Ra End of Ra Day!

Wednesday 6:20 p.m.
I had to read my new novel today. I mulled it over and decided to read it in Bert's Bar, although these days I am a complete teatotaller. After four pints of IPA, I came home. Well, what's the verdict? Hmmm. It's not really a novel. I got a novel published nine years ago, but that wasn't really a novel either. Anyway, I've got to correct three or four wee things and that's about all.

I don't remember the last novel I got published having any good paragraphs in it. But it was written in the first person. I think this novel has one good paragraph in it and it's also written in the first person. Progress. The first novel I got published was written in the third person and it had seven good paragraphs in it.

The bits about ra bliss sang true to me in this latest novel. That's maybe what counts. The last novel I got published nine years ago had true stuff about my interest in boxing. All the stuff in Alma Mater about the university course I was on is true.

I suppose I should sit and wait and re-write it again. But I probably won't. It's a book about ra bliss and about walking away from samsara. I suppose it's a bit of a rant about education as well. If anybody wants to have a look, email me through my webpage and I'll send you a copy.

I much enjoyed reading samsaramom's latest post. With a name like Heather, she must a be counted as one of the fortunate people, which is to say Scottish. She's been away meditating for a week. How I wish I could do that right now! You've got to want to make the effort. There's something very Scottish about that!

11:35 p.m.
Yes, making the effort! I've only written the book twice. The great thing today was that I read it right through for the first time and didn't get annoyed. Getting annoyed is a sign of my "spiritual" immaturity. So I really have to be cold with it and have a good think, and re-write it. And re-write it. And re-write it.

Why bother? Well, some Joe or Josephine might try to read it and it would be better for them if the words were perfectly paced.

I read books by St Teresa and she's a crap writer. No, she isn't.

And I'm not St Teresa!

There's no hurry. I'd like the sensei and reverend to read it in its current state because he is my brother in arms, and my dharma brother, and he's a writer and understands this shit. I maybe should ask for his advice on this. Any body else ... well, I don't read books, so why should you?

Ra Book!

Sunday 3:46 p.m.

I've just finished my novel! Well, not completely done with it yet. I'll have to re-read it, correct it, tweek it, etc., but it's basically finished. I feel curiously contented, resolved, satisfied. It'll never get published, but that doesn't matter. It's mine. All my own work. Nobody else could have written this book. It's mine, all mine! Yes, yes, yes!!!!!!!!!

Rat Urn to Berlin

Saturday 7:14 p.m.
Hello, Jack the Spam Robot, the Martians, Masai Warriors and the castratee penguin fiddling pervert who regularly visit this blog!

Surf's up! With my Narcissistic Personality Disorder buoyed by tsunamis of the ra bliss over the last few days, I have decided that now is the time of announce the formation of my new church, which I've decided to call the Amazing Bloggy Church of the Bad Boy Blissheid. To join up all you have to subscribe to are these three lines:

We embrace our ignorance.
We don't believe in any things.
Especially thoughts.

Then there's the tenpercent off the top, of course!

It has to be now because I have heard from my spies that Adolf is set to return to Berlin from the Unheard of Island. Already on the beach a Hercules transport aeroplane is being loaded up with crates of mutant psycho-penguins, all with wee moustaches, and all chanting One Reich, One Yoke!

I now announce the first fatwa as head of the ABCBBB! It's not going to land in Berlin now, Adolf! It's straight into the drink in the middle of the vast Pacific Ocean!

Did someone mention a drink there? Hmmmm.


The fatwa is because Adolf promised this poor extremely no well woman, who'd repeatedly cured his screaming neck pain, that he'd meditate for her and he's done bugger all meditating for her! Can you believe it? What a spanking in the hot, cold and occasional hells he's going to take for that! If you think spending a few eons as a bad smell in the worst toilet in the Milky Way was bad after the last Reich, you aint seen nothing yet, Adolf! You'll be trying to blog from the other side while demons are sticking hot pokers up your bottom before you know it!

Get into ra bliss, flatheids! Get into ra bliss!

Ra Best of Possible Worlds!

Saturday 4:26 p.m.
Hello, flatheids! What a fortunate creature you are to land on RaBlissBlog! Here you can learn about the incomparably wonderful Vajrayana, the juju of jujus ... about ra bliss, the vase breathing and how to stop going around with your head stuck up your backside! What joy to be able to do ra bliss!

Although I am completely teatotal these days, I felt so knackered last night that I had to imbibe five bottles of Russian or Polish lager for purely medicinal purposes. Very nice indeed and coming in at 5.6%. Because of this, I did not start meditating today till noon. I meditated straight through from noon till just before four, sitting here in my room, facing the photie of the great buddha, Lama Yeshe Losal! During the breaks to ease the legs, I did Tai Chi and stood on my head. Oh, ra bliss, ra bliss, ra bliss!

Oh, I have been in ra bliss, Jack! I have been in ra bliss! And what about ra heat? Yes, Jack, I have been in ra heat! If you traced my family tree all the way back to pond life, I'm sure that no individuals have ever been as fortunate as moi. This is because I meditate, Jack, and because the great kagyu masters have come to Scotland!

