and Tony was, but he wasn't wanting to go there much because I wasn't allowed in, and a lot of the prefects were complete basturns. Father Burns tried to get the reprobates to be prefects and I don't think that worked too well. He might have been progressive. Funged up my catholicism, so he did!

                            So Tony gets put in charge of the Christmas show when we were in sixth year at school. He also got put in charge of the big board in the English corridor. Mr White let Tony do what he wanted with that board and he wrote stuff on it, and got ... I was his pal and didn't really pay much attention, and sometimes he stuck stuff up on this board and sometimes he didn't. So I don't really care and it's just something that happens. He didn't study, but was dead good with stuff off the top of his head.

                            Mr White had room 24. You weren't allowed to be in the corridors or anything, but since Tony was in charge of sticking things on this board in the the English corridor and Mr White was the head English teacher, me and Tony, since I was his pal,  were allowed to be there.  Because of Tony, we were allowed to sit in room 24. Nobody else was. Me and Tony used to sit there and rap. Mr White, we all knew, had a wife who had polio, and he sometimes came into his room at lunchtime to find me and Tony sitting there up the back rapping away. He said once that I should take up debating. But Tony was the joe for that. No way was I interested in that. I'd die first.

                             There was a Christmas show and Tony was organising the Christmas show for our year. Bunch of basturns he was doing this with. I told him to watch out because I did not trust these currants, but Tony breezed on and they were cool.

                              I got to get out of classes because Tony was my pal who was organising this show and I got to play the Indian Band. So I've got a stupid towel round my waist and a blacked up face and a guitar with no strings. I mean, it's just awful, but the first years loved it. 

                              The bunch of basturns he was doing the main thing with turned out to be very talented musicians as well. 

                               So he's just got off with the girl from Renfrew at this time. And he has to go and see her. I'm not happy with this because for the first time in about two years he has to do something without me. It's the only time I almost fell out with him. So I manipulated things; a quiet word here and there ... We had to go to the YMCA in Bellshill that Saturday so I could try to lumber someone and ask them to got to the school dance. We never lumbered anyone out of that dancehall, but that night I picked on the best looking girl we used to dance with and asked her to go to the school Christmas dance.

                              A week or so later, Tony fixed me up with a blind date with his new friend's best pal and everything chilled out again.

                               

A Fortunate Creature!

Thursday 11:14 p.m.
                               I don't like hypocrisy. Although I write this bloggy mainly about meditation and whatnot, I've never claimed to be good, or virtuous, or even very nice. I am not holy or saintly. I just enjoy meditating a lot. If I could think of something better to do, I'd do that instead.
                               And sometimes it seems that things just aren't fair. I enjoy good health. A friend of mine's daughter who isn't five yet has probably by this time undergone a serious operation for something that will probably not get better. What did she ever do to deserve that?
                                Karma and the rationale for suffering and such like are way above my head. I don't think I'm going to be reborn. If something occurs after I'm dead which has some connection with what I'm doing with my life, well, sure as hell it's not going to be me.
                                So I was sitting in the hut this afternoon and getting an awful lot of bliss. An awful lot. And I was thinking why was I getting such shedloads of bliss when none of my close friends around here get any.
                                 They don't meditate, Hotboy. I know they don't meditate, Jack, but I've got a sneaky feeling that some people might meditate more than I do and still not get the bliss. Are you sure of that, Hotboy? No, Jack, I am not sure of that. I certainly hope it's not true.
                                  But I am a fortunate creature. I really am. And I didn't even have a hangover today!!
                                

Cramond

Thursday 11:20 p.m.
                              It was cold and clear, but cycling into a wind on the way along the promenade at Cramond yesterday. Beautiful really. It took me and Brian Wilson just under an hour to get there using the North Edinburgh cycle path network. I do not know how long it took to get back. I lost Brian Wilson along the way. He could still be cycling yet for all I know.
                              You can buy a pint of Samuel Smith's Bitter in the Cramond Inn for £1:80! You can't get a beer in Stockbridge for under three quid. But we stuck to the Alpine Lager which was reduced from £2:08 last week to £2:02 this week. It's almost a pleasure to hand over the money!
                              To ensure that everything was kept under control, I only took enough money with me for only four pints, but .... I knew we were on a sticky wicket when it took so long to get on the bikes. We kept falling off. Every time I stopped, I fell over. I fell over when I was trying to get off the bike back in Stockbridge. Where are the polis when you really need them?

