Going away again!

Wednesday 12:40 p.m.
                                   It's autumn tomorrow. At the start of May I had no idea I'd be retired now. Once that occurred, I thought I could easily have the best summer since 1988. Freedom and money to spend; easy hours up at the hut; afternoons under trees in the Botanics; bliss, bliss, bliss. Well, that never happened.
                                   The Monday and Tuesday just gone put me back on track and were possible because I spent Friday night in Edinburgh. Three nights in Spookyville just chokes me somehow. There's a time pressure on everything I have to do after that. But  by yesterday afternoon everything was just excellent!
                                   Almost no flatheids in the first two days of the week! I spoke to the Domestic Bliss for  about half an hour on either day since she was going out to the festival. Hurrah! The bliss has been more than ever before and I've managed to make the allotment look respectable, get a change of dentist and got an appointment to get my bike fixed.
                                   Right now the only thing hanging over my head is the editing of the Cyclists book. Sitting at the kitchen table in Newmains .... perfect place to do some editing, but there isn't a computer connection there. Bugger!
                                  It looks as if I'll be three nights in Newmains again this week, which I am not entirely happy with considering that the mother in law has blood relatives little more than an hour's drive away, but I'll go and get on with it in an hour or so.
                                  I've stopped smoking today again. No pizza left. Hmmm? If it wasn't for the fabuloso bliss, Jack .... if it wasn't for the bliss!!!

Monday Evening

Monday 10:40 p.m.

                               I went up to the allotment this afternoon and wrestled huge clumps of grass out from among the tatties. And I took some photies. Other than that just a bit of prostrating and reading the paper, and investigating the bliss. Lovely day.

Wonderful Monday!

Monday 11:00 a.m.
                             Monday is now my favourite day of the week! It amazes me still that I'll never again have to go to work.. I just love that! And I'm still doing tons of physical jerks and I'm not even sick. Hurrah!
                             My festival consisted of a visit the see the Ladyboys of Bangkok and an event in memory of Paul Reekie, which was up at the Book Festival, last night. I ended up having to go on my own, and as usual hardly spoke to anybody, but it was nice to be there somehow.
                             With the wonderful way these meditations are going now, how can I lose? What a great day I'm going to have! I was standing watching the band last night and could feel this "stuff" filling out the top half of my body and a big smile was on my face. This is a wonderful life! I know it's hell for some people, but not for me. Not today. Here comes the bliss!! Here comes the heat!!
                           

Back Home!

Friday 3:55 p.m.
                         The bliss took the jump it did over the last couple of weeks despite the fact that I'm still drinking some (not a lot!) and smoking (tons!). This makes it feel a little undeserved. The pollutions hold back the bliss and lead to poor thought patterns and unfortunate thoughts arising. So anything polluting your mind is a definite no no. But it still happened anyway, whatever it is. Anybody can do the bliss, even me.
                         As far as living for a long time is concerned ... I'm less in favour of that than ever. Being a flatheid and being old is a kind of hell. Birth, old age, and death ... grief, sorrow, lamentations ... disillusionment, disappointment and despair ... suffering in this life.
                         Anyway, I'm not into stopping drinking and smoking so I can spend more time on the geriatric wards. No way. On the other hand, I remember the nonagenarian jazz player saying if he'd known he was going to live so long, he'd have taken better care of himself.
                         It's been chaos out there, Jack! I've done less meditating in the last couple of weeks than ... classic today. Ten minutes into the meditation and a fire alarm went off. Been mad like that, but the bliss when I do meditate is off the scale. Bowled over by the bliss. Reeling with the bliss. I can't work out if this is the start of the unleashing of the forces I will be unable to control because I'm not getting enough time to investigate them!
                         Anyway if you read this blog and don't meditate, you have chosen to live the life of a monkey and die like a dog, so good luck with that!
                       

Back to Spookyville!

Wednesday 11:40 a.m.
                                   I've got a secret recording device now. It's got enough space on it to hold recordings lasting thirteen days. I've already secretly recorded some people. I recorded an hour of conversation between myself, the auld maw, Auntie Kathy and my brother Silvest, row of forty medals on his chest, big chest, on my Friday visit. It was better than Brendan Behan, so it was. I listened to it back in Newmains and was falling over laughing at some of it. At sixty I was the youngest person in the room by a mile.
                                   I'm just about to go back to Newmains again. When you want life outside to persist with metronome regularity so you can get into the bliss, movement is all there is. Disruption. Have succumbed to sometimes feeling pressed for time. Worked like hell on the weeds yesterday. Oh, well, all that's gone now. Let's hope nothing happens in Newmains.