In the best of possible worlds ..... I finish my book and it sells enough so that I can give pots of money to my daughter and to the Samye Ling ... and have enough left so that when my auld maw passes away, I can give up work and take to the hut full time to practise this wonderful, wonderful juju.

17:31 p.m.
What a wonderful day I've had! I went back to the meditation seat when something dodgy seemed to be happening with the blogosphere .... It was ecstasy, Jack. Simple as that. Come over the the bright side, Jack! Come on over!

If there are no sentient beings, there are no flatheids, that's for sure! Becoming a wave on the great ocean of consciousness is the way to go! There is a lot of crap in my wave because I am a bad boy, but there's tons of ra bliss because I meditate. Yes, there is! All that's coming from your wave, Jack, is screaming terror as the dark night closes in! What will it be like when your dead, Jack? What will it be like when you're dying? Are you going to say, Oh no! I'm dying! I'm dying! I'm laughing at that, Jack! What a fool you are! Still, bugger all to do with me.

Tonight my mother in law is celebrating her 21st birthday, which she's been doing for the past 67 years. Before the flatheids come and drag me away from ra bliss ... well, I'm going back to do some meditating, amn't I? Physical bliss and mental ecstasy here we come!

Ra Visit to Bellshill

Thursday 5:50 p.m.
Since I don't get paid till tomorrow, I walked up to Haymarket Station thinking I'd put the ticket to Bellshill on the credit card. I'd forgotten the number and walked back home again. I got the train eventually from Waverley Station. Dearie me!

But it was a sunny day. My maw sat out on a bench against the wall in her back garden. I sat in a half lotus on the tarmacadam path. Quite relaxed, I didn't say anything for a moment or two. My maw started singing The Fields of Athenry. I closed my eyes and started immediately doing ra bliss. My mother even at 87 years old has a very nice singing voice. A tear came to my eye as I thought of how nice it was to sit out there with my auld maw, and how these days do not last forever.

She sang another song and the sounds of the singing attracted a guy from two gardens away who came and stood in the next door neighbour's garden. My auntie Kathy gave him a cup of coffee, as he stood looking through the slats of the big fence they have there now, and he told her that he was taking 30 pills a day for a considerable catalogue of diseases. He hadn't his teeth in and shook a bit. I stood on my head in the back garden and did a tai chi set as my maw sang some more. The guy's wife died when he she was 43. It turns out the guy was 51, four years younger than me. I engaged him in conversation, embarrassed that my first inclination was to ignore him. He asked me which team I supported. We all know what that means in the west. Bellshill often does my head in. It's not like here.

A joe I knew a long time ago turned up at my mother's house just before I left last week. This joe was called Joe. He told my maw after I left that a workmate during slack time one shift had given him a book to read with a strong recommendation that it was worth reading. It was Are You Boys Cyclists? Small world!

Rem Thieving Swine!

Wednesday 7:21 p.m.
There was a big sign on the gates into the allotment when I got there about four o clock today. It began in bold letters with something like: TO THE PERSON WHO'S BEEN STEALING FROM MY ALLOTMENT, and went on to say that they'd been spotted and something they'd dropped during the thieving had been handed into the polis. What drama among the allotmenteers! We're talking about folk stealing stuff like turnips here. I wish someone would come and steal my turnips as I've got far to many even if I make nothing but turnip soup for the next month. Long term readers of this blog (hello, Jack!) will remember me complaining that the evil bourgeois were stealing my dirt, or the plants must grow from sooking up the earth, which still sounds logical to me.

Allotmenteering makes frontiersmen of us all! The west wasn't won with a licensed gun! Just remember that you thieving, fung, basturn swinehunts! Put your paws on my apples and you'll be pushing up turnips next year!

We have a wee apple bush on our allotment. As a boy, I stole apples from folk's gardens. Sometimes we had to run away, but I did not think it was a sin, or I would not have done it. Today I tentatively bit into one of the apples on our wee bush and it tasted .... very nice! Such a surprise. For the last two years they've been sour. So I'm going to make apple stew to go with the delicious soup (the current pot is beige coloured but very nice indeed!) and the home made bread. What a fortunate creature I am!

23:33 p.m.
Twenty years ago, me and Brian Wilson and Capn Jambo used to run up Clermiston Road. This is a big, big hill, the biggest hill you could find on the ten mile round trip we used to take on a Sunday morning run. Today I cycled down in on the nazi bike. I've never been on a bike and gone faster.

I'm the urban spaceman, baby, I've got speed. I've got everything I need.

I'm on the Epilogue of this draft of my new novel. Some of it is about ra bliss! I'm going to use this stuff, which you can get at by sticking Benson, Harvard, Tummo into google. He's the scientist who did the measurements on the juju I'm practising. Here's how it goes:

"The researchers also made measurements on practitioners of other forms of advanced meditation in Sikkim, India. They were astonished to find that these monks could lower their metabolism by 64 percent. "It was an astounding, breathtaking [no pun intended] result," Benson exclaims.

To put that decrease in perspective, metabolism, or oxygen consumption, drops only 10-15 percent in sleep and about 17 percent during simple meditation.

But you cannot measure ra bliss! I'm going to read some more of the Kite Runner in bed! So it's over and out from RaBlissBlog!