Anxieties!

Wednesday 12:05 a.m.
                                  The meditations were full on today, though I had to do them at the jobbie. Tonight I was meditating between nine and ten o clock.
                                  It's hard to describe what's happening. So it's at the margin, and there's quite a bit of heat, or warmth.
                                  So I hoped that I would be able to dry off wet sheets so I could impress my chum that it wasn't all what it seemed to be, that it just looked like that, and it wasn't happening they way it seemed to be happening, and that we were truly ignorant. And I did wish for the heat.
                                  But the heat is very freaky. You can tell yourself it's just an extension. You can tell yourself whatever you like. The Greek chorus is screaming at me.
                                   The lama: You will unleash energies you will not be able to control.
                                    Ringu Tulku: It is quite easy to open the channels. The problem is in closing them again.You must do things in the right order.
                                    Lama Thebten Yeshe says in the Bliss Of Inner Fire that you just have to let go. Also bad things can happen as well as good things.
                                    This juju has always been a bit scary. It's always been at the edge. Every time there have been developments, there have been anxieties. But there is a kindness in this juju. If it's my tao to crash and burn, let's crash and burn. I hope I will not crash and burn, but I'm on this path and I don't want to get off it. There is a beneficence in this juju. There really is. It is scary, but sometimes it feel so right.
                                     Yes, it would be much better if I was doing stuff in the right order. It would be much better if I was monk and lived down at the Samye Ling under the tutelage of Lama Yeshe.
                                      But in this time are we going run away? Are you going to run away, Hotboy? I do not think so, Jack! I will try to be measured in my response to events, and not blow a fuse if I can avoid such a thing. But I will not run away. Hotboys don't run away from the heat! Shame about the flatheids and all, but this is experiential mysticism we're talking about here, so it should be weird and scary and whatnot. Allah Akbar!
                                    
                                    

Vase Breathing Update!

Tuesday 1:30 p.m.
                            According to The Bliss of Inner Fire, the main part of the juju for raising inner heat is to concentrate on the triangular symbol at the navel chakra. Heat is supposed to go where the mind goes. If you had sufficient mental calmness and concentration, you should be able to warm that symbol up. I was never able to do this. I was hardly able to get the symbol to appear at all.
                             Still,  I stuck with that for years, bearing in mind that the Book of the Three Inspirations by Tsongkhapa said that you shouldn't try to raise heat until the white, blue and red channels were clearly visible. Well, I couldn't do that either, but I did concentrate enough on the navel chakra symbol to get some effects, or side-effects. Mainly, increased libidinousness.
                             Then I started raising the awareness, if not the heat, up through the other chakra symbols even although I was nowhere near getting the channels in sight. I'm doing this accompanied by vase breathing. On the outbreath, you go up a chakra. The bliss experienced when you hit the mid-brain chakra site was amazing.
                              Whenever the bliss gets stronger, you feel you must be on the right track. You're heading towards ecstasy and breathlessness. You must be.
                               Then I saw the lama at the start of July and all that stopped. I stopped thinking about channels and symbols altogether. I was hard to rejig the visualisations, but things still progressed. The bliss I was getting when I dissolved everything into emptiness became more and more amazing.
                               Since then everything continues to progress. These days I don't vase breathe as much as I used to by any manner of means. I stopped doing it entirely for a wee while and now I do it sometimes. This is because the after-effects of the outbreath are very, very strong.
                                 And I have sometimes started to go back to the symbols though I'm using them far less often than I was. This is partly because the common or garden bliss is so strong sometimes you just want to let it be. The thing that was increasing and developing continues to increase and develop.
                                I'm living a wonderful life! So I am! What a fortunate creature I am, I am! What a fortunate creature I am!

Completion stage!

Monday 10:30 p.m.
                              Since almost nobody meditates, it's mainly flatheids who land on this bloggy. Flatheids aren't even beginning to pretend to be in the human race. They have, being too dumb to meditate, lost the human race. However, they have a purpose in this bloggy thing, and that is to continue the dialogues. If it wasn't for the folk commenting on this blog, I would have found something better to do. Maybe in the far distant future, the Alien Creatures from Outer Space will land on this bloggy and maybe understand what I am getting at.
                              What are you getting at then, Hotboy? Well, Jack, I'm trying to explain the unexplainable, as far as flatheids are concerned, so that the Alien Creatures from the future will know that we were not all complete idiots, walking around with our heads stuck up our bums, morons and molluscs the lot of us!

