Ra Book Fight!

Rosemary Canter, who has lots of kidbook practitioners on her PFD list, came up to the mark for the book fight! So I challenged her to put up two books against the two kidsbooks I wrote and she named one by Cathy MacPhail, called Missing, and another one I can't remember right now. I'll get some twelve year olds to read them one after the other and score them in questionnaires.

I found it hard to believe that she actually went for this. What a nice surprise! Anyway, her books haven't a hope in hell. Of course, I'll have to re-write chunks of Light in the Dark before August when the fight is due to happen, but even at that. I should have got her to bet. Beating her books in the questionnaires isn't an offer, or a cheque. But it would give me a big smile.

My meditations over the last couple of days have been fabulous. Really one after the other of exceptional quality. The ones first thing have been a real treat. Blazing in ra bliss soon after sitting up is the only way to start the day! My visits to the Samye Ling recently have kind of raised a platform, and then it gets higher for the next while. The meditations have seemed to improve and keep improving. I expect the charge to decrease. It used to.

Adolf in the Unheard of and McDonald Islands has been unable to blog recently due to having a sore bum. Whether this is due to Brian Wilson rampaging hither and yon around the volcano I do not know. There is a photie of the Sensei here. Having a head like that might be better than having no head at all, but the jury's still out. See him striding towards you with the Bulldog 44 swinging back and forth in his hand. If you go down to the woods today .....

Ra Monday!

About ten o clock at night. I sent a letter to Teresa at the Samye Ling today to say thanks to everybody for making the Samye Ling be there. What else can you say? Here's some money, but I haven't got any. Yet.

I've never made much money. I can see why. It's too much like hard work.

I sent out another twenty emails to agents tonight. That must be a hundred emails so far. You wouldn't think there would be a hundred literary agents. I wonder what they do when they're not deleting their numerous emails. But I also sent one to Rosemary Canter. I asked her to put up two books to fight my two books. She's with PFD and must be a big player in this game. She's got about sixty writers of kidbooks and some really good ones. But I'll get kids to read my books and hers, and the poor woman doesn't stand a chance. I should have asked her to bet. The first one I wrote ... even if it does need a bit of a going over ... (Light in the Dark) beat Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone four to one. Even I didn't believe that.

Gopi Krishna's book has been at times fascinating. Whatever he was, a flatheid he was not. He had a halo.

Ra Normous Brain!

There was a programme on last week about these folk with enormous brain power. The star was a boy who could do fantastic mathematical calculations. When he was describing how to do these sums, he said he saw the answers in his head and just read off the numbers. He forgot little and learned how to speak Icelandic in a week.

Gopi Krishna reckons that geniuses might have had a bit of the old kundalini arousal. At one point he starts writing down poetry. He'd no interest in verse before. Couplets come to him. He sees them and writes them down. First of all, he's doing this in Kashmiri, then English, then in all sorts of other languages that he doesn't know or understand. So he's writing down German couplets when he doesn't know any German. This is just a total mystery of course. What the hell could that mean? Where is the German coming from?

The guy who could see the answers to sums went to see the boy with the really enormous brain. He was the model for the Rain Man. He could read a book using his left eye for the left page and the right eye for the right page. He didn't forget anything. When the guy with the merely enormous brain was leaving him, the Rain Man boy hugged him and said that one day he might be as great as him.

I think the weekend at the Samye Ling last weekend has brought things forward again. The heat seems more accessible. However, I think I might be getting a wee bit sensitive to things. On Wednesday I got really angry about something I knew was trivial. I knew the response was over-egged, but it was the response. Some emotions on Thursday weren't too clever either. You've got to keep your eyes open with this juju. Pretty fundamental stuff we're dealing with here!

This is nearly ten p.m. I went a wee walk up to the allotment. It's only five minutes away. What bliss! Ra bliss! Ra bliss! Everything seemed to be working very well. Had my eyes closed. More bliss and light than heat. Fantastic wonderful feelings. You have epic moments with this juju.

It's not dark yet here in Edinburgh. I was thinking that all summer I could sit in my hut in the evening and have my head filled more and more with ra bliss. What a fabulous prospect! Hotboy.

Ra Gopi Krishna!

Just back from a couple of hours at my allotment. It was too wet to dig. The wrens have all gone.

Gopi Krishna's book has quite inspired me! The connections between what he's going on about and the Tibetan Buddhist stuff is very reassuring. Once he's had this kundalini arousal (and avoided dying), he mentions how wonderful everything starts to look. He's obviously projecting radiant wonderfulness onto what he sees. When this happens at first, he can hardly drag himself away from the varandah he'd been standing at.

This reminded me of something I'd read about deity yoga. At some point something called sacred vision seems to check in. Then you see everyone as a deity, all speech as mantra, etc. When you read about this at first, it's hard to get a handle on it. Gopi seems to have got there without knowing anything about deity yoga. He sees a heavenly environment. Nagarjuna, the philosopher of the middle way, says, I think, that there is no difference between nirvana and samsara. Could this stuff happening to Gopi Krishna be something like what he's talking about?

Gopi starts to have wonderful, lucid dreams. Fabulous dreams to die for. He gets them every night. This just has to be similar to dream yoga, one of the six dharmas of Naropa.

For me, despite some reservations about how some of it is written, this is a really brilliant book. This book might change my life a wee bit. It makes me really keen to do this juju. What is the point of doing anything else?

Ra Thursday Evening!

There was a wren chick in the hut in the allotment today. It had feathers and all that, but not skillful enough to go out yet. Couldn't fly very well. It kept falling off the walls and landing on the floor. Eventually, it got up on top of the old clothes horse thing and sat about four feet away at shoulder height (when sitting). One of its parents (0r one at a time!) came and fed it. When I was going out to dig, I checked the nest which is right above the door frame. Nobody left at home.

There is only about four hours of solid digging time left in the allotment now. I did just a little bit today. Didn't matter. Still knackered.

Reading Gopi Krishna's book "Living with Kundalini" has really been good for giving me confidence in the Tibetans. Gopi's has basically got into kundalini yoga though I don't think that's what he was trying to do. Maybe this is the whole point of yoga ... to get the prana (or kundalini) from the bottom of your spine to the top, or into your brain. When the boy had a kundalini arousal which did just that, although he seemed to have asked tons of people, he couldn't find anyone who had actually lifted their kundalini to the seventh centre. This is, I assume, the crown chakra. So there's all these joes going on about kundalini yoga and he can't find anyone who has actually achieved this. He seems to have asked the whole of India and got nowhere.

He should have tried some wee fat baldy guys in the claret and amber. In Tsongkhapa's Three Inspirations, you're told not to use the crown chakra and don't do the vase breathing until you can clearly visualise the three tubes. Gopi nearly died because he was using the crown chakra and the kundalini went up the wrong tube. The Tibetans are also clear that you shouldn't be doing this juju without the help of a qualified master. Gopi had no one to ask or help him when the shit hit the fan.

There are other correspondences. Gopi says when the kundalini starts to flow correctly through your body, you can see it. Well, he could see it doing stuff to his internal organs. This kundalini seems to get in about your body and change it somehow. This reminded me of something I read about Milarepa and Gampopa, the Tibetans at the beginning of all this a thousand years ago. Milarepa sent him away at one point to let these changes in his body go on.

Skillful means is what the Kagyus say they have. Having got this far with this juju, I have to really take my hat off to them. I think it was thirteen generations after Naropa that he said should pass before anyone wrote about the Six Dharmas and then thirteen generations later who showed up but Tsongkhapa, who did write about them and got rid of the dross that had built up in the interim. And now anyone can read about it and the folk who can help you do it are right here in Scotland. How amazing is that!