Thursday 9:40 a.m.
Just before going to Bellshill. I've been meditating this morning from about quarter past seven. Slightly irritated that I'm going to spend so much of the next few days of my so-called free time with flatheids.

I'll try to remember that flatheids arise as appearance and emptiness, waves on the great big ocean of consciousness. Just like moi. You are not what you think you are. Things just look that way. It's just a view. So stop feeling irritated and that wee bit resentful. If the flatheids are going around with their heads stuck up their backsides are are too dumb to meditate, well, that can't be my fault, Jack. So I'm not going to let it bother me! I'm not! I'm not! They're lucky to be flatheids. They could we wasps, or slugs, or monkeys!

Rem Odd Landings!

Monday 5:00 p.m.
The difference between just now and the start of my holidays as far as ra bliss is concerned is quite marked and obvious. Meditating this morning before going to work ... whoa!... I become more fortunate with every passing week. Now that I'm completely teatotal, apart from when I have a beer or two, I expect progress to gallop along.

Somebody landed on the bloggy looking for orange people. I clickied back to find a reference on a Celtic website to John Doyle, who was a good friend of mine at school. He died when he was about thirty from electrocution during DIY. That definitely confirmed me in my handlessness as regards fixing anything!

I heard he'd died in a news flash on the telly one evening after I'd been awake for a few days in a row. (Yes, I was a bad boy!). Sitting on my own when this message comes out the telly. How weird is that!

One of the best sporting moments of my life was watching the telly round at Shiva's one night when John (known as Johnny to the fans!) headed in a goal against Real Madrid at Parkhead. If that wasn't a childhood dream come true, I don't know what is! He headed the ball, and he never headed the ball, from nearly the eighteen yard line. What a wonderful thing to witness!

I got an email from someone who must have landed on my blog looking for references to Hugh Collins, now the wonderful Scottish writer. He was commiserating about my dead brother who used to lock him up. This bloggy malarkey is great, so it is!

Ra Lonesome Cowboy Bill!

Sunday 1:40 p.m.
There has been yet another qualititative change in ra bliss! Great globules arise as I sit here. Whatever is supposed to happen with this juju seems to be happening. It would be amazing and wonderful if I got a shot at the primordial awareness ( which I'm assured is non-dichotimous, non-dualistic and very, very nice!) just as I come to the end of this draft of the book ... since it has quite a lot in it about ra bliss!

I got a phone call telling me Bill Campbell, who set up Mainstream Publishing with my uncle Peter, was on Radio Scotland. How the memories flooded back as I listened to him! It was Bill who decided to publish City Whitelight twenty years ago, for which I have to be eternally grateful. I take my hat off to both these joes. They set up a publishing business, they made pots of money, and they did good. What more can you ask for? I haven't spoken to Bill for over a decade. I bet he's as grey as a rat by this time! Really excellent people!

Rem Smokey People!

Saturday 11:19 a.m.
Brian Wilson has invited me to cruise the bars of this wonderful festival city this afternoon, but since I'm teatotal I had to ask him to desist. Also, I'm broke till I get paid next Friday. Spontaneously doing the same thing last year was one of the highlights of the festival for me. Were you allowed to smoke in pubs last year? I can't remember. Yes, you must have been. Changed days!

It's all gone too far! You can't smoke on stage, which is just plain stupid. In Petrol Jesus Nightmare, one of the actors rolled a joint and pretended to smoke it and pass it on. I mean, it's a bit silly if he has to puff on it and can't light it. The boy playing Winston Churchill had the same problem. It's just stupid. Busted was a play I wrote about the cannabis laws. A version of it toured and I re-wrote it for the fringe. Apart from Dario Fo, I still haven't seen anything funnier on a stage. Anyway, the actors were smoking dope throughout, or supposed to be!

I re-wrote it for the fringe when I was still in Australia, where I spent a year housewiving in 1990. I remember thinking that all my problems were solved. I thought I had totally cracked it. Tom Stoppard became Tom Stoppard through getting a play done on the fringe. I was so happy with the version I wrote in Australia I thought the same thing would happen to me! I'm going to be rich! I'm going to be rich! Of course, I didn't take any money from the company who performed it on a profit share basis and never made a penny from it. If you performed it today, you'd get busted for the tobacco smoke. How ironic!

1:21 p.m.
Hello, Jack the spam robot, the Masai Warriors, Martians and any other flatheids who do not meditate and will never get ra bliss!! This is RaBlissBlog, here to tell you poor, sad flatheided basturns all about ra bliss! I've meditated today for about three hours and each one was better than the last. In between I did a tai chi set. Feel the power! Tai Chi sets in combination with meditations are a different kettle of fish. I can't explain ra bliss. I cannot demonstrate it. I cannot show it to you. I'm afraid you're just a non-meditating, sad basturn, Jack!

Are you scared of dying, Jack. Today I laugh at all that! Tis a good day to die! I'm shortly going cycling with the Poisonous, which is actually quite safe since there's a better chance of the Himalayas going flat than Poisonous offering to buy you a pint!

00:10 a.m.
As we cycled the cyclepaths in this wonderful city this afternoon .... the cyclepaths are like an alternative cityscape provided by old railway lines. It's like cruising in the countryside of ex-railway lines. You're not in the city really, but still going through it.

