RaBlissBlog

Ra End Might Be Nigh!

2007-06-29T09:59:00.000+01:00

Friday 10:00 a.m.
THIS IS FOR WHOMSOEVER PUT THE LINK FROM MY PLACE OF WORK TO THIS BLOG.

We are made up of a great many diverse complexes, and we are in combination. We are Legion. The HotboyMadyamikaS.O.B. who is the author of this blog is a fictional character. You must know me from my place of work. If I'd wanted to write as that person who goes to work, I would have done so. My real name is all over my webpage. I am an author of fictional works and have nothing to hide. This blog was trying to do something a little different.

I have been unable to meditate properly for the last two hours due to the perturbations caused by your actions. At the start of this six week period, this is particularly unforgiveable. I assume what you did by placing that link to here, you did with malicious intent.

Some people are no more than they appear to be. If you knew me, you would not fung with me. I will return you malice to you a hundred, a thousand, a million fold. The only vow I've taken is the vow not to kill. Well, I don't want you to die. Certainly not! I want you to suffer. Instead of having difficulty meditating, I shall instead concentrate my meditations on you. I will curse you. Your body doesn't have a mind; your mind has a body. Your suffering will start with a thought. You're having that thought now. Thoughts are like that. You can't stop them.

It's impossible to continue this blog if it's going to have schoolkids swarming all over it. I've set the settings to make the blog unavailable to anyone who hasn't permission, but this probably won't work.

Albert? Are you there? Could you
1) Try to get the link off Wiki, or tell me how to.
2) Advise me how I can save this blog to a webpage or something, so I don't have to delete it all.Or if it's faster, use the passwords to do that and sent me an email telling me so.If you do this, I will dedicate four hours of meditations to a subject of your choice.

If you regularly come to this bloggy (hello Jack the Spam Robot!), but are not a pederast ... if there are no entries after this, contact me by email and I'll tell you about the new blog, which will have a limited readership, if such a thing is possible.

As for the evil basturn who has done this to me ... as long as the link stays on that site, I'll give you two hours a day. It'll start with a slightly queasy feeling ...

Ah, this evil is a wonderful thing. Oh, at last to embrace it!

6:10 p.m.
I sent an email asking Wiki to get the link off then discovered the at the wonderful Ion had edited out the link. What a nice thing to do!

I've spent the last two hours before coming to the computer performing a rite from the Secret Magic of Abramelin the Mage. Aleister Crowley once spent a while trying to get this juju to work, but he was a flatheid! And I'm not a one trick pony!

What does that mean, Hotboy? It means you shouldn't fung around with tantric adepts, Jack! What, Hotboy? It means it's going to be sore, Jack. Awful sore.

Well, now that the malice has come among us here at RaBlissBlog, I guess it's time to get the hut onto the rowing boat and head off for uninhabited islands far away. I'll leave comments on folks blogs when I've set up a new blog and anyone I miss out can email me from my webpage. Okay, Jack, let's load up and go! Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream! Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream! And it's bye bye from RaBlissBlog!!

Ra Last Time I Got Arrested!

2007-06-28T21:27:00.000+01:00

Thursday 9:30 p.m.
I got arrested tomorrow. It was while I was doing my boxing training routine. Sometimes your thoughts drift into the murderous maelstrom of menace. Kind of puts you in character. The routine involves dancing about to Waiting for the Man and throwing about 1500 punches in 18 minutes. You'll moida da bum, Hotboy. He doesn't stand a chance, Jack. And I was feeling very fit tonight. Really fit. I've been doing stuff like this several times a week now for thirty years.

Wouldn't it be great to be in solitary confinement! Wouldn't that just be brilliant! You wouldn't have to worry about going out then, or leaving your seat. This is a common volitional problem for prospective hotboys. Bang me up! Three meals a day and they could throw away the key!

You could put fifty pence pieces between your fingers, put a bit of scotch tape round your knuckles, the put on those big black gloves.

So I backtracked from the statscounter thing and someone has put a link to here from my work's site on Wikipedia. What do you think, Jack? Take a limb, Hotboy. Take a limb.

This morning I started my meditations in the hut at eight and came down the road just as the one o clock gun went off. I had a break to eat a piece and read a wee bit of The Book Of The Three Inspirations, and weeded once for quarter of an hour. This morning was very good indeed! Bodes well.

I spoke to the agent, that man of great taste and perspicacity, Mr Adrian Weston today on the phone. We talked about The Real McCoy. It's about integrating parts of your life. The boy in The Real McCoy spends six years in a cave and starts floating about like St Joseph of Cupertino. I can count sitting in the hut as research, which it is anyway. Since yesterday I've become dead keen to re-write this book. Just the perfect time for it. I'll re-write it seventeen times and make sure it's good.

We're going to be rich! We're going to be rich, Jack!

Well, you'd better not go to jail then, Hotboy. What about the Wikipedia thing? Bugger all to do with me, Jack. I'm not liable to hear from the hut the fevered cries of teenage girls shouting: We want Mr Hotboy! am I, Jack? Only in your dreams, Hotboy. Only in your dreams.

I had a wee lie down on the couch this afternoon and went into ra bliss. I really like doing this these days. So you go into ra bliss and fall asleep. Somehow it seems as if you haven't fallen asleep because almost seemlessly you come awake and are still in ra bliss. These are very nice sensations indeed. You shouldn't really expect anything of course, but I could easily have the best time of my life over the next six weeks. It's just a matter of calming down really.

Ra Wonderful, Wonderful Day!

2007-06-27T20:26:00.001+01:00

Wednesday 8:25 p.m.
A great bountifulness seemed to be heaped on oneself today! My holidays started. Hallelujah! I got paid so I can spend your actual money for a couple of days! Hallelujah! The Domestic Bliss returned from Spango and Froggyland! Hallelujah! The meditation I was having when she rang the doorbell was so bloody wonderful that I knew I was going to have a truly wonderful six weeks in the hut or nut. Oh, ra bliss! Oh, ra bliss! Oh, ra bliss, ra bliss, ra bliss!

Once, when I used to drink alcohol, me and Brian Wilson met a really nice joe called Ian Sclater and because of this he published a bit out of The Buddha and the Big Bad Wolf in his magazine called Instant. .

Sometimes, he has to send out emails to everyone he's ever used before to get copy, such is the world of magazine deadlines. The last time I got one of these was when I'd just finished my new book. Right then are there I emailed the book to him and said I'd go fifty fifty until he made a million pounds if he'd hustle it for me. No reply. I don't think some people take me seriously, Jack, and they're all going to be sorry when these Hotboy books sell boatloads.

This time I told him he should stick some of it in his magazine and he was going to be sorry for not reading it the first time. So he said he has read it. Hmmm? And no reply? He's really going to be sorry! Anyway, he says he might publish a 1,000 word chunk if I send him a couple to choose from.

That means I'll have to read it. I've not wanted to do that since I finished it. I used to get really annoyed reading and writing that book, Jack. That was a first! I'll skim it!

And I got a great idea! I'm going to re-write The Real McCoy. The great idea was knowing what to do with it. It's the second time I've had this great idea. It just came thundering back in whilst I was investigating ra bliss in the lobby, before the doorbell went and the Domestic Bliss came home.

And ROME is coming on the teevee in five minutes. I can't remember enjoying anything on the television so much. Maybe I CLAUDIUS. I'm maybe just a sucker for the sand and sandals epic. Tonight Cleopatra comes to Rome to bonk Mark Antony.

Ra Next Day!

2007-06-26T22:22:00.000+01:00

Tuesday 10:20 p.m.
By about noon tomorrow I shall be leaving the jobbie and will be looking ahead to really six and and a half weeks of not having to go to work. All that stuff that you do on a Sunday as you mentally prepare to go once more back into the horror of trying to communicate with the evil bourgeois, the flatheids ... well, it won't be there for a while, Jack. You really get three weeks in the middle when you are free.

So many times I've been in peoples' houses when they were setting off for the Sunday nightshift. There's nothing worse. You have the comfort and you know the cost because of the slightly wired and poised joe (and it was always a joe) getting ready to go out there and pay for it. The jobbie in the factory where it is so loud that to stay there for years makes you deaf, etc. Well, we engaged with the evil bourgeois sufficiently so that we didn't have to pay that price, Jack. And we have six weeks of holiday in front of moi.

Jesus Christ spent forty days fasting in the desert. There's fasting and there's fasting. He might have been eating wasps and other nourishing stuff! Locusts are a perfectly balanced diet. Locusts and honey. Is that what it takes?

So, Hotboy, six weeks is forty two days. The six weeks really starts next Monday. Maybe if you just meditated for about nine hours a day and didn't drink, Hotboy. Wouldn't that be an improvement? Wouldn't that be enough?

The kiddo is my fault. None of the rest of the flatheids are in the same category. They're not my fault. She is. I could make her come to give me things in the hut. Otherwise, I'd just have the eating of the allotment. Why do men do things? To impress women.

You have to work up a real scunner to go and want to sit in the hut for ages. Why do you want to do that again, Hotboy? Well, Jack, I wish to develope equanimity. Don't the normal people have that, Hotboy? Jack, the normal people ... don't start me on flatheids again, Jack.

The last week, while the kiddo and the Dom Bliss have been visiting the Mediterranean rat towns, has been crap! The disease was crap. Samsaric shit! The fact that you can be okay with it and tell yourself that it's okay, is also crap. Being good humoured is crap! Tomorrow, I'll have to say to anyone that it's alright. Well, it isn't alright, Jack! It's samsara, Jack. Get me to the hut! Chain me down! Don't let me leave. Next year I could have the black spot and then I don't want to think about all the chances I didn't take!

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. It will be nice to see them. Then bye bye. If I wasn't an asshole, I'd have the money to go to the Samye Ling for six weeks. Hmmm? Credit cards? They accept credit cards!

Ra new friend!