Here's a nice thought for us here in chilly Jockoland. The sixteenth Karmapa, the head boy of the Samye Ling sect, told some people, including Dr Akong, one of the Tibetans who set it up, to go to the west. Tibet wasn't so good now for practising dharma and the juju needed to move. It moved to Scotland. The sixteenth Karmapa came to the Samye Ling and left a footprint on a stone. This says we're here. If the rest of this juju is correct (I have no doubts about the kundalini/deity yoga stuff at all now), then buddhist saints should start reincarnating here in Scotland, or hereabouts. Wouldn't that be brilliant!

I'm a couple of weeks off finishing a first draft of a book. I just thought of something that's made it a far better idea. I'm going to be filthy rich now of course. Just have to get an agent.

Ra Thursday Morning!

Lydia Swartz sent me an email today saying she'd had trouble downloading The Buddha and the Big Bad Wolf. I think the site only lets you download so much then packs in. It's free. Anyway, she found a way round this by typing the file name into the links that did work. This shows vast technical know how and is way out of my league. Anyone having trouble downloading anything should just email me and I'll email them stuff.

I got a parcel from PFD today telling me to fung off. Very nice though. The reader of the slush pile had an illegible name (lawyers do that as well!), but said the writing had "an appealing energy". Not appealing enough for anyone there to want to represent it of course. Still, I'd sent two packages and they'd put them together and sent them back, so that's quite impressive. I wanted them to bin them since I don't like getting rejections through the post first thing, so I hadn't sent them postage. Anyway, I can't complain about PFD. You send it. They seem to read it (not the agents of course!). Then they send it back. My only chance of getting something from PFD is if Pat Kavanagh agrees to marry me.

I've gotten no response at all from the twenty emails I sent out yesterday.

I read the seven or so chapters I've already written of the book I'm working on just now and at a first draft stage I'm really quite happy. Well before it's finished it should have been rejected by every agent in Britain. In the four months I've been hustling this project to agents, I don't think I've gotten any of them to read it yet. When I'm writing the book after this one, I think I'll go about getting it rejected by all the agents and all the publishers in Britain before I start!!

It's only half eleven in the morning. I've got all day to meditate on this!

Ra Back Home!

I got an email today from a writer called Alan Emmins who was asking me about promoting his book. It's called Mop Men. I reckon he must have got to me through putting Simon Trewin of PFD into Google. Simon Trewin is his agent. I sent a package with three chapters to PFD in February and I've heard zilch since. Simon Trewin might have sent me a nice email though. Pat Kavanagh of PFD hasn't replied to my proposal of marraige. I'm not sure if this is because I can't spell marriage, but I suspect more than this may be involved. Actually, the idea of anyone asking my advice about books, promoting them or otherwise, is hilarious.

I feel as if it's a million years since I was at the Samye Ling. Sensei had got a Bulldog 44. This sounds like a big gun. If they were legal here, I could get one and shoot some people. Then I could get put in jail for life. For a long time I've thought the only way I'd ever get enlightened was to spend some time in solitary confinement. Tilopa, the grandaddy of the 6 dharmas of Naropa, spent twelve years chained to a wall. With a Bulldog 44 I could get some people to do that for me.

Adolf is blogging about losing his virginity in the early days of the Third Reich. He has posted a photie of his poor partner though where she's put the white stick I wouldn't really like to conjecture.

I sent off another twenty emails to folk on the site Everyone Who is Anyone. Eight of them came back as duff links. Despite that, if I do manage to get an agent using that site, I will have to send the boy who set up the site a few bob. I must have sent emails to about sixty agents on the site by this time. So far I have had responses from Ben Mason, Euan Thorneycroft, and maybe Robin Jones, or Wade. Also, Will Francis. I think I sent them all email attachments of the first three chapters of my new novel and not a cheep out of any of them!! I think in a couple of weeks I should have got nothing from everyone on the site, which should be every agent in Britain. After that, I'll start on publishers and ask them if they ever publish books without agents contacting them. Of course, they'll lie. Getting a kidsbook published without an agent seems to be impossible. Maybe adult books are different. I'd like to find out before I finish the book. If I'm not going to get it published, that's okay. I'll get one of them big guns and smuggle it in.

Ra Going Away!

My bags are packed. I'm ready to go. I've had two spectacular meditations since the last blog. Last night in the temple and this morning. I have millions of people to thank for this, of course. Not just the Kagyu masters and a thousand odd years of lineage holders, but the guys who built the temple, work in the kitchens, the bus driver who brought me here. In a way, I'm just the lucky bugger who got ra bliss at the end.

Sometimes things seem totally appropriate in their time. Last night in the tent I was reading Gopi's book by candlelight (hello, Sensei! The light isn't too bad if you get your face right up to the page!). I got to the bit where he describes the total nightmare he got into after his kundalini arousal. There are three "tubes" (which aren't there!) and his kundalini went up the right one which is described as red. Anybody who wants to try doing this juju without any help and just from the books should read this book!! You don't need a guru for most things, but after I had the experience (not quite in Gopi's league!) last night in the temple, I was very pleased that I took empowerments and that the great Kagyu masters are now among us in Scotland. It's just very reassuring that they're there.

I spoke the gatekeeper of Nirvana a couple of minutes ago as I was leaving. I has hit my site!! I told him about it the last time I was leaving.

A sweet moment: a nun I don't know spoke to me as I was coming there (three chats in three days! What a blabbermouth!) She said she liked my tai chi. Between showers, before the stupa. My tai chi isn't really very good. I can pose with the best of them!

I'll have to remember that I owe everything to the common man and confine my flatheid comments to my deep dear friends who should know better. Allah Akbar! Haste ye back, Hotboy!

Ra Heat Arises!

Just after lunch here at the Samye Ling, possibly the best place on earth! I should be out on the island in front of the stupa, having a wee kip on the bench there, but I'm here instead. This might be the last blog from here today since there's a performance from Nepalese ex-street kids in the dining room at 3p.m. This will be organised by Rokpa, Dr Akong's charity. You should give them some money of you've got any.

I came here to blog about ra heat! Ra bliss! Just before lunch I had a red letter meditation. The first time I raised inner heat ... I don't know if I made anything arise. I should say it arose. Maybe I helped it. But the first time this happened with on April 6th, 2003, about one o clock on a Sunday afternoon. Completely gobsmacking experience. Right after that, I had to go to a fiftieth birthday party and couldn't tell anyone about it. Well, you can say the words. You cannot convey the meaning since all my deep dear friends are flatheids, of course.

The meditation before lunch was in the same league as the first one, but obviously I don't feel quite so blown away since it's happened to me before. But it was awesome. My eyes were closed and I was concentrating on my navel chakra when I noticed the temple was empty. So I went for the vase breathing then. Lama Yeshe says the fire element is more pronounced in the morning (despite what I say about not being able to hold the breath for long then, or maybe because of that!), so i gave it a go.

I've been getting some heat and I've been getting a lot of bliss, but what happened this morning was in a different gear, a different league. Be amazing if you could do that every time you sat down to meditate. I assume there are a few people round here who can.

I've been meditating about nine hours a day here for two days before this occurred. Usually, I expect a block. That's not a physical block (maybe it is!), but when you do the breaths, it sometimes feels as if you might fall down in a twitchy mess or black out. But when it works, it seems to go straight through. There isn't even much pulsing which I get sometimes. It just like .. let out the breath and fasten your safety belts. This is ra ultimate juju!!

