Ra Thursday!

11:15a.m.
Very exceptional meditations today so far. Very accessible bliss and heat. The only problem is that I can't concentrate well enough. You just want to be fixed somehow to ra bliss, but my mind wanders as much as anybody's. The three beers last night didn't make too much difference ( but we're into subtlety here and they do make a difference!), but that's all the beer I can really afford in July, so I hope not to do that again. I did enjoy drinking those beers though. Yummy. This is a bad sign!

The sensei advised me to try Ancient Futures out on Tor, who seem to be a big American scifi/fantasy outfit. I sent an email asking if they looked at foreigners and haven't had anything back yet. They won't reply. But I'll think of something else. Probably, I'll eventually just post them a copy and tell them to bin it if they don't want it. It's the return postage from the states, etc., that they ask for.

I thought I might hear from Anjali Pratrap this week. She's from AP Watt and has been having a look at Bugtown. You have to brace yourself. This of course is a stupid reaction. Once I was learning how to play goolf with Brian Wilson. Sometimes you swing and miss, and a very bad mental state immediately occurs. This might be accompanied by irritation and some cursing in bad cases. This is, of course, a stupid reaction to hitting or not hitting a stupid ball. So I started working out how not to have this feeling, so that it didn't really matter how I struck the ball or not. Then I wasn't bothered about not hitting the ball properly. Then I hit a great shot. And that didn't bother me either. Hardly any reaction. No point in hitting the ball at all really after that. Is it possible not to give a toss about rejections and rejoice in acceptances?

Dull and overcast and drizzly. I'll do another hour before lunch!

8:30p.m.
Had a lovely time in the allotment from three till about six. I was in the hut. It rained incessantly and it sounded nice on the wooden roof. Honeysuckle tendrils have invaded the space. Looked up at the sound of a songbird by the chickenwire. It was a wren. Lot of song. Earlier in the year, well, May, it didn't sound like that. Today it sounded far more complex. Gotten interested in birdsong since last March when I spent ten weeks in the hut, more or less. Blackbirds are great, of course. Why do they need such wonderful songs? I am self taught. The Gods have implanted in my heart songs of all kinds. You have to have stopped a bit to get interested in bird song.

Time passed very quickly then. I had my eyes closed for most of the three hours and interspersed that with reading Reading on the Six Yogas of Naropa by Glenn Mullin. This boy's books have been a big, big help. The Readings one supplements Tsongkhapas Six Yogas of Naropa. Actually, these two books and the Bliss Of Inner Fire are all you need if you want to go mad, go on fire, or have a really, really nice life.

You're wired when you're always wondering what time it is. When you sit down in the hut like today, it doesn't matter. You get kind of washed away. I wasn't expecting any heat. The lama in his book said afternoons weren't so good for the heat element. Mornings are better, it seems.This isn't what I needed since I want to meditate throughout sometimes. But sit in the bliss, breathe, whoosh, different space, but you cannot really get it together to do a succession of breaths (and that's how it worked before) since the breath you've just let go has sort of wallied you so much.

Anyway, in the Readings book there's a boy called Gyalwa Wensapa. He's the biz. Everyone in Tibetan buddhism is going on about enlightenment and nobody will talk about being enlightened. If I was Tsongkhapa, these boys would all be wearing badges. Grade I, etc. My lama says he's not enlightened. I heard him saying that. Not enlightened. Twelve years of retreats and not enlightened. The boy in the book is described as arrogant and wild. I am the man! If you can float, let's see it. Make a video. We need role models.

I've had two dreams with the Dalai Lama in them. Millions of people have had dreams with the Dalai Lama in them and I can see why dreams are not very reliable. Last year, I went to see the Dalai Lama and the boy who set up the gig, when asked on the telly, said he started doing in because the DL told him in a dream. If the DL is asked on the telly if he is enlightened, he will probably say no. Maybe he can't fly. Maybe he's not quite Siddharta, but I find this denial of any achievement irritating. I want someone to levitate on the telly and say, stop being a stupid flatheid. I don't want someone to say, I'm just a flatheid like you.

The samsaramom got a sore back while meditating and is getting emotionally charged meditations maybe. It is not easy to go away without any sweeties and do this juju. I haven't had the time to check the rest of her blog to see what tradition she's doing this in, but they seem to have a very weird eating ritual. Must be Japanese. Thought about well before anyone knew about germs! Woman's got three kids. All the women I know have kids and sore backs. Burn your seats. But you've got to take your hat off to people who are trying. Somethings you do are dead hard. Why do you do them? Something inside maybe knows about ra bliss. Maybe.

She says in her daily reads that she looks at this and Adolf's . I mention this because I do not know how to list them and also because Adolf will not have noticed. Adolf, the nazi photographer, is one of the dead smart people. The samsaramom is probably dead smart as well. Due to the severe toilet training and the Third Reich, of course, Adolf has a few problems which the samsaramom will not have. She's Canadian and they're all nice. I can see her now in a brownshirt being photographed by Adolf down on the beach below the volcano in the Unheard of Island.

Things here are fantastic by the way. I will drink more Black Bavarian Lager and I will get blissed and pissed at the same time. One of the other people who live here is out at a school prom. It's an american thing. The other one is out entertaining people. This is a wonderful life. You need ra bliss and the smiley face, and the guru who smiles at you when you sometimes close your eyes. Also, not doing anything happily. Non action. Listen to tweety birds. I'm sure it's all method. Well, tonight maybe method and beer. Allah Akbar!

Ra Great Wednesday!

3:00p.m.
Free at last! Everyone still alive. Left one and all with heads on shoulders. The kind of buddhism that leads to Samurai warriors lopping heads off willy nilly could do with some investigating. Appearance, voidness, off with their heads. What about karma? Well, there shouldn't be any if you've lost your false idea of self, but if you'd done that, why be bothered cutting of the heads in the first place? Michi Regier
seems to think non-action is more effective than action. Probably is. Pretty tricky doing nothing though. Even if you hold your breath, that's doing .... If you desire to sit still, it's still desire. It's hard to get out of the realm of desire.

The sensei has another great bit about writing in his blog for Tuesday. The last piece I remember him having was by Elmore Leonard. This stuff is by Denis Cooper, I think. Never heard of him, of course. Never heard of anybody me. The boy knows his stuff though.

I wrote this on my wall twenty years ago: "I am self taught. The gods have implanted in my heart songs of all kinds." I used to write stuff on the wall when I was drunk. I did teach myself to write, but I wish I'd made a better job of it!

Brian Wilson's chimp has learned how to semaphore. I can see him on the beach of McDonald Island. He says Brian wants to turn over a new leaf and is asking for drinking lesssons. He wants to know how you drink the thick black stuff (4.1%) instead of the sticky pink stuff (40% alcohol). Tricky one. I could be a help. I could show him. I have done it before. But there lies grief, sorrow, lamentations ... the suffering in this life. Fortunately, the choppy seas makes rowing across to the Unheard of Island problematical for the foreseeable. But I don't go back to work till Monday.

Adolf has put a photie of me on his blog. I think I might be twenty one years old. May you stay forever young!

It is clear enough to cycle round the volcano this afternoon. I'm got a date with Shiva today. We have to do 54 rounds of sun salutations, so that I will be too exhausted to get into any trouble till tomorrow.

7:00p.m.
Shiva and I only did 27 rounds of sun salutations. Half an hour. Quite good, but the next time on Sunday we will have to do the 54. After the salutations, we did some pranayama and I got off my face just sitting there on the squishy, sweatladen mat with the simmit hanging wet.

Some people might not know what a simmit is. It's a Scottish chastity garment especially when wringing wet.

Shiva is very good at hatha yoga, but does not get any bliss. I don't think he understood the point of meditating for a while. He is not a driven, obsessive. I'm looking forward to reading the rest of the journal of the samsaramom since she seems to be doing exactly the right thing. Go away without any sweeties and do your head in with hours and hours of it.