2007-06-25T23:21:00.000+01:00

Monday 11:24 p.m.
I got an email from someone who wanted to be my friend. What a wonderful sentiment! I got a MySpace thingy so I could stalk this gorgeous writer (who was female. At least, that's normal!)and then somebody sends me an email saying they want to be my friend. Unfortunately, my normal username and password don't seem to work on this MySpace thing. My passwords are not a secret. I would be obliged if any of my putative Hut Management Team would deal with this and get back to me. I know you enjoy this kind of identity perversion. There is only one thing. You are allowed to pretend to be moi!

I wasn't anything like as hung over as I should have been today what with the six bottles of 6% alc/vol., but I was a wee bit underpar of course. Oddly enough, just slightly knocked off. The network is down. What a boring day! Then this very nice girl is standing and asking for my attention.

But she's standing there at the desk with her two pals, and they are having a wonderful time. You should stay forever young! She can't stop laughing. She's giggling at me. She says would I mind speaking to her for a while so she doesn't have to go back to her teacher? I say no way and bugger off. Three other gurls were falling off the seats laughing so much just a wee bit later. Neither stoned nor drunk, just totally exuberant.

Are you trying to tell me something here, Hotboy? No, Jack. Just don't get old.

Ra Broon!

2007-06-25T18:50:00.000+01:00

Monday 6:50 p.m.
Though we don't normally do politics here on RaBlissBlog, I'm so pleased that Gordon Brown has got the job as Prime Minister! I'm twelve days older than him. He did history at Edinburgh University, but was two years in front of me because of his giant brain. But he'd have read the same books I as did. He'd know who Proudhon was. He'd know who Bakunin was and who Kropotkin was. He'd remember that Plekhanov was the joe who translated Marx into Russian. Politics is the art of the possible, of course, but he's from the left and he's one of us!

There's an account of life at Edinburgh Universtiy at this time on my web page. It's called Alma Mater.In fact, there might be a story about trying to vote in a student election in 1973 whilst out of one's face on downers ... which he was probably running in, or his pal Jonathan Wills was.

Now that the boy who told lies and got us involved in the killing zone that is Iraq has gone, I can now vote Labour again, at least in Westminster elections. Well done to the boy, eh?!

What'll I hae for my tea the nicht?
A herrin', or maybe a haddie?
Has Gran'ma gotten electric licht?
Is the next stop Kirkcaddy?

Ra Last Post!

2007-06-25T14:21:00.000+01:00

Monday
I blame it all on Peckhams. They were selling Kronenburg's Premier Cru (at 6% alc/vol)as buy one get one free. Very good beer. Usually retails at £1:99 a bottle. The catch is you cannot use your credit card for under a fiver, so I had to buy 6 bottles. Dearie me! Fortunately, I felt good today and not the way you'd expect after drinking inferior brews!

But I was quite surprised by the last post today! What's all that nonsense about angels?

A couple of angels came to see Lott once according to the Old Testament. When the other folk heard that angels were in Lott's house, a crowd gathered outside and started chanting something like: We want to hump the angels! We want to hump the angels!

Being on my own has been a wee bit of a trial, especially with the swamp fever and the binge drinkers giveaway at Peckhams. Couldn't go to the allotment for the bloody rain, far less stay in the hut!

Despite my shocking lack of self-discipline, the meditations have once again appreciably kicked on. But even with the swamp, I was putting in eight hours most days anyway on the cushion. It's not been easy, Jack! Yesterday wasn't easy. Still, I am getting there.

Ra Summation!

2007-06-24T22:33:00.000+01:00

Sunday 22:34 p.m.
So, there you were in this big flat in Edinburgh, and there was no one else there. It's almost like being conjoined with the evil bourgeois. There were no other sentient beings there, Jack. Old people do this all the time. Be on their own.

After the several days of being on your own, have you reached any conclusions, Hotboy? Yes, Jack. You should not be on your own. You should sit beside the angels. They should perform adult sexual favours for you, and, they should find this amusing.

What if they do not want to perform these sexual favours on you, Hotboy, and they are not amused by this. Well, then they cannot be angels then, Jack.

After fighting off these diseases, tomorrow I shall return to the wherewithall. I don't need a gun. Or a knife. I'll just kill the fungers with my bare hands and send them off to Hades!

Was there anything good about the hours and hours of sitting quietly doing juju over these days since Wednesday, Hotboy? Even with the disease? I had it today, Jack. I knew I had it, but because I can't do the yamas (the way you are supposed to live!), well, there was no contentment ... though ra bliss was mighty!

If you do the yamas, you must engage with the wonderful stillness, and not have these idiotic, stupid, aggravating thoughts arising!

I'm far too old for this now, Jack. I want to go to the formeless zones, where there are no thoughts, and no forms, and no microwave ovens because in the formless zones there are no things, and no thoughts, and no aggravations.

Hotboy, go forth! Try to smile and be nice and helpful. There are some 12 year old spotty people, and they love you, Hotboy, so go out there and do your stuff! And be nice. And also dead cool.

Can you do ra bliss, Hotboy? Yes, Jack, I can. Can you get out of your face on air, Hotboy? Yes, I can, Jack. Well, get out there and try to be nice to the joes and josephines who canny do that then! What else are you supposed to do!

Ra Lonesome Cowboy!

2007-06-24T15:05:00.000+01:00

3:01 p.m.
I haven't had a conversation with anyone - except two wee ones on the phone - since the Domestic Bliss left last Wednesday morning. And the weather has been truly manky, so no great desire to go out in the rain. Only having to deal with the residues of the swamp fever, so I should be okay for work tomorrow. Only two and a half days to go, Jack, and then the next six weeks are all mine! Yippee!

Ra Three Bodies, Or Two!

2007-06-24T00:34:00.000+01:00

Sunday 00:34 a.m.
Have you been oogling the naked manniquinns in the shop windows, Hotboy? No, it never gets that bad, Jack. I don't get out much.

So, say you just stayed in and sat, and gazed, or stared. After a while inexplicable things may occur. The creepy uppy thing might start holding you up. Eventually, you may find yourself sometimes sitting in the midst of the light sword. What can we say about this, Jack? You can say: There's two of us, Hotboy! There's the miserable funger and there is the enjoyment body. What? There is the Enjoyment Body, Jack. Let's give a nomenclature, a conceptualisation. We'll call it The Enjoyment Body. It's the sheath that arises, wherein ra blis and enjoyment occurs.

What about the other one, Hotboy? Ra basis. Well, we do not know about ra basis, but we do know about Ra Enjoyment Body. It sounds enjoyable. We should stick with that one for a while.

It's coloured Lapiz Lasuli, Jack! If you could separate the Lapiz Lasuli joe from the other greetin' faced basturn, boy!, wouldn't you have a time!

The thoughts arising are your own fault. That's why you should be nice and behave yourself, and not be a bad boy like me!

Ra Half Pissed Bliss!

2007-06-22T12:57:00.000+01:00

Friday 1:00 p.m.
To cure the swamp fever I took some of the magic medicine given to me when I was empowered to do the Medicine Buddha juju. But only a couple of grains ... in case I floated off or anything. You have to be careful with the magic medicine, Jack. And, lo!, after blasting in some of ra heat, by yesterday evening I felt much better than expected, and could sally forth into another open grave up at the Traverse.

And there was free beer! At last, free beer for the workers! I had five wee bottles of Fosters, finished re-reading the Introduction to the Book of the Three Inspirations, spoke to not a soul, and came home.

Last year it seemed somewhat unfair that the dusk around here doesn't check in till ten at night these days. The heat, bliss and everything else does seem to start working better around the twilight time. But by ten o clock at night, if you were going to do any recreationals, you'd have started by then. Why can't it get dark every night about half seven. That would be perfect. That might be Australia.

I watered down the barrel about a week ago. That means that after a pint of this beer you can still count to ten. I had about four pints in the course of the evening after being at the Traverse. Instead of just going to bed around midnight, I sat in the lobby ....Jack, it was just fung amazing! It's hard enough to find words to describe to flatheids what these meditations could feel like, or what a human being could feel like, but the heat and ra bliss.... Oh, ra bliss, ra bliss, ra bliss!

Half pissed, he took to ra bliss! Never happened before.

Where does the air go, Jack? Old Empedocles didn't know what a can of worms he was opening when he discovered air. You take a breath and usually you can hold it easily for about 40 seconds, or a minute if you're trying. You can feel a lot of air in you and it wants to get out quite soon after you've trapped it. Then, lo!, there comes a time when you can hardly feel it inside you at all. Then it seems far, far easier to hold your breath because it seems to have stopped pressing back somehow. How can this be, Jack?

Hmmm? The air is still there. The sensation has changed. I think it might be because there is an anaesthesic effect in the kundalini. Gopi Khrisna mentions this in Living with Kundalini, and he should know. But it's not just that. You seem to need less air. Hmmm? Mysteries on mysteries!

What's supposed to be happening with this juju is that you are supposed to be withdrawing the "winds" and "airs" into the central channel ... and this is what is supposed to happen when you die. You definitely go breathless when you die. Supposedly, some yogis think they are dying when this first happens to them.

So are you supposed to be, somehow, mimicing, or taking control of the death process? I think you are.

What if when you die, you just die, Hotboy? Well, that's alright because whilst I am engaging with ra bliss, ra rapture and ra multivarious ecstasies as I emanate as a deity, the flatheids will be hanging on in there, the moaning and groaning growing ever louder as they plunge into the grief, sorrow, lamentations ... suffering in this life! Flatheids just don't get ra bliss!

This is a win win situation here, Jack! This isn't pie in the sky when you die. This is RaBlissBlog and here comes ra heat!!!

6:30 p.m.
Sometimes folk come to this bloggy looking for stuff on agents. Well, today I got word back from Andrew Lownie. What a good interaction! He didn't want the sensei and reverend's book, but he really only deals with non-fiction, and he gave me the name of another agent who might be more suitable. First time that's ever happened! Also, as regards my own situation, he says it sometimes takes a year to place a book, so don't despair. Obviousl, a good bloke!

Ra Good or Bad Fortune!