Three hours meditation this morning and then the Poisonous and the cycling. Then a different thing was happening in the meditations early evening. Just a difference of quality which I could not ever describe to you, Jack, because you don't meditate and are like a ... unable person to descibe ra bliss to. Anyway, a subtle difference occurred. Yes, it did!

Because she doesn't seem to have as much on these days, the domestic bliss and I were out tonight ... just walking around the festival city. You should live here. I've really grown to love this place in my old age. But I can take it or leave it. I could have sat in the hut instead. But what better place is there at this time of the year than Edinburgh? I suppose it is so good because people try hard to make it like that. Well, my thanks to you! It was great walking around the city this evening!

00:45 a.m.
Just about to turn in. I'd like to say hullo to the joe from Fort Wayne, Indiana, who silently shows up on the stats. Also, to whoever you are from Valencia in Spain, a silent partner for ages. If I promise to stop drinking, will you promise to start meditating?

Ra Early Morning!

Friday Morning. 00:45 a.m.
Close the eyes. It's like a slightly throbbing of ra bliss globule, out the front like a circle stretching down to your chest. (Let's do some real time blissblogging! I'll try it touch typing and it'll end up in Bulgarian!)

There is a little noise, but not a roaring yet. Ra bliss lifts and stretches and pulls your face into a rictus grin. After sitting for a little while curiously satisfied in a clear bright globule of ra bliss. ...Do a breath. There seems little obstruction to the after effects of the vase breathing. It just soars. I'll try a big one this time.... too blissed to be buggered trying to describe this. Everything has expanded and deepened again. And I'm hardly even trying.

I think sobriety has a lot to answer for here! I'll finish this blogging and get back to sitting up in bed, doing ra bliss, which is what I was doing. Describing ra bliss is way beyond me.

What a great day I had today! Meditated in the flat this morning then at the allotment. Came home with a cabbage, tatties and some turnips. Made the bread and soup, then wrote for three hours. Then evening I went round to Shiva's to get some more time on the nazi bike.

Shiva said Realism by Anthony Neilson got a great review in the Guardian. Well deserved really! They screwed up the end though. They didn't give the actors a curtain call. That just gave the audience an uneasy feeling to go home with. But it was wonderful picaresque piece of theatre really.

I've only got the last chapter to work on and then this draft of my novel will be finished. The last book I got published was written in about four months from start to finish. This book is no bigger and has taken me over two years already. I was working part time then as well, but not meditating for so many hours a day. "Are you boys cyclists?" was laugh to write though!

While I was looking around for the hard copy of my novel, I found the first three chapters of the book by the sensei and reverend. I emailed the agent Robert Dudley and he agreed to have a look at the beginning. And he said he'd accept it by email, so I forwarded his reply to the sensei, who seems to have not starved to death yet!

Rose Happy Days!

Wednesday 13:52 p.m.
Sometimes this morning I felt so happy that I wouldn't be at my work this afternoon! I try to gauge how I feel as a pointer to the rest of the week when I get home on a Wednesday. Happy, happy days are here again!!

I'm away to my allotment on this sunny Wednesday afternoon and I will concentrate on feeling wonderful!

5:12 p.m.
I went to the Botanic Gardens instead since it was so sunny. I sat under a tree which had a label on it saying: Tilia Plattphylis, I think. After meditating till my legs were stiff, I lay down on the grass and fell asleep. I just love catnapping like that. Anyway, I noticed the leaves on the tree were not all that dissimilar to two leaves I have nearby just now. These are souvenirs Shiva brought me from Bodhi Gaya, from the clone of the original Bo tree, under which the Buddha became enlightened. I've no idea what a Bo or Bodhi tree looks like.

Under the Bo tree
Joy without passion
Love without desire
Radiant light.
Something else from the wall.

And now to do some work on my book!

11:18 p.m.
The free ticket fairy took me to the Lyceum tonight to see a play called Realism. I've seen the playwright. He had a play on at the same time as me at the Traverse Theatre about 1989, but the rehearsal schedule kept us apart, and we never spoke when we were in the same room anyway. That's weird. I never speak to people I should even if I want to. I've got the networking demolition syndrome. I think one time I thought it was being cool.

The lead in the play was Stuart McQuarrie who was brilliant. I'm a fan of Stuart McQuarrie's. He appears very natural. The words seem to be his. He was very good in the play and the character he played was called Stuart McQuarrie. How weird is that? Maybe it's something to do with the title, but it's still naff. But it was a good night in the theatre. I thought at the time that it might have a wee problem with dramatic shape, but the more I think about it the better I like it. Some bits were very good and the production was superb really. The Lyceum is a really nice theatre; quite plush and not too big.

Stuart McQuarrie was in a play I had on at the Traverse the year before I had on the second one at the same time as the Realism playwright ... Anthony Neilson! That's his name. One neuron left! So I saw Stuart McQuarrie in rehearsals. A playwright called Stuart Hepburn had a play on at the same time, but I can't remember the name of his play. No neurons left. Stuart McQuarrie was superb in it. A real treat to watch. The play was much better than mine as well. C'est la vie!