The day and the bliss!

Monday 11:35 p.m.
                              My eyes were closed during large parts of the Ladyboys of Bangkok show. So I'm doing a wee bit of breathing and ...
                               Were these the uncontrollable forces being unleashed, Hotboy? Bloody hope so, Jack!
                               So sometimes it's a wee bit hard just to go along with the frolickings, and the wanderings about in the Festival City when what you really want to do is just sit down and do the bliss. By Friday evening something wonderfully full on was happening. You just want to sit like a big tumchie, close your eyes and wallow in the bliss.
                               I was going to do the allotment today and one or two other things maybe, but I didn't get out of my kip till ten and the day is practically finished by that time, so I decided just to stay in and re-establish my by now broken connection to the juju feastings on the bliss, and that's what I have done today. Nothing. Read the wee version of the Independent. Smoked. Peace in our time.
                               After the dose of whatever it was at the Samye Ling, the bliss and heat stuff is way way on from what and where it was. And everything else is chaos. All my routines are torn asunder. Flailing around with the flatheids and the turmoil, the turmoil, but then you get a wee chance to dip back into the bliss ... and god alone knows what's going on there!

Some recent photies!

Monday 10;35 p.m.
                              The first one was with Poisonous last Monday. The rest were from the Ladyboys of Bangkok on Saturday night and from a walk we took yesterday. The painting is from a John Byrne exhibition.

Moving on again!

Wednesday 11:25 a.m.
                                   Home from the Samye Ling on Saturday afternoon. Exhausted as usual. Folk that night came to dinner. Next day got a chance to survey the weed strewn wreck that was going to be my lovely allotment this summer. Weeded and harvested all the onions. Had to attend to the Domestic Bliss all evening with talking and walking, etc. And drinking. Then I had to see the kiddo on Monday afternoon and have vitriol poured in my ear by Poisonous on Monday night. On Tuesday I had to see the bank folk, the pizzaman and the consiglieri. Today I have to travel to Newmains. Chop, chop. Bang, bang.
                                    In between times I have been doing a wee bit of meditating!! You really have to work hard to the keep the flatheid contacts down to the minimum when half the time you're not here. And what could have been pleasures, like the allotment, become just another hassle.But the meditations have been wonderful.
                                    For someone who wants things to stay the same so he can get on with practising his juju, these are slightly trying circumstances.
                                    But we will prevail, Jack! Forward! Forward! All my plans are simple!

In the War Against the Machines Part 9.

Monday 7:10 p.m.
                            The mother in law bought me a machine for recording voices. The Domestic Bliss bought me a machine called a Netbook so I can go to Newmains and harass folk who don't know about my wonderful writings on Kindle. Brian Wilson said we should have a netbook and then when she went to buy it, he said that nobody buys them anymore.
                             Hmmm? I might unwrap the device for recording voices and see if there is an instruction manual in there. From the box it appears that the recording device can sing in Urdu and perform sex acts you've never even heard of, but I suspect that this is the phonus balonus, and all it will ever do is go beep beep.
                              Started the day by visiting the gorgeous African girl in the bank. I want to open ... and I made her laugh. I should go to Africa before I get too old. It occurred to me this morning when I wakened up that the schools might be starting up today, and how happy that made me feel! Not with me they aren't! I so just love being a retired joe! Also, the beautiful African girls all left school last year, so if I had gone back they would not have been there anyway. Vimbai. Ongani. Wezi.
                              Instead I went out to do the Festival with the kiddo. This is the first time I've been out with the kiddo and had any money ever since she was born. But I couldn't spend it on her. The show we might have gone to wasn't on today because it is a Monday (what?). So we sat in the Traverse Bar and there was no one else there and I told her things about her family she didn't know about, like how one of them threatened to kill me, and how the rest of them were evil bourgeois basturns, etc.
                              So to hell with the Festival. I was going to stay in this evening, but I got a call from The Poisonous, and he's about to be swamped by thirteen year old girls, friends of his kiddo, and wants to go out drinking. There was a time when the drinking was peripheral because we knew people and could take some decent drugs. Oh well. Once more into the breach, dear friends!
                             

