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.