I've had many wonderful experiences in that temple. Often when I've been meditating in there with a lot of other people and Lama Yeshe (may he live 10,000 years!). But the lama isn't here just now. What I was trying to say what that none of this is really down to me. I feel as if I'm getting this. I didn't know the juju would work this morning. The lama's big brother was in my head this morning when I was trying to do guru yoga. He walked passed the table I was sitting at yesterday and we exchanged looks. Who knows anything? I don't know very much at all. At least, I know I should get my butt down here as regularly as I can. Time to go time. It's not raining at the moment. Win some, lose some. Hotboy Madyamika SurfingTheOceansOfBliss!!

Ra Wonderful Day!

I'm going to have a great day today. In the temple this morning, I did a wee bit of vase breathing after everyone else had left the temple to go to work and such like. Looked around and there was no one in the place but me. Vase breathing really took me to strange places today. After reading Gopi, I reckon the deity emanating juju might take place with the vase breath. You feel a bit like a different joe anyway. You might as well stick the deity on top of it. This is not the same a being a deity, of course. The guys sticking pointy sticks through their cheeks in Gopi's book are deities, I'm sure, when they do that. Maybe once the kundalini gets going you don't have to be. Very much a learning process this juju, especially when I come and don't speak to anyone who could tell me about it. But I'm getting a lot of help and I'll find out sometime.

This is a spontaneous kind of writing. No corrections really. You get half an hour on the machine and by the time I get passed the stats and emails, there's only ten minutes or so left.

Four folk hit the webpage with the free books on it yesterday. Usually, it's one or none. I wish I could tell if anyone was downloading anything. The site has been hit 117 times since the start of February. This blog has been hit nearly 700 times in less than a fortnight. It's had about 190 visitors. Not sure about the hits and the vistors, the difference I mean.

Gopi's book has made me think about my behaviour since the start of the year. I haven't been drinking and I've been keeping away from the flatheids I call my friends as a consequence. I get nervous at the thought of being there with people boozing and me not. In fact, why be there at all. However, after throwing beer bottles at the telly, I've only had three drinking occasions and only got pissed once. I think I'll have to think about having parties once a month and getting it over with then. My partner, the Domestic Bliss, does not meditate and gets anxious. Some people get angry. Some people get anxious. You have to pay attention to the flatheids or it's not compassionate, is it? Have to go. Hotboy.

Ra Samye Afternoon

If I ever feel restless here, or doubtful, or at a loose end, it's usually the afternoon. This is the afternoon break. I'm just down from the temple, but today I feel good about everything. I could be a wee bit tired, but normal for here.

The Big Indian did the Makhala prayers on his own this afternoon. Don't know why. This included chanting, gong banging and cymbal crashing. Quite the boy! I had my eyes closed for most of it.

I'm always saying there's more bliss now than ever before. But this afternoon has been a wee bit special. When the Big Indian left, I just closed my eyes in a half lotus and that was that. Ra bliss! Sometimes it's like great globules of stuff, but this was more like opening bliss. Bliss that kind of opens up. I'm still occasionally trying to focus on the navel centre, but there seems little point.

The lama's big brother smiled at me as he came passed my table at lunch. I've taken two empowerments from him. He's my guru in some kind of way. He might be everyone's guru around here in some kind of a way. They say they have the skillful means, these Kagyus. I certainly hope so. I haven't got to the bit in Gopi's book where it starts to go pear shaped, but almost dying and nearly going mad is probably better avoided.

Gopi's dead interesting on kundalini of course. He thinks some mad people have had arousals. Clairvoyant nutters. He also says kundalini has some anaesthetic qualities, mentioning a nutter going through the streets with a hot container on his shoulder which was burning him. This is also interesting from the Shaolin perspective. I mentioned earlier about martial artists talking about raising something to their heads which enabled them to batter themselves with iron bars, etc. Also, Gopi mentions these boys becoming possessed with a goddess and sticking spikes through their cheeks, etc. We've seen that on the telly now. Says they don't bleed and no scars are left. It's great that there's no explanation for any of this. Of course, the goddess stuff did remind me of deity yoga and, especially, the stuff I read about the Nechung Oracle. Zapped as if by lightning, he becomes a wrathful deity. I love all this stuff!

Well, that's the half hour nearly up. I think I'll go a walk up the river and meditate there on the bench. I'm really having a special time here. This is a great break!

Ra Samye morning!

It's quarter to eleven in the morning and I'm in the Samye Ling cafe for the morning break. What a great morning it's been so far! The tent even felt comfortable for a bit this morning. I was lying there with the sleeping bag covering my face thinking this is actually quite comfortable. The birds wakened me at four a.m. What a fantastic amount of birdsong!

I got up in time for breakfast then went to the temple for the group morning meditation. Unfortunately, the lama wasn't there, so he's probably not at the centre. Teresa was there though. About quarter of an hour ago, I left there and had a shower and changed my clothes.

Some of the time during the two and a half hours I was meditating was really fantastic. Great globules of white light bliss. Some of the time I had my eyes closed and some of the time I was looking at the mandala on my diary. And when the monks and nuns and all left at nine, well, I did try some vase breathing then. At one time ... the amount of bliss that came with the heat! This can't be all that different from what Gopi Krishna goes on about at the start of his book when he has the first arousal of kundalini. It's really just a matter of degree. But, of course, a bit of a degree is what makes the big difference.

I couldn't hold the breath for long this morning. You can tell you shouldn't try. It takes an effort to even make the effort to do a vase breath since ra bliss seems very satisfying by itself without doing anything with the breath at all. But then you take a breath and it goes kind of ballistic!

Last night when I left here I tried holding my breath a bit in the temple. It was fabulously empty. You can definitely hold it longer in the evening.

How could anything be better than to be here!

Read a bit of Gopi in the tent last night. The book is the best thing I've read in years. I take my hat off to the boy's old man. He walks off the park and nobody says boo! Everybody's left skint. And he hardly says a word to anyone. Occasionally, it becomes obvious that he has siddhis i.e. powers. He can tell the future sometimes. But I don't think Gopi likes him. His dad is the kind of saint you'd get in Scotland. Sour faced, crabbit bastard of a saint. A calvinist saint. Gopi reckons he went overboard on the asceticism.

I love this stuff so much because I feel as if I'm playing the same game as these people, but just in a different league. They're playing in the European Cup Final and I'm still down in the Ayrshire coo parks, slicing and sklaffing the ball, trying to stick the nut on the referee at half time.

Gopi's old man's attitude to flatheids is brilliant. Why waste your time talking to flatheids? I've talked to flatheids about meditation for years and years and it's made not the slightest bit of difference to any of them. Some cats got it and some cats aint! Still, I can write about it then I don't have to talk to anyone. In fact, since I started this blog, I've been keeping away. Hotboy

Ra Samye Rain Again!

Chucking it down outside this cafe. That's my excuse for not running out to the temple and meditating. I'll run after this half hour is gone even if it is chucking it down.

I just checked up the statistics for this blog and the last four referrers to this page have been agents. Only one person has checked the web page in the last two days i.e after I emailed the agents. Why are they coming to this page and not the one with all the books, etc., on it? Well, you probably don't have to pass a test to be a literary agent. Even an agent who told me to fung off last week has visited this site. See? They sit around with nothing to do (I wouldn't want to read all that crap either!) and come to this site looking for gossip about other agents. Apart from not being too smart, I can't think of any other reason.