                                So here is a bit about the completion stage. You have the generation stage and then we have the completion stage.
                                 Die and arise as a light being, and you are striving to do the generation stage. The completion stage is in two parts. There is the esoteric and the bit they'll tell anyone about.
                                  In the esoteric, you maybe go from the deity in the mandala and the offering up stuff etc., to going into the vase breathing using the channels and the symbols. That is what the lama told me not to do at the start of the summer. Don't go there, Hotboy, or you will "unleash energies that you will be unable to control" and whatnot.
                                   They'll tell any joe or josephine the next bit. You dissolve the deity in the mandala and all that into emptiness. So you go from trying (and in my case failing) to generate the deity to almost nothing there at all.
                                    I am the dharmakaya. This is basis. Ground. Maybe like one of the models of the start of everything in the cosmological theories; vacuum with energy, but without properties, or characteristics really.
                                     If your absorption and concentration are spot on, there is no need for anything else. You are a fortunate creature to be able to reside in this space at all. If your concentration is not so hot, your mind will wander before you know it .... meditation without object, but with great bliss, heat, light is what we're trying to get into here ... and your mind will jump hither and yon, and you will only notice sometime after you've lost it.
                                     If your absorption and concentration are not spot on, it might be better if you used something like a mantra ... so you have the mantra in the background and foreground ... on top of concentrating on the navel chakra symbol or something else like that.
                                     Does using a symbol to concentrate on here help you to develop a deeper concentration? Hmmm? I think it might.
                                     But going to the dissolution without being a deity, or concentration on a symnbol, is surely where we will eventually arrive. Meditation without object.
                                     So emanating as a deity and whatnot is just a stage on the way maybe.
                                     The lama told me to chuck the symbols and all that arising stuff. Thank you. Just by giving that up for a while has made me realise that the dissolving into ... is what you're looking for.
                                      When the bliss is just the bliss and not the ecstasy, you are still striving. I cannot even do the generation stage. I don't think you can do this juju properly unless you are in the hut in the middle of nowhere. God, place me there sometime! But you may be able to do ... you may be able to jump that generation stage. Maybe what you want is the heat and bliss and light  when thoughts arising merely arise and dissolve into the perifery of consciousness instead of being in your face and annoying you with the lies, the prevarications, the partialities, the idiotic, the stupid, ignorant thoughts.
                                                                      
                        

The Hotboy Escort Agency!

Sunday 9:30 p.m.
                           Yes, someone left me a message on the last blog asking what had happened to the vase breathing posts and whatnot. Well, since most of the folk landing on this bloggy are perverts, I assume all the anonymous comments are from Albert just trying to wind me up. So if you really want to know about the bliss and the vase breathing and whatnot, what you should do is ask me out.
                           I went out to watch a footie match with the consiglieri yesterday and had a really good time. The last time I was at a footie match was about 1987 or thereabouts, when Graeme Souness was still playing for the huns. Four one to the huns against the Hearts. You had to admire the brutality. Souness was the first to get booked. Three out of his back four were booked.
                            It's completely different now, Jack! There are seats to sit on. Wee sprinkly nozzle things pop up out of the grass and wet it. Mechanised. It's the Dalek turf. It looks like somebody's living room carpet. What happened to the famous slope at Easter Road? Aye, changed days, so they are.
                            I'm always amazed and impressed that I can remember things from the long ago and stuff like the slope, and when there was proper grass, and mud, and puddles. You can sit a bit stoned now in a half lotus and watch the games. The place was half empty of course.
                            Anyway, the consiglieri paid £22 to get me in and gave me a present which must have cost about £10 on top. So it cost him about £32 to see me. Of course, for him I would have given it for free, but ...
                            You wouldn't expect to get to have an evening with me for nothing, would you? I think about twenty quid and a wee present is just about the minimum. For that, what would a client get, Hotboy?
                             Well, Jack, what you get is moi! And I like to talk. What could you talk about, Hotboy? Well, after talking about the footie, the wonderful writings, all the interesting perverts I've met, world history, socialism, anarchism, tai chi, boxing, yoga, and meditation, we could get onto tantric sex..... At this point, the £22 plus the present has been used up ... also, I'm far too old for this hanky panky malarkey, but if you want my take on it, it'll cost a bit more than thirty quid!
                             You're in the embrace of the scary red babes, who has the sword, trident, dagger, etc., in her eight hands .... I don't know how many drugs you have to take to get here, Jack, but I can't afford them ... and she is sitting in  your lap, and you are in a lotus position. I don't know who is getting skewered here. It could be both of yous, but I think there should be only one thing, or approaching that at this point.
                             She stares at your enemies in the ten directions and she's a red hot, scary bissum, there's no doubt about that, Jack!
                             You are ecstatic and blissful anyway with the arisings of the inner heat, but .... you and she take a breath and hold it, squeezing it from the top and bottom. This means you raise the pelvic floor muscles together. So it's grip and throb. Then you breath out. It's relax, but what with the amazing bliss and heat that will arise when you relax and breath out ...
                              I think these shenanigans are necessary if you haven't done this juju before. Hmmm? I think if you are not totally purified and see everything in deityville by this time, you just shoot off to hell as usual. Well, who wants a shot of this first?
                             I think I should charge more than £22 and a wee present for this.