Samye Ling Photies!

Some cats!

Friday 11:11 p.m.

                          So the cat walks up and down the railway station platform, and sometimes makes noises like cats do. Moiawow. Lockerbie station has always been weird ever since the falling from the sky of the human beings. I have to pass through it to go to the Samye Ling and I have to go through it on the way back, but no one has ever got over the sign that says Lockerbie. The whole brand is funged.

                          Cats need folk to do yoga. If you do a wee bit of yoga, you can sit everywhere in a half lotus like moi. I eat breakfast in a half lotus. That's the way I tend to sit. It's the second best way to sit, so I get to Lockerbie train station today about half ten and have to wait for about an hour and a half, and the cat is patrolling up and down the platform making lonesome cat noises, like meowia, meowia, and such like. It is completely white. I have never seen a completely white cat apart from in a James Bond movie.

                         I haven't got anything to feed the cat. I think it's making these noises because it needs something to eat, but I haven't got anything, and I'm the only joe there, and the cat is making noises and patrolling up and down. Virgin trains go passed and the air reverbrates, a bit shuddering, but the cat does not seem to mind.

                         I'm reading  the sports pages of the Saturday Scotsman about the Rangers transfer policy and such like ephemera as I'm trying to get over the four days of trying to calm, and the cat walks up and down in front of me.

                        Then the cat comes and sits in the middle of my half lotus. You can't move. The cat is warm and somehow loving, and also very white. I tried not to notice like the cat was trying not to notice, but the cat was wonderfully warm, and we needed some warmth since these days in Scotland it is not warm enough.

                        The station guy said I had a friend. He said it had been coming to the station for the last three weeks. Sometimes it went for a walk up the Main Street. Sometimes it jumped the tracks and went over to the other side to consort with the people over there. When he said this, the track and the gulf seemed enormous.

                       He said this to me as the cat was sitting on my lap. I'm easy because I am sitting in the half lotus, which is the second best position, and a good position for the imperialism of cats.

Last Samye Ling Post!

Thursday 8:38 p.m.
                             I was still quite crabbit this morning and obsessing about the same stupid ideas, which I know are nonsense, but the situation turned round in the course of the morning.
                             The Guru Rinpoche Drupcho finished this morning. I do not know what drupcho is. There were about one hundred and fifty punters in the temple and most of them were reading the chants and whatnot, but I never do that and just sit there with my eyes closed for most of the time. Sometimes nuns give you things to eat, like biscuits, or pour a thimbleful of pink stuff into your palm.
                            In the two and a half hours of this in the morning everything gradually got better and better, and the nicotine edge to the thoughts dissipated, and new thoughts started to emerge. Towards the end, Dr Akong came round with the joe who I think will be the future abbot, and they handed out stuff, then Dr Akong came down the rows and blessed everyone individually.
                            It's not just the joe giving the blessing that counts. You've got to try to get your head right to take it properly.
                            I'm pretty sure Dr Akong is some kind of saint, and I'm pretty certain his brother is. Lama Yeshe wasn't attending the drupcho this year and that's a pity because the place always feels better to me when he's here. But he came in flanked by Teresa right at the end and sat up the back. Sometimes it just seems to beam out of the guy. I certainly don't go out of my way to crawl up his arse, but some cats got it and some cats aint. I doubt if I'll ever meet anyone quite as advanced in the juju as him. I almost spontaneously beamed with delight when I saw him come through the temple door. I think he might have a fan!
                            Dr Akong gave a wee talk at the end and I think he mentioned something about setting up retreats in a couple of years of three months or five months duration. I'd love to do one of them. I could get away with that. Don't see how I could get to do three or four years right now even if I wanted to. I think he also said they'd put about a hundred folk through the three or four year retreats. That's an amazing effect to have on the world.
                           I just feel so satisfied and happy to be here right now. It's always the same after three days. God alone knows how good you might feel once you'd been in retreat for a month or so.
                           The meditation I had just before I came out to the cafe was, well, I keep saying it, but it was better than ever. Effortless arisings of bliss with periferal heat just awaiting. I think at some point you might not be able to have more than cotton sheet over you at night due to the heat .... can't wait. Bring it on!!
                            I think I might be seeing Froggy McDuck tomorrow with his family, which would be great. Froggy is one of my favourite people and there won't be anything to smoke since I finished mine before coming here. Hurrah! No doubt we'll go to the pub and get steaming, which will be great. Anyway, I'm going to try and get the bus outside the gate at the back of ten tomorrow, so I don't think I'll be back here.
                            I might sit up tonight in the room and get into a wee bit of vase breathing, but I might just wallow in the bliss. I've given up trying.
                           