2007-06-20T20:31:00.000+01:00

Wednesday 8:30 p.m.
I think when Chou Enlai was asked if he thought the results of the French Revolution were good or bad, he said: It's too soon to tell.

So I got the disease, which is bad, but it's not the black spot, which is good. Also, I had to cancel going to work this morning due to the pains in the lungs, etc., (which was good) and a meeting with my friend with the very, very bad cough (which was bad). Also, I won't be going to Bellshill with this disease, which is bad, but I don't really have to see anyone at all now till next Monday morning, which might be good or bad.

I'll get this bit wrong, but I'll have a bash. You've got three bodies. There's the body of every flatheid who's ever lived. It's the coarse body. Then there's the subtle body. That's like your acupuncture meridian body. Then there's the bit I don't know. It is basis. It might have no characteristics but a kind of ability to cognize, and contains all good qualities maybe but undifferentiated. It might be clear light mind.

This is the buddha in one lifetime juju! "When we can see, straightforwardly and non-conceptually, the nature of our clear light mind and remain totally absorbed in this nature without ever regressing from it, we have become a buddha." Dalai Lama. The Wall. So I reckon you have to get access to this clear light mind.

The deity yoga is the subtle body juju. You clothe the subtle body in the Medicine Budda .... does the Medicine Buddha have the swamp fever? If you sneeze, you sneeze, but the Medicine Buddha only has a wee bit of the swamp fever. It is one of the causes and conditions, but there is a step you're beginning to take here into ... it's just a wee bit transcendental, Jack. You're in ra bliss and a step away from the coarse body. And this is very nice, Jack, because the coarse body has a helluva fung touch of the swamp!

Ditto whilst feeling a bit fashed and bashed the day after hitting the barrel.

Oh, what a fortunate creature I am, I am! What a fortunate creature I am!

I saw something funny of the bloggy of the sensei and reverend. He got this from Jeff Patton for his birthday. As usual, I'm the one with the hair.

I can't got to the hut and spend the night. There's no teevee or beer in the hut. But there is the start of the second series of Rome on the teevee right now! I loved the first series. A bit of chibbing and tolchocking, hanky panky and history ... right up my street!

As an aside: The complete fool who did the teevee crit in the Times today hates this Rome show. He should get himself a proper job! My money is on Octavius. Mark Antony was just fabulous. They picked that boy to look like Marlon Brando and then he did the whole British acting trip on it. "I'm not getting out of this bed till I fung someone!" None of this monogamy nonsense for these Roman aristocratic joes! The show was superb. Well done the BBC and the HBO for, no doubt, sticking in the money!

Ra Pestilence!

2007-06-19T20:43:00.000+01:00

Tuesday 8:43 p.m.
By law, occasionally I have to inform the pederasts coming here looking for hotboys that this is a police surveillance prototype bloggy. You've only got ... here come the discerning devices to pursue your address.

Despite wearing the surgical mask and having the ten foot pole, the disease still managed to cross the room, propelled at millions of miles an hour by the terrific coughs and sneezes. It started creeping up on moi this afternoon. Anyone who has been reading this blog for a while (Hello, Jack the Spam Robot!) will know what a wonderful sick basturn I can be. So I thought I would see if I could counteract the disease with my yogic powers, and came in here about six to meditate.

I read somewhere that making the inner heat arise was dead good for your health. Like, you heat up like you would with a fever, or some such. Fry the germs.

The earth has moved again, Jack. You mean there has been further developments with ra bliss, Hotboy. I just goes on and on changing and being amazing. This meditation lark is very exciting in the old vajrayana. So yesterday I could tell it was different again. Something has moved aside and let something else in. A lot more heat in this complex mixture of gases and blisses from the vase breath. And I am starting to get quite hot.

So if it keeps on like this by next winter I should be going to work in my simmit. (For the people not fortunate enough to even be Scottish: Is that a singlet?) I'm bound to stand out. If anyone was dassing to risk me fisk by remarking on the snow turning to steam on my skin, I'll screw up my face and slowly say: Be-elzeebub!

You must be able to get into hospital if your boiling hot all the time. I'd need long term observation since these doctors wouldn't know what to make of a self heating malingerer. Three meals a day and nurses uniforms! I could just not tell them about the meditating and get it down as a new syndrome: The Hotboy Syndrome. Promote the brand. I should be in public relations, so I should.

As far as the contest between the yogic powers and the flu is concerned, ten nil to the flu!

Ra Bathtime Bliss!

2007-06-17T18:03:00.000+01:00

Sunday 6:00 p.m.
I went into the bath just after posting last time. I closed my eyes and sank into a great whiteness of ra bliss, and therein dozed off. Then, and it was as if no time had passed at all, I became conscious of nothing other than bliss. I wondered where my body was and managed to locate it. I was quite surprised that it was in the bath. I can't really convey how fantastic this felt. You can't buy this stuff, Jack. I have tried.

I had a similar experience of ra bliss in the hut about an hour ago. While I was up there, I ate some raspberries. I brought home some onions I'd planted last winter. This is the beginning of eating one's way through the allotment!

Ra hut or not?

2007-06-16T16:17:00.000+01:00

Saturday 4:15 p.m.
They'll think you're mad if you try to spend most of the six weeks of your summer holiday in that rickety old hut, Hotboy. Who, Jack? The evil bourgeois and their progeny, Hotboy. Well, the too dumb to meditate, Jack, cannot do ra bliss, cannot get out of their faces on air, and as they twist and turn in the winds of chance, what awaits them, Jack? Yes, grief, sorrow, lamentations ... suffering in this life! Well, we certainly do not have to pay much attention to what the flatheids think.

It'll be able to sit for ages in the hut if you could get over the first couple of days. If you got through the first couple of days, you wouldn't want to do much else but sit in the hut. I know this from the week's I've spent down at the Samye Ling.

I'd like to sit in the hut and do the Medicine Buddha juju, known as the sadhana. The little problem I have is that I do not really know how to do the Medicine Buddha juju. There's a process here you should repeat and I don't know it. I can read through it in this book I've got, but I don't know it. I don't know the sanskrit mantras and I don't know the mudras. That's only the things that I know I don't know.

Anything else lacking, Hotboy? Well, Jack, it might have been handy if I'd had a word or two with the lama in order to discuss the order of doing things, what things you are supposed to do, and what not to do, and when. I think somebody is supposed to whisper the whispered intructions in your earhole. All I've got is stuff from a few books and a bit of guesswork.

And what is not lacking, Hotboy? I have had the empowerment to do this juju from probably one of the most prominent juju masters in Europe anyway, and I have a root guru in his wee brother, who has done at least twelve years in retreats perfecting this juju. The more I meditate, the more confidence I get in these joes.

The Domestic Bliss and the kiddo are off for a week from next Wednesday visiting various Mediterranean rat towns. Someone said why do you have to go to the hut when the flat is empty that week?

There's something funny starts happening with your mind after you've been on your tod meditating most of the time for a couple of days. I found this out during Christmas retreats in Purelands, the isolated bit away from the main Samye Ling monastery. Your visual field becomes a bit plasticy; the objects in it seeming to become a bit more malleable somehow. Your can project a bit. This is surely the beginning of being able to do the three dimensional visualisations which are the crowning glory perhaps of the skilfull means; method and wisdom conjoined.

Your mind is just never going to become that calm in a flat with a teevee, and a barrel of beer!

The only problem with the hut is that it is too near here! You need a hut in the wilds, or ...

I'd like to offer myself up as a hostage to a group of religious nutters, who are stupid enough to believe in stuff, but not competent enough to go out and get a real hostage. Here's the deal.
1) I get a warm hut and three meals a day of soup and bread.
2) They can put a webcam on me for 24 hour a day in case the levitations kick in half way through the gig.
3) I have no problem telling the camera that the Americans and the British crusaders should get out of Iraq, but I have to be allowed a new teeshirt ever week with a slogan on it.

Teeshirts:
1) Flatheids just don't get ra bliss!
2) Oh, ra bliss, ra bliss, ra bliss!
3) The mind game is the only game in town.
4) How can nothing exist outside your own mind?
5) It's all a lot of old photons!
6) Arising and abiding and declining in mind.
7) Can you, or can you not, do ra bliss?
8) Physical bliss and mental ecstasy.
9) Experiential mysticism is the game here.
10) What a fortunate creature I am!
11) Oh, what a fortunate, fortunate creature I am! What a fortunate creature I am!

That's too many teeshirts! I'll have to re-negotiate the deal.

I did not put in Fung Off Flatheids as a tee shrit because I am in such a good mood! I'm still in the Beer Monster Reduction Vehicle - what a brilliant training session I had! - and will shortly be soaking in the bath. Tonight the flat will be full of hopeless alcoholics, but I as ever will try to maintain the middle way. Hmmm? Off to do some more surfing on the oceans of bliss!

Ra Wonderful Day!

2007-06-14T13:54:00.000+01:00

Thursday 1:55 p.m.
This morning was great. I so want not to have a jobbie! Anyway, it was too busy since I had to make my bread and the delicious soup. I costs about £5 to make enough bread and soup for four or five days. I could live like a lord on £20 a week, which is just as well because that's all I've got in cash till I get paid again. But I've got supplies.

The other thing I had to do was visit the library for the Domestic Bliss. While I was there I put in an order for Afloat by Jennifer McCartney. I definitely going to read novels again. Anyway, they'll have to buy it to give me a look since it's not in the Edinburgh Public Library catalogue yet.

I'll be able to read more novels in bed now that I have a new pair of specs (which I can actually see out of!) and will soon be completely teetotal. Just when I was getting my resolve together, I get another invite to a drinks reception at the Traverse for next Thursday. Another open grave! Also, the Domestic Bliss has invited a bunch of hopeless alcoholics to dinner on Saturday night.

Something told me something was the matter with all this weeding folk do in their allotments. Now, I've discovered that the poppies I've been pulling up are opium poppies! All things come to those who wait, Hotboy. They'll be running about the allotments with AK 47s mounted on the back of jeeps before you know it!