                        

Closing Time!

00:09 a.m.
                Just finished listening to Leonard Cohen on BBC Four, on the digital thingy.
                There were some things I could do when I was a writer and some things I couldn't. Here are maybe some of the things I could do.
1) When I wrote radio plays, I could write up to the minute. So you're doing a drama and it's supposed to last and hour and a half like the ones on Monday Night Theatre on Radio 4, two of which I wrote. Anyway, you have to write an hour and a half. Not an hour and thirty one minutes. Not more than an hour and a half and not less. I learned to do this. This meant that the producer didn't make any decisions on the script. It fitted. Nobody has to do this in the theatre. Theatre is sloppy by comparison.
2) I could write dialogue that made folk laugh. I don't know why this was. It didn't make me laugh. Sometimes when I watched folk watching Busted, which was the be all and end all in some ways, they were falling off their seats laughing.. Bizarre to see this.
3) Before there was word processing, I wrote City Whitelight. This book has, if I remember right, about thirteen really good paragraphs in it. I think I counted them once. It might have been seven. If I had been able to write the book in longhand seventeen times, there would have been more paragraphs which were good, but thirteen paragraphs in a book which were good is quite a lot. You get whole books with no good paragraphs at all.
4) Rhythm. It don't mean a thing if it aint got that swing. Even after there was word processing, I tried to make the writing hypnotic. Like, you start reading and you want to keep reading. I don't think I ever did this all that well in the third person, but in the first person I could maybe do it a bit though the first person is easy, and is not art. It's like pick your personality and then flow ...

             Anyway, that's all I can say about the good bits I think I could do. Whether or not they were any good doesn't really matter. They got me through this existence. Before I had to leave Bellshill at the New Year due to having to witness the appalling excesses of alcohol abuse, I used to stand outside the auld maw's and at the front gate listen for the bells. And I'd think what might happen to me in the next year, or not happen. I always knew when the draft of whatever was going to end because I could tell how long it took to write a page. So, I'll be finished this by February and this might happen or not.
               In comparison, I hardly write anything these days. I don't care. I have reached the end of times. Trying hard to write was the surfboard that took me across the ocean of horrors  and kept me apart from it.
               The auld maw rattled off a list of factories that used to be in Bellshill today, and a list of pits. And she named all the women who moved into the then new houses in Orbiston Drive. And they're dead now, Jack! Telling folk about dharma is the best thing. Thank god for the spam robots!!
              

My Home Brew Days!

Friday 9:12 p.m.
                        I've come to that part of the month where I reside in the lonely financial zone, my home brew days. I can't really afford to spend anything much until I get paid again in two weeks. But the "sheath" is filling as I sit here, and pulling and stretching, and rising. Oh, ra bliss, ra bliss, ra bliss.
                       The Domestic Bliss has gone to the west coast of the States for two weeks. I'll miss her. But I'll get on with it. More time to meditate. More time in which I could do some writing. But most of all I'll develop the bliss. This evening I was sitting in the lobby for an hour and half and could have sat there a lot longer, but someone came into the flat. It was a great hour and a half.
                        I was thinking that if someone had told me thirty years ago, before I'd sold anything to anyone but had an agent, that I'd be hitting sixty and have no money for foreign holidays, or no money at all really since I live on an overdraft, well, I might not have been too happy with that even if I've had eight plays produced and had written ten books with two published. No that would not have looked so good.
                       If anyone had told me that I would have found my way into accessing huge amounts of bliss, like finding a vast cache of the best sensations you could ever imagine within myself, well, I would have thought that was completely wonderful and unbelievable. But there it is.
                       Is it a draw then, Hotboy? Only a flatheid would think that, Jack!!!