I got by all the tricky moments today and passed all the anxieties because of meditations I'd previously completed. It was working against appearances. I wanted to smile a lot anyway. I got the surrounding cloud of ra bliss on the bus this morning and I knew it was going to be alright. I'm looking forward to meditating over the next couple of days. Amn't I just! This is RaBlissBlog and I'm away up to my room for some of ra bliss!

11:50p.m.
Got paid today. No, yesterday. On the way home I bought a bottle of Herold beer, some kind of Bavarian black lager. I scooped this up and tried to see if it changed my thoughts. In fact, it did. I had some funny thoughts. Mainly about honesty and being nice to people and being happy. I think I should start getting drunk again. Breathe in, breathe out. Where is the tao? You probably have to make adjustments to stay in the flow. Two pints of Stella then one bottle of black lager. Like being on a secret holiday. Can't afford it; totally enjoyed it. Have to stop it. But how fortunate to have the pounds to buy it! And enjoy it. And then to ra bliss and tomorrow and not going to work, and the contemplation of the wonderments of existence.

A catholic nun spoke to me yesterday. I was reading a newspaper at breaktime. She said something which meant she was trying to communicate with me. I said what. She said the same thing again. She wasn't phased by the what. I didn't understand her again. After she tried again, I said whatever you say: Ok, yes, yes, yes. But she's a nun. I wonder what she thinks of God. I'd like to speak to some catholics about ra bliss. She's a nun. She'll know all about St Teresa. I wonder if she gets ra bliss. I must ask her. I might not be very good at communicating with people.

I'll do penance and try to read The Interior Castle again, by St Teresa. I only got to the bit at the beginning where it talked about the folk who were still on the outside drinking Black lager and fooling themselves.

It is great to be here. Allah Akbar!

Ra Yesterday

10p.m.
I looked at this note, which I'd forgotten I'd written, in my diary tonight. It was about this morning. 7:25. It was all about the wonderful bliss of the second meditation, the one just finished. I was quite surprised and pleased. The rest of the day was crap compared to that. I need more bliss. I need enough so that everything else cannot penetrate. Events might be allowed to bounce around on the perifery of the great impenetrable bliss. But just as appearances. Something amusing that could not penetrate your invulnerable... I need more of ra bliss that makes everything amusing, the big smiley bliss!

Samaramom is blogging about a retreat, quite a heavy duty one by the sounds of it. But she's meditating seven hours a day, so she's bound to hit ra bliss sometime surely if she keeps this up for a week! I can't remember how long it took for me to get down to ra bliss, but I must have done an awful lot of meditating before I got there. I can't remember why I liked it so much. It's far far better than drugs now, but there was a lot of going into the open prisons over Christmas and New Year and strange masochistic stuff like that. Yes! My knee was kind of dislocating after I'd been sitting in a really lousy lotus for ... ages and ages. Hours every day. Who knows why you do stuff? If you don't do it, you don't get ra bliss. I was doing yoga for four years before I could get into a lotus. The self generating smiliness is what you want really. To face the world with.

I must say the view here from the cave on the Unheard of Island is looking rather good. Nothing to complain about at all. Everything calm so far.

Ra Blogitis

The person who logs onto this blog most is me. My kid says I'm addicted. Not another thing to be addicted to! But it's time to get this blogitis into perspective. Why blog?

I thought it would be a good idea to make of record of my attempts at deity, guru yoga, etc., and to detail stuff about ra bliss and ra ecstasy. This is so that if I ever got anywhere with this, there might be a record for other people to look at. I wish I had a road map for this, but everywhere on this map there are just signs saying obscured by clouds, and here be dragons.

Also, I thought if I kept a blog about my attempts to get an agent, it would keep me persistent. And it has. I don't think I'd have sent out 200 plus emails to agents if I'd not had the bloggy incentive to keep trying.

As for the readers .... my blogs are too long and too like diary entries for folk to want to read much. There are about thirty to forty hits on it a day, but my assumption is that people are just passing by and not reading much. I don't really need readers. I've kept a diary/journal for over thirty years and no one has read that, including me. Of course, I'd like to get an agent and sell books, but I don't care if people read them or not. When people have told me before that they've read books by me, I'm usually embarrassed. I think that makes me a post-modernist.

So apart from the robots and Masai Warriors, Martians and people who only speak in clicks and raspberries, the people who look at my blog are Adolf, Brian Wilson, the sensei and sometimes maybe Michi Regier. Almost everyone else is like a hungry ghost. They may be there, but you'll never know, so just ignore them. Except the unseen make you too careful about what you write.

I don't set much store by this blog. I like typing, but the whole thing seems dead insecure to me. Blogger.com could just disappear into cyberspace at any moment. Yes, I'll need to cut back, diminish, withdraw a little and not spend so much time on this!

8:20p.m.
Just back from my allotment. God knows what I was getting neurotic about last week. This is RaBlissBlog and the best thing in this world is ra bliss! Just had a great meditation up the allotment on this beautiful sunny evening in Edinburgh. Also, seemed to be different elements involved so maybe progress again. How can I fail to have an amazing summer?

Got an email from Dr Alfredzo, who must be an anagram. He's a grade thirteen pupil somewhere so he's got more grades than me. He wanted me to answer some questions about Buddhism. I actually don't know much about buddhism. I only know about ra bliss, but I don't know what it is. I think I'll go back up to the allotment again.

11:03p.m
For someone giving up blogging .... just when ... the Blogpatrol boy says 28 visitors have been at this today. It forecast 37. It's never been over 30. What time zone is Blogpatrol on then? It's Tuesday in an hour. It's been a good Monday. I remembered today how I used to feel. I feel better now. A wee bit of improvement year by year. Slowly slowly catchee fishee, as the penguin said.

11:40 p.m.
Totally fabulous bliss. Something a wee bit different again. Very white and a lot of it! Pity it happens later at night. I have to go to bed now!

Rem Voodoo Dolls!

11:07a.m.
The meditations this morning were being ruined a bit by intrusive thoughts about work. This is Sunday morning. The last time I was at work was noon on Wednesday! Why am I letting this stupid little part time job bother me at all? I suppose it's because you want to do the right thing. Something karmically positive.

I think I blogged a couple of months ago about going to hell. Tibetan Buddhists have got all kinds of hells! It said in this book you might go to hell if you got siddhis before you lost your false sense of self. If we assume hell means a bad mental state, you can look at this as the Darth Vader syndrome.

Say there were things called siddhis i.e. yogic powers i.e. magic. At some point in the path to enlightenment some yogis are supposed to get these powers. There may be some rituals involved, but these powers must be motored by the power of thought i.e. if you can think things in a certain way, you can affect the material world.

If you haven't lost your false sense of self, some people you will not like. At what point can you affect people, not things, by directing certain kinds of thoughts at them? Your thoughts should be benificent, (they would be if you'd lost yourself a bit in the universal), but what if you did a voodoo doll thing. What if you made a drawing of someone and decided to go for their arm? I could easily do this this afternoon. I could gaze at such a drawing all afternoon. Actually, if I wanted to, I could do it all day. Directing malice at folk is not what a buddhist should be doing! But would it work? It would certainly be bad for me, but would it be bad for the object I'm directing the malice towards?

Milarepa is the granddaddy of the Six Dharmas. He killed twenty or thirty people before he started on this juju. I believe the stories. I think you could do this stuff at some point. To me, it's a matter of when and if you'd want to. It would definitely be better to have overloaded on compassion before you get near expertise in this stuff.

The novel I haven't been writing since Wednesday is going to end in a scenario something like this. I've only got a couple of pages left to finish the first draft. But I haven't been writing it since my mood has been a bit too preoccupied and I don't want to write about malice at this time. But loss of a false sense of self is the essential thing.

It's still a beautiful, sunny day. Brian Wilson and his chimp are rowing south, but stormy weather has hampered communications. If they get here this afternoon, we may cycle round the volcano and see if we can find Adolf for a boxing match. Me and the chimp will be in Brian's corner. Adolf will have to make do with some nazi penguins. We will have to agree some rules about the wearing of trusses and supports and also whether or not biting with the false teeth is allowed, but today some fun should be had by all!

