Ra Samye Day 2

3:20 p.m.
So the name of the game is to get rid of your false sense of self.

Suffering is caused by desire (or actions and delusions) based on ignorance of your own true self.

This is RaBlissBlog! We're trying to get out of the suffering. Grief, sorrow, lamentations ... suffering in this life. You've got to take a bit of a spanking, but thank God I'm not a complete flatheid. Flatheids think things external to themselves will make them happy. That makes me laugh!

My chum Poisonous sneers at happiness. That, at least, demands a wee bit of respect!

The next bit is useless to flatheids. It's what I'm trying to do in deity yoga and is not authoratitive by a long chalk. Couple of books and reading between the lines.

Calming comes first. If you can't do calming .... your head will always be flat. Adolf thinks he knows about being calm. Try this Adolf. Count your breaths. If a thought arises, go back to one. How long would it take to get to ten? The book I read said it would take eighteen months for a beginner to get to two!

So you start with being dead. You've stopped breathing anyway. You go through the process that breaks down your individual mind as the supports collapse. It goes mirage (I do the lama here. You should do Christ if you're a Christian. You should do your dog, Adolf, because that's the only unconditional love you're liable to get), smoky clouds, blue with sparks, flickering candlelight. Then there's a white flash, a red flash, then total blackness. Clear light mind checks and hold it there.

Turn into a blue tube and place the four symbols in the tube. The red (triangle will do) one is at your navel, the blue one at your chest, the red one at your throat (the reds point up, the others down!) and the white one right in the middle of your brain.

Shrink the blue tube from either side and add a red one to the right and a white one to the left. These connect with the red symbol at your navel, from the bottom.

Then go deity. You're in the middle of a mandala. (You can become your dog here, Adolf!). A deity looking just like you is hovering over the edge of the mandala. The mandala represents everything. You offer it to the deity hovering, realising its voidness.

Get the deity over your head and into a white line. Bring it down. It's a light being full of compassion. ( In a way, it might be compassion). You're a primordial buddha here.

Dissolve the deity and the mandala and return to being the blue tube. See the navel symbol and give it laldy with the vase breathing. Collect the four blisses.

Dissolve the tube and the symbols until your are the blue symbol at the heart centre. Dissolve that from the top and bottom until there is nothing.

I think that should be primordial awareness ... non-dual ... non-dichotomous ... and very, very nice.

If your mind was properly calmed, you should be able to move from image to image, etc., without being interupted by other thoughts.

If you can do this, you are a better man than I am, Gunga Din!

That'll be ten percent off the top, please!

All this is done in bliss from the word go!

The bliss has gone ballistic today. And this is only the second day. I haven't settled in or settled down yet.

I slept badly last night due to the midgies, but I've worked out how to deal with that tonight.

Got up in time to hear the boys from the Sherab Ling do the morning chants and gong bashings. Blew me away. When you can do ra bliss and have few thoughts arising, these boys just blow your brains out!

Had breakfast and managed to sit through the hour's meditation with the lama from eight. I kept falling sleep for seconds as I sat there. Falling into wee dreams and out of them.

I said in a previous post about "lucid" dreams. I meant vivid dreams. As the sensei and reverend pointed out, lucid dreams are ones when you know you're dreaming. That's how you do dream yoga. It's the same as the deity yoga mentioned above except you go into the dream state from the clear light mind, I think.

I did have a lucid dream once. I was in Whitby. I'd had a nice visit there before en famille. Dracula also visited Whitby once. I kept going up to foll in the street and saying: This is a dream, isn't it. No, they said, this is Whitby. One of the few vivid colourful dreams when I've had a good time! Roll on, says I!

Went and slept in the tent for two hours after the meditation with the lama. Vivid dreams again. I was with Brian Wilson. He went into a chinese restaurant and these two guys in great big chainsaw machines came down the road after me, but what a doing I gave them! Very self affirming. Bruce Willis eat your heart out!

This machine is the first one I've used on broadband. What a difference!

Every meditation is starting off now in mega bliss. Close your eyes, Adolf! What do you get? That's because you're a flatheid. Not my fault!

This has cost me £2, so I may not be back!! It doesn't promote calmness, I don't think! But I'm not talking to anyone else, Jack!