I wrote about eight plays in ten years and then stopped. What was all that about?

No work till Monday. Thank you, God! Thank you!

Ra Second Day Back!

Tuesday 8:45 p.m.
I told someone at a thingy for librarians today that I had a web page with a couple of kids' books on it. She said she'd have a look. I forgot to ask her to be my agent. I must be losing heart.

Anyway, I got a message from geocities which I cannot understand. The page has been getting about 10 to 14 hits a week recently. God only knows how! But I suspect most of them are spam robots or martians because they only stay on the site for zero seconds. I mean, that's not long: no seconds at all. This is the message I got from geocities. Does anyone know what it means?

It said: We're writing to notify you that your Yahoo! GeoCities free web site http://www.geocities.com/madyamika2000 was unavailable to visitors 4 time(s) in the past 90 days because your site exceeded its bandwidth limit.

Bandwidth, or data transfer, is a measure of the amount of information that your web site visitors view and download. Your free GeoCities web site comes with a healthy 3GB of monthly bandwidth, which is measured each hour. Whenever you exceed that limit, your site becomes unavailable for up to one hour.

A novel on that webpage probably comes in about 500 k. Whatever that means! Some are under three hundred.

It says it has a 4.2 MB limit per hour downloading on the site.



Even although I'm in the middle of writing one, (well, at the end really!) I've decided I can't really like novels. I almost never read them anyway. But I'm going to try and read one as part of my new turning over of the new leaf. It's called The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. Bet I don't finish it!

Only one motorist lost the rag at me today. Motorists don't seem to like driving much, not with me around anyway!

Ra First Day Back!

Monday 11:00 p.m.
Work is a bit weird if you haven't been there for six weeks, but I've only get to get the noon on Wednesday to be free again!

I've been on the new nazi bike four times (including driving it home from the shop!) and I think I've freaked out about four car drivers. There's a big roundabout at PC World in Costorphine. You should have seen the face of the woman who found herself almost driving into me. Quite aghast! I never wore a helmet for a bike before. Invulnerability. I think I should have a camera in the hat to take photies of the my fellow gobsmacked road users.

I have to drive the bike home from the International Bar on Saturday. This was the first time I'd tried the U shaped new security thing, not a chain. Anyway, I've managed to lose the keys. The beginning of the end, eh? I don't feel right with a swanky looking bike. It's bound to get stolen.

Despite suffering from complete mental and physical exhaustion from a whole day at work, I had to get off the couch and go the a tartan benefit for the Waverley Trust down the Pleasance. Great show. Mike McShane was hosting it and he was fabulous in an adaptation of Ubu Roi last year, I think. Two of the comics (Rod Gilbert and Jason Byrne) were particularly brilliant. It was a great show last year as well.

I'll have to go to work tomorrow as well. Two days in a row at work? Are they taking the michael, or what?

Ra End of the Holidays!

Sunday 4:35 p.m.
This is the last day of my six week long holiday, so how did it go? Well, I didn't write much of my book, and I've been a bit of a slob for the past week or so, but meditations have gone wonderfully, which is the main thing. I don't have to do much more than close my eyes these days and ra bliss is there. Sometimes just lately I've checked my breathing and it's been very light and subtle.

As long as that's working, what more could a body ask for?

The weather has been remarkably good for Scotland while I've been off work. This has given me some enduring memories of sitting under trees meditating in the Botanic Gardens.

So I could easily count my blessings! I've got a good job and I couldn't ask for a better job share partner. Since the kiddo left the nest last year, me and the Domestic Bliss are getting along very well. No one I know has been given the black spot recently. In fact, I am indeed the most fortunate of fortunate creatures!

Ra Blissiestistness!

Friday 6:03 p.m.
I got to the allotment this afternoon at half one. I asked an fellow allotmenteer what the time was as I was leaving: 5:45 p.m.

What an amount of ra bliss there was in between! Straight into bright, thoughtless, blissy bliss bliss. No, I haven't wasted the last six weeks! Shoot a breath into that and you lose arms, legs, all kinds of definition.

I did the first sitting just outside the hut door, a spot where it's actually quite hard to see me. Then I spent the next three hours in the hut. What a fantastic afternoon!

I was keen to get some bliss in because the McDucks are coming round for their dinner this evening. Hand out the do-it-yourself lobotomisers! Well, you just can't keep some flatheids away. If anyone would like to jump into the open grave before I do, be my guest!

Ra absence of ra bliss!

Thursday 9:21 p.m.
This weekend will be the last of my six week holidays. I haven't mentioned much about ra bliss for a while. This is partly because everyone I know is a flatheid and I wouldn't want them to think I was gloating. Well, I can get ra bliss and they're still walking around with their heads stuck up their bottoms .... but that's not gloating. That's just the way it is. Flatheids are too dumb to meditate and will never get ra bliss!

I'll have a wee meditate here and then tell you a wee bit about progression with ra bliss!

You just close your eyes .... there are aspects of your physicality which you have no access to because you're a flatheid ... just close your eyes ..... the balloon like sphere, inside you and outside you, might be one of the sheaths the hindus talk about, but I don't know. Sometimes I think of it like a half filled hot air balloon. Just close your eyes and it's there, filling and expanding and rather bright. Put a wee vase breath in there. A gentle throbbing of warmth and bliss! And that's just the very beginning! Ra bliss, ra bliss, ra bliss!