All those who've already told me to fung off (apart from Pat Kavanagh, the agent and hockey player who hasn't yet rejected the proposal of marriage) can go fung off themselves. So there. Anyone else ... well, I don't mind if you're not too bright. As long as you can do lunch and go to parties that should be enough. Just look at the damn page and see what a wasted life this scribbler has had.

If it wasn't for ra bliss ... Someone got here by sticking vase breathing into Google. I really don't do much vase breathing when I'm down here. You're not often alone and it is noisy. Also, maybe some of the other meditators here don't know about vase breathing and you don't really want to draw too much attention to yourself. Shooting the breath is a bit noisy

I had a dream about eight years ago. I was wondering how you get out of samsara. I must be have been thinking this before I went to sleep. Anyway, I had a dream with the Dalai Lama in it. Just a completely black background then his head came in moving from left to right. He said, "Liberation through samedi". My root guru might have told me once that I'd get whatever with the straight calming stuff. I find that last bit difficult to believe, so I often wonder if I heard it right. Milarepa told Gampopa, who could do samedi for four days straight, that this was nothing compared to the inner heat juju. But maybe I should concentrate on the navel chakra and try to get that symbol fixed in place.

If you just to the calming stuff and concentrate on the navel chakra, then occasionally take a vase breath ... well, that's probably best for me just now.

I've revised down my estimate of how much of mandala I was able to get. I said one percent, but I'm nowhere near one percent. There are supposed to be 722 dieties in this mandala along with me and I haven't even got one of them!

It's still pouring down! It's the run from the temple to the tent that you want to be really dry. Still an hour before the temple closes. Dave the Doorman smiled and gave me a wee wave today. Apart from a word with the Gatekeeper, that's been it for conversation.

Ra Samye!

Of course, it's been raining on and off, but I got here this morning dry and pitched the tent with some confidence ... well, more than previously. The tent was up no bother! This is the third time I've been here with a tent since the first time in October. Once I stayed in a room. Four times since October.

I don't think I've ever arrived here in such good condition for meditating. I've been doing plenty. But I was up at five this morning, so the only problem has been dozing off after the spectacularly good lunch, as usual. I'm only here for three nights this time and I don't want to take ages settling down.

I sent off twenty emails to agents yesterday and, after checking the site statistics on my web page, it seems that there was one hit. So I suppose Ben Mason, who asked for the three chapters, did take a peek. Also, someone got to this blog after putting Lucy Luck into Google. That's kind of odd. Sort of inhibits you from being scathing about agents. Anyway, I had hopes for Lucy Luck. She's got to be Chinese and I could have impressed her with my tai chi set! Unfortunately, she wasn't interested, or was too busy.


This is going to be an interesting couple of days!! Heat, bliss, light, who knows? At last, back at the Samye!!

The wee bit I've managed to read about Gopi Krishna in Living with Kundalini has been dead interesting. It wasn't written on a word processor. You can tell! Really nice writing. Also, he was surrounded by saintly people from the word go. His old man walked off the park early doors and let his maw get on with looking after everyone with no dosh, etc. Father is a holy man and the maw is a saint. The book reminds me of the Autobiography of a Yogi. Similarly interesting personalities here and there. One guy kept up a job all week then went home to be a yogi at the weekend. Covered himself in ash and wore a loin cloth. Folk would come to see him to ask him about stuff and he always answered without waiting for the question. Someone from his work showed up and he did this to him. This might give you pause for thought. Not much point in giving a subordinate like that a piece of your mind!

The real Brian Wilson is coming to Glasgow again in the summer. My Brian Wilson, who thinks he has the same molecules as the real Brian Wilson, took me to see him the last time. Sitting there, waiting quietly for the show to start, Brian Wilson (mine) whipped out the pig's face from his inside pocket and started chewing before he handed me a little refreshment in an unmarked carton. I think I remember someone saying, "and this is ... Brian Wilson!" That's all I got for fifty quid. Not in quite the same league as falling asleep during Jimi Hendrix at the Isle of Wight. When Jimi H. said, 'That's the end of surf music!" at Monterey, he didn't realise that molecules can go and get in everywhere!

There is nowhere quite like this place anywhere else. I love this place. I get such a huge benefit from coming here. This is the biz. This is where you come for ra bliss, ra bliss, ra bliss!!

Ra Rain

I wasn't able to go to the Samye Ling today, but I can go tomorrow. For three nights. I'm totally looking forward to it. I'll be stuck to the floor with ra bliss. But I don't care what it's like really. It's still the Samye Ling. And today the meditations were at times sublime. I feel as if I'd like to do an awful lot of that now. Nobody will stop you meditating at the Samye Ling.

I sent off twenty emails today and got one response. The guy's called Ben Mason. He's with Sheil and Land. Google says he was with A.M. Heath, but hardly anything on him at all. Let's give the boy a noble silence. Stick him into Google now and this'll come up. Hello, Ben. Didn't tell you I was psychic, did I? Millions. You'll make millions.

Ra Free Time

It's Wednesday evening. I don't have to go to work now till next Tuesday. What a fortunate creature!

Adolf from the Unheard of and McDonald Islands - his momentos of the third reich always close at hand - has remarked that my web page is crap. He says I should take off all the photies of the women with the big breasts. I think he wants to be my agent. His experience with penguins might come in handy. Once Mr Element of Element Books wrote me a letter saying he would take my book, The Buddha and the Big Bad Wolf
to New York and sell it to Mr Penguin himself. Fortunately, I only believe in the illusory nature of reality and cheques. You can't fool me, Mr Element. Mr Penguin's in Batman.

Got a sudden case of cold feet about getting cold feet. In a tent. Lying on the ground. It's still bloody chilly for May! I know I'm overdue when I think like that. Once I get the tent up. Anxiety. I try to spot anxiety. It's just anxiety. But I don't suppose I'll be able to go tomorrow, but I might be. Once I get the tent up. Boy, will I have me a time once I get the tent up!

Ra Moonies

This morning ra bliss was like sitting in the moon. No messing about beforehand. Just sat down, closed my eyes and there it was: the moon bliss. When ra bliss is like this, it seems pointless to attempt visualisations. You just sit in ra bliss and say your mantras. It seems profound somehow. The moonlit bliss. Very peaceful. I'm trying not to meditate so much these days with my eyes closed, but sometimes you just want to sink into it.

Gopi Krishna's autobiography, Living with Kundalini, starts brilliantly with the boy telling you about his kundalini arousal. This was interesting in various ways. First of all, he was meditating on a lotus in his crown centre. You see a lot of stuff about which chakras to meditate on. Whether the actual chakra exists or not doesn't matter. Where you put your attention might. Some gurus say you should concentrate on your heart centre. Tsongkhapa, who is the guy who started the Dalai Lama's sect, is quite clear that you should concentrate mainly on your navel centre. He says the heart centre is dangerous because too much there might lead to heart problems. The initial experience that Gopi Khrishna has seems to be right on the money, but I'm sure the boy gets a real spanking later on, so it's still the navel centre for me.

Some people say this might lead to excessive interest in hanky panky since this chakra might control the reproductive organs, but there are worse things that can happen to you!

Another interesting thing about Gopi Krishna's kundalini arousal is that by then he was 34 and could sit for hours without discomfort. I didn't start meditating till I was in my early thirties and I still can't get anywhere near this. I usually struggle to make an hour if I'm sitting in a full lotus.

My attempts to stir up some apathy among the agenting classes was highly successful last week. I sent out about thirty messages and got ... well, nothing. Robin Jones initially seemed interested and so did Will Francis, but they fell by the wayside almost immediately. Are these guys all like the bloke in American Psycho? Do they just sit there until it's time to do lunch? Anyway, I reckon I can go ahead now and get my new novel rejected by every agent in Britain before it's finished. And without any agent ever having looked at it at all!!