Posted whilst Pissed!

Thursday 23:41 p.m.


I always inspired by you, your views and way of thinking, again, thanks for this nice post.

- Joe 

Well, Joe, it was nice to hear from you, but you arrived in my yahoo email thingy and when I clickied the link to the blog post you left this comment on, there was no comment. A ghost in the machine? How did you get there?


I think if you are inspired by moi, and my ways of thinking, you are really a completely funged up, stupid basturn! But, since you managed to to get to my email address without leaving a trace on the blog you were supposed to leave a comment on, well, you might be one of the spam robots on the Five Point Plan to Get Out of Your Face on Air. And I did apppreciate the "Joe"! Also, I think by the little mistake in the English that you might be Indian. I certainly hope you are! The Great Vajrayana, the Juju of Jujus, comes from India. I want to go on holiday to India as soon as I have any money. Apart from the lepers, and the starving children, and all that, India is cool!
                      Of course, you may be Albert. If you are Albert, I hope you die of something horrible and not slowly either. Albert, you should not be funging around with this super clickiness just to show us all how smart you are because you do not meditate and are, therefore, never going to be happy. And it is not smart. It's part of the disease you have from being brought up among the evil, evil bourgeois with all the spankings and debasements, the def dight, def dight of the marching up and down, and that was not my fault, so why take it out on me, just a simple joe, a mere orphan from the underclass who was lucky enough to get an education when it was free, when we, the proletariat, just that one time, got something back?
                       I had to interrupt my meditations on the wonderful Thursday to go and watch documentaries about poverty at the Film House. I did this because one of them was done by the Domestic Bliss's very talented brother. His film was about Oxgangs and Granton, and I really wanted, after watching it, to join the Provisional IRA, the Baader-Meinhoff Gang, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Everyone, and all of that.  
Instead I had to wait and not do the bliss, and wait, and wait among the flatheids who were talking about their purchasing power as if the poor basturns in the documentaries .... some of them are Christians. Christ sent all the rich basturns to hell. Thank God for that!!
                    It's okay if you are from the evil bourgeois, toffy nosed, privately educated morons and then you watch films about poor people. Poor people are just another species to you. You don't know. You've never seen them. You've just had to keep marching up and down, def dight, def dight, and waited for the trust funds to filter down. Well, you are all going to hell! You fung deserve it as well! Hell is too good for you. You should have hot hells, and cold hells, and occasional hells. 
                    There is something about the middle classes. I've always in my heart despised them. I have always felt superior to them. I have always hated them. They are the problem. Stupid basturns!

Back to the Bliss!

Thursday 1:20 p.m.
                            The last couple of weeks have been a wee bit difficult, but I'm well out of the woods now. Been quite a learning curve in some ways.
                             Emotions are basturns and sometimes outwith your control, or so it seems. My assumption is that if you spent six years in a cave they might be under your control, at least a whole lot more, but I'm not going to be able to do that, so I'm stuck with them. Unexpectedly feeling bereaved is not very nice.
                             Having said that, whilst doing some juju for my dead friend today, I was getting a lot of smiley reactions. It seemed to be from him or with him, but I know it was all about moi. Tony didn't die at home. He died in hospital and passed away with his daughter holding his hand. And he had some time, it seems, to consider his life and death. I'd settle for that. Most human lives don't last as long as fifty eight years, so all and all, it wasn't the worst way to go by any manner of means.

The butterfly effect is a metaphor that encapsulates the concept of sensitive dependence on initial conditions in chaos theory; namely that small differences in the initial condition of a dynamical system may produce large variations in the long term behavior of the system.