8:35p.m.
Brian Wilson's rowing boat was sunk by penguins when they heard he was going to be Adolf's opponent. They remembered him from the last time he was in these parts. Fortunately, all those years of his life spent listening to the Beach Boys was not wasted and he and the chimp managed to surf onto McDonald Island. Here on he Unheard of Island I watched through my telescope. I decided just to cycle round the volcano on my own.

I bumped into Shiva as I cycled round a bend and we said hullo. Shiva is on a different path and has little chance of going mad, or going on fire, or anything interesting like that, but he certainly isn't a flatheid. I haven't seen him much recently since he practically lives in the Himalayas, but we used to spend a lot of time together. I said if everything is essentially void, why don't I get a Bulldog 44 like the sensei and just let them have it.

Shiva said the volcano is made of the same stuff as the sun, but not so hot. If the volcano explodes, everything all around will get it in the neck. We must take the volcano apart piece by piece. The sun is even hotter than the volcano, but it just heats folk up. Let's salute to the sun.

We did 54 rounds of sun salutations. That took an hour. After five minutes, I was sliding in the puddles of sweat. Love stuff like that. Just what the doctor ordered. A doing. A purging. Made a date to do it again on Wednesday afternoon. This might be auspicious.

Ra Sunny Day!

5:40p.m.
Adolf is getting ready for a boxing match. He's bulking up on wheat beer. God knows if there's going to be any left since six bottles were sitting on the lip of the cave last night. At last! A decent drink! The boxer he mentioned in his comment got beaten in England just a couple of weeks ago. Ricky Hatton, who beat him, fought at ten stone and went into his training camp at nearly thirteen stone. That's a loss of twenty kilo bags of sugar, just about.

Psychologically, things have been a bit tricky over the past few days, but are now much improved, maybe due to the wipe out of brain cells from the wheat beer extravaganza. Asceticism isn't really my bag. I tend to try too hard. Well, I'm not trying so hard now, am I? Still, go for a bit of the middle way this evening.

I haven't been down to the Samye Ling for about six weeks. It's starting to show! A few days on retreat right now would be absolutely wonderful!

The boy from Dunblane, which I visited yesterday, is winning the second set at Wimbledon just now on the telly. Nice to see Dunblane getting some good press after the awful things that happened there.

7:17p.m.
I spent the last hour meditating, having my eyes resting on this... accept the link doesn't work! Well, it does now. Does this boy look as if he's got ra bliss or what? The last time I spoke to him was a year past in February. He looks a bit like ... a buddha! He's my root guru. This is what makes me a very lucky man!

Adolf wants more visitors to his blog. I suspect he'd get more traffic if he posted more photies of women in lederhosen, but what do I know? Since Tuesday, I've had another 34 visitors and 181 hits. I'm sure some of my visitors must be from outer space. I bet they've got agents as well.

11.10p.m.
Just been having amazing amounts of ra bliss. When this juju works, there really is nothing like it. You can worry that maybe you're getting too sensitive and over-reacting to stuff, but there is always occasionally the neurotic wee concerns, and a dose of ra bliss like I've just had quite blows the doubts away. It seems wholly good.

Lovely evening here by the way. We went up to the allotment. You could hear Elton John playing at Easter Road which is probably four miles away.

Tomorrow is Sunday and Sunday is a great day for meditating! I could go up to the allotment and not do anything at all.

Ra Friday!

11:05p.m.
Sitting on the lip of the cave, looking a bit askance at the long evening ahead when a penguin without a flipperband waddled up the slope with a basket containing some bottles.
"What do you think of this?"
"It's crap!" I said.

The penguin looked hurt. You shouldn't be offensive just because you're tired and in a bad mood. I looked at the bottles in the basket a little more closely. Sneider Weisse, it said on the label. I bought two bottles though my finances are a little stretched just now.

So I drank the two bottles of wheat beer and my mood immediately lifted. Everything seemed a lot funnier. I had some interesting lateral thoughts about my false sense of self. My mind did sparkle a little.

You can try too hard. There's nothing the matter with a wee bit spontaneity.

I told myself it was cool to have two bottles of beer partly because I checked my weight and I'm now dead on eleven stone. Last year I drank three bottles of such as Sneider Weisse every night and went from eleven stone to twelve and a half. That's almost the weight of Jack Dempsey. I want to be ten ten at some time this year. Lean, mean, agile, mobile, hostile, except not hostile. Sugar Ray.

I've done maybe three hours today so far. Even two bottles of beer will affect in some way how you think next day. We're dealing in subtlety here. I want to be in the weird zone as fast as possible. There you have transcended, at least a little. You feel slightly like a different thing and the visuals are even slightly different. Then go heat. All the neuroses; all the stupid emotions clinging to the imaginings should be consumed then. Been getting little realisations of emptiness about stupid work thoughts this morning which is very nice. I've had a break. Time to go again. Oh yes! I slept like a log last night!

6:30p.m
Spent the afternoon in Dunblane and went for a walk in the countryside. Away from ra bliss, I decided I was meditating too much. You breathe in and sometimes you've got to breathe out. I'm going to try and enjoy myself and see people and have a laugh if possible. Time for a wee bit of a middle way. Tonight I might go out! Meditate on that first, I think.

Ra Thursday!

11:20 a.m.
Didn't eat much yesterday. Not much appetite at all. Hardly slept last night. Well, didn't get off to sleep till four anyway. Got up before eight. Feel fine now. What's going on? I don't know. I had a poor day at work yesterday, but that doesn't normally affect my appetite or sleep.

The meditations today have been very good. But I don't think my concentration has been up to making them superb. But with the vase breath there isn't hardly any juddering at all; a little pulsing and, of course, a wee bit of roaring in the ears. Spent most of the two and a bit hours just sitting quietly doing nothing

There has been over a hundred hits on this blog in the last two days. I wonder if there are just random robots or people maybe interested in ra bliss. One comment was from L (shortest anagram award!) who said they'd like to get some bliss. If you thought about it, you'd have to be a very strange person not to want to get some bliss.

The sensei and reverend has an exploding computer problem and can't blog much just now. He emailed me to let me know that he doesn't have fantasies about murdering people, which I and loads of my relatives have admitted to. Of course, the sensei might have had a kinder genetic inheritance and might not be descended from such murderous Irish basturns as my good self. He did mention that he lives near a mental hospital. I'd like a wee holiday in one of them sometime. Most of my chums have probably beaten me to it. This little fantasy is for the sensei. It's about getting to stay in the looney bin.

Just follow him out the door and engage him in conversation about what a wonderful thing Morris Dancing is and why isn't it in the Olympics, then trip and tumble. You'd have to pick the fat bastard up and throw him down from the next landing, then the one after that, of course. But if he was too heavy to pick up, you could just roll him , then jump on him, then roll him, jump on him, then just jump and jump and jump on him. You wouldn't want to tire yourself out because you'd need to go back for the big scissors to get his head off. Then you could just kick the head around in the football parks and wait for the men in the white coats to take you away.

I've just remembered! The sensei got me published in Rebel Inc with a nightmare I wrote down once. I think I might still have a bit of work to do on my mindstream.

Gone overcast outside. A day for ra bliss and forgetting about everything unpleasant!


5.00p.m.
The day has just got better and better. I went to the allotment and on the second meditation it started to work big time. No idea why it should happen then. Mid-afternoon. Then I went to the Botanics for a coffee and meditated there in the secret garden. Brilliant light and heat again. Funnily enough, there was a different feeling in the hut. Ra bliss isn't simple and whatever composes it changes so that sometimes you seem to be getting a slightly different (or very different !) sensation. Every difference I tend to think of as progress since the difference is generally more, not less. It usually feels like a development.