                           

Half Way Thoughts!

Thursday 3:32 p.m.
                              I smoked about two ounces of the cannybliss in under three weeks, and was smoking the night before I came here. So I came here with the worse nicotine problem I've had in ages and ages.
                              A lot of thoughts arise which are condemnatory or derogatory or just plain wrong. Of course, when the meditations have been working well, the bliss has been better than ever. Well, better than when it's being screwed up with the tobacco. It does dim the bliss.
                              After four days and nights wrestling with the Nicotine Dragon, it should be mostly subdued by the time I get back to Edinburgh. Almost half the population doesn't smoke now, but the great majority of the folk I socialise with smoke. Socialising is a problem.
                              Sometimes you wonder why you bother!
                               I've been in the habit of trying to do difficult things or things which were just a bit beyond where I could go. Meditation definitely comes into this category. To be really successful at this malarkey, I think you have to be able to commit to spending long periods in solitude. People who do this say that eventually they grow to love the solitude, but even if I could grow to love solitude, there's bugger all chance of me getting any, except in little doses like just now. I'm surrounded by flatheids. My daughter is a flatheid, my partner is a flatheid, and there's no one I know who meditates at all, apart from Brian Wilson who did five minutes once.
                               So I may get lots of bliss and whatnot, but gaining the correct view of reality ... well, I seriously doubt that this is going to happen to me during whatever life I've got left. So there's virtually bugger all chance of me becoming enlightened, not like Milarepa and a million other lucky basturns!
                               It's alright this if you believe in rebirth. Right now I don't believe in rebirth and I don't not believe in rebirth. I'm frankly much more interested in this life than anybody else's in the future or past.
                                This might present a slight problem if you want to meditate a lot, but realise in the end that you will probably not be completely successful. Is it worthwhile to cut yourself off from people and do the juju for ....
                                 Of course, the more meditating I do, the happier I get!
                                  But this is a problem. It's not a problem if you believe in rebirth. You can meditate in the understanding that it, along with other things, will increase you chances of a good next life. Hmmm? Bugger that!
                                  I was hoping this was going to be the best summer since 1988. But it hasn't been. I thought I could do what I wanted to do, but I can't. If I could do what I wanted to do ....
                                  Apart from all the Newmains business, the summertime is like Christmas in that the flatheids come loose from their moorings and collide with you whether you'd prefer that or not. When I go home, there will be the McDucks, like great sponges of alcohol and nicotine.
                                   It's very difficult to mull over stuff on this retreat because the nicotine withdrawals make everything you think an even bigger lie than usual.
                                   Are you going to tell us you believe in something then, Hotboy? If I do that I can't be the single member and sole representative of the Disbelieving Congregation, can I, Jack? No, Hotboy. Tell me you believe in something and I'll tell you to go fung yourself.
We embrace our ignorance
We don't believe in any things
Especially thoughts.

Back to the gong bashing!! I don't even know what a Drupcho, or a Drupchen is!
                  
