Ra New Beginning!
10:50a.m.
I feel so bloody positive just now.
Really had a good time last night. My Uncle Peter showed up at the Cask and Barrel on his own, without his partner, the Lonesome Cowboy Bill. Peter is simply an effortlessly pleasant joe. You've got to take your hat off to this guy. One of the few who made an interesting life in an interesting and hard game, book publishing. I had three beers; two pints of eighty shilling and one Landlord.
Shiva lives in the neighbourhood and I dropped in on him. Shiva started telling me how much he liked Shiva, the Indian God I'd called him after in this blog. He doesn't read this blog. But there he is going on about Shiva. What he really liked was the dope smoking Shiva who hung around the Ganges not doing very much.
I'm going to enjoy some wonderful meditations today. At some point I'll start the re-write of the novel. The curtains are closed in here because of the scaffolding outside. I've got the noise blockers on. This is RaBlissBlog! Here comes ra bliss!
1:40p.m.
I don't deserve to have the meditations going so well today. Really top class. The vase breathing is stretching my mind right into the zone. The whole perceptual business does go a bit wonky: I'm gazing on the sticker of the Kalachakra Mandala and when you've done the breath, it doesn't look the same any more! Is this the way the visions lie? Bet you it is!
It's a fine day. I'm going up to my hut. I may go to the Botanic Gardens to read my book on Generation Stage Deity Yoga. I mean, what a life!
Seeing my uncle Peter last night has reminded me that you don't have to meditate for years on end to be a good person. But it is better to meditate because it makes you happier more often, even if you don't get ra bliss. But I do get bliss and tons of it! I'm just going off for some more.
Calming is everything. Don't have calming; don't have fung all.
I read the first draft of the new novel; some twenty thousand words short. Right now, it just looks like a big effort. So is everything. Slowly, slowly, catchee monkey.
As part of the purification and accummulation: I did my benchmark training session, sort of. Someone once asks me what I was training for. Just training. I've added the first bit to an old, old routine. So, dress up. Teeshirt, jumper, binliner, jumper, ski hat. Old bandages with some blood still there and the rotten old mitts, after the skipping. Five minutes of sun salutations. Then five minutes of skipping. Then six sessions of two minutes long of shadowboxing.
Bud Schulberg talks about the potential beauty of shadow boxing routines in The Harder They Fall. Never seen it expressed elsewhere. Six twos is the benchmark. It tells me how unfit I am.
Didn't feel too smart on the last two rounds, but happy enough after the riot of the last couple of weeks.
Then I couldn't resist. Had three bottles of Premier Cru (6% alc per vol.) and ...
Felt excellent. Still feel excellent. From about five till about eight I didn't. Not enough calming. You have to know that nothing can condition your happiness. That's what I think calming should do.
People spend time on their blogs, and try hard with them. This is really not much more than rabbiting. I'll really have to spend time thinking about sentences if I'm going to write this new, and probably never to be published, novel. But I'll keep blogging about ra bliss. Unless I get the black spot (Robert Louis Stevenson. Blind Pugh. Treasure Island. Scottish) pretty soon, something might happen with ra bliss. Something wonderful. If it does, inexpressible as it may be, it will be noted in some way here. So today I've been trying.
The best bit of the day was wakening up. For years and years I hated the first part of the day. Gie's a fag! A cup of coffee! Don't talk to me, you bastards.
I can't do the mandala, the sticker on the back of the old diary. But when I'm lying in bed first thing, it's much easier somehow. You die as you go to sleep, and emanate into your dreams. You die in your dreams (hey, where did the black bit go?), and arise as a diety in the waking state. Something about deity yoga.
The lying feeling good in the bed and trying to visualise yourself on the mandala is wonderful. You have a bit of ra bliss anyway. And the image of yourself stretched out. Then you try to lie yourself on the mandala, as an offering maybe. Or just lying there.
Flatheids don't get ra bliss. If you don't meditate, you might as well say you enjoy going about with your head stuck up your arse. Something about being a flatheid.
I feel so bloody positive just now.
Really had a good time last night. My Uncle Peter showed up at the Cask and Barrel on his own, without his partner, the Lonesome Cowboy Bill. Peter is simply an effortlessly pleasant joe. You've got to take your hat off to this guy. One of the few who made an interesting life in an interesting and hard game, book publishing. I had three beers; two pints of eighty shilling and one Landlord.
Shiva lives in the neighbourhood and I dropped in on him. Shiva started telling me how much he liked Shiva, the Indian God I'd called him after in this blog. He doesn't read this blog. But there he is going on about Shiva. What he really liked was the dope smoking Shiva who hung around the Ganges not doing very much.