Sometimes on a day like today, you might have your doubts, but in the hut it was obvious that this juju is what I should be doing. And as much of it as I can do comfortably and even uncomfortably. There's nothing like raising inner heat. Be great if I ever manage to do this juju right! Must have meditated for over five hours today so far.

Ra Wednesday!

Finished work till Monday! And it's only Wednesday. I should have recovered from this two and a half day week by Friday. I need an angel to save me from having to work for a living. I don't mind ascending into unemployment. If I can't get an angel, an agent would do.

Anjali Pratrap blew out BUGTOWN, which was a pity. But at least she read some of it and was approachable. Also, she's with AP Watt who say they're the oldest, so they're probably quite big. She doesn't seem to have a huge client list at the moment, so if you were a writer with something to sell I'm sure she'd be a good one to go for. Actually, she seems like a very nice, sensitive person.

I need an agent for those kids books if I'm going to get to Sikkim or Bhutan, or even get to the pub again. The book I'm working on just now is almost at the end of the first draft, but it's been rejected by almost everyone already, even although no one has actually read it, including me. But you never know. I can get rejected a million times, but I only have to score once.

This might be a good day to buy a lottery ticket!


7:00p.m.

Lottery number is 10,21,29,30, 42, 44. If you'd like to buy this ticket for a million pounds, email me. It's a winner!

Just got another email from Anjali Pratap. She says she will read on. How weird! I don't envy her really. Doing the lunches and going to the parties would be alright, but not reading the damn books. I've only read one fiction book this year. It was The Curious Incident .... which I really liked. I was looking forward to reading Lovely Bones, which people have been raving about. As soon as I started reading, I thought this would be a treat, but then I realised this wee girl was going to be murdered and raped in the first couple of pages. I just couldn't go on! What a wimp! Can't watch drama because of folk shouting at each other, then .... I'll need to read books about goblins and such!

11:10p.m.
I didn't win the lottery after all! I'm shocked.

I feel fairly well recovered from my attempts at gainful employment over the past couple of days already. This augurs well. This morning I had a fantastic meditation, just like the one on Monday. Straight into deep, white light bliss. I can meditate all tomorrow morning. What a treat!

The penguins are calm and the view from the cave here on the Unheard of and McDonald Island is good. No incoming, but I feel I should go and speak to some people this weekend. Brian Wilson and his chimp are cycling up Ben Nevis as we speak. Eight people a year are killed on Ben Nevis, but none of them on bicycles. He says he'll row down here with some bikes and we could go cycling on Friday night. Hmmm? Whereabouts could you cycle to on Friday night?

Ra Marriage Bureau!

All kinds of things are going on in this blog that I don't know about. People are proposing marriage and all sorts down in Rose Caves. Thank god I'm far too old for any of that malarkey.

Anyway, Michi Regier has admitted that she quite liked Light in the Dark so that's nice as I'll have to have a look at it soon to make sure it's up for the battle of the books in August. "Enough to sit up and read it in one go." Can't say fairer than that!

Today I got a response from Curtis Brown, saying to send stuff to Ali Gunn. The response was from a Stephanie Thwaites. You wouldn't want to have a wisp with a name like wat. I got another response from a Chloe Benedictus at Blake Friedman so I sent them forty pages. I think Benedictus is a fabulous name. Adolf will probably try to marry her now and get her into the lederhosen photie book. A worse fate ...

Waste of time sending a novel with stuff about the 6 Dharmas of Naropa to flatheided agents. Still, too late to keep all this about ra bliss, ecstasy and ra rapture to myself now!

RaBlissBlog has now received over 500 visitors and over 1500 hits since the Blogpatrol thing as put on. I don't know how many of the hits were really "pings" and how many were robots or Masai warriors, but I've had bugger all success with agents and no one has left a comment saying they have had any experiences at all with ra bliss, or even any idea of what it could be.

Adolf has been hallucinating on one pint of the brew he has concocted. I saw a beer in Freemantle once called Iron Brew (yes!) which was 12 or 13%. I wanted to come back to the bar one night and watch people drinking that. Of course, now that I've given up having any money participation would have to be put off till I get paid anyway. How far away is Freemantle? Probably just a few thousand miles. Too far to swim. It might be time to challenge some penguins to a fight.

Ra Sunny Day!

Superb meditation first thing today. Might be a present for being good! That's two Monday morning meditations in a row that have been brilliant. Once I used to think that Monday would zing along as long as I had four hours meditation under my belt on Sunday. But this morning was right into steady, heavy white light bliss. Not much thinking there at all. Just being in ra bliss first thing. Most encouraging.

I sent out about ten to fifteen emails today. That's got to be 150-200 emails since the start of February and I think that's enough of that. I'll develope my tactics. Ze vill be sorry!

I reckoned if Anajali Pratap had emailed today, I might have stood a chance of getting an agent for Bugtown. If she'd emailed me today, she would have read it over the weekend. No email. It'll be sitting in a slush pile at AP WAtt waiting for the one eyed purple paper eater to lurch over and throw it in the bin. So pleased I didn't waste money posting it to them! Ha!

Ra Day of Rest!

2p.m.
The view from the cave here on Sunday afternoon is rather reassuring. Apparently, the Canadian army is due to arrive soon, but they won't find me if I don't lose the plot and go chasing after penguins asking for spare beer. Terrible thirst yesterday, but I managed to tough it out. Even here in the Unheard of and McDonald Islands we have temptation to overcome. Yes, we do.

A boy on the radio said the British Army swallowed 70 million amphetamine tablets during the second world war. So it wasn't just the kamakazi pilots. Amazing there's anybody left.

The sensei and reverend could use an appetite suppressant. Most people in Tennessee seem to be fat basturns. That must be why he moved there. Find some stranded fat people in the woods and then eat them. Once he get off the bed and gets the gun out ....

8:45pm.
I've not done much today. Meditated till I wrote a wee bit of my book at half three. Just after five I went to the allotment and did a wee bit of weeding between meditation sessions. I haven't seen anyone apart from family members since I finished work on Wednesday. This is the quiet life.

Very serene meditations in the allotment this evening. Great contentment. You have to not need anything else. No aggravating thoughts. Huge steady bliss.

With this juju working .... the bliss, heat, etc., ... I'm careful about what else might be going on. I've been getting a bit more sensitive than I used to be to other peoples bad times. This might have been going on for a while. I used to be interested in drama, but I got put off by the characters shouting at each other. I really don't like hearing about other people having a bad time. The sensei's story about no getting his dinner is a bummer. I always got my dinner. People put up with me very well. Usually, the only one being a basturn was me. I was the second youngest. There wasn't any bullying going on at all anyway. My elder brother goaded me and I threw a cup of boiling hot tea all over the front of his shirt. Didn't even think about it. Was only about eight. Bad tempered wee get.

I asked my daughter if she ever had uninvited fantasies about murdering people. She nodded. We're really bits of other people.

Ra Friday!

11:05 a.m.
So well was ra bliss working last night that I sat up against the wall instead of going under the duvet. All you really have to do is sit with a straight back and that's it. Hello, ra bliss. Or something at the start of ra bliss. Just sitting and you can feel something anyway. I can't get near describing ra bliss at the moment. Soon ....

I usually go to see my mother and my auntie Kathy on Fridays. But today they have gone out visiting someone else. This someone else is equally old and bits of her are falling off. Her family has gone away and she lives alone. She is dying of loneliness. Or grief, sorrow, lamentations ... suffering in this life. In fact, the usual flatheid. God preserve us from the flatheids.

Instead of sitting against the wall last night and getting into ra bliss, I did consider going out for a bottle of plonk and getting boohoo. My trouble is that I like everything. There really isn't much I've said no to. Temptation, hmmm?

AP Watt is a big agency, I think. I don't know if it's one of the six big killer agencies you have to be with, but I think it's at least dead old. I should have jumped at sending them three chapters. Maybe it was because I'd given up that ruse in my head before I got the contact, but I think I know if I get an agent all kinds of hassles will start. Do I need the incoming at the moment? I think not. End of break.