I might post about the wonderments later!

5:10 p.m.
As you come round the corner at Brandon Terrace, you can see way way way up to Princes Street and the Scott Monument. It's part of my benchmark 4 mile run. Though I haven't been running much recently, I sailed up the hills today. And what a great hour I've just spent soaking in the bath! Eyes closed with the whole head enclosed in a great globule of ra bliss! The bath after the run was always wonderful, but now that I can do ra bliss in the bath. Well, what can I say, Jack? What a fortunate creature I am!

Rat Small Bird!

2007-06-12T23:04:00.000+01:00

Tuesday 11:05 p.m.
A little under an hour ago, I was experiencing so much more of ra bliss, ra bliss that has said to you that you thought you understood and had experienced all of ra bliss, but all of that, Hotboy, was just child's play. How much of ra bliss was it?

It was like the first sight of the Michelin Man in Ghostbusters. It was benificent. But it was towering over all the skyscrapers in Manhattan, and so gigantic ...that I thought I'd better have a drink. Or, it didn't matter if I had a drink. It's just a bit more of a spanking you have to take on the way to the hut. But, Jesus, it was a lot of ra bliss!

Nothing exists outside your own mind.

How can nothing exist outside your own mind?

Everything exists inside your own mind. Well, where else could it exist?

And thus we can begin to pray again.

So the medicine buddha arises and you arise simultaneously. You both arise in mind. You're in the mandala and you offer everything to the deity, who looks just like you. Then, you get the deity up on top of your head, and try to think it's really there. Then, you take the blessing, or the stream of light down comes down from the deity ... that's always been special. The stuff coming down. Oh, ra bliss!

Where is the Medicine Buddha? It has to be in your mind. Where else could it be? Are you blessing yourself, Jack? Who else could be blessing you? There is only one thing. You have to bless yourself? Fung sake! That's worth more than ten percent off the top. Okay, ... okay, four pence!

The next morning. The wee bird is my Tai Chi teacher. She says she does 49 knee bends every day, plus at least twenty "snakes", and all the rest of the warm up stuff. That's on top of the sets she does and the teaching she does. She's got to be 78 years old at least!

The amount of ra bliss last night kind of freaked me, there as so much of it. Today I feel as if the world has changed for me. It's like it's just always going to be in the breath, Jack. Always there. What a fortunate, fortunate creature I am, I am! What a fortunate creature I am!

Ra Very Nice Looking Gurl!

2007-06-09T23:31:00.000+01:00

Saturday 11: 31 p.m.
There are a lot of people around. They are flatheids. They are also very nice. But if you do too much of them, well, you forget what you are supposed to be doing. You just lay down your guard ... then, there's Popeye, my wee brother. The next evening there is the daughter and her boyfriend. Pause for sobriety and more meditations. Then, today, there is my deep dear friend from Australia with the very, very bad cough.

I might be on a list. It's a Traverse list. This means that me and the kiddo get to go to the first nights of all Traverse productions, but I do not know why. The list maybe leaks. I get asked to go to this thing for authors. And joes and josephines who would like to be authors. There is free drink.

So she slides into the seat across from me. Nobody sits in these seats, which are away at the side, except for me and the other joe, who came to see me because |I was reading The book of the Three Iinspirations and sitting ...in a half lotus.

I will have to explain to all the spam robots listening right now that I am truly gorgeous. It's not so much the way I look, it's the emanating as a deity that really attracts these babes.

She will make a fortune and be rich and also think that she has been successful. The second time she slid into the seat across from me, and I had gone back to reading The Book of the Three Inspirations at the time, and I was wonderfully attracted to her, and she was dead young and attractive, and ... so on.

When the mormons come to your door, you should tell them that you are a catholic, then they run away. It also works with the Jehovah Witnesses. All you have to do is come and speak to me, babes, and you will melt my heart. She's got a book published. She thinks this will help her to be happy. I told her I'd been in monogamy for decades. No, I didn't. Neither did I mention kamamudras. But, God, I really wanted to bang her brains out!

I think it's called networking. The guy was funny and knew lots of things. He was called McDowell. The gorgeous girl was called Jennifer McCartney. Her book is called A Float.

I just love speaking to anyone who is trying to become somebody. Far smarter than moi! None of ra bliss of course. Still..... hmmm? Nice gurl!!!!

Sunday 10:30 a.m.
The yamas are the things you are supposed to do. The niyamas are the things you're not supposed to do. What am I not supposed to do then, Jack? Hotboy, you are not supposed to go to receptions with free alcohol, neck half the free alcohol singlehanded, then spend the rest of the time drooling over attractive young women from Canada, with literary agents and a book published. Bad boy! And what am I supposed to do? You are supposed to sit in the hut, go breathless and emanate as a deity. I see. Well, I'd better do that then. You didn't ask if she was in a volleyball team as well, did you, Hotboy? I hope not, Jack. I hope not.

Rat Breath Again!

2007-06-08T10:23:00.001+01:00

Friday 10:22 a.m.
Empedocles proved the existence of air to his chummies in Ancient Greece by upturning a bucket in the sea, and squeezing down. There's something there, he might have said. You can feel it inside the bucket. We'll call it air.

How many radio stations are in the air around you?

For a wee while last night, I became amazed at the air. Whilst doing ra bliss and heat around dusk. Here, these days that's about ten o clock. How can ra bliss be associated with breathing i.e. when doing this vase breathing? There are odd connections going on here between the air and your body. You shoot the breath and go to California. How could that possibly be and what could it mean?

Is the air full of ra bliss? Are we surrounded and totally immersed in ra bliss, but just don't have access to it, well, not if we're a flatheid and too dumb to meditate anyway. It looks as if the air is full of ra bliss, but it looks as if the sun goes round the earth.

I chanced upon this yesterday in the Glenn Mullin translation of Tsongkhapas Six Yogas of Naropa. ."... the breath becomes increasinly subtle, and eventually stops altogether. Concerning the experience Jetsun Milarepa stated,
.... Ecstasy is experienced.
And also
When the breath no longer comes and goes, ecstasy;
When one completely cuts off the flow, ecstasy.

That'll be ten percent off the top, please. I'm away to Bellshill. I'm going to give a copy of my new book to Skinny McDuck and my brother Silvest.

Ra Bad Boys!

2007-06-06T14:14:00.001+01:00

Wednesday 2:15 p.m.
When his boat had docked at Leith last night, my wee brother Popeye came to see me. Unbeknownst to him, I've been a confirmed teetotalist since my barrel ran dry on Saturday night and when I got home from the Tai Chi, bottles of Hoegarden wheat beer were waiting for me on the kitchen table. Well, it would have been rude not to have had a few!

Wine is the drink associated with catholicism and coffee is associated with the moslems. I think the drink for buddhists should be beer. Of course, proper practitioners don't touch alcohol, but when Gampopa first met Milarepa, the great Tibetan saint, practically the first thing Milarepa did was give him a skull full of alcohol to drink. Although he'd taken vows to lay off the bevvy, Gampopa gulped the lot in a oner!

I'd like to drink beer out of a skull. Anyone got one to spare?

Three of the four main disciples of Gampopa were the bad boy brothers from Kham. They were fully enlightened and kept asking Gampopa if they could have some beer. He allowed them three skullsful of barley beer and they went off up the mountain to display their miraculous powers and to show that being pissed was no impediment to them maybe. Later on, they were partying in the monastery, singing and dancing (I suspect not without female company!) and were ordered to leave by the Discipline Master. When they were leaving , they prostrated towards Gampopa, who'd gone into retreat up the mountain, and the grass bowed, and the trees bowed along with them. Gampopa hurried down the mountain and asked them to please not go away. It seems that nobody objected to their carousing after that!

My brother Popeye seems to have really enjoyed my new book! Who cares if it doesn't get published?! It won't make Popeye into a meditator. Who cares? I yam what I yam, says Popeye! He might be a Taoist! I'm going to take a copy to my brother Silvest, row of forty medals on his chest, big chest, who lives in Bellshill on Friday. Who cares if he thinks meditation is a lot of something odourous?!

I'm in such good humour at the moment! I don't have to go to work again till Monday and it's only three weeks till I have six weeks off. After taking my bread out of the oven, I'm away to the allotment to do some mega bliss. Oh, ra bliss, ra bliss, ra bliss! What a fortunate creature I am, I am! What a fortunate creature I am!

1:35 a.m.
And the sun shone. The meditations were mighty. After seeing my wee brother, Popeye, I think it does not matter if you are a flatheid. He's a much nicer joe than I am. Ditto several others en famille. Unfortunately, they do not get ra bliss. Well, it would be good for them if they got ra bliss, had access to ra bliss, and could do ra bliss when they needed to, but they are still the wonderful people and my support. In this mandala, they will live well and pass away with courage, and I should stop hassling them just because the flatheids are too dumb to meditate .... even Albert Einstein was too dumb to meditate ... and only truly, truly fortunate creatures will experience ra bliss, and there's really no point in giving them a bad time. Because they are my support. The supporting joes and josephines. When I get a bit better at this juju, I will realise and know that there is only one thing, and then who am I shouting at?

I read in The Times today that the most popular name for boys in Britain now is Jack.

How are you, Jack? Me and all the spam robots are sticking with you, Hotboy! There is only one thing. There's only one thing. Experiential mysticism is the game here! Are the Masai Warriors bouncing up and down behind you, Hotboy? Of course, they are, Jack! And The Alien Creatures from Outer Space? Where are they, Hotboy? They're configuring right by my side, and supporting me, and saying: Go for it, Hotboy. Take to the hut! There's only one thing, and we're all on the lid, rising up. There is no such thing as being on your own. We don't do being on your own in RaBlissBlog! With slight exaggerations, some spitting, chibbing, tolchocking and some terrible mistakes after which we may make amends ... just try hard and keep the motivation right! Into ra bliss! Into ra bliss!

Ra Cure!

2007-06-03T16:48:00.001+01:00

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

Ra Black Dog!