                            I'm interested in the butterfly effect as it might apply to what you're thinking and how you are thinking it. Part of the problem over the last couple of weeks has been the way I've been thinking about my jobbie and digging up past resentments and angers about it. 
                            I'm sure that almost any thought was an emotion attached to it is a lie. The classic, "I hate the basturn" is not telling you any more of the truth than "I love the basturn", although the latter is probably pleasanter.
                            Impurities in your system have a large final effect on what you're thinking, or can have. Nicotine withdrawal is a stand out in this regard. Even with a little bit of nicotine withdrawal, an almost imperceptible amount, your final thoughts will be much angrier than they would have been. This is why purification is so important and why I cannot just sit back and allow myself to be the kind of joe who drinks and smokes and takes drugs and whatnot. Eating soapbar is the best I could ever manage. 
                            Just as well you've given up the drink and drugs years ago, eh, Hotboy? Just as well, Jack!!
                            The Great Yajrayana, the Juju of Jujus, is very aspirational. And just because you are almost always bound to fail doesn't not mean that you shouldn't try to succeed. You will end up in a better situation if you try, or you should do if you try hard enough. It's the same thing that attracted me to writing.
                            The first meditation of the day lasted nearly two hours and showed great promise. This is my wonderful Thursday and it's going to be taken away from me again. I have to do something this afternoon and the Domestic Bliss will be getting ready to spend two weeks in the States tonight. She leaves the house tomorrow morning at 4 a.m. The evening before she departs is always a nightmare of agitation. Still, I've got an hour and a half before the flatheids intrude and disrupt the wonderfulness of it all. Dearie me! 
                            I've just answered the phone. I've got no time left at all. Basturns!!

Cycling to the Cramond Inn!

Wednesday 9:15 p.m.
                                 The tree photies were taken yesteday when it was nice out, and sunny on the way home from the jobbie. The others were taken on the way to and from Cramond.
                                  I thought I'd better get on my bike to obviate any anxieties about doing the granny run through Lanarkshire on Friday, what with not being on the bike since a week past last Friday. Anxieties, anxieties ... you've got to watch out for anxieties. They're just anxieties.
                                  Before that we had a meeting at the jobbie because I'm bone lazy and don't do anything there if I can help it. Well, they probably think I must be doing something, but would never suspect that I'm sitting there for ages and ages sometimes with my eyeballs rolled up to the top of me head doing the bliss, as you do. But the meeting was very good and I might try to do something now, but it's difficult to get into that when one of the things you believe in, apart from not believing in things, is that doing things is pretty futile, given that you don't really know what the things are that you are doing.
                                   My game is concentrated inactivity, Jack. You should get the sack, Hotboy. If only ...
                                   The northern Edinburgh cycle paths are a strange oasis of silence and peace in the middle of the beautiful, wonderful city. Eerie and a bit weird with strange folk drifting along them. They must have been railway lines at some time.
                                    Being on my own, I got lost several times, but managed to get down to Cramond. I really like being in Cramond because the Romans were there once. Odd to think of guys from Africa and Germany being there so long ago; drinking wine, eating grapes, lounging about in the public baths.
                                     I stopped off at the Cramond Inn. It has been there since the beginning of the 17th century. I had a pint of Alpine Lager, weighing in at 4.5% and costing £2:08 a pint. What?!!! A beer down the road costs well over £3. So I had another one and £2:08 is all the charge for a beer!!
                                     Although I swore off all alcoholic beveridges many years ago now, I think I'd like to organise a visit there with Brian Wilson now that his new liver has settled down.
                                      I'm going to start having a wonderful time again!! My usual wonderful time!! I really am! I really am, Jack! I really am!