                                  
                             

Anagarika Govinda

Wednesday 11:02 a.m.
                                   This is from the Way of the White Clouds. Wonderful book! Most interesting anecdotes about re-birth. It's full of stuff like the following:
                                    'A differenent kind of consciousness would create a different world around us, whatever the existing -or non existing - raw material of the universe might be. ... we cannot change the world other than through our consciousness - which is the world as well as that which transcends it: samsara and nirvana, bondage and liberation.'
                                      Dr Akong was in the big seat today. He's got a different kind of consciousness from mine though you wouldn't know it to look at him. Shame Lama Yeshe isn't here. At a previous drupchen I was sitting feeling a bit agitated and restless when this picture of him appeared (my eyes were closed at the time) and he said: Why can't you just enjoy being here?
                                      One of several weird scenes!!
                                       Back to the gong bashing!!!
12:30 p.m.
                                       The drupchen finished at noon which was a bit of a surprise. I went into the back temple and did a tai chi set. The difference sitting meditating for a couple of hour makes to tai chi has to be experienced to be believed. Now, it's lunch time and I haven't had anything to eat today. Lunch then go to the room for the rioting news on the World at One! What a great time I'm having already! No nicotine problems at all. It's pouring of course! Always a surprise when it aint down here!

Arrived at Samye Ling!

1:20 p.m.
              Just had my lunch and I'm waiting here in the cafe till I can get hold of Germe in the reception at half one. No bother with the nicotine withdrawals (yet!). Well, that was about as long a spell smoking than I've had for a while. Probably pretty constant for over two weeks. Anyway, not having tobacco or drink has never bothered me down here.
              One of these times I'd like to stay at home for a whole week!

Nice Sunday

10:50 p.m.
               This is from the Three Principal Aspects of the Path, an Oral Teaching by Geshe Sonam Rinchen. Translated and edited by Ruth Sonam.
               'Does the self exist? Yes, but not as we perceive it.Why does it appear to exist yet cannot be found when we search for it? Because it is false: it appears to be what it is not and exists in a way that does not accord with how it appears. Yet owing to our confusion and imprints of ignorance we assume that it exists as it appears.'
               Well, there it is. And the same with everything else.
                I've had a wonderful day today, Jack. Stayed in. Smoked, meditated, read. Did my shadow boxing routine. Great slabs of bliss like in a layer cake.
                Tomorrow I've got lots of business to do. And I go to the Samye the next day. Chop, chop. Bang, bang.

Back Home!

Saturday 2:45 p.m.
                            I had a two granny day yesterday. So I'm talking to the auld maw about the other one. The auld maw doesn't think I should be in Newmains for three nights a week. I tell her I'm trying to see the advantages in the arrangement and not the disadvantages. That auld wummin, she says, should be put in a care home. The one down in Uddingston is great, she says. You get your own room with its own toilet. Her pal Mrs Reilly had spent a week there as respite for her son and she said it was brilliant. You get folk to look after you all day and you've got your own toilet. Maybe the mother in law wants to stay in her own house, says I. She should be forced to go into a home, says the auld maw. Just get her telt.
                           I'm getting used to being in Newmains a lot. I'm settling more into the routine, but next week I'm going to the Samye Ling and someone else will fill in for me. I'm feeling pressed for time. I've got a lot of stuff to do up the allotment.
                           The view of Cambusnethan Church is from just outside the mother-in-law's back door.
                            The meditations have been truly fabulous, by the way. Almost as soon as I'm closing my eyes, the bliss is such that I'm hardly doing anything else but residing in the wonderment at the start of sessions. This was what I was hoping to be able to do way back when. Well, it seems to be here now.
                           I'm going to bliss my way through The Death Zone. Perform good deeds and do the juju. What else can you do?

The War Against the Machines Part 7 or 8

Monday 1:15 p.m.
                           One machine I would have liked to have bought today was a tape recorder, the kind you could use to record peoples' voices, like the kind reporters used to have.
                            There was once a time before that when you could get twin tapes, a double reel thing for playing the music on, around 1970. Before that you could buy a tape machine for recording off the Radio Luxembourg, but these were rare and you needed to jam a screwdriver into them to make them work.
                            All I want is something to record the mother in law and I have already despaired before setting out the door. I'm sure there are machines that would do this, but you can also probably use them to phone, or get on the internet, or read ebooks, or tell you which bus you are on, or where you are in relation to the Orion Nebula. And I'm sure they will have a big fat instruction manual to tell you all about these useless things you don't want and you will have to read all the way through until you get to the bit that says this model requires a cable which only comes from the Orion Nebula and that's why you have to know where you are in relation to it.
                          This technological revolution is just a sign that the world is in the hands of the uncoolest geeks and big wee boys!
                           The photies are from the top of the National Museum in Chambers Street. We were there on Saturday to check out the refurbishment.