1:40p.m.
Further increase in everything before lunch. At one point I thought I almost had a bit of an emantation in a mandala. Of course, this doesn't seem to be working the way I was expecting. I thought you'd do the calm mind and gradually add bits. Like, start with the nose or whatever. But when you do the breaths and start going into the different zone, then it seems is when the deity yoga is appropriate. In the weird zone you've kind of transcended anyway.

Of course, if I was in a retreat situation with some Tibetan chums, I could just ask. I've never quite got the positioning right. When I was thirty, I was trying to re-write Alma Mater and I thought I should be a writer-in-permanence somewhere. Maybe an American college where I could just concentrate on the book. But I was doing a full time job, trying to write for radio, and training my body to a frazzle.

Asceticism is purity in the midst of impurity. I'm no very good at that. Thank God I'm in this cave up the side of a volcano and no down there with the penguins and the Pelican Peculiar!


11:10p.m.
Thank god for penguins! One breached the lip of the cave entrance and left three bottles of the Pelican Peculiar! There was a note. Slowlee slowlee catchee fishee, it said. But today was like no other for ra bliss.... ra bliss... ra bliss!

Rose Caves

Last night it occurred to me that I keep writing about caves. This might be a bit odd. The first short story I wrote was broadcast on Radio Scotland in the godslot one Sunday evening. How I laughed at that! I wrote it sometime after reading The Varieties of Religious Experience, a great book which had a big effect on me, but the contents of which now completely elude me. Must have been about caves.

In Light in the Dark, which Michi Regier actually read, has someone in a cave. The Real McCoy ,which is the book I enjoyed writing most, I think, has a boy in a cave. Here in the Unheard of and McDonald Islands, of course, I'm now esconced in .... a cave. If I make some money from writing (ha, ha, ha!) (which I will soon!), I'd like to go to Bhutan to see where Padmashambhava meditated. It's a cave!

The view from the cave today is superb. It's is overcast and drizzling. Nothing could be better. There is still three hours of digging to be done in the allotment .... but not in the rain. Instead, I should go for a run, but ... it's raining. I will have to write my book at some point today, but other than that, I'll just meditate.

With the great progress in the juju, I no longer have to worry. If anyone comes to see me, that's fine. If they want to row here and fight their way passed the nazi penguins, that's their business. I have an ongoing situation here and nothing is going to hold it back now. So today I'm cool. I can go with the flow. I don't have to go to work till Monday. It's just after noon on Thursday. It feels as if I must have done something right!

8:40 p.m.
There's a great photie of the sensei and reverend on his blog. The whole thing has a peaceful tone which will be down to the massive amounts of painkillers he must be taking. No grinning into the camera with the severed arm in one hand and the bulldog 44 in the other. He and Adolf, who apart from Masai warriors and robots and some mad anagrams, are the only people who regularly visit this site, both have sore backs and like green tea.

I got an email today from Anajali Pratap from AP Watt. She said she wasn't hassling me, but she hadn't got the book in the post. I was rather taken aback. An agent has never tried even the mildest of hassles with me. Usually, they immediately delete the emails and hope the RSPCA aren't on the way. Anyway, I had to send it as an attachment. I think all this means that she will at least read the first couple of pages. If she gets to the castle, we're sound. Only one agent has ever agreed to look at this book. Rosemary Canter office had it and rejected it. It had taken me about a year to get anyone in the business to read it and after Rosemary Canter didn't want it, I gave up. For a bit.

I went for a run today in the drizzle, or less than the drizzle. The word might sound like smir, but I can't spell it. I did my six mile run which I haven't done for weeks and weeks; not since I had to dig the allotment. I felt really good. It was odd. There was none of the anxiety you'd expect. About being sore, tired, not liking it, etc. It was brilliant. Getting rid of anxiety is the name of the game. Calm people aren't anxious.

Now that I feel ironclad, that the juju will happen whatever and I shouldn't be anxious about the flatheids coming to see me, there's no one in sight. Just me and the penguins far below goosestepping along the shoreline. Allah Akbar!

10:30 p.m.
Ra bliss, ra bliss. It's a wee while since I mentioned how pleasureable ra bliss can be. There is no apparent end to how blissful ra bliss can be. Tonight ra bliss was right up there and better than anything else has ever been. This is RaBlissBlog and tonight there was more bliss than ever before. It's not like ice cream. You can't get too much of ra bliss. You might get as much of ra bliss as you can take. What a fortunate creature I am! So are all of you, except you might not meditate and probably have no idea about ra bliss at all. Hotboy

Ra Light in the Dark!

Just found out that Michi Regier has read Light in the Dark! That's really amazing. Nobody has read The Buddha and the Big Bad Wolf and Light in the Dark. The latter is one of the books that will go into this wee competition against two of Rosemary Canter's books, but I think I'll have to re-write bits of it first. But fancy someone reading two of the books on that site. That's made putting it up worth it really.

The comment on the previous post is from her. She doesn't say anything about the book, but she seems to have got through it. You're supposed to be twelve, but that's really cheered me up anyway. She refused to become my agent after reading The Buddha and the Big Bad Wolf, but maybe she'll change her mind. Two books, eh? I wonder if she knows Sean Connery. Sean Connery for the sage!! A handsome two hundred year old guy. Got to be Sean Connery.

I emailed both Anjali Patrap and Martina Devris today. About their contact yesterday. Anjali Patrap got back to me. She has a section in the AP Watt site. At least one of her current writers is into kidbooks. She should email Michi and ask what she thought of Light in the Dark. I wonder why she picked that one?

I came to the machine to blog about ra bliss! The progress is a wee bit amazing really. I was sitting tonight in ra bliss and wondered (you can do that after you've been meditating for a while!) if this bliss was astonishing. I got some bliss down at the Samye Ling once and thought (for you can think as well at this stage of the game. When you first start meditating, one stray thought and it's gone!) this is astonishing! I think that was last year. Was it as good as astonishing? More or less the same, but I wasn't astonished because I'm more used to it now.

But some bits of that meditation (about six p.m. to seven) were astonishing. This inner heat tummo stuff is really taking off this week. Is this a sudden acceleration? Will it stop? Who knows. A couple of times this week it's started off deeply, deeply blissful almost from the word go. Also, the heat thing is working.

On Hogmanay, I felt as if something had changed when meditating a few hours before the bells. Sometimes it feels as if you're hitting bliss blocks and disappearing them so that you're in another part almost. That was a heat thing, as I remember. I told people I'd be able to dry stuff off this year. Well, I won't, but .... I wish somebody else would tell me about ra bliss as well. Folk from buddhist blogs have been hitting this site. Nae bliss, eh?

One of the reasons I got ra bliss in the first place is because I tried hard. I still try hard. Apart from that .... almost everyone else has led a more saintly life. I'm not kidding. If you don't get any of ra bliss yet, try hard and you're bound to get some. HotboyMadyamikaSurfingtheOceansofBliss

Ris Great Bliss!

I slept in today which is very unusual. I blame it on The Lou Reed Special Brew, but it gave me a rare opportunity to go outside and get to work without meditating first. I could remember being a flatheid! It's crap being a flatheid. You don't go around with any special delight in emanating into the wonderful day or anything. You're trying to manage.

Speaking of flatheids, Dora has emailed me to say that she has successfully rowed round the world and is now back in Ayrshire. If she sticks with the meditation sessions she's started, in about five years time .... we can start a hotboy and hotgirl club! Maybe sooner. Of course, I did say this to my pairbond about ten years ago. If you do this, within five years you will certainly have access to ra bliss. I wouldn't mind if it wasn't for the five year you have to wait, she says. So ten years later, she hasn't done it and of course knows bog all about ra bliss. Where has the time gone when she could have been meditating? Did she achieve anything else by not meditating, apart from getting older. I'm afraid not. Time spent meditating is not wasted. It's like putting money in the bank. It pays dividends.