Ra Marriage Proposal!

According to Blogpatrol, 23 people from cyberspace visited this blog yesterday. You can retrace the steps. One of the google entries was looking for Euan Thornycroft of Curtis Brown. Since he doesn't own a bit of Oxford Street yet (of course, he'll own a bit. His daddy will have given him it!), if you put his name into google, RaBlissBlog comes up. Please don't sue! Eaun Thornycroft, I haven't got any money unless you get me some! Even replying to the package you asked for a hundred years ago would be a good idea!

He's probably a nice person. Put your name into Google, Eaun or Euan ... luckily nobody can spell your name, so libelling you would be a waste of time.

So I tried to find if putting Pat Kavanagh into google would find RaBlissBlog. No, Pat Kavanagh seems to be a hockey player. How she combines being an incredibly rich agent with playing hockey is beyond me. But a photograph of her came up. It's in some portrait gallery and is with her husband, Julian Barnes, who I believe is very famous in France. In my heart, I knew the only way I'd get a literary agent was to marry one, so I emailed her immediately with a proposal of marraige. Which I can't spell. Anyway, being rich and being able to spell and being married to a famous novelist isn't everything. It's eleven o clock on a lovely Edinburgh morning. Nobody to bother me. A whole day fooling around in ra bliss!

Ra Hullo Down There!

If you do not think Martians can visit this blog, have a look at this. This isn't a hoax site. That is supposed to be a picture of the Virgin Mary on top of a church. I first came upon this wonderment about twenty years ago. It didn't get much publicity when I was a tim, but the church is a coptic church. Say it isn't the Virgin Mary. She's been dead a long while and real folk don't go white and float about like that. Well, what is it then? The boy who first spotted it pointed to it with a sore finger which was miraculously cured. I love stuff like that!

I stuck calmness and desert fathers into Google and got this coptic pope going on about calmness. A whole document about this calmness and the different kinds of calmness. I think the coptics might be worth finding out about. The desert fathers were like Saint Antony, I think. Bare arsed dudes surfing the oceans of bliss.

I'm nothing like calm enough. I blogged a while ago about once or twice being able to stick representations of the lama onto things like trees and houses and them staying there. I wasn't much excited by this then, but I think I was very calm. I think if you were very calm and could place these mantric symbols in the chakras in your body, then they might stay like that. This means that when you went looking for them while doing whatever juju, they'd be there. You wouldn't be trying to contruct them from scratch. You'd just see them there. I hadn't connected these things before. That makes me feel really stupid.

I don't think I've ever had a properly calmed mind. Seems unlikely. But it has gone calm enough for me to know that something does change in the way it works. You can project images onto things. Like the lama or maybe these coloured symbols in your body. Must be how you do the mandala. You'd have to be awfully calm for an awfully long time if it works like that. I'm still hoping for the bolt of lightning and voila, the Acid King!

Poisonous was good value today. A conversation with Poisonous ... dance with a black mamba. The sneering riposte. You should never go first. He waits brilliantly. He watched me dig. I told him about Milarepa and pointless endeavours. He smirked. He doesn't make the slightest effort to be nice, but he is my deep dear friend. I don't actually like nice people. Nice people can give you the creeps.

Ra Afternoon!

It's time to go to the allotment again. About half one. Yesterday I felt fit. I thought I've been doing this digging for a while. Started digging just after three. By five I was back home, but walking about like a zombie. Digging is a real thief! People who do manual labour die young. Middle class chaps who go to gyms live far too long!

I got a phone call this morning from a bookshop. It used to be the Body and Soul Bookshop, but someone has just bought it. I've now got Living with Kundalini to read. I'm so pleased. I've read chunks of it on the net and bits here and there, but I've got it at last. This is a real treat. They also managed to get me Thomas Merton's Thoughts on Solitude. Yippee! I know you could get these by going on the web, but I'm trying to support this local bookshop. And show patience. I must have asked for the Kundalini book for the first time about two years ago!

Thomas Merton was a trappist. That's another word for a buddhist.

Brian Wilson has emailed me from the Unheard of and McDonald Islands. He says after doing something that he can understand now why Papa Ratzy said the buddhists were auto-erotic. He seems to think prostrations have something to do with your postrate. Or your prostate. Or your posterior. He's asked for some pigs faces to be shipped out along with a gallon or so of the pink sticky stuff. Also, some kind of Roger Rabbit device. He says he's looking forward to performing some really deep prostrations on a few drunken penguins. I don't know what kind of buddhism that is.

Did about four hours meditating this morning. When I worked full time, I used to think I really enjoy Mondays at work if I could do four hours on Sundays. Meditations, when you grow accustomed to them, are like the wind in your sails.

The Desert Fathers were into calmness. It's hard to develop if people keep jabbering away at you. That's what I think the solitude is for. The allotment. Poisonous says he will visit me there. Then I will dig and speak only in mantras. I won't tell him he's a deity. He's got enough problems with his flat heid!

Ra Visitors from Outer Space!

It's about ten past ten in the morning. Time for a break. I've been a day and a half away from work and it tells. All systems go this morning. Ra bliss, ra bliss. Managed about seven hours meditating yesterday and I've just finished about two and a half this morning so far. I checked the blogpatrol counter and it says that twenty eight Masai warriors and creatures from outer space visited this site yesterday. Where did they all come from? The site seems to have had 361 hits since last Wednesday (when the counter was put on) and 90 odd visitors. But yesterday was twice as much as it normally gets. I suspect it might be the mad nazi people on the Unheard of and McDonald Islands, but maybe some buddhists or meditators from the Buddhist blog ring.

If you're a buddhist and not a nazi or a robot, you might like to have a look at The Buddha and the Big Bad Wolf. It's not a brilliant book by any manner of means, but I wouldn't mind comments from vajrayanists about the buddist parts of it. Also, some words would be good to help describe this kind of stuff. Tibetans will probably have words for this.

So there's some kind of sheath like thing you can feel the bliss and kundalini pushing around. Sometimes it just sits there, mainly out the front of your jaw, neck, chest and sometimes shoulders. You sometimes feel it by just sitting still. It comes on. I can feel it just now. A vase breath into this puts you into a different place. It feels wonderful. Sometimes you can feel a pulse, pulse up your body, but when it's really good, it just kind of beams into the space. This is the transcending .... Back later.

Ra Later On!

The only person who phoned today was Brian Wilson's chimp. He said he can now speak four languages, including Gaelic, and would now like to become my literary agent. He can't read and doesn't know how to answer an email, but he can light fat cigars using twenty pound notes and can eat lunch with the best of them as long as he doesn't have to pay and there's bananas on the menu. Definitely a candidate for agent of the year!

I showed one of the people who live here my new trick. That's the headstand into a lotus then sitting down. She was impressed. I think she'd be more impressed if I could give her a couple of grand when she goes to college. Me and Gordon Brown both got grants. Shame on them!

I can go up to the allotment now (just the back of one!). I'll do a tai chi set on the way. There's a huge expanse of grass in Inverleith Park. Nothing in it but sky. You can stand in the middle and no one is within a hundred and fifty yards of you.

One of the other people who stays here is going away from the weekend. She's meeting someone I used to share a student house with in 1971. Haven't seen him for about eighteen years. A character based on him is in Alma Mater. How weird it would be for him to read that. If I was him, I wouldn't want to.