2007-06-02T23:55:00.000+01:00

Saturday 11:55 p.m.
After two pints from the barrel. Perhaps Onan could advise. (This fung thing won't accept links again!) There's two kilos of sugar in this brew. The tin says one kilo. How much, Onan, do you reckon? It's got to be well over 5%! Pretty squiffy already on two pints!

After half a pint, I was watching a show on the telly about re-creating Sargeant Pepper's. They were doing "I'm leaving home." I didn't cry very much at all for years and years and years. I think it was after starting meditating that I started to cry. I was thinking of the girl who wasn't getting on with her parents (no point in just jumping into this if you're a pervert landing on this bloggy looking for hotboys. Maybe this is just between you and me, Jack.) and the lyric seemed so apposite, and brilliantly encapsulating ... I'm a lot less hard skinned than I used to be. Oh, I cried, and cried, and cried!

Anyway, something like that is going to make you look crap at writing anything.

Drama requires conflict, I think. Last night I was supposed to be watching a movie called Babel. It was a very well made movie and it was nice to see Brad Pitt doing some acting instead of being Achilles in whatever awful crap that was. These joes don't get the jobs if they can't act. Sometimes the jobs don't require that much really good acting. So half way through Babel, which was an interesting enough movie, I stopped watching it. I don't want to have my face shoved into how upset the flatheids can be. I was once interested in seeing all that kitchen sink emotionalism, but now I can't be bothered. I accept that for performers it would be good to do that. It's acting.

I'd prefer watching The Importance of Being Earnest. The kind of drama I really like is the drama of the absurd. I can't spell the French boy's name anymore. Someone wrote a play about a dead body being off stage and the dead body got larger and larger till the legs were sticking onto the stage. Now, (Anoiulh? Anouilh ... how can you expect to be famous with a name no one can spell or remember even if they were sober?!) The Rhinoceros! What a great play that was!

The reason why one cannot treat this as a writing medium , apart from being able to do it when you're out your face, is because ... well, the typeface just changed there to what it was about a month ago. Give me a duck to chase so I get pull a feather out of it's bum and write with that!

Oh, to be perfect! How many things am I not very good at, apart from equanimity? Almost anything you care to mention.

This morning I couldn't take a proper vase breath because the after-effects would have blown me out the window. I could take wee ones. I thought of all the things I hadn't done, and couldn't do to get this far. It was fung dangerous again. But you couldn't breach it. You just knew it was a time to hang on and wait a wee bit.

Tonight when the Domestic Bliss went out, I sat in the lobby. Until about eleven o clock when I started on the barrel. And it's just like I just can't do it yet.

The Black Dog is a symbol for depression. I don't know why my sleep has been poor sometimes this week since I do not think I have been bevvying more than one day in two. But the third dream I had last night was about The Black Dog.

There were crowds of people in Raeburn Place, but The Black Dog saw me and loved me and wouldn't let me go, although it seemed like a stranger and not my dog. For you doggie people, it was a cross between a greyhound, and Irish Wolfhound, and a Great Dane, a big black dog. At no time did it scare me though sometimes it hugged me in a slightly pre-humping way, and from the back. I took it up the stairs, which were bigger in the dream and full of folk and their different breeds of dogs. The Black Dog loved me so much and was so happy to be with me that I had to kid it on and take it down to the door and fool it so that it was locked out. How it scrambled and lay on it's side in desperation to be with me, and clawed at the door. I was happy thoroughout.

Then I was outside on the street sometime later and The Black Dog found me again, and how amazingly happy it was! I was so happy to find this symbol of depression and delighted that it loved me so!

We don't do depression here in The Amazing Bloggy Church of the Bad Boy Blissheid. If anything, we do acting out. I was very happy that the dog liked me so much. What does that mean, Jack? Drink less beer, Hotboy. There is more than you suspect in this home brew barrel. But it's finished this weekend, Jack. And I loved the dog!

Rat Old Sailor Man!

2007-06-02T10:53:00.000+01:00

Saturday morning: 10:53 a.m.
I received a communication this morning from the sensei and reverend who is now settled in Phoenix, concerning the press reports that getting knocked out could lead to an increased risk of developing Parkinson's. Although the sensei was brought up in that idyllic, Brigadoon-like little Scottish village called Maryhill (what a nice name!), where the only trouble he could recall was an argument over who was going to get first prize at primary school for the flower arranging competition, he thought a bit of the old ultra violence was maybe hard wired into to some young joes, and that what you weren't evolved to do was sit around smoking and frying up dead animals! And he might be right. Or:

I biffs em and buffs em
An' always outroughs em
An' none of em gets nowhere.

I'm fond of the lyrics of that song. Anyone know where it's from?

By the way, for the people who land on this bloggy looking for info on agents ... I couldn't get Simon Trewin of PFD to look at three chapters of the sensei's very good crime book. But I sent him an email and he did get back to me after a wee reminder. Considering the amound of emails he must get, that's really quite good.

If I can't get an agent for the sensei (but I will!), what's the point of me writing a crime book? It'll take a long while and I've already got seven unpublished books (at least!). I've hardly got time to work on the plotline for this one, but I hope to have it finished by the end of June. Then I'm off to the hut. Then, I'll leave the plan and if I'm still going to write, I might work on a script. Lots of writers can write better prose than me, but I'm taking my hat off to nobody when it comes to writing dialogue. I've always thought it was better to write books that I couldn't get published than scripts I couldn't get produced, but tempis fugit. Scripts are faster and you can write them easier in your head.

I hope everyone is going to have as good as Saturday as I'm going to have!

Rem Beliefs Again!

2007-05-31T17:00:00.000+01:00

Wednesday 5:00 p.m.
I believe that most of the joes and josephine who land on this bloggy do not believe in miracles. They would say that miracles were a lot of old, superstitious, irrational nonsense. And they might be right. Most of these people would believe in evolution and the current hypotheses concerning the Big Bang. Well, this is kind of acceptable, and rational, and all that kind of stuff.

But to say the Bang Bang occurred from a point without circumference (what?), without any explanation thereof whatsoever, and then maybe 15 billion years later you're standing there and saying you don't believe in miracles just makes me want to laugh. How fast do miracles have to be?

Of course in the Amazing Bloggy Church of the Bad Boy Blissheid we don't believe in miracles either.

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

What about Celtic winning the European Cup 40 years ago, Hotboy? Well, of course, I believe in that, Jack. In fact, I watched it on the telly. My auld maw was pally with team captain's auld maw.

To be religious is to know that the facts of this world are not the end of the matter. Wittgenstein. The Wall.

What the Amazing Bloggy Church of the Bad Boy Blissheid is really trying to tell you, Jack, is that because we are the human beings and have only certain faculties, senses, abilities at our disposal, we misapprehend. We do not see the connections. We see the stuff as separate, isolated and usually pretty unchanging. That's why fire is so good. It constantly transforms; it changes; it flows a wee bit like clouds.

The best of the flatheids, who believe in things, try to believe in heaven and try to be good in a sensible kind of way. So we'll let them off because life isn't easy for a lot of folk and flatheids are badly alienated since all they see is separateness, and they're stuck with a false sense of self, and they think they're going to die. Oh no!

But you cannot get anywhere, Jack, with dogmatists, the folk who generally believe in total crap, like creation started five thousand years ago, like the Bible (Koran) is literally true and the word of God, or that that some messiah is going to come and then everything will be alright.

These flatheids cause all the bother in the world that the capitalist basturns haven't caused and the lot of them are invited to commit suicide regularly in this bloggy.

That's a bit intolerant, Hotboy. You're right, Jack. I sound like one of these intolerant, flatheided basturns who believe in things!

I started to believe in the possibility of miraculous events once about twenty years ago when I'd been meditating for a wee while. I realised I was hardly breathing. When you meditate sometimes your breathing becoming less than at any other time, including deep sleep, etc. But that's not what I was trying to do. I was simply trying to concentrate on the Mumbo Jumbo I was repeating to myself, Sussquehanna (Still, a great sound!!!)Anyway, at the time I thought: That's a miracle! I couldn't believe how low the breathing rate had become. And I thought, if you could levitate, it won't be because you're trying to levitate. I will happen because you're thinking of something else, or trying to do something else. I wondered what.

Well, what, Hotboy? I don't know, Jack. I can't levitate!

I think the world record for breath holding is about nine minutes. Free divers are into this. I think the word might be apneasts. I held my breath on Saturday night for one minute 52 seconds, but usually I'm stuck at about a minute. Saint Teresa said her breathless states lasted about half an hour, she thought. But she hadn't a stop watch and she wasn't trying to hold her breath. Amd she could float as well although she didn't really want to. It wasn't what she was trying to do.

I realised my ignorance was truly profound when I had my first rising of the inner heat. Ten years ago I would have very much doubted the stories of these yogis wandering around the frozen wastes in the Himalayas in cotton nightshirts, and not having their goolies frozen off. The problem is that we don't know what we are and we think we do. Who are you? I don't know. Perfect answer!!
In The Amazing Bloggy Church of the Bad Boy Blissheid we try to keep an open mind. It's arrogant and stupid in equal measure to claim much knowledge of anything. Or saying anything is true, except stuff like Celtic won the European Cup in 1967.

It's much more fun doing this when you're half pissed! That'll be ten percent off the top, please.

Ranother Long Weekend!

2007-05-30T18:35:00.002+01:00

Wednesday 6:36 p.m.
Fee, Fi, Foo, Fum!
Look out, Cassius, here I come! The Inimitable Bob.

In the Times today: "Those who had suffered a single knockout had a 35 percent chance of developing the disease, while those who had been knocked out more than once more than doubled their risk." Of getting Parkinson's.

I wonder what the methodology was behind that! I lost four seconds once, but I beat the count. I only had eight fights. Are you reading this, sensei? How many fingers? Don't worry! The dementia will get you first.

In the full Beer Monster Reduction Vehicle, I've just completed the six three minute rounds routine. I'm really quite fit for that now, but I'm still sitting at twelve stone, which is a stone of fat I really don't need. I blame it all on all this sitting quietly doing nothing.

