Ra Cure!
Sunday 4:50 p.m.
Feeling a bit scunnered this morning from overindulging in the barrel last night, I started slowly, moped about a bit, had breakfast and read the paper. At times like this it may be useful to tell yourself that you are not who you think you are, and it's not happening to you the way you think it 's happening to you. It might be useful, but it might not work.
The flat is empty and I sat down for the beginnings of the meditations at eleven. With breaks for food, etc., I've just finished.
What a great thing ra bliss is! Your concentration at times like this might be a bit off, but it's like you've been hanging around the bogs with the hangover and then ... caboom! You're back in the discotheque! It's still not as good as it would have been, not at first anyway, but it's still way beyond the imaginings of your usual flatheid.
The vase breathing yesterday morning was a bit tricky, but whatever obstacles and obstructions there were had disappeared by today.
You've got too many brain cells, Hotboy. You need a good drink to get rid of a few million. Shut it, Jack!
The heat diminished as the afternoon wore on, but ra bliss increased and increased and increased. The blissheid and the drunken bum are like two different joes. Anyway, I'm off the the allotment. Oh, ra bliss, ra bliss, ra bliss!
11:12 p.m.
Sober and straight again. That's four nights out of the last seven. This is very good for me. I find it hard sometimes to lay off the beer when there's nothing else. Bob Marley has just been on the telly. If I lived in Amsterdam, not drinking would be dead easy. Purification and accumulation. The discipline is difficult if you've been a bad boy all your life. Here's the start of my new book, my last novel.
If God dealt drugs, the hit he would give himself would be the one called bliss ... if you want to read it, just say so! I'm not putting it on my webpage.
The Domestic Bliss and I have just finished watching Apocalypto. Chibbing and tolchocking and nothing too deep! My kind of movie!
I meditated from eleven this morning till after eight this evening with breaks for the blogosphere, food, etc. Everything is still pushing on! It's hard to remember how fabuloso it was, especially in the hut this evening. That's partly why you make mistakes and drop your guard! Hope everyone has a nice week ahead. Night night from RaBlissBlog
Feeling a bit scunnered this morning from overindulging in the barrel last night, I started slowly, moped about a bit, had breakfast and read the paper. At times like this it may be useful to tell yourself that you are not who you think you are, and it's not happening to you the way you think it 's happening to you. It might be useful, but it might not work.
The flat is empty and I sat down for the beginnings of the meditations at eleven. With breaks for food, etc., I've just finished.
What a great thing ra bliss is! Your concentration at times like this might be a bit off, but it's like you've been hanging around the bogs with the hangover and then ... caboom! You're back in the discotheque! It's still not as good as it would have been, not at first anyway, but it's still way beyond the imaginings of your usual flatheid.
The vase breathing yesterday morning was a bit tricky, but whatever obstacles and obstructions there were had disappeared by today.
You've got too many brain cells, Hotboy. You need a good drink to get rid of a few million. Shut it, Jack!
The heat diminished as the afternoon wore on, but ra bliss increased and increased and increased. The blissheid and the drunken bum are like two different joes. Anyway, I'm off the the allotment. Oh, ra bliss, ra bliss, ra bliss!
11:12 p.m.
Sober and straight again. That's four nights out of the last seven. This is very good for me. I find it hard sometimes to lay off the beer when there's nothing else. Bob Marley has just been on the telly. If I lived in Amsterdam, not drinking would be dead easy. Purification and accumulation. The discipline is difficult if you've been a bad boy all your life. Here's the start of my new book, my last novel.
If God dealt drugs, the hit he would give himself would be the one called bliss ... if you want to read it, just say so! I'm not putting it on my webpage.
The Domestic Bliss and I have just finished watching Apocalypto. Chibbing and tolchocking and nothing too deep! My kind of movie!
I meditated from eleven this morning till after eight this evening with breaks for the blogosphere, food, etc. Everything is still pushing on! It's hard to remember how fabuloso it was, especially in the hut this evening. That's partly why you make mistakes and drop your guard! Hope everyone has a nice week ahead. Night night from RaBlissBlog
posted by Hotboy at 4:48 PM
14 Comments:
you seem to frequent the barrel quite a bit lately.