Because the Domestic Bliss is away, I won't be asked to go anywhere. Hurrah!! I won't have to see anyone except my aged parent tomorrow. This is great. Everytime I speak to a flatheid I know, all I get is disturbed, funged up, or bizarre.

Last night sometimes there was so much bliss, it was as if I was hardly there at all.

Is that what happens when you die, daddy? No, because you are a stupid flatheid, you could easily get a part in some nightmare 3D horrorshow all of your own!

I'm off now for a wonderful afternoon. Days like this, I feel ... the Tao that can be expressed is not the real Tao ... like I'm in the right place, right time. Hotboy

Rem Prostations!

Brian Wilson is now on the Unheard of and McDonald Islands. There's a map! He's been looking for Adolf and the bunch of nazi paramilitary school girls, but all he can find are gangs of drunken penguins, who keep swaggering up to him with bottles of beer under their flippers and challenging him to boxing matches. Penguins aren't very good at boxing, so he's bored. So bored that he thinks he might get into Buddhism. I suggest he do some prostrations on the beach. He wants to know if that involves getting a thumb stuck up your bum. Only where he comes from.

I tried to blog last night, but it disappeared into cyberspace. Said I had no data. Really?

An encouraging thing in the last novel I read. It was called The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. Loved it. It's about a kid with Asperger's Syndrome. He can remember everything. It says he can recall the shape of the patches on cows after a glance into a field. So the ability is in us. How do you access that? Recently, I've been getting better with imagining I'm in the centre of the mandala. I'm using the Kalachakra Mandala which is on a sticker which is attached to the front of my diary. Rest my eyes on that a lot. Once when dreaming I seemed to be hanging off the edge of a spinning version of this and the mandala looked fine but incomplete then. Sometimes I'm maybe getting one percent. That's a big improvement!

The wren (there might be two of them! Identical tottie things!) comes into the hut now with wings of insects protruding from its wee beak. It jumps about a lot. It can stick to the walls. Sometimes it goes out through the chicken wire window then comes back in. Hops about again then goes to the nest. Weet, weet, comes from inside. I think the wren must be looking around to see if there's anybody about. Or anybody else. It doesn't really come within arms reach.

After sending out about twenty to thirty emails ... this is a well considered email ... to agents using the Everyone who is Anyone website, I've basically got absolutely nowhere. Somebody said they would get back to me when their email server thing wasn't giving them grief. Mostly, nobody replies at all. Apart from getting to torment some rich people there doesn't really seem much point in continuing with this, but I'll press on. I think next week I'll send the email to everyone else on the list (this will take hours), so I can definitively say I have been rejected by every single literary agent in Britain.

It's nearly half ten in the morning on Thursday. It's lovely outside, but I said in the email that I'd be in for calls if anyone wanted to ring me up, so I'd better stay in.

You don't need an agent to write. But you can write about not getting an agent. The current novel I'm writing has plenty of stuff in it about not getting an agent for kidsbooks. So getting rejected by absolutely everyone is not a complete waste of time.

Speaking of writing, the sensei has a link to a jaw dropping article about why you can't get done for raping your wife in Tennessee.

I don't need to go to work today, tommorrow, the next day, or the day after that. What a fortunate creature! This is the best time of my life! For I'm a Hotboy Madyamika and I can surf the oceans of bliss!!

Ra Agenting Classes.

Somebody from Ed Victor clicked on the blog yesterday! Hitesh Shah probably. I like to send things to folk with interesting names. Sophie Hicks works there. She didn't want Light in the Dark, but I think her people might have read it. They seemed to have. That was the one of maybe three agents I got to have a look at that in three years trying. I'm going to re-write the beginning (cut out the "suddenlys") and go again with that book after I've finished the one I'm on just now. Kids I gave it to in a blind test really liked it.

I sent out twenty one emails today to agents. I got a really nice reply telling me to fung off from Zoe at Pollinger. The human beings are rarely listed. Will Francis of Greene and Heaton asked for three chapters of the book I'm working on just now, but I sent him one chapter by email and asked him to look at this blog. Agents will all be flatheids of course.

I sent the email to Pat Kavanagh of PFD asking her what she thought of it. A score out of ten perhaps. She might actually reply since she's far too rich to bother with someone like me. But if I was in her position I'd certainly not be bothered reading books. Menus. Bottle labels. Maybe emails. Definitely cheques.


Got an email from the Samye Ling yesterday. The Doctor is looking for help from brickies and joiners. I'd love to do something like that, but I'm completely useless. My old man helped build Sacred Heart chapel in Bellshill. Sometimes it makes me look at it differently. He was a brickie. If there was a lot of work about, being a tradesman is the best job in the world!


This morning's meditation was startling bright, white and blissful. I didn't get started today till half six, so I stuck with the straight emptiness stuff. How cares about bloody agents? If it wasn't for the poor starving orphans!

Pat Kavanagh sent me another really nice email. She's got a client list full of people who can actually write so there's no chance for a scribbler like me. I sent her the start of the current novel though I'd sent it into PFD months ago. Also, I got a nice email from Robin Jones at Imrie Dervis. So that's not bad really. Three contacts for twenty emails. I need to find lucky young persons who are just starting in the business of making money from writing. I'd like to actually libel some people, but everyone has been really okay. Useless but okay.

When I've got through all the agents in Britain, maybe I'll start on ones in the Unheard of and McDonald Islands. Brian Wilson says he's headed for there since this country is full of vegetarians and folk who can only speak Gaelic. Hotboy

Rem Agenting Chaps!

Can't blog about (not) finding an agent if nothing's happening, so I sent off about twelve emails today using the webpage Everyone Who Is Anyone for the addresses. This should stir up a bit of apathy surely!


Brian Wilson's flatulence problems were so bad yesterday that Poisonous and I were unable to get anywhere near him. We shouted at him from the gate of the castle he lives in down Portobello. He seems to think the French are going to invade from Fife and has a small nuclear device he obtained in Tennessee pointing in that direction. Chewing on the usual pig's face and swilling back a pint of the horrible pink stuff, he says he might eat the nuclear device if it doesn't go off first. Portobello tourist people should really know this! The back blast could reach Glasgow!

Lucy Luck of RCW literary agents actually clicked on my webpage. This is, I'm sure, the first agent who has ever visited it though it was put up to attract agents at the start of February. She says she's way too busy to bother with poor people like me, but it was good to see someone at least doing something asked for in the email!

So far at the end of the working day, I've had four responses to the emails. Everyone said they were too busy to be bothered, and one said he'd pretend to look if it meant I wouldn't report him to the animal cruelty people for doing bad things to a sheep. He should be so lucky.

Can't remember now why I want an agent again. Yes, it's for the poor starving orphans and so I can get to be rich and keep the flatheids away! I must say no going to work at all would be quite nice.

I've saved myself today for the digging tonight! If I'm lucky it'll rain and I can sit in the hut instead. Last night I thought I'd like to spend a night there this week. Retreat! Retreat!

Ra People Sitting on Your Head!

You're supposed to think your guru is like the buddha. Or is a buddha. Or even better. You're supposed to develop devotion for your guru or the juju might not work. This is not an easy thing for your usual Scottish person. We're all Jock Tamson's bairns around here.

I might have heard this from Anagorika Govinda who was just about the first buddhisty boy I'd read. This is how ra bliss usually starts. Often I get blissed out of my face doing this.