It's the gallons of beer you drink, Hotboy! Shut it, Jack. I wonder if getting punched on the head gives you schizophrenia. You're never alone with schizophrenia, Hotboy.

I'm only drinking beer about three nights a week at the moment, but I can't be bothered now about giving it up for this juju. It seems to get better and better no matter what I do. How odd is that? Every time I do a vase breath I go to California!

I'm been trying to get the kiddo to read my new book and told her about the somebody who left a comment who was getting ra bliss at 24 years old. That's nearly ten years before I started to meditate! I hope that one turns out to be a floater!

I felt little waves of anxiety today about the way this inner heat stuff is rapidly progressing. I have not been doing this right, or in the right order, or the way they would have done it in Tibet, or even down at the Samye Ling. I have not completed any prostrations, far less 100,000.Ditto with the 100,000 recitations of the 100 syllable mantra, and so on, and so on. Tsongkhapa says if you haven't got the three channels visualised properly, you're going to hell.

But in the Amazing Bloggy Church of the Bad Boy Blissheid we don't do anxiety. What a wonderful couple of days I'm going to have!! I'm not going to crash and burn. This vajrayana might be a bit of an extreme sport the way I'm doing it, but what the hell! You could get the black spot any day! At fifty six I'm in overtime here. Tempis fugit! All my plans are simple! To the hut! To the hut!

11:17 p.m.
It's not dark here just now till after ten. But fires are still beautiful. I sat meditating in the open tonight since there was no one around up at the allotments, and gazed on a fire I'd made from old newspapers. It's better in the dark or the gloaming, but flames still look great any time. Naked flames. They're bound to make it illegal sometime! It's night night from HotboyMadyamikaSurfingTheOceansOfBliss!

Ra Jobbie!

2007-05-29T23:17:00.000+01:00

Tuesday 11:18 p.m.
They were leaving today. There is a space I'm supposed to be in control of in the jobbie where I work, but because the pupils have exams, I've been pretty closed down for a couple of weeks. But there weren't any exams today when the three of them arrived, and there was only me. They'd drifted in.

One kid has multiple hair cuts and has told folk he might be bi-sexual recently. One other kid is going to college (which means he's not on the dole figures) and the girl is dead smart, but having maybe a bad time. Her best friend when she was six or seven was killed by the currant who massacred the kiddos in Dunblane. She has been beautiful and she will be beautiful in future, but right now she's not getting on with her mum and dad.

She meets with her mum. She hasn't seen her for four months. She says her mum is crying a lot, but she can't cry. She tells me this, and do I want to know, a couple of days ago.

So they come in. I've been having a pretty wonderful time, what with the place being empty, and when they come in, I resist hassling them at all. These three kids know me.

It's more of the last day for the boys than it is for the girl, who is dead smart, but missing exams, etc. Sometimes she appears and I always say okay because she is one of us really. The last day is really only for the sixth years. These folk didn't get that far.

They come into my space, behind the counter. The girl hands me a felt tip pen and tells me to write on her back. She turns. She's got a green jumper top thing on. I say: what? Then I write across her shoulder blades: MEDITATE!

She's the only girl who tried to hug me. I backed off. As you should. But I wrote something on her back. I told the kid, who's parents had parted and how hurt he was,to stay off the smack. The bi-sexual kid will have a wonderful life in hairdressing, and will be fine in that.

I've seen them grow up. Usually, I was far too tired, or too hung over, or funged up, to be of much help, but in their passing ... I did try.

Will it make any difference, Hotboy? Well, Jack, I do not think so. But I tried my best.

I never think of young people as flatheids. People of my age who do not meditate, well ... well, well, what can you say about them?

Well, what can you say about them, Hotboy? We're playing the long game here, Jack. Just last night we found someone who knew about ra bliss! What a fortunate creature I was then, Jack! What a fortunate creature I was then!

Ra Summary!

2007-05-27T23:45:00.000+01:00

Sunday 11:45 p.m.
Things just got better and better after I walked away from the jobbie on Wednesday. So I'm doing ra bliss all Saturday morning and then I'm shadowboxing through the first half of the Scottish Cup Final ... when who walks in the door but Benny and the Midnight Runners, the Lou Reed, the joe and josephine, my deep dear friends from the Wiziristan of Scotland, the Wild West. Party time and sorted, we're off to conjoin with our friend with the M.S. and the reception for the building of the decking out the back.

Most of the folk I've known for over thirty years, which is wonderful, and if I haven't known them for that long it's because they are progeny. Poisonous at one point was sitting bolt upright on the sofa while his kid holds up four fingers, and says: How many, Dad?

But I'd decided not to drink. They don't lose anything from bevvying. They don't get ra bliss. They don't have ra bliss. They are my deep dear friends, but I say: I am very sorry, my deep dear friends, but yous are flatheids and do not get any of ra bliss, and do not know about ra bliss, and cannot get out of your face on air, so I'll see yous later.

This is a very beautiful garden in Marchmont. Fortunately,it is cold and a bit wet sometimes and this means that the flatheids will not venture maybe too much down the garden, and I can sit on the one seat semi-obscured, and see how the investigations into ra bliss are going. But they, the flatheids, who are my deep dear friends, do venture forth sometimes, and I always try to be nice as you do, but sometimes I say: Can you or can you not get out of your face on air? Being flatheids, my deep, dear friends, cannot get out of their faces on air, and really do not know what I am talking about, but I have known lots of them for over thirty years, so I think they may not bother if I'm a bit peculiar.

The bugs are slow because of the dank and, as it's getting dark, I've gone off for my second respite away from the flatheids, and it is truly, truly wonderful to be there, and ra bliss is coming on so exceptionally.... at one time I joined my chummies and their offspring on the patch of grass, but how sad it was that they did not get ra bliss, and never will, because they do not meditate.

It didn't matter about 20 years ago when I started raving about meditation to these joes and josephines. Then the meditations were just interesting and interesting, but I could not access ra bliss the way I can do now. So, now it felt so sad that their time had passed by, and after it had gone, the babes weren't babes anymore, and the men were old and fat, and the only one who could do ra bliss... was moi!

And it seemed so true: At the end of the day, what it comes down to is this: Can you, or can you not, do ra bliss?!

Just meditate or blow your brains out now, Jack.

Someday some young alien from Outer Space, or a Masai Warrior, or one of my spam robot chummies, may come upon this bloggy, and they will maybe mutter, why did he stop?

It should mean something. The effort should have a reciprosity. If the flatheids are just too dumb to meditate .. well, bye, bye, I wish you well. Shame you didn't even start to become a proper human being. If there's twenty comments, I might start again. Otherwise, what's the point? Flatheids just don't get ra bliss!!!!!!

Ra Axeman Cometh!

2007-05-25T00:22:00.000+01:00

Friday 12:20 a.m.
This post is for Ion. I'd put in a link, but something about this bloggy is totally funged up. You clicky the icon for links and you don't get what you used to. Ephemeral shit! That's why I should give up and write writing instead. Anyway...

I'm thirteen years old and I'm over at the swingpark with Boab and Walter Campbell. There was another joe there, but I cannot remember who he is. It might have been Jake Carlin. We're going to the woods. I didn't usually hang around with Boab or Walter, his big brother, but I was with them this day. They had an axe, or hatchet, or machete, a quite blunt one. There's two sets of swings. I'm swinging on one of the swings and footering as you do. I've got a loan of the axe and I'm sitting on the swing and the axe is hitting between my legs in a desultory fashion. Nothing much is happening. We've paused there. The Black Woods are across the road.

Then this old joe comes out of the hut. For some reason there's a hut there with an old joe sitting in it. God knows what for. He comes out and starts hustling the Campbells and telling them to go away. The Campbells start taking the piss. And running around the old joe, and Walter is the worst. The old joe is not too swift on his feet and Walter is really not too bright. So they're running circles round the old joe and I get off the swings and tell them to pack it in, so we can go to the woods.

Then the old joe, who is a bit doolally, runs into the Calder Road, which is between the swing park and the Black Woods, and waves down this cop car. What the fung that was doing there God knows! Before you can say, fung the Queen, the constabulary have us lined up. The old doolally joe wants them to do something and they ask who vandalised the swing? What? It was a very old swing, the seat decrepit, etc. I had chipped out a few bits and that was that. I knew the old guy wanted Walter hustled. Who did it? said the pig. (He was a pig! I saw him in the pub near there, when I was about 19, and what a nazi currant!)The Campbells are saying fung all, and I think we'll have to stay there forever, and say it was me. At least, the old guy looked surprised... since I was the joe who stopped the Campbells hustling him.

Sometime ages later the pigs come to the door and I answered it. Got my maw and the old man from the living room. They spoke to the pigs. What a laugh they were having as they came down the lobby afterwards! They were falling about. I was a wee bit distressed since I'd heard that I was going to have to go the juvenile court, and told them, bottom lip quivering, that I'd pay the fine.

My parents had a very good sense of humour.

So, I'm in first year at high school and have to take the day off to go to court at the Bellshill Police Station. I'm in the waiting room. Then there's only me and my maw and this other, much older joe, with one of his parents. The joe, obviously a habitual offender, tells me they'll let me off if I start to cry. I think, no way! I am not going to cry. My maw finds out who the magistrate is. A protestant. We're funged! It's a protestant. She'd have known the tim magistrates.

My maw is standing at my right. I can just about feel her bristling. I've got on my school uniform, which is the best clothes I have. Our Lady's High School. The protestant says why can't this boy join the Boy's Brigade if he wants to go to the woods with an axe? My auld maw says, we don't have the Boy's Brigade. We have the Boy's Guild. The magistrate says I have to pay costs of 15 shillings for the swing. Admonished. So I do not have a record for that. Malicious damage.

Fung off, you bourgeois basturns! Just fung off!

My uncle Donald was the same age abouts as my auld maw. After his old man died, he got done for stealing biscuits off a train, and my old man had to take him to the Police Station, the same one, I think, to get birched.