Me and Tony in Lourdes

Monday
             You might not believe this, but Lourdes is a great place to go on holiday, especially if you're a catholic kid. I went when I was fifteen with the school and when I was seventeen with folk from St Coumbus parish down Viewpark. Tony was dead keen. I had to be convinced, but Tony told me the priest who was taking the trip was a great guy and there wouldn't be any hassles from him. Tony also pointed out that it looked like there would be three times as many girls as boys.So I went. The party was mostly teenagers and a few young adults, and a Virgin Mary crew of grown up women around the priest.
              After three days on a bus, we arrived at the hotel in Lourdes and by ten o clock that night the corridors were full of drunk pilgrims, girls staggering about the place having discovered how cheap the brandy carry-outs were. One guy had drank six pints of cold lager, but he hadn't eaten for three days since they tried to feed him all this froggy food when all he could eat was fish suppers. He was having some kind of convulsions and folk were holding him down on the bed. Apparently, this can happen if you have six pints of cold lager on a completely empty stomach, so don't try that one at home, kids.
              Lourdes is very romantic. Tony and I got off with two girls from Kilwinning and went a walk down by the Grotto. There's a huge basillica on top of the rock the cave is in and there's a river and a nice promenade place down by the side of the basillica on the way to the Grotto where the Virgin Mary was supposed to have appeared. We went down there with these girls. I was sitting for ages on a park bench rather close to where the Virgin Mary appeared snogging this girl. Romantic and ironic at the same time. What more can you ask for?
                The next day we were trying to get them into the hotel and met the Virgin Mary crew of responible adults in the lift. An awkward moment. But they didn't say anything. I'm rolling my eyes at Tony across the total silence.I think Tony and I were sharing a room, but we got the loan of someone else's room and went our separate ways for the ten minutes it took for the girl I was with to think that my intentions might not be completely honourable though, in fact, they were. Almost anyway.
               The next day the girls showed up as our bus was going away to see us off. Our bus is parked and then there's a space of maybe fifteen yards till the next bus. By the time I was walking passed that bus on the way out of sight, round the back of it, Tony and his girl were trying to suck each others teeth out. This was in full view of our bus.
                After I finished snogging the girl round the back of the bus, I said cheerio and started back to our bus. Tony and the girl were still snogging. Every eye was on me or them, mostly them, as I went back to the bus. Then I'm sitting on the bus watching this snogging. Someone should have thrown a pail of water over them. The bus driver is waiting for Tony. We all were. Finally, he gets on the bus.
               It wasn't Lloret de Mar we went to next. It was Fuenterrabia. The priest called a meeting and wanted everyone to attend. For some reason, Tony managed not to be there. How convenient! I can't remember what his excuse was. The priest wasn't a happy bunny. So he's belling everyone off about getting drunk and whatnot, but what he's really annoyed about is what Tony and I were trying to get up to with these girls. He's threatening that any future shennanigans like that would result in some people being put on the next flight home, and I'm sitting there black affronted and wondering where the hell Tony is! It wisny me! Honest! I was round the back of the bus!!
                We went to confession in Lourdes. Usually, the priest would tell you to say five Our Fathers and five Hail Marys as a penance, but I suppose since it was supposed to be a pilgrimage, he gave me and Tony both five full rosaries. This is an enormous amount of Hail Marys!! Like, fifteen decades or something like that. And he told me not to worry about it before he laid the penance on me. Told us both we'd be okay once we got married. Aye right!

Getting Better!

Saturday 11:32 p.m.
                              We went on holiday to Yugoslavia when the Domestic Bliss was five or six months pregnant. Great place. Loved the restaurants since they were cooperatives and the waiters weren't doing the Uriah Heep. This morning I was listening to this joe on Radio Four, which is a wonderful manifestation, saying how he killed this woman who was lying beside her dead husband, shot in both legs and partly disembowelled in a cottage where he'd found her screaming, because she was asking him to kill her, and the joe knew the genocidal basturns were going to be there pretty soon and would torture her, and kill her in a few minutes.
                             So I haven't been too chuffed over the last couple of days, but it hasn't been all that bad really. Like feeling poor if you're really a millionaire.
                             I've been reading Flight to Arras by Antoine de Sainte Exupery.... a Froggie joe. It is an anti-war novel about a joe who had to fly a pointless mission over France as it was collapsing under the invasion of the Alberts. It was published in 1942. I hope Google has got it somewhere because such a beauty is not going to be published for the supermarkets right now.
                              When things go awry, I want to get into writing again and reading again, and that kind of thing because I can't settle to do the juju the way  I can otherwise, when I'm settled into the juju.
                               Well, right now the bliss and such like has never been better though it is being crowded out by a lot of other stuff. Back in samsara, Jack! I fung hate it, but I'm going to start doing it. Bye, bye, Mister NiceGuy. Here comes Johnnie!!

Slings and arrows!