Hotboy! What do you think about this (an excerpt from an article in the Summer 2007 issue of Tricycle, the Buddhist rag):
"As for right concentration, one of its crucial factors is a sense of bliss independent of sensual objects and drives. When you gain some skill in meditation and can tap into that bliss whenever you want, you can satisfy your desire for immediate pleasure, at the same time weakening any demand that the pleasure be sensual. As the Buddha once noted, people pursue sensual pleasure, with all of its inherent limitations, simply because they see no other alternative to physical and mental pain. But once you've mastered this more refined alternative, you've found a new way to feed the demand for pleasure right now, freeing the ego to function more effectively.
You have also learned the key to the Buddha's strategy for true happiness: It is possible to taste an immediate gratification that causes no harm to yourself or anyone else. Genuine happiness doesn't require that you take anything away from anyone--which means that it in no way conflicts with the genuine happiness of others.
This understanding is revolutionary. For people dependent on sensual pleasures, happiness is a zero-sum affair. There are only so many things, only so many people, to go around. When you gain something, someone else has lost it; when they've gained, you've lost. In a zero-sum world, the pursuit of your own happiness constantly has to be negotiated and compromised with that of others. But when people access the bliss of right concentration, they've found a way to satisfy their own desire for happiness in a way that can actively augment the happiness of those around them. When they're more content and at peace within, they radiate a healthy influence in all directions. This is how healthy ego functioning, from the Buddhist perspective, benefits others as well as yourself."
The author is a Theravada Buddhist monk named Thanissaro Bhikkhu, and the thesis of his article is that a healthy, functioning ego is necessary on the spiritual path. I took issue at first with that thesis, but found nothing objectionable in the article when it came to his descriptions of "healthy ego functioning"; I think he's just using the word in a different way than I think of it in context of meditation and the mind.
Anyway, all that's mostly linguistic nonsense to me, but I thought his point about meditative bliss was a very good one. Meditating's made me a lot easier to get along with and a lot less easily rattled, but yet also less numb. All those poor flatheids who get jerked around by life because they don't know where to look to find relief or satisfaction! And hurt other people in the process! What a mess.
I used to have a lot of doubt that I just don't have anymore--I've experienced the truth that various spiritual teachers have taught, that it's far more blissful to give it all away than to try to claim and hold on to everything. Feeling compassion, meditating, all of this is loads more blissful than all that other stuff people chase after. That said, the occasional dinner of beer and potato chips can be quite enjoyable...
Toyo! I think you might have something there! I made it too bloody strong as well!
Somebody: You might have to have a strong sense of self, or ego, to want to get rid of it and pursue that end. Also, getting ra bliss makes me a lot happier and, I think, somehow it must affect the rest of your life (particularly if you stay away from the beer barrel!)( i.e. behave yourself!). But I think you can only gain true happiness by realizing emptiness, since bliss won't stop you being a straw in the wind, not with the levels I'm getting anyway. For instance, I've still got a very bad temper which, fortunately, I rarely lose. Realising emptiness must entail a loss of your false sense of self. Realising emptiness should produce equanimity which, in the juju I'm following, is game, set and match. That's why ra bliss and then ra heat are just something on the way, I think. Thanks for letting me see this! That's two theravadins talking about ra bliss!! (the one was in the book you linked to). Hotboy
But how separate are these things, really? Seems to me bliss only arises when the false sense of self is relinquished, if only momentarily. And it seems to me that what T.B. is saying in that article is that bliss is also linked to equanimity to some extent, in the sense that the more one experiences the deep pleasure that can be found solely in resting the mind in silence, the more that craving for sensory pleasures is diminished.
There's still a lot of things I like and even crave from time to time, but I'm a lot less neurotic and fixated about it than I used to be. And I can still display a temper, but it's not near what it used to be, and I attribute that almost entirely to meditating regularly. I agree that this increased equanimity I've experienced seems more to do with a view of things than it does with the capacity to experience bliss, but it all seems linked.
And it seems that the Theravadins and the Tibetans both have a good amount to say about ra bliss. Whereas Zen is very quiet about it. Don't know why that is.