They're all in hell now, Jack. The basturns all go to hell! Allah Akbar!

Ra Second Time I got Arrested Again!

2007-05-23T22:14:00.001+01:00

Wednesday 22:14 p.m.
This is the 601st post! I'd been trying to tell myself that I should stop because this blog has served its purpose. Brian Wilson told me about blogs and said I should set one up when I put my books onto the webpage, which is the worst writer's webpage I've ever seen. It's a Mike Tyson, no bells and whistles, webpage. (You do not understand that reference, well, who cares? This was never about you. It was always about moi!) Anyway, I put up the webpage when I stopped working full time in the jobbie because I thought it might help attract a literary agent. And, amazingly enough, it did. Took a while but it helped. So now I can't blog about literary agents anymore and anything about business because my literary agent has advised me not to do so. As it would not help.

I've had two pints of the wheat beer home brew. Hmmm? A serious brew.

The objections I have to writing a blog are mainly to do with the fact that I don't do it as a writing task. I sometimes come here when I've sobered up and edit the most appalling mistakes, but it's not writing for me, though I appreciate that other people try a bit harder than I do. And have cameras. And know how to stick photies on their blogs.

So, I thought, at first that I should do this to keep track of the literary agents I was going to insult, etc., because I have no office skills, and I'm certainly not going to develope any. This blog has been useless for that.

All I did was sent off random emails to folk on Everyone Who Is Anyone in Publishing, etc., the webpage.

The wonderful thing about getting a literary agent was that this was one less thing I had to think about. As soon as this man of great taste and perspicacity appeared, I could concentrate again on ra bliss. Because I might be able to give up the half of the jobbie I have left at some point, and take to the meditations in a more serious manner. And I don't like trying to convince.

"Those who justify themselves do not convince." Lao-Tzu. The Wall.

The literary agent won't sell any of the books, of course. They might not be any good. The new book might be quite an interesting go at a book, but I don't expect it'll get published now.

The great thing I've liked about blogging is other peoples' blogs. Because you're in the game, you think you can look! I must say I have been much amused by other people's blogs and the whole blogosphere.

My auld maw sent me £10 in a letter today. She has started giving me £10 as I leave her house for the last year or so. The last time I was there she fell asleep as we were listening to the Dharmapada, so she sent the ten pounds in the post. I don't need the £10. I had only 20 pence to do me for the next week, but I don't need the £10 because I've got plastic. The auld maw gives.

Now that I've got an agent and no money, what I have to do is set myself for the six week holiday I can have from the end of June. I have to go to the hut in the allotment and stay there.

Truly fortunate creatures can collect the Four Blisses. Extremely fortunate creatures can go breathless at will. But you don't get it by being a sweetie eater. Sometimes you may have to endure.

So for the next month I have to really try to get myself into a non-clinging position where I can go and sit quietly doing nothing in the hut. And I think that will happen. I don't want to sit and cry, at least, not too often. I just want to be able to sit.

I had hoped when the bloggy started to conjoin with a lot of other joes and josephines who were doing ra bliss, but that was a mistake. This is a minority interest. I have always tried to consider myself as average, the norm. Though millions of joes and josephines have gone down the path before me, we are truly as rare as the stars in daytime. Flatheids to the left of us, flatheids to the right of us. Flatheids everywhere. What did I do wrong to end up surrounded by zillions of flatheids?

What are you going to get from all this, Hotboy? I'm going to get it all, Jack. I just have to stay alive long enough. Don't expect anything as the joe said. Just keep on practising.

Ra 600th Post!

2007-05-22T20:54:00.000+01:00

Tuesday 8:55 p.m.
I started looking for some books to maybe help me with plotting my crime story. I found this book by a guy called John Pridmore. I think it was called From Gangland to Promised Land, the story of the man behind the machete. I'm looking to see if I can see how London criminal gangs might operate when I come upon this account of a born again experience, if that's what they are. Anyway, very like some of the conversion experiences from The Varieties of Religious Experience.

The guy went breathless and thought he was dying. When you're supposed to be collecting the Four Blisses, I remember reading that you might think the first time it happens that you are dying. Oh no! Breathless, not breathing, breathless. So he thinks he'll certainly go the hell and falls on his knees asking for one last chance. Then he gets the mega love, and seems to go out of clock time for about four hours, which he thinks is about a minute or two from his end.

I couldn't help but notice how similar this seemed to a kundalini arousal. Because John Pridmore was western, of course, he had a slightly different interpretation. Anyway, the experience seems to have completely turned this guy's life around. And, interestingly enough, he's gone with the catholics.

I've been trying to plot a story interweaving crime with deity yoga, or something like that, so this book couldn't have been more appropriate. I goggled the joe and sent him an email saying thanks very much.

It's this kind of experience which the Tibetans have worked out how to engender in folk and, I mean, how clever is that?!

Ra Nazi Bike Workshop!

2007-05-21T21:37:00.000+01:00

Monday 9:35 p.m.
I did something today. Usually, I avoid that, especially doing something to things which have broken. Normally, with things that are broken, I find it better to walk away, or else the shouting and screaming in frustration may commence. But needs must. Tonight I fixed the slow puncture on the bike by putting in a new inner tube. This is on a back wheel and it's got 21 gears attached to it somehow.

The last time I attempted something like fixing a bike was about forty years ago. It only took me forty minutes. The sweat was pouring out of me so after that I did my physical jerks.

So tomorrow the cycling to work will recommence after giving in to the filthy weather in December.

I've had a wonderful Monday holiday from work. The meditations were excellent and I went to the Botanic Gardens with the Domestic Bliss after she picked me up at the allotment. Then we went back to the allotment and she worked while I sat outside and pretended I was maybe reading for two hours. The meditations then were superb. Everything was pretty beautiful looking sometimes today, and I even got my bike fixed without screaming and shouting and kicking anything at all!

Rarthur's Seat!

2007-05-20T21:21:00.000+01:00

Sunday 9:20 p.m.
Me and my chum Poisonous went cycling round Arthur's Seat in the early evening. I was hoping to see Sandy Buchandyke, but wondered if I'd recognise him from the nudie photie he sent me. There's a map with Arthur's Seat on it in his bloggy.

Arthur's Seat. Thirty years ago me and my pal Jerry used to run round Arthur's Seat as part of going to the boxing. I wore an old pair of Converse basket ball shoes Poisonous was finished with. Poor? Aye, poor! At least now I'm a good credit risk, sort of.

Ra Accident!

2007-05-18T23:19:00.000+01:00

Friday 11:20 p.m.
So I'm walking out of Haymarket Station after an okay visit to Bellshill, as you do on a Friday evening about quarter to five. There's a bottleneck that you might watch, where the even worse off sit, before you have to cross the road. Sometimes you might check the traffic and jackrabbit across the road if the circumstances look favourable.

But you're going to soldier on passed the bus stop. Would you like to go for a pint in Ryrie's Bar? No! Why did that come up? Thank God it's not as wet as I was expecting. Why did I fall asleep on the train? I was meditating late on last night.

So I'm scanning about as I approach the bottleneck where at least one begging person might be esconsed and I see this old lady try to cross the road. It's on the left and back a bit. Everybody just wants to get home. She's wearing a blue coat and has a blue hat on her head. And the stick.

Then it's all in slo-mo. The old lady walks out and the road is greasy and the car tries to stop, and she gets hit by the car, which is screeching to a slow halt, and the old lady folds onto the top of the motor. Then it halts and she gets slid off the bonnet, like a piece of cake, and lands an interestingly long distance away. Then, everything stops. Count the seconds. One, two, three, four ... and everything starts again.

I think: I've never seen anything like this before. What am I supposed to do? So I realised that nothing had happened and everything had stopped, so I walked towards the accident, maybe the third person to do this.

The first joe is crouching by the woman by the time I got there, and then it's not looking so cold and the start of Catch 22, the movie. Then the woman comes out of the car. Completely freaked. Oh my god! Then a bit worse than that. She's the usual woman. She's got two kids and lives in Penicuik. She's just got off work.

Some joes might have put their arms round the woman, but I didn't do that. Made pacifying noises. Then turned to the old lady.

The guy, who is semi-kneeling ... can you do this, Jack? The semi-kneeling with no knees touching the ground, says to the woman: I am a doctor. He's got a professional middle class accent and a pin stripe suit. And a brief case. He's like the guy out of American Psycho. He's the boy from Terminator 2. Perfect. He's asking the woman about her arms and legs, etc.

The underclass dress me. What can I offer here? I'm standing there watching the world spin round and wondering what is the point of wanting to help if you can't do anything. You cannot hug the driver. Some woman appears and hugs the driver. The doctor is going to move the woman. Some other woman says should you do that? I ask if I can be of any assistance? The doctor says to the woman: I am a doctor. Like, he's the boy you're supposed to wait for if you're lucky. And he's there. And he's impeccably dressed. Also, been in Terminator 2 and American Psycho.

So I went to the front, thinking I might be of some use, and had a good look at the old woman as she was being encouraged to sit up. Walt Disney drew the old woman. So I slinked off. Completely bloody useless. Also, I am too old to decide to become a doctor like the responsible joe who took over the woman's case, and was a wonderful emanation forsooth, and so I shall just try to connct with appearances in a different way.

Today, I heard another CD of the dharmapada at my auld maw's. How odd. The buddha was talking a lot about taking off for the woods, and bugger everything else. I would like to be able to do that, but I can't.

St Antony heard something in church. I think he thought: shit is that what you have to do? And then he went and did it. Cue the forty years in a cave mood music!

You're not going to do that, are you, Hotboy? No, Jack! I couldn't do that! What if I had a toothache?

The Nullabor Plain is where I'd like to be! It's Australia! The best place in this world is Australia. I'd like to be a proper person and go to Australia and sit there and await doom. They don't, some of them, worry about their dentists in Australia!

Ra Personal Development!