I won't go on. I have to assume that I am unusual. It's an awful thing to say, but I don't think anyone I know is ever going to get near experiencing these wonderments. What a real waste of the humanbeingness that is!

Henry Adam, who wrote Petrol Jesus Nightmare, which the kiddo and I saw last Wednesday, and loved, came back to RaBlissBlog, so I checked up his reviews on the web. They weren't bad, but the production didn't get the plaudits it deserved. The Guardian gave it 2 out of 5, which is outrageous, and the Times gave it 3 out of 5, which you can live with. The Independent was okay and the Scotsman gave it 4. The Scotsman is an Edinburgh paper and anything even half as good at the Traverse normally gets a five from them.

You can write the best play in the world and still get duff reviews. People don't judge a play on how it's written. They judge it on what they can see. Mainly, that's acting and directing. I love acting. There's nothing like it. For performances you've just got to be there. The acting in that play was brilliant by all the actors. Someone mentioned a duff performance from one of the players. Someone applauded the same performance. That happened twice in the reviews.

In my experience, reviews are dead important to actors. Actors can't see themselves. They are in a very vulnerable position. Also, they're performing some one else's work and sometimes the writing is not very good, or the part doesn't suit them.

Most reviewers work freelance. Most of them don't know anything about anything. With really established reviewers, the ones you've read for years, you get to know the kind of stuff they're going to like and the kind of stuff they maybe won't. So they're useful... Owen Dudley Edwards, an old tutor of mine, used to write (maybe still does!) fringe reviews for the Scotsman. His reviews were fantastically generous. If I was a reviewer, I'd like to be like that. Then if you mentioned that maybe the piece wasn't perhaps quite worth transferring to Broadway straight off, folk would go and see it because it was so awful it would be worth seeing!

It's ten years since I tried to write a script. When this novel is finished, I'll maybe go back to writing dialogue for a while if I keep writing. No, I haven't worked very hard on my novel during this holiday, but I will finish it before Christmas.

I was in Bellshill today, but not for long. I got taken to the Carfin Grotto. The last time I was in the Carfin Grotto was when I was in primary school. I have this lasting memory of processing round the paths in the wonderful sunny summer's day and thinking how wonderful it was. The Carfin Grotto is a kind of catholic theme park. It's a park with a glass church in it, statues, plaques, etc. Very nice indeed. You can walk around, but it's much bigger when you're a kid. They have a sound system ( a good one!) and hymns and such sound out. There is a statue to the patron saint of cancer. I think he was depicted with a sore leg. I was standing there looking at this with my big sister. She told me she'd read this blog, all of it, up to two weeks ago. What? Who's got the time? I told her I was pissed when I wrote some of it and she said she knew that.

My instincts to keep away from the flatheids if I want to be truly happy are correct. Maybe I just need more retreats. Why do I think they're a problem? I'm the problem. Flatheids are just flatheids. You construe flatheids how you like!

Ra Lama Yeshe

Wednesday 2:16 p.m.
Feeling still as if I'm chasing my tail after the weekend. I've stopped getting up in the morning. I'm acting like I'm on holiday.

But I managed up to St John's Church at the end of Princes Street to see Lama Yeshe, who is my root guru, this lunchtime. Of course, I forgot he was on. Got there late. Couldn't hang around to chat when he finished, but that was alright. He was on with a Greek Orthodox joe and they didn't seem to have anything in common at all.

Someone purporting to be Henry Adam, who wrote Petrol Jesus Nightmare, which me and the kiddo saw on Wednesday last, seems to have landed on the blog comment bit of Rem Shennanigans. Of course, in bloggyland who knows. Anyway, I loved the play and so did the kiddo, so if you're reading this in Edinburgh, go and see it.

Basically, I'm being swamped by flatheids. I'm going to hide away from them as much as possible since the meditations are going brilliantly. I'm off to the hut!

00:38 a.m.
The one brake bike became like that because the metal on the back break succumbed to fatigue and just turned to plasticine one day. I'd like to eulogise the wondrous qualities of the one brake bike.

I cycled the Raleigh bike ... it has Astley Sturmer gears? ... three gears inside the heavy back wheel hub ... but I was told they were dodgy, the gears, and to keep it on the one gear, the second one ... as I cycled it one day about 22 years ago from Newmains to Edinburgh. It was a sunny Saturday afternoon, and probably, early evening. Only a couple of years ago, I cycled it several times from Lockerbie to the Samye Ling. Oh, how I wish I was at the Samye Ling just now! Only today did I realise what an wonderful achievement that was! I put the one brake bike outside on Saturday with a bit of paper on it saying: Free bike. Bye, bye, bike!

Before I'd cycled the bike from Newmains to Edinburgh, I hadn't been on a bike for years and years. But I was, as usual, shockingly fit for someone with a bad habit lifestyle. But I do remember getting off the bike.

How far is it from Newmains to Edinburgh? Too bloody long!