You imagine somebody on top of your head. Say you were a christian and you imagined Jesus Christ's head from the Turin Shroud a bit above your head. So you've got the image of Jesus Christ's head above your head. You could really just try to hold it there. Then, you say to yourself: Jesus Christ, who suffered and died for me, is my guru. Please give me your wisdom mind. Then the image becomes a white line going up and up, and then you start taking this down your body through the top of your head. You pour the white stuff right down through your body and then imagine all the impurities leaving your body. I usually think of a black brick. You make the black stuff fall and get smaller and smaller. This will make you feel as if you are floating. When the black stuff is very small, a chinese dragon eats it and turns that into ra bliss as well. If you do this juju, you will sometimes feel really, really fantastic! This is ra bliss.

Tomorrow, I'm going to stir up some apathy among the agenting classes.

Poisonous and I cycled to Port Seton today. I thought we'd just be going down the road a wee bit. Looking back from Port Seton, you could see the bay city. It looked gorgeous from Mussleburgh. It looked a long way back from Port Seton. We cycled for about three hours. I fell asleep in the bath. Lance Armstrong eat your heart out. Hotboy.

Ra minus swamp digging weekend!

Minus the swamp and plus the digging, it's been the same weekend as last. I want everything to be the same so I can calm my mind. I'm not looking for any excitement. But the whole world looked fantastic from the allotment this evening. The big sky. Everything washed and shiny. You can't see the castle in the distance through the trees anymore. It's still a wee bit chilly.

Brian Wilson says he has such a severe case of flatulence that he can't leave the house. He wants visitors. I said I might come if he'd buy this CD first. Some protection against the torrent of full volume surf music.

The unspoken promise was that if you did well at school you'd never have to dig. I think manual labour should be the preserve of the middle classes. Tell them digging is a hobby. But even the digging was okay tonight. If you hold your fire till the night time, you can really go at it. And be unable to walk the next day. Tonight was the middle way - just enough to slightly brutalise you.

My friend Poisonous is coming round tomorrow morning. This is a wonderful life! Characters based on Poisonous have been in several things I've written, and something I even got published. The character I based on him in Alma Mater
got killed by maybe not quite accidentally driving a motor cycle into some railings. In the thirty plus years since this didn't happen, Poisonous has tred lightly on the earth. Tomorrow we're cycling. If I knew how to take that link to Alma Mater back, I would. It might seem good in a hundred years. Fancy knowing someone for over thirty years. He hasn't improved.

Ra Blogpatrol!

Got a blog counter stuck on this. It says ten martians and robots and Masai warriors visited this blog yesterday. That's a helluva lot more than visits my site. I just visited the site of Glenn H. Mullin, who translated all this tantic stuff. Actually, I was re-reading his book of Readings on the Six Yogas of Naropa while in the allotment this morning. Brilliant that this stuff is now available in Scotland and now we can all go on fire, go mad, and emanate as deities if we want to! I sent him an email telling him about this blog just now.

The election here worked out perfectly. The nazis never got in. I was watching a programme about the woman who took down Adolf Hitler's last will and testament last night. The usual nice woman. Adolf is now resident in the Heard and McDonald Islands
where he posts photies of his relatives dressed as rhine maidens.

Most of my friends (all three of them!) are going mad. I feel like Allan Ginsberg before Howl. The grief, sorrow, lamentations .... they so richly deserve! ... are catching up on them big time. Also, they seem to be turning into prunes. I hope I die before I get old. They should be so lucky! Seeing the state of my degenerate old chums makes me happy that I started sitting quietly doing nothing a long time ago. Got a lot of what I'm looking for in the allotment this morning (It's three o clock in the afternoon here). But there's an awful, awful lot I'm not getting near.

The boy on the telly is a Shaolin Temple instructor, so he's a buddhist martial artist. He's got this iron bar and he's battering it off the top of his head. Big grin. They say if you can take something (God knows what!) up to the top of your head, the iron bar isn't sore and leaves no marks.

I saw this other boy pulling a bus with his plait (pony tail) . He said he knew it was a goer once he got the stuff up to the top of his head.

Well, whatever it is, isn't at the top of my head yet! I'm going back to the allotment. Yesterday I was too tired to blog! What a weakling!

Ra Vase Breathing!

It might be that the boy didn't whisper in your ear about the vase breathing until you'd been sitting there trying to emanate as a deity for a year or so. Not lying down to sleep. Sitting up in your meditation box. Then it really must have blown your mind.

There's nothing sensible about vase breathing, and prana, chi, kundalini and whatever else is supposed to be going on here. No way am I near knowing enough about this to talk about it really, but ... when you shoot the breath (after holding it and squeezing the symbol at the navel), afterwards you sometimes get ra bliss, and like a big dose of it, kind of rippling up your body, but sometimes you can hardly hold the breath at all. You think you might start to black out or something. I think the time of day might affect this. Then sometimes when you let it go, you get a juddering sensation. You definitely have to watch your step here. You might seem to be losing consciousness for a second or two. Then you'd better hold up. I'm dead careful at this point.

Harish Johari's book on Chakras is interesting on the breath. Says there are times when it goes evenly up both nostrils ... that seems to be what you're looking for in the vase breathing stage. It might go evenly up both nostrils (the air, that is) when the sun is going down.

Anyway, sometimes (before the swamp!) I could tell that I was holding my breath for an unusually long time. As I said, sometimes I could hardly hold it at all without warning signs. Weird.

Sometimes you might get a lot of bliss after a breath and maybe some heat, but the weird thing is the strange mental state you go into. How can I describe it? What is it like? Your visual field goes a bit wonky as far as colours and perspectives go. It really does feel very pleasant. You might even feel a wee bit amused, which seems very odd.

I've just done one and am doing one. The business is maybe happening in the sheath thing the kundalini started pushing in years ago. This feels bigger in front of your chest and face. .. really, that was wonderful. It wasn't w0rking so well today at all, but it comes on brilliantly at this time. It's nine o clock here and nowhere near dark yet. Anyway, what was I saying .... ra bliss, ra bliss!

If I could emanate as a deity while I was blogging, I'd let you know. Because you don't emanate as a deity on your own. Everyone's a deity.

Even Brian Wilson would have to be a deity. So would the chimp.

Sitting here: blasting on air; getting blissed out on air! What a fortunate creature!

Empedocles invented air. Before that nobody was sure if there was any or not. Him and his pals were trying to figure out what made up things. They all got the fire, earth and water, but air? He put a bucket into water and trapped the air. How does that prove that there's air? He proved reincarnatiuon by taking his pals up the side of a volcano and then throwing himself in. Must have believed in something. Thought he was a god apparently. There must be a difference between a god and a deity or I'm going to finish this really confused.

I voted against the war, for higher income tax and for civil rights. Can hardly bring myself to say it. Kerr Hardie, who was born near Holytown (certainly a buddhist!) which is right beside my home town, will be birrling in his grave!

Ra Election!

A friend of mine is hiding in the Heard and MacDonald Islands. He's posted a photie of his nazi relatives in his blog. I could vote for the nazis today as we're having an election, but the second world war wasn't the best public relations exercise ever.

I owe everything to the Labour Party, but I can't vote for the war in Iraq or for having a home secretary called Himmler, so I'll have to vote for someone else. This is a pain in the neck. I want to vote for Gordon Brown. He was at the same uni as me and a year in front on much the same courses. He helps the poor. At least, he's heard of Kropotkin.

The half of the allotment which has still to be dug and planted is twenty paces by five. It looks like the sea, the ocean. The ocean of dukka. When you dig with a spade, the ground ends up in waves. Then you have to go over it again with a fork and shake all the earth on the fork so you can take out the couch grass roots, etc. There must be about 1500 forks worth. I don't know what a fork full of earth weighs. The first noble truth is the truth of dukka. It can be frustration. You can't beat it. The allotment always wins. I need some agent orange. All I want is the hut.