Of course, you have to feel compassion and sympathy for flatheids because if you were that dumb yourself .... it's a shame you can't just give it to them. Most of them are much nicer than me. A lot of them are much cleverer. Nice, clever stupid people.

The only other way to become enlightened is to read BOMBER, available free from my webpage. From reading this you will inadvertently learn how to make a remote controlled explosive device. Once you have brought this to Edinburgh for the G8 summit in a couple of weeks, you can almost guarantee twenty years in jail. Get into solitary and refuse to come out until you can levitate! Actually, if someone read it and thought it was crap, I wouldn't have to read it myself.

It takes a lot of effort at first, but if you start meditating after a wee while you'll probably fall in love with it. Or it's not for you. As someone into experiential mysticism and who only really and truly believes in the illusory nature of reality, why I am getting so much of ra bliss is open to question. In the last year or so the progress has really been something else. Today on the bus to work, I had just to close my eyes and a few seconds later the bliss is there and in huge dollops. I have to thank my connections with the Samye Ling for most of this. I have to thank somebody. I don't think I can take the credit. Bad boys get bliss too!

Rem Other Agents!

Had two very nice responses to my emails yesterday. First of all, Anjali Pratap of AP Watt got back to me and said she'd been to the site. So that was good. She tried to download Bugtown and failed, so that was bad. I sent her it today. This means that Anjali Pratap is really looking for clients and is quite smart. The most obvious book on that site to sell would seem like Bugtown to me (apart from the children's book market being improbable), so if you're looking for an agent, I'd try her for sure.

She's got a degree in French and English and seems to be Scottish.

I got another very nice email from Martina Dervis. She's part of Imrie Dervis and I've already had good connections with Robin Jones there. They say they're small and only receive a hundred submissions a week, so getting passed their slush pile should be a piece of cake!

Both of these very nice people asked me to send three chapters, but I can't be bothered. They'd just come back. I want someone to have read a page or two anyway. I'm fussy, I am.

Rat New Feeling!

When everything goes full on and all aspects exceed their previous boundaries, it's as if you've entered completely new territory. The elements have created something else. A new feeling. Not often you can think you might have felt something new. First thing today was a wonderment.

I still don't think I'm near the first of the four blisses yet, but even getting blotto with Poisonous and being a bit naughty last night hasn't slowed it down. I'm not really truly in control of this juju. You can nudge and guide, but it's not your thing.

Sometimes I think wonderful things are going to happen with this juju, but they're happening all the time.

Dora Bryan had rowed from Ayrshire to the Unheard of and McDonald Islands to tell me she's started meditating a wee bit. That's just brilliant. But in order to complete this fantastic rowing feat she was fortified with yon potion concocted for the kamakazi: the Lou Reed Special Brew. I could recommend this to anyone wishing to dive bomb other people and also those who wish to practise their yoga nidra for hours at a time without the slightest chance of falling asleep.

The sensei and reverend has got a sore back. He's got this hillbilly smack stuff to stifle the screams. What he needs now is a bottle of Jack Daniels. What a great country that sounds like! Down the Jack Daniels and take aim with the bulldog 44. Bang! Bang! The sound of freedom. People from Scotland shouldn't be allowed to buy guns and whisky and smack.

I sent off another twenty odd emails to literary agents today. That's got to be maybe one hundred and fifty emails sent to literary agents since about the start of February. The only agents who got back to me were obviously the poor starving ones. I think there might be little mileage left in this ruse and I might change tack. I think I might try to sell Bomber. This means I'll have to read it again. Then I might not bother.

Watching Dora row off into the sunset on her way back to Ayrshire, I tried to remember what it was like to start meditating. Then teaching yourself to sit till you were sore and getting bog all bliss. Not even knowing there was any of ra bliss to get. But what a wonderful time you have if you just stick with it! For this is RaBlissBlog and I'm really interested in surfing the oceans of bliss!

Ra High Noon!

12:03p.m.
It's a shame sometimes to get tired and have to go to bed when ra bliss and ra heat are working so well. Last night was wonderful at times. Then you've got to get out your bed and start to crank it up again. I was great between ten and eleven this morning, but I'd been at it for a couple of hours before that.

I'm supposed to be writing my book, the current one. I hope to finish the first draft of this by the end of this month. Then I can spend the next six weeks getting one of my kidbooks up to scratch for the book fight with two of Rosemary Canter's books in August. But I have to have a first draft of the new book by the end of this month. This book has, of course, been rejected by over a hundred of our wonderful book agents already. I should have covered almost everyone who is anyone by the end of the next two weeks.

There was an item on the radio about blogging this morning. It said there was a dairy farmer in America who has 24,000 milking men and women checking out his blog every day. Strange world.

The view from the cave today looks calm and clear. One of the penguins wearing a nazi flipperband left a note saying: Go Home White Boy! just at the lip of the cave entrance. Apart from that, they seem quite friendly. Dora Bryan represents the only in-coming. I can see her paddling like fury for the shore as I blog. Must write my book before all my time goes.

Rat Saturday Still!

6:35p.m

Fabulous meditations in the allotment this afternoon! Don't know why. I was up Inverleith Park at a tree hugging festival of some kind. Wood in evidence anyway. Afterwards the Domestic Bliss was doing some weeding and I sat in the hut. Sometimes you just want to sit and shoot the odd breath. But it was truly brilliant. When you stop though, it's a wee bit like changing planets.

The blogpatrol counter was set up on May 7th. There have been 403 visitors and 1172 hits since then. The webpage with the books on it has been hit 140 times since it was set up near the start of February. It gets a hit every other day normally, but there was more hits this week than usual. I can't believe it, but Beef McDuck's review of Ancient Futures might have sent folk to the site. Four hits on one day. When I pretended there were photies of women with large bosoms to be had there, nobody hit the site that day. That might mean something, but I'm not sure what.

Caves are traditional. Jesus Christ is supposed to have fasted for 40 days and nights in the desert. He did this impossible thing to show joes like me that he was a yogi. But he probably sat in a cave sometimes. St Antony sat in a cave for 40 years. Mohammed used to go and sit in a cave for a month a year. The Buddha sat in a cave. Caves are where you are supposed to go and sit. Beef McDuck asked me about the cave in the Unheard of and McDonald Islands and that's why I'd be better off sitting there.

Instead of rushing down to the beach at the first opportunity, whooping it up with the penguins and downing the Pelican Peculiar! I'm still not over that yet. Still, none of that nonsense this evening!

Rat Saturday

One o clock p.m.

Done very little besides meditate today so far. Tried to encourage myself by thinking about the amount of progress I've made recently with this juju. Just over a year ago I had some time off my work (ten weeks!) and spent most of it in my allotment, meditating for most of the day. During this time I managed to connect breathing and bliss. I cannot connect them all the time, but a connection was evident then. That means that after the outbreath, there is a rising of ra bliss, or an expansion thereof.

This morning there is far, far deeper experiences of ra bliss and when I do any vase breathing, and somehow I don't do it that often, heat seems to be there. There has been a vast development in this regard. Last night, I was very blissed and warm. But it is a different kind, or kinds, of bliss. There is a different mental zone being entered. It is much easier to pretend to be a deity in this zone.

It is not even a year since I took my first formal empowerment.

I need encouragement today because I am still a bit pissed off about hitting the beer on Thursday. I do not feel my relationship with anything else other than the juju is much good just now. Nobody else is on this trip. Would I rather be them? What an amusing idea!

Michi Regier has a guide to Aikido on her webpage. I read this last night and found it fascinating.
There's a place in Colorado you can go to where some Japanese guy will hit you with sticks, let you stay in a room, and work in his restaurant. Brian Wilson is far too old to live there, but getting hit with big sticks would do him the world of good. I'd run away if he took his false teeth out beforehand.

Mood is tricky to control. Concentration lapses and sometimes it is hard not to do all the things that brought you pleasure sometimes before. But when you get knocked down, you can usually get up again. You have to keep making an effort. You don't want to be a flatheid. You really don't.