I'm going to enjoy some wonderful meditations today. At some point I'll start the re-write of the novel. The curtains are closed in here because of the scaffolding outside. I've got the noise blockers on. This is RaBlissBlog! Here comes ra bliss!
1:40p.m.
I don't deserve to have the meditations going so well today. Really top class. The vase breathing is stretching my mind right into the zone. The whole perceptual business does go a bit wonky: I'm gazing on the sticker of the Kalachakra Mandala and when you've done the breath, it doesn't look the same any more! Is this the way the visions lie? Bet you it is!
It's a fine day. I'm going up to my hut. I may go to the Botanic Gardens to read my book on Generation Stage Deity Yoga. I mean, what a life!
Seeing my uncle Peter last night has reminded me that you don't have to meditate for years on end to be a good person. But it is better to meditate because it makes you happier more often, even if you don't get ra bliss. But I do get bliss and tons of it! I'm just going off for some more.
Calming is everything. Don't have calming; don't have fung all.
I read the first draft of the new novel; some twenty thousand words short. Right now, it just looks like a big effort. So is everything. Slowly, slowly, catchee monkey.
As part of the purification and accummulation: I did my benchmark training session, sort of. Someone once asks me what I was training for. Just training. I've added the first bit to an old, old routine. So, dress up. Teeshirt, jumper, binliner, jumper, ski hat. Old bandages with some blood still there and the rotten old mitts, after the skipping. Five minutes of sun salutations. Then five minutes of skipping. Then six sessions of two minutes long of shadowboxing.
Bud Schulberg talks about the potential beauty of shadow boxing routines in The Harder They Fall. Never seen it expressed elsewhere. Six twos is the benchmark. It tells me how unfit I am.
Didn't feel too smart on the last two rounds, but happy enough after the riot of the last couple of weeks.
Then I couldn't resist. Had three bottles of Premier Cru (6% alc per vol.) and ...
Felt excellent. Still feel excellent. From about five till about eight I didn't. Not enough calming. You have to know that nothing can condition your happiness. That's what I think calming should do.
People spend time on their blogs, and try hard with them. This is really not much more than rabbiting. I'll really have to spend time thinking about sentences if I'm going to write this new, and probably never to be published, novel. But I'll keep blogging about ra bliss. Unless I get the black spot (Robert Louis Stevenson. Blind Pugh. Treasure Island. Scottish) pretty soon, something might happen with ra bliss. Something wonderful. If it does, inexpressible as it may be, it will be noted in some way here. So today I've been trying.
The best bit of the day was wakening up. For years and years I hated the first part of the day. Gie's a fag! A cup of coffee! Don't talk to me, you bastards.
I can't do the mandala, the sticker on the back of the old diary. But when I'm lying in bed first thing, it's much easier somehow. You die as you go to sleep, and emanate into your dreams. You die in your dreams (hey, where did the black bit go?), and arise as a diety in the waking state. Something about deity yoga.
The lying feeling good in the bed and trying to visualise yourself on the mandala is wonderful. You have a bit of ra bliss anyway. And the image of yourself stretched out. Then you try to lie yourself on the mandala, as an offering maybe. Or just lying there.
Flatheids don't get ra bliss. If you don't meditate, you might as well say you enjoy going about with your head stuck up your arse. Something about being a flatheid.
posted by Hotboy at 10:50 AM
9 Comments:
What's Landlord? Will it do the same job on my bliss levels?
Landlord is a real ale sold in the Cask and Barrel. (4.3%)
Have you got any bliss levels?
good point.
About the question of my bliss levels. You and I simply have different strategies for managing the bliss. It's the same as with the beer levels.
- I like to stretch out my consumption, so I have one low-alco beer every day, and never get guttered (or hung over).
- You like to get blitzed, then you go on the wagon.
It's the same with bliss.
- I coast along reasonably happily with an unexciting background level of bliss that some call 'contentment'.
- You're into attaining the heights and by implication depths.
But over a year the total quantity of bliss is about the same. Once again, everything balances out, thanks to Taoism. I hope this helps.
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Adolf! Ra bliss is ra bliss. If you don't get ra bliss... it is inconceivavble, like LSD if you haven't ever dropped any. Vajrayana juju is incomparable.Also, it isn't bi-polar. It doesn't have a down side that I can see, apart from the world being full of flatheids! I hope this helps.Hotboy
Hotboy. I already have the downside (the flatheids). My decades of Taoist training tell me that ergo, I also have the upside. Q.e.d.
Happy to help
I hope this helps: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/treasure/book/chars/char2.htm
I'm more of a Ben Gunn myself - he was marooned on the island for three years, like me stuck here. He manages to spend all his money in three days, and I've managed not to spend any money in 3 years. He becomes a porter for the rest of his life, and I'm about to start a brew of porter.
Post a Comment
<< Home