Today I finished digging the first half (almost, always almost!). Last night, a robin joined me. It found a lot to eat there. Today some kind of hawk sat on the hut at the top end. It was reddish in bits.

It's only three o clock on Thursday and I'm knackered from digging and it was only just over an hour. It doesn't matter how you dig. You can try to beat the earth into submission or go slowly slowly catchee monkey, and you still end up knackered.

I was going to blog about the space after the vase breath. That was interesting today as well. Maybe later. Hotboy

Ra Nicety Nice

The sensei has a Bulldog 44. Sounds dead butch. I'd love to get a gun and shoot people. It would be great. My liberties are being infringed in this country. If we didn't have laws, we wouldn't have any crime. We could all get guns and you could shoot who you liked.

Michi Regier seems to have managed to read all of my book, The Buddha and the Big Bad Wolf. I found this amazing and have immediately asked her to be my agent. I offered fifty fifty till the first ten million. I think that's fair.

I got a reply to an email I sent to this woman who wrote a book about living in an ashram. I read it only a year or so ago and really enjoyed it. What I remember best is the stuff about chanting. I've never done any chanting at all. I got put off by reading stuff about becoming suggestible through singing or chanting, or going Zeig Heil! a lot. I stopped going Zeig Heil right after I read that. But she was dead interesting on this chanting. I think she mentions heat. It would be nice if someone read this blog who knew anything about ra bliss.

The sensei has got a bulldog. If you go down to the woods today ...

Rem Agents!

I set up this blog really to follow the agent trail. Like, see who'd told me to fung off and when, so that when I got the siddhis (magic powers!) I'd make sure they got theirs,

But it's full of a lot of irrelevant stuff about meditating! You can get addicted to blogging. Addicted to anything.

Anyway, eventually I found the entry about Euan Thorneycroft at Curtis Brown. It's a month since I sent him a package, so I've sent a wee email asking if he's still alive.

If I get no email back (probable) or one back saying he doesn't remember anything about it, it'll just go to show that there's no point in playing honest injun with these people. The PFD folk have now had two packages from me for well over a month.

Does anyone know anything about agents out there? Do they have slush piles which strange office temps are sent to clear out and bin every now and again? I suspect they might. On the other hand, you might be able to get adult fiction published these days without an agent. This is impossible with kidsbooks. No agent and nobody will read one of those.

Brian Wilson is heading off for Tennessee. I might ask him to visit some literary agencies in London on the way back. Then they'll be sorry! Hotboy

Ra Shooty Shooty!

I once met a man in a bar who said he had a permit to carry a concealed weapon. Why a concealed ..weapon? So that nobody knows you've got it. He had his sticking out of his boot, under his trousers. He said he worked in utilities. Great country America. If I had money, I'd definitely live there for a while. And get me a gun.

The sensei in Tennessee has got a permit to carry a handgun. I bet you it's one of them Magnums from the Clint Eastwood movies. I bet he wishes he had one of them when he was growing up in Maryhill, that idyllic little village near Glasgow. I thought I should mention this in case anyone fancied seeing the choo choos in Chattanooga soon. Stay away from Tennessee.

The swamp is almost gone but not quite. The flu is a great leveller. It doesn't care. I have no idea anymore what my meditations will be like when I get back into the swing of things. I've been doing six or so hours a day. Saw nobody. More or less the same thing every day. Except with the swamp. Or son of swamp. A swampette.

Brian Wilson has almost decided to go to live in Tennessee. I had to tell him they had a creekit team. I didn't have to lie about the grenade lauchers. I'm sure they're freely available. Hotboy.

Rat Praying Thing!

I'm a bit suspicious about praying. When I was a kid, I suppose I prayed a lot. There were sick people about the place and I used to pray that they got better. They never did. Telling kids to pray to God for specific things might just screw them up. Should you tell kids to pray to a creator God when you don't believe in one yourself?

Praying to something outside yourself is obviously a sign of alienation. You're obviously alienated from the thing you're praying to. You're separate anyway. But people are alienated. Could praying help that circumstance?

When I taught myself to meditate, I thought I was trying to control the language bit of my mind with repetitions (of Susquehanna)(that still sounds brilliant! I made it sound like that to me!). Then I was watching for a change in the mental background. This never happened to me with praying, but I never went into praying with that kind of awareness. I wasn't looking for a change. I suppose by the time I started teaching myself to meditate, I was well used to altered states and was looking for some change.

Hail Mary, full of grace, the lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus. Holy Mary Mother of God pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death, amen.

From reading St Teresa's life, she must have got ra bliss, ra rapture and ra ecstasy by saying stuff like that to herself. I'm dead interested in this just now. These nuns were praying blinking day and night. They were never done praying. She talks about concentration and recollection (as assume from mental wandering) as well.

St Teresa says there were four stages to prayer. I was a tim till I was nearly an adult and no priest ever said that to us. The last stage of prayer, according to the woman, is the prayer of union. That sounds familiar. Union. Yoga. That's unity with God. If not a buddhist, definitely a hindu!

Mystical experiences maybe come in two types. One is unitive, which is the kind I had. (It's about fifty pages into The Buddha and the Big Bad Wolf).
The other is contemplative. That seems to be when you sort of witness things. You're not a part of something as much as seeing it. There's a brilliant description of one of these in the autobiography of Cellini. He was a rennaissance joe. He was stuck in a dungeon. One day (he's in despair, of course, as you might be!) when he got the whole works. God on a throne, archangels, angels, the works. The Book of Revelations reads like this. Like the guy was looking at something.

That boy must have had a lousy agent. He had to live in a cave on the island of Patmos. I went to visit him there since we share the same name. Hotboy. But he was dead. I've never been so freaked and impressed by a place in my life! Freaky doesn't describe it! Go there sometime.

Anyway, St Teresa seemed to have moved from seperation to union through praying like mad. But I still don't get it. How come she saw devils and stuff like that? She must have been getting both kinds of mystical experience. Unitive and contemplative.

Inner heat yoga can give you visions, I believe. You can see hell. If it's not there, how do you do that? Back to what's there and what's not there again. I think the first conference after Guatama died was about that question. What is reality?

Ra Labour Day!

It's May Day. Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer, we'll keep the red flag flying here.

You can't vote on for anyone who bangs on about individualism if you're a buddhist. Not if you accept that everything is interdependent and you're suffering from a false sense of self. It's the false sense of self after all which is making you a capitalist bastarn!

The Samye Ling is a fair enough model of agrarian communism. Some people down there don't have much use for money. Of course, the abbot's word has to be law, but that could really just be about getting to ra bliss, and you could leave the decisions about who peels the potatoes to the workers representative committee. That's where it would fall apart. I used to know a bit about communities, especially in America. Without charasmatic leadership, they don't tend to last long.

It doesn't matter. Kropotkin was a buddhist!

At half four, it's starting to clear up after pouring all day. You have to sit in anyway. This afternoon ra bliss was superb. Closed eyes in ra bliss. It's almost like being invulnerable for a while. No aggravations gets through ra bliss. Periods of wonderful contentment and bliss. Then you might take a deep breath.... maybe later. I'm supposed to be writing a novel.

Brian Wilson's chimpanzee says the forerunners of the BNP, during the Napoleonic Wars, put a monkey on trial. They thought it was French spy. The best thing about people on the right is that they are usually stupid bastarns!