I've got a nazi bike now. Some kind of robocop fung monster. When you pull the brakes, it just stops. I'm not comfortable with good things. So I cycled the thing down to Portobello to show it to Brian Wilson, so that he would now know that I was indeed a joe of property, and should be respected.

I don't think he was quite ready for the three turnings of the wheel of dharma, not right away anyway. If Brian Wilson thinks I'm going mad, well, it definitely takes one to know one.

Ra No No No.12!

Tuesday 9:00 p.m.
I've got a bike; you can ride it if you like. It's got a bell and I got it on the never never. Syd Barrett popped his clogs last week. Anyway, I have purchased a big thing even if it was on the never never. It should look like this. It says Ridgeback on it. It costs about £300, but I get £18 a month taken off my wages every month for 18 months and that's it. It costs £36 a month to get the number 12 (my favourite bus of all time!), but you don't have to push it.

I carried the bike down 67 stairs to the front door and, when I opened it, discovered that it was raining outside. So, I carried my bike back up the 67 stairs to our flat.

I congratulate myself on keeping the flatheids at bay for so long! Then one little falter in the wall of no way, fung off, why can't you basturns leave me alone, and three or four whole days just disappear. Just like that. I think I may have my mind back to where it was last Friday by tomorrow afternoon. As part of the recuperation programme, I went back to the allotment this afternoon. And sat in the hut for two and a half hours.

A wren came to visit me. The windows of the hut face south and are made of chicken wire. Buglia grows over some of the chicken wire. Buglia attracts butterflies. It is blue behind the buglia for some of today. So inside the hut is pretty sparce. The floor is covered in dust, but it's quite clear. I was going to stay in the hut this summer, but I haven't. Anyway, it's pretty clear now. I sit at floor level and face the door. There is a wren's nest above the door, but it wasn't used this year for rearing chicks. Then this wren comes through the chicken wire and jumps about at the nest. Then it holds onto the wall. How they do that, I don't know! It came closer to me as I sat there than any wrens had ever done before. There's been a wren's nest in the hut for about eight years anyway. The wren really cased the joint. It even hopped on the floor. Very familiar with this place. Who knows what's going on with wrens?

I think I found flatheids a wee bit scary at the weekend, especially after hiding away from them so successfully recently. They cannot do ra bliss! What a tragedy! But what larks! Shame for them though. It really is. Of course, I'm a complete disgrace as usual. I don't even know what ra bliss is! Or why it came down to me, or out of me. Or why did I manage to get down to ra bliss and, still, everyone I know is a flatheid.

Can I go back to the Unheard of Island now, Jack?

I just thought the joe who wrote the lyrics for the Popeye song must have been some kind of genius. Unfortunately, there are no verses left.

Rem Shennanigans.

Monday 1:45 p.m.
I just said, "Awright," to one flatheid. Honest, that was all I did! So since the last post on Wednesday, I've:
1) Been to brilliant production at the Traverse, called Petrol Jesus Nightmare. Best thing I've seen for ages. Of course, it got mixed reviews, but me and the kiddo spoke to the director last night and reassured him that it was terrific. The acting was really committed and superb.
2) Saw a terrific tumbling acrobats act called the Caesar Twins. And a stand-up called Ed Byrne.
3) Went to a party in the wilds of Ayrshire.
4) Visited a relative in Lanarshire.
5) Went to a party celebrating someone's homecoming from Africa.
6) Went to another good play at the Traverse last night.

So I didn't get out of bed today till after noon. Dearie, dearie me! It's almost like being normal!

I'm going to develope a secret vice. Something I can't talk to flatheids about. So I'm at this party in Ayrshire and, being the west, folk are very friendly and chatty (and almost all of them out of their faces on something!), and they want to know what you've been doing.

Well, I've spent as much of the last five weeks meditating as I could manage. I mean, I'm starting to sound completely mad. Yeah, I'm hoping to get into a bit of primordial awareness, man. But of all the people I knew there, not one of them will ever get ra bliss! Not one! You could tell them about ra bliss till you're blue in the face, but not one of them .... that amazed me for a bit, so it did.

I'm speaking to the boy who's getting over the brain haemorraghe (?). The pain seemed well etched in his memory. Right off the scale this, the unimaginably painful pain. So painful that it made him throw up anywhere. He received the last rights twice. Then he wakens up two days later with this big tube sticking out of his forehead.

Still, although bits of his self had not returned, the bit that was left could get out off its face with the best of them! Undaunted by exploding brains in the west.

If anyone dasses to risk me fisk
It's "boff" and it's "wham", un'erstand
So, keep good behaviour
That's your one life saver
with Popeye the sailor man.

00:53 A.M.
The joes are just joes. They can say what they like. Say, they say that you cannot do this, or accomplish that. Then you have to remember that they are just joes. Maybe they say they know something you don't know. We have to laugh at that, Joe! They know something you don't know? Joes, Joe.

Ra Mind on Mind Juju!

Wednesday 9:41 p.m.
The views from Mawson Peak here on the Unheard of Island are truly spectacular whether is rains, snows or blows a blizzard, which it generally does most of the time. But the views don't really matter. Today I rolled up the whaleskin for a while and, sitting at the back of the cave, gazing out at turbulent skies, I felt true happiness arise. Ra bliss is coming through!! Sitting there wreathed in smiles, I just felt wonderful.