Friday 10:00 p.m.
                           You can meditate as much as you like, and whilst meditating you may encounter ra bliss and you may try as hard as you can to emanate as a deity, or Donald Duck, but there is no stability. There is no emotional stability.
                            I assume if I was a buddha and a friend of mine died .... are all emotions afflictive? ... after sitting in the cave for six years, do you still cry? Do you know such wonderful "emptiness" in your life that when your old friend dies you know, just know that this joe was merely a figment of your imagining, a process of conjoining forces which arose, abided and declined. Well, if you can do that, you're a better man than I am, Gunga Din.
                           It's a choke leash. You run ahead and think everything is fine, and you get choked back. I must say that some folk are much better at folk they know dying than me. Some folk just seem to not be bothered so much. I wish I was one of these joes or josephines. One of my dead friends was like that. He said he just kind of shook his head.
                          Of course, I am a sensitive joe. You throw bricks at me and I hurt. You die on me and I will grieve. I really wish I didn't.
                           This is stuff you do not control. These are events, experience. These things occur and tell you what to think and do and feel. I hate that.
                           My old friend dying and the jobbie going belly up has made me realise that I was born to write. You have some control there. You have all the control there.
                           I have arrived at a stage in the meditations which is a very good stage to arrive at. I do not think I can go much further. Experience can just blow me away. I am nothing in the face of it. So I think I should keep the writing in mind. I could write stuff if I hadn't given Friday away. I have to get something back. I can probably get it back by ... I'll just try to get it back. I need time for moi! I don't care what I write. I think I'll just have to keep doing that. When I'm not writing, and I've been trying to give it up for years, I feel like the bilge. You just slop around. Nothing interesting occurs. It's like being a slob.
                           The Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church  decided maybe around the third century  or so that you weren't allowed to castrate yourself to avoid the sins of the flesh. I think they might have been right. Unfortunately, even although I seem to be a vegan, I am still human. This is a fung bummer!

Yesterday's Photies

Friday 3:20 p.m.
                         I went to the Botties yesterday and the allotment, just for a wander. Saw the Africans on the way to the crematorium.

Free Friday!

Friday 9:50 a.m.
                        I cancelled the cycling through Lanarkshire today. I'm glad now, the weather here is so bleak and overcast. It's been a really crap week so things must be on the up and up!

Mixed metaphors!

Thursday 10:20 p.m.
                              
                                I remember getting an awful lot of bliss before I took refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha.
                               The great buddha, Lama Yeshe Losal, is my guru. Here's what goes on.
                               So somewhat reluctantly, with some misgivings about leaving my catholic roots although I hadn't practised catholicism for a long time, I took refuge on January 3rd, 2003.
                               It was one of the years I gave up drinking. Purification and accumulation.
                               I took a couple of deep breaths while waiting for the Domestic Bliss to get on with her celebration of her fiftieth birthday, and an amazing thing occurred with the heat freaking me out as it sprang from the navel chakra up into my lungs. Filigree, leaf veins filled in the lungs, but there was some movement before that which just arose. So it arises and then goes WOOF out into this what seems like a lung system of veins.
                              This has never happened again. Recently, I was wondering if this was an exhibition of the forces you cannot control which the lama warned me of in July. But it wasn't. It think now it was a cleansing.
                              Around then, I got the connection between the bliss and the breathing. This is the most wonderful thing. It doesn't work all the time, but you can go there.
                              So, you have the outbreath and the movement of the something in the sheath that you think you have developed. It's happening in the sheath.
                               I think now that the sheath and the central channel of The Great Yajrayana  are the same thing. The sheath is the same size as your body except a wee bit bigger. Tumultuous wonderful bliss and all  go blasting through this.
                             These are winds. These are the winds entering the central channel. I've been trying to visualise this central channel as being a straw thick and going up by my spine, but that is not the way it has been manifesting. What is happening is that you are in the central channel. You are the central channel.
                              And after a while the winds enter the central channel and they abide before stabilising.
                               Are they stabilising, Jack?
                               I think they are, Hotboy?
                               And what does this mean?
                                This means that ... it's kind of starting to stop. It's so white and bright and wonderful. But it's not changing so much. You might want to do all of this and that, and being busy with you're emanating as a deity and whatnot, but when it starts to stop, you have the bliss. You don't have so much happening in the sheath or the channel. You have the bliss.
                                You also have your friends dying. And your jobbie being crap. And maybe you have the dying of something ... like starvation. Anything.
                                 There is no discernible beginning or ending to this samsara. I would like to have less contact with it. If you've got food and beer and drugs, I can live in your hut and become a living saint. I could meditate for you. I could become good.Little by little.