Ra Review of Ancient Futures

Having your relatives reviewing your books is probably best. Beef McDuck says of Ancient Futures: the story is an "engaging one with some lively dialogue, some interesting characters and with a smattering of moderate sex and violence thrown in here and there also. The plot also has some neat and unexpected twists, which I will not divulge here for fear of ruining others enjoyment of the tale. I would recommend Ancient Futures as good holiday/travel/beach/poolside reading or perhaps (as I found) as a good way to while away a shift on a quiet day at work." So there it is!

I have no recollection of writing the last post. This is maybe not a good sign. Still, it was worth it yesterday to discover from Poisonous that all the miserable basturns are really okay and have always been miserable basturns. It was all my fault for becoming cheerful. Still, purification and accumulation is the name of the game and I'll have to boot up my resolve to stay away from places of entertainment where alcoholic beverages are on sale. Thank God they're banning smoking in pubs!

Ra Cave Still!

Here we are gazing out. We are preoccupied with out own wee selves. We are trying to lose our sense of self, but this is very tricky. A bit of a conundrum. We have incoming! Poisonous has explained everything. As usual. Nobody gets ra bliss, and nobody can be bothered. There is no point in talking about ra bliss to flatheids because they will never get ra bliss. Flatheids are flatheids. Also, none of my deep dear friends are having a bad time. They are alright. You do not need to concern yourself with them. They are sometimes quite cheerful. This is better than screaming. Screaming from them might not happen. So, what have we gained from forcing ourselves out to see our deep dear friends? Everything as usual. Four beers and two cigarettes.

Also, Beef McDuck, who has the same molecules as me, actually read Ancient Futures. I could have told him all kinds of things about what it meant to me. The treachery of women, for instance, and all that boy stuff. But he managed to read it and he is the only person other than me and two other people who have read it, and it is not going to make you ill. However, it is still complete shite. Or art. They may be similar.

I am going to stop being the problem to myself. We should all go away and sit in the hills of Scotchland and sit quietly doing nothing, and there has to be an end.

The sun still shines. Sometimes despite ra bliss ...

Ra Unheard of and McDonald Islands

When I sat up this morning for my first meditation, this lovely little blossom of bliss opened up in my head. I'd just got to the bit when I say, "I take refuge in the ..." and there it was, ra bliss. Someday maybe that will a great balloon of liquid light and I'll think: dat's da first bliss!!

Beef McDuck, one of my many nephews, has been reading Ancient Futures. He says this blog is entertaining and also tedious. He says Ancient Futures is a "parable of environmental exploitation and modern geopolitics". So it is. He says it is entertaining and enjoyable.

The egor who deals with the slush pile at Annette Green sent back the package almost before it had arrived. None of this waiting around for months with these boys. Waste of money. Be better to make them read a page first to make sure that they could actually read before you send them anything. They might be a front for some kind of illegal immigrant scam. Maybe I should grass them to the immigration people.

The view from the cave here in the Unheard of and McDonalds is fabulous. Some penguins seem to have climbed the slope with provisions and a video link to the outside world. The only bleak spot is that the Poisonous has been hissing down it about killing and eating his bosses. This is what happens when the flatheids get into bother with their jobs, or their domestic arrangements, or they get hit by a bus. They haven't even got a wee bit of bliss to go back to. Grief, sorrow, lamentations .... even here you cannot get away from them.

I abandoned the Thomas Merton book half way through, but will go back to it. It's Thoughts in Solitude. Nowhere so far has there been one single mention of ra bliss!! I had a look at Readings on the Six Dharmas again and realised I know absolutely nothing about them. However, this will not stop me practising them. Anyone who knows anything about Catholics and ra bliss and I'd be pleased to hear from them!

Yesterday was the best I've felt about finishing work for the week. I can see the barrels of Pelican Peculiar on the beach and the penguins has started whooping it up and it's only ten thirty a.m. Lord preserve us from the flatheids!

Ra Cave at Last!

This cave is much better than being sent to jail and put into solitary confinement. Same idea in some ways, but here you get the views. What a beautiful outlook! How bracing the air! The only people I have to worry about are those dressed for the office down there on the beach. I suspect they may be clones of Adolf. Dressed like that for the beach, they must be into heavy duty toilet training for children, that's all I can say! Zey vill be toilet trained zis instant!

I'm going to read Thoughts in Solitude by Thomas Merton. I fear it may be a disappointment (I should have got the other one!), but I was assured somewhat when he started going on about the Desert Fathers. They also wanted to be alone. If things get too busy for me here, I may go off to the Nullabor Plain which is in the middle of Australia and definitely a spot where you might get some peace and quiet.

Alexandra David-Neil, who should be read by everyone, says that the inner heat juju is supposed to culminate in the joe's inside temperature matching the outside, kind of. Like, if it gets really cold, you get hot. When it grows cool, so do you. Right now, with the volcano at my back, I should be okay until this system developes.

No telly, no beer, nothing illegal, and no people! What bliss!!!

Rat Monday!

Required a bit of snorkelling to avoid the welcoming party, but the Unheard of and McDonald Islands look like a good spot for a bit of meditating to me. Everyone on the beach is dressed for the office and some of the penguins are going around with swastika flipperbands, but I've found a cave half way up the volcano and have settled in nicely nicely.

The sensei and reverend has been blogging about Jaan Kaplinski. I haven't a clue who Jaan Kaplinski is, but he's probably got a killer agent and is filthy rich by this time. Know the sensei and get rich. It's my only hope. An abiding memory of that time (early 90s) is of waiting to speak to the sensei after he's done a reading in Riddles Court in Edinburgh's High Street during the Festival. I had my kid with me and she was only four, so I couldn't take her into the reading. The sensei was doing a reading with Irvine Welsh and the language was just going to be atrocious for your usual four year old. The sensei and Irvine Welsh were quite pally at the time and Irvine came out of the venue first. He was waiting for his girlfriend, standing by the wall. I knew they'd got the usual crowd of two old men and a dog and I thought I'd go over and say hullo. The sensei had offered to introduce me to Irvine Welsh a couple of times before, but I thought from what the boy was reading about that he might just be into junk. Anyway, I felt quite sorry for him standing there on his ownio and I was just going to go across and say hullo when his girlfriend arrived stage right and I didn't bother. Two years later and the boy's a millionaire. Selling out the Assembly Rooms. You just never can tell.

Back on the wagon this evening. If I point my telescope down to the beach, I can see the penguins goose stepping around and squaffing down the Pelican Peculiar. If it wasn't for ra bliss....

Ra Viking Helmet!

I phoned Brian Wilson yesterday and invited him to go to a pub where he could imbibe on the pink, sticky stuff, chew pig's faces in public and even at any time take out his false teeth and put them on top of the bar. He said he was going to church with the chimp. You can't rely on anyone.

I mention this because I am not a saintly person. I am not holy. I do not know what holy is. Occasionally, (since I am descended from a long line of murderous Scots Irish bastards) I want to don the Viking Helmet and rush around in the mental mayhem of all day drinking.

As I said before, if I can get ra bliss anybody can.

This is why the fifty something flatheids, also known as my deep dear friends, are such a pain. All you have to do is sit with the straight back and say Susquehanna to yourself. That's all I did at first. But it is evident that since they have not done any of this, they will never get ra bliss or ra ecstasy. They have wasted their entire lives. They have missed the point of existence. Which is to be happy. Or happier. Or get into non-self, emptiness and be able to dive into ra bliss at a moment's notice.

I blame it all on the severe Protestant toilet training meted out to them in those 2.4 families with no one in them. This has left the poor flatheids with iffy parental relationships, a fantastic sense of smell and a complete and utter inability for stop walking around without having their heads stuck up their arses!