This has happened before. Sometimes you can work it like that and sometimes you follow the world and it doesn't happen so often. But when your mind is not disturbed and your conscience is clear, well, here come the big grins!

I think if you're doing mahamudra meditations, you have to make some decisions about your mind. The first decision I made about my mind is that I've lost it. I used to think it was between my ears, but now I'm not so sure.

These might be analytical meditations, which I'm not very good at. You have to ask yourself what colour your mind is. It's tartan, Jack. And then you ask yourself stuff like what does it weigh? The where is it question is the one I get stuck on. If it's between my ears, how can I get it to enter my central channel so I can experience primordial awareness, which I have been assured is not only non-dualistic, but very, very nice.

So I went out and lay on the lip of the cave and looked up at the sky. Your mind is supposed to have the same quality as space. Space is everywhere. Space allows everything to be there. Space doesn't obstruct anything. There's nowhere where there's no space. Hmmm? But, unlike space, mind has the quality of knowing.

Maybe I'm just a suggestible joe. When I saw the big mind, it was bugger all like space. The space had all been filled in. The air wasn't transparent. The air was thick with red and blue. The quality of knowing ... it was the sheer, amazing power. Your "phenomenal ego" has gone and been replaced by something a million times better, and so powerful. It was power filled. Everything said power.

But that is not to say that at the end of the day that was not just more appearance and emptiness arising in conjunction. We always have to remember that we're dealing with the illusory nature of reality. You're not going to find something. You get a different view.

So they say that even the victorious have not seen it, so what I saw couldn't have been mind. Hmmm? I'd like to speak to the translator, please. There must be different gradations of mind surely. Anyway, maybe the space analogy is just to help you get along because you're a flatheid, and a bit of a moron really compared to a joe like the buddha.

Wonders are many, and none is more wonderful than man. Sophocles. The wall.

Nothing new since Sophocles.

I felt very happy today. Because the weather was so bad, I had to sit in. To allow you to be happy in an empty room, what is else your mind for, wherever it is?

How nice to feel blessed!

I'm one tough gazookus
Which hates all palookas
Wot ain't on the up and square
I biffs 'em and buffs 'em
An' always outroughs 'em
An' none of 'em gets nowhere

RaT Mind Again!

Tuesday 13:15 p.m.
This is RaBlissBlog coming to you martians and Masai Warriors (and you too, Jack!) from Mawson's peak, the highest point on the Unheard of Island. It's a beautiful night as I gaze up at the starry, starry southern skies outside the cave and ponder where my mind might be. I think I lost it a while back.

Obviously, you can't think without your own brain, which is definitely between your ears. So at least it seems that your brain is a pre-condition for thoughts arising. If you cut off your hand, you can still think. If you cut off your head, it looks a bit unlikely that any thoughts are arising.

But is your mind in your brain?

This next bit is really for folk who have religious convictions, christians primarily.

Say your head got chopped off. Charles I had his head chopped off and some very strange Christian people count him as a martyr. So he went to heaven. To be with God. The question is: did he know he was there? Well, how could he be in heaven if he didn't know he was there? At one point he must have thought: I'm in heaven. Yippee!

Thoughts and minds go together. You can't be in heaven and not know you're there. This knowing thing and this thinking thing is a mind thing.

Christians, of course, have souls. Your soul goes to heaven. But it must know it's in heaven or it can't be heavenly. So your soul can think? Is your soul your mind then? Or can you tell the difference?

Of course, if you're a straightforward materialistic flatheid, your mind is connected to your brain and when your brain dies, you die. The self you cherish and think is somehow permanent isn't permanent after that, is it, Jack?

I agree with the last in that it's your sense of self that dies, but that's just one idea of self and the least comfortable one to have. If you want to keep this sense of self... well, you're a braver man than I am, Gunga Din!

This is 9,000 feet up. I've lost my mind and I'm not sure where it is. I think I'd better have a firm resolution to this problem before my stay on the Unheard of Island has to come to an end. But I've still got nearly two weeks of my six weeks holiday to go. Hurrah!

23:54 p.m.
Has the mind got a body, or has the body got a mind? Interesting idea once you've been given the black spot. So the joe was terminal with the bad cough and thinks he'd like to go to Switzerland to do the voluntary euthanasia. That's all very well, I says, but it depends if you think that the mind has a body, or the body has a mind.

Even neanderthals had rituals. When someone dies, you do something ... and it should somehow be comforting.

I was brought up a catholic. At least, the tims know how to do funerals.

If you remember that nothing is really true, and that you don't believe anything, you should get away from this idea that the body has a mind. Frankly, only sad basturns think like that.

Felt a bit disturbed today, Jack. But that's really because I haven't properly settled in. On top of this massif in the middle of the southern ocean with my supplies of spinach, well, Jack, the anxieties will go. I've done everything else, Jack. I might as well do calm and peaceful.

The whaleskin flapping but strong, and the warmth from the volcano at my back, well, what a fortunate, fortunate creature I am!
]

I'm Popeye the Sailor Man
I'm Popeye the Sailor Man
I'm strong to the finich
Cause I eats me spinach
I'm Popeye the Sailor Man 

Too right!