Somebody! You're probably dead right there! Everything should progress in tandem. The Dalai Lama said that even sitting in the mandala you will experience afflictive emotions, that afflictive emotions will take eons to deal with (let's hope we all started earlier!)and that we should measure our progress in decades if necessary. You're lucky to have found this young since, hopefully, you'll have more decades left than joes like me! Hotboy p.s. I don't see how mental calming can't wash through into ther non-sitting times, and if you have access to bliss every day, of course, that's got to be cheering. Just think of the flatheids! You wouldn't want to be like one of them, would you?
Somebody! I've heard that to get at the emptiness it may be helpful to do analytical meditations as well. Do they do them in Zen? Hotboy
Emotions are definitely the lynchpin of the whole thing! I can't even imagine a state in which afflictive emotions wouldn't arise. I'm speaking out of my league here, but isn't the idea in the higher tantras of the Tibetan tradition not that afflictive emotions don't arise, but that they're immediately transformed into their opposites? I've experienced something akin to this on occasion, for example, when I've gotten angry, very quickly after the anger has appeared, it's become apparent how absurd it is, and instead I feel compassion for everyone involved in the whole mess. Emotions seem to be the fuel for everything! Seems to me they can always be put to use if one is skillful and disciplined enough... though of course it takes decades and decades to refine skill and discipline to that point. Getting angry about "me" is so seductive!
In Zen, they start you off counting the breaths... a variant of simple shamatha practice. Sometimes I count, sometimes I don't, depending on how speedy and dense thought is at the time. Then, as you stabilize the ability to concentrate, you can either take up shikantaza, a more open-ended, vipassana-type form of meditation, or sit with koans. I don't know if koans could be likened to analytical meditations or not; the point of them is to spark off some intuitive process. I don't know from personal experience as I'm still working on stabilizing the mind in shamatha. My mind is like a hyperactive kid who didn't take her Ritalin, and the 30-60min of sitting I do a day usually is hardly enough even for my mind to settle down to where it's workable. It's amazing I ever get any bliss at all! Learning not to fight whatever is going on in my mind at the time, and instead to just let go of it, has helped a lot. I'm also hoping to have the chance to do a week of solitary retreat this summer, and meditate for several hours a day in an environment free from distraction. I find that on the occasion I can do a silent retreat, it affects my meditations for months afterward. It's amazing how much time slows down during an extended period of silence and intensive meditation... and of course, ra bliss!
This comment has been removed by the author.
Doctor Robert reckons that bad temper is one symptom of depression. What a shame you can't use the pills. And I thought your body was a temple to pharmaceuticals.
Never mind, the 2 different joes unite on realising emptiness at the bottom of the barrel.
Somebody! Doing these week long retreats are bound to have a huge effect, though when I've done them, I've sometimes had a weird few days coming "back" from them. The most amazing thing that ever happened to me occurred using a koan though I didn't know it was a koan at the time. (A detailed description of this is in the Buddha and the Big Bad Wolf on my webpage). I didn't know that zen used the vipassana type of meditation. Also, I don't know enough about the higher tantra juju to say anything about the transformation of afflictive emotions as they arise. What these joes are doing sitting in caves for years is in a different ball park from anything I'm getting to. But I don't think bodhisattvas are supposed to get angry. I can only think that the thing to do is stick with it, and if one tries one's best, well, that's all you can do. I'm personnally not that good on the theory or the practice, but I am quite a persistent joe! I'll come back and read all this stuff at the end of my working week (Wednesday)when I've got more time. Been interesting though! Hotboy
Albert Johnson? Is that you? I can't use the pills because I haven't got any. I can't remember ever refusing anything like that, especially if it was free! Send me a couple and I'll road test them for you! They probably took one look at you and gave you a placebo! And I've never heard anger being described as a kind of depression. Is it not going the wrong way? Well, you might know a bit more about that than me from your time in navy. Hotboy
According to Doctor Robert, depression is often described
as frozen anger. I can ask him to put you on the waiting list for a session.
Albert? I'm leaving depression for the Bavarians. This is RaBlissBlog! We don't do depression here. If the flatheids are too dumb to meditate, no wonder they get depressed. Hotboy
Denial is a perfectly valid strategy in the short term.
Albert? If you lose your short term, you'll forget what you're denying! Are you that old? Hotboy
Post a Comment
<< Home