This is RaBlissBlog and I'd like to say something about ra bliss! Last night I went to St Mary's Cathedral to listen to some classical music. This is the sort of thing that might happen if you've lost your Viking helmet. The view in there was fantastic. Miles away there was an alterpiece with Jesus Christ on the cross. A huge cross was hanging from the ceiling. The seats were extremely good for sitting in a half lotus and nobody noticing. Cue the music and cue the bliss. Because of the music and sometimes clapping, I was able to take the odd vase breath. I want to go back! I want to go back!

Further developments in ra bliss! Then, as Schubert's giving it laldy with the Mass in G, it's as if you're moving into new territory. Ra bliss has turned some kind of corner. Everything has expanded. The envelope, or sheath, which is sometime in front of your face, neck and chest, just went ooowwff, out there, and is now in front of your legs and knees as well. The heat or warmth is going everywhere. You're in that odd zone you sometimes go to after the exhalation, and it is comfortable to be there now. And kind of tingly. And then it seems as if you know that soon all the blisses before ... the astonishing bliss, the extraordinarily amazing bliss ... were mere childs play and now we are entering the realms of bliss beyond your wildest imaginings.

On the other hand, I might phone up Poisonous today and see if he'll go to a bar. Just after noon here and the day is but a pup! HotboyMadyamikaS.O.B.

3:40p.m. Brian Wilson has agreed to come to the pub in his motor. This means he will not drink. Vengeance is mine! He'll have to shut up and listen to me ranting about ra bliss for hours. Yippee!! I've been meditating all day since the last blog. Straight from the oceans of bliss into ra piss!!
8:45p.m.
Where would we be without our deep, dear friends? Sometimes when ra bliss seems to be taking us outwith the normal range, we can ask our deep dear friends for help. How wonderful it is to have even one deep, dear friend! After five or six pints of the black stuff, I closed my eyes and realised there was no point in talking to flatheids about ra bliss. They are never going to get any of ra bliss. I have decided then to go an live with the penguins who are still alive on the Unheard of and McDonald Islands and hope when I am there that the penguins will understand about ra bliss, at least more than all these flatheids do in civilisation. I'm leavin on a jet plane, don't know whem I'll be back again .... Hotboy

Ra Exceptional Bliss!

11:45a.m. This has already been a wonderful day. The trouble with blogging about ra bliss is that there isn't enough words for it. It is impossible to describe ra bliss to anyone who has not had an analagous experience. Even then there's still not enough words. But this is RaBlissBlog and I'd like to blog about ra bliss!

I started meditating (20 years ago!) because of insomnia. How things change! I can hardly keep my eyes open after ten o clock these days. But last night the other people who live here were out and I started meditating about ten. What an exceptional meditation! How can there be even more bliss, further reaches of ra bliss, and great extensions on how much bliss there has been experienced before? But it seems as if ra bliss has innumberable facets to wonder at. Like, would, sir, like a little bit added to ra bliss? A little heat perhaps? How about going into another zone where you might feel very wonderfully weird and transcended and then get whacked by some really weird and wonderful bliss?

Then the door opens and someone comes in and switches on the telly and asked you how you are getting on? What can you say? They've heard it all before. There are no more words. I've just been getting even more bliss.

The greviously mentally ill, also known as flatheids, Evolutionary Tales, and Those Prehensiles, are, I have to remember, the people without whom I could not become enlightened. At this particular juncture it would probably be better not to have them in my head, but they know where I live. The men are the worst. Women I like and never did understand. Flatheided men in their fifties? Fung sake! No bliss awaits them. It's grief, sorrow, lamentations ... suffering in this life for these boys. Sometimes you don't want a ringside seat. It's a brutalisation and not a contest. You want to watch from between your fingers.

Brian Wilson's chimp says he wants to play at goolf on Sunday. I have too much to do. He says he will carry all the clubs, take me there, bring me back. I've told him I could be levitating by Sunday the way ra bliss is going and would not be able to hit the ball unless I could make that levitate simultaneously.

De Quincey, (Confessions of an Opium Eater) stayed once in Lasswade, near Edinburgh. He looked forward to four o clock in the winter. The housekeeper went away. It got dark. He closed the curtains and had a big bowl of laudanum sitting on the table. No visitors. No nobody. Let it rain, let it rain, let it rain!

Rem Gurus!

The blogpatrol counter was put on this blog on the 7th May. It's now the 2nd of June. That's 26 days. In that time according to Blogpatrol, this blog has had 301 visitors and just over 900 hits. That seems like an awfu lot of robots and Masai warriors to me. Either the counter is lying or there are a lot of folk out there with bugger all to do.

It's break time. After eleven on Thursday. I don't have to go to work till Monday. I went to see two people yesterday afternoon and that's my social duties done. I had an email from Brian Wilson's chimp asking me if I'd play goolf. But it's pissing down.

The chimp says if he can't be my agent, he'd like to be my first devotee once I can get the thing that doesn't exist from the bottom of my spine to the top. I told the chimp to fung off, even although he can now speak twelve languages and go a skateboard. People drooling and dribbling after gurus give this juju a bad name.

If you can't get it from yourself, where will you go for it?

Paramanhansa Yogananda said if your guru can't go instantly breathless he's no use to you.

Time's up. Back to ra bliss. The blocks to the breathing exercises seem to have (temporarily) disappeared. I can raise heat whenever I sit now. Here come the days of the blootering bliss and I'm not even at the Samye. Tempis fugit. Let it rain!

Annette Green replied to my email of the start of the week. One out of about twenty. Told me to send in three chapters. Since I'm bound to win the book fight with Rosemary Canter's books, I could end up filthy rich after all. But Annette Green won't do children's books. I sent her the start of BOMBER and the one I'm working on this afternoon. Bomber has a great start: "Speed kills, Sweik muttered ..." Unfortunately, you have to have been without sleep and out of your face for at least three straight days to undertand the rest of the chapter! If it wasn't flatheids, it'd be straights!

7:40p.m. I didn't send Annette Green Bomber after all. She got the start of the one I'm working on just now and the start of The Buddha and the Big Bad Wolf.
Then I got an email from Robin Wade telling me to follow the website stuff and that they were always looking. I have a warm feeling about Robin Wade. Must be because he's called Robin, Batman's wee pal.

There's gurus and there's gurus. You might need someone to teach you something. You might need a role model of some kind, maybe just to show you what can be done. All that's okay. If you could find someone who could instantaneously stop breathing, then you should probably listen to what they have to say because there certainly aren't a lot of joes like that going around.

For the juju I'd like to do you need a guru. This guru should have at least realised mahamudra, or emptiness. This is no small achievement, but the guy doesn't have to be able to go instantly breathless or be able to levitate, or such like. The Tibetans seem to rely on their lineages. However, you do need to have devotion for your guru. They say it won't work if you haven't got that.

Why should this be like this? Why do you have to feel devotion for someone you don't really know? I don't know. The Dalai Lama showed up in a dream I had once at the Samye Ling when I'd been wondering about this and how this might relate to the bonking gurus and whatnot. I assume if you need it, you just develope it. It started meditating while looking at a photie of Lama Yeshe after this, and I have developed as much devotion as I can.

If you think the boy's a buddha, you get the blessings of a buddha. If you think the boy's a Brian Wilson, you get the blessings of a Brian Wilson.

But I do think the boy's a buddha. I think he should be able to straightforwardly and non-conceptually become absorbed in the clear light mind and stick with it without regressing. I assume that's what he learned to do during 12 years in retreat. That's what I'm trying to develope devotion to. Maybe the ideal.

Us Scottish people aren't very good at devotion. We're all Jock Tamson's bairns here. The grovelling and dribbling and drooling after some joe is not really what I'm into. That might be more of a trip for girls. No wonder they get bonked!

Lama Yeshe doesn't want to see me unless I've got a problem. I've only spoken to him about twice in the last year or so, and only then when Teresa asked me to go and see him.

Having said that, we smile at each other a lot. In my head. I think he's my root guru and will get me out of samsara if I can try well and hard enough. But he doesn't seem to want me to grovel around the place. What kind of arsehole would want folk to act like that?