2007-05-16T23:52:00.000+01:00

Wednesday 11:52 p.m.
What does it look like from the flatheid perspective, Jack? I mean, all this about ra bliss, etc.

We know that you are mad, Hotboy. But the spam robots don't mind that. The spam robots love the stuff about ra bliss. Tell us once again about how you get into ra bliss?

Step One: Say Mumbo Jumbo to yourself. Basically, that's all the steps. Just say Mumbo Jumbo to yourself incessantly. This certainly worked for me, Jack.

So that's all you have to do, Hotboy?

You could stare at the wall and count your breaths if you like, Jack. But, yeah, something like that. Something simple.

And what is the end result of this, Hotboy? What happens if you say Mumbo Jumbo to yourself for twenty years?

Well, Jack, as the man said, we mustn't gloat. No, no, certainly not. No gloating here! I'm gloating like hell, Jack! I'm gloating like hell!

We were all standing looking into ra abyss! Toes curled over the edge. Ra personal annihilation, no less. This is where our atheism has landed us. Oh, no!

At least, now I really don't know. The more spectacular the results ... what can you really know, Jack? Well, you can know that your thoughts are in a frame and you can alter the frame.

I don't have to go to work again till next Tuesday. How fortunate!

Ra Monday Monday!

2007-05-14T15:02:00.000+01:00

Such immediate access to ra bliss this morning on the first meditation. That's a good time to check progress after a hard weekend on the cushion. Well, I could hardly believe it! If it doesn't get any better, that would just be hunky dory. It was brilliant, Jack. Deep and wide with hardly any arms and legs in it at all. Set your controls for the heart of the sun!

I haven't as yet had any reply from Jenny Brown, a literary agent here in Edinburgh, about the sensei and reverend's crime book, so I sent an email sometime last week. Still no reply. So I sent off three emails to agents in London. One was to Lucy Luck. That's just such a good name!

I sent an email to Pat Lovett, who runs an actors' agency here in Edinburgh. It was for the kiddo. But no response there either.

These folk who don't reply to emails (including the Buddhist basturns of Snow Lion, Wisdom and Shambhala Books!) had better watch out. I might be able to curse folk soon. You never know. May your hair get split ends, ya rotter!

Ra Names for Snow!

2007-05-13T13:20:00.000+01:00

Sunday 1:20 p.m.
I'd like to tell you about the sensations, Jack, but how many names have you got for snow? Hundreds, Hotboy! Get on with it!

What you have to remember is that being, most likely, too dumb to meditate, all these paltry descriptions will be of stuff you have never experienced. I mean, none of it.

Even moi walks around with his head stuck up his bum for much of the time. There is an interior monologue accompanying this, which might have cravings, threads of anxiety attached, or whatever. All these wee decisions you've been making and all your wee anxieties (which you probably don't realise you have) just disappear very soon after you hit the cushion. Very quickly you're in a completely different mental environment.

Let's go through the senses.
1) Vision: Melded, heightened colour, and objects seem to be less anchored, more shoogly. Sometimes they seem to move a little. Everything is a bit less solid and separated.
2) Hearing: Sometimes there is a rushing and roaring in the ears.
3) Taste: No change there that I've ever noticed.
4) Smell: No change there either!
4) Feeling: There are many different feelings, a smorgasborg of the buggers! Sometimes a great sense of uplift. Your eyes seem to widen and you face is sometimes pulled out in a rictus, clenched teeth grin. You seem to be in contact with something inside you (kind of) which is doing a lot of stretching and pulling. Put a vase breath or do some vase breathing in this condition and ... well, that's been changing a lot. There is the connection somehow between bliss and air. This seems to be developing between bliss and air and heat. But it seems dependant on what time of day it is, etc. I find this frustrating because it shows the mind is so connected with the body somehow, or environmental circumstances you can't really control.

Do you think you've been chosen to do this juju, Hotboy? No, Jack. I think I choose myself. But if the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas have been sitting about in a heaven somewhere looking around Edinburgh for some joe to road test this juju on, they might have noted there there were only two or three people capable of that and since the other two are already in mental hospital, it was down to me.

Let's face it, bloggy chummies! You can't get blogging like this anywhere else! For this is RaBlissBlog, here to tell you flatheids all about ra bliss you could be immersing yourself in except you're too dumb to meditate! Not me, Jack! It's back to the lobby for me. Oh, ra bliss, ra bliss, ra bliss!

8:40 p.m.
Well, that was an interesting weekend. I've dug out Tsongkhapa's 6 Yogas of Naropa in case I start getting the hang of this juju. I want to find the bit when he tells you about all the diseases you can get if you don't do it right. I suppose that book and The Bliss of Inner Fire are maybe the most valuable books in the world. You should be able to work out most of the technique for becoming a buddha in one life time from these books.

When we can see, straightforwardly and non-conceptually, the nature of our clear light mind, and remain totally aborbed in this nature without ever having to regress from it, we have become a buddha.Dalai Lama. The Wall.

By doing this juju I think you're supposed to be able to collect the four blisses, and thereafter your meditations will start with the first bliss. I wonder if that's what the Dalai Lama is talking about. If it is, that's a long, long way away, Jack.

Ra Summertime!

2007-05-12T17:35:00.001+01:00

Saturday 17:36 p.m.
My new book is not available from my webpage, but since I don't expect it to get published anymore, I hustled my wee brother Popeye to read it. He said he thought it was "fab". Man of few words is Popeye! It's not on the webpage, but if anyone wants to have a look, I'll email it.

I stopped meditating last night at half eleven and started today at half eleven. For a while in the lobby last night, a great feeling of contentedness mixed in with the usual wonderments. Peace. Satiation. If this could be maintained,you might sit till the cows come home, and then some. The foe destroyers who sit for days at a time maybe have a huge wallop of this added in. But it's probably something completely different by the time you get to that stage.

I'm trying to get set for the summer holidays, when I should get six weeks off again. I was in the hut this afternoon for a couple of hours, just for a change of scene. There's a duplicate postcard of the Medicine Buddha sticking onto the doorpost, so that was nice to see!

I'd like to be able to stay in the hut for days and days at a stretch, Jack. No hut manager, no book published, no money. Just six straight weeks to investigate ra bliss! What a fortunate, fortunate creature I am!

11:45 p.m.
Stopped the juju at half eleven again. Why is it always half eleven?

Sandy Buchandyke sent me a naked photie of himself. Thanks for that, Sandy. Perhaps the Arabian gentlemen who come here looking for hotboys would be better off there. Or at Onan the Bavarian's. Stop sending me photies, Onan!

Probably doing eight or nine hours a day for the last three days. Glad I put in the time. Got a bit further, into different mind spots. And there's still tomorrow to go! And tonight is but a pup!

Ra Cool Joe!

2007-05-11T10:40:00.000+01:00

Friday 10:40 a.m.
The meditations started at such a high point this morning that I'd like to spend the day in the lobby like I did yesterday, but I'm off to see the auld maw. What a wonderful journey I'll have on the train to Bellshill! Oh, ra bliss, ra bliss, ra bliss!

17:36 p.m.
What a great trip I had today! I'd only been in the auld maw's house for half an hour when she said she wanted to go upstairs and listen to the CD of the Dharmapada. So she lay on the bed and I set on the floor in a half lotus. The CD must have taken over an hour.

I've never read the Dharmapada, but there's bits of it on the wall

The wish that it be made known that "I was the author" is the thought of a man not yet adult. The Dharmapada. The Wall.

Let no man think lightly of good, saying in his heart, "It will not come nigh me." By the falling of water drops a pot is filled; the wise man becomes full of good even if he gather it little by little. The Dharmapada. The Wall.

When I was still at uni and dressing up as a hippy, I remember finding out that "cool" was a translation from the sanskrit (pali?), meaning that you weren't full of desire and craving. You were cool. I was listening to the Buddha telling us to be cool today.

The Dom Bliss bought me clip on shades for my specs to help combat the global warming last week. I mean, how cool can you get?

Ra Anticipation!

2007-05-10T14:11:00.000+01:00

Thursday 2:11 P.M.
I went to see Carthage Must Be Destroyed for the
second time last night. What a great production that is! I'd go again
if I hadn't maxed out my overdraft limit to go the second time.
Fabulous acting! Great everything!

The Domestic Bliss is leaving town tonight and won't be back till Sunday night. The flat is empty just now. The weather outside is pretty filthy and wet. Let it be
filthy and wet. I'm going to stay rooted to the spot for as long as I
can today. How fortunate I am to be doing this juju! This is RaBlissBlog! Off to the lobby to soar away with ra bliss! I'll keep you posted, Jack!

10:26 p.m.

I started meditating this morning at ten and just finished there at
10:15 p.m. Might have had two and a half hours off out of that twelve.
Meditated solely in the lobby. And after being so good, of course, one
has to be a little bad! I've just started on the home brew. Sometimes
it was hard today and sometimes it was easy. Mainly easy. But as it's
getting dark (after nine here just now), it just goes fabulous. What is
going on here?

Anyway, the flat is empty. Bring on the dancing girls!

If you exist, but not the way you think you exist ...if it's happening,
but not the way you think it's happening ... if whatever is happening
certainly isn't happening to you ... why are you so funged up?

Then I tried to tell myself that I should pretend the depiction on the
postcard was really the Medicine Buddha.

That way lies madness, Jack. Go for it, Hotboy.

You remember the chariot, Jack? How could I forget, Hotboy?
Well, it's a multiplicity of parts, no part of which actually contains
the chariot. The chariot is in your mind. Where else could it be?

Also, as I've said, after a while, the postcard can look
a bit wonky, the colours beaming vividly and kind of melding into each
other.

So we just embellish a little more and, voila, the Medicine Buddha!

Has he started to talk to you yet,Hotboy? No, Jack. He's really still just a fuzzy, warm postcard, but I'm working on it.

It's just like the stuff you do with the image on he Turin Shroud. If a
postcard is all I've got, it's going to have to do!

So the first thing the Medicine Buddha is going to say is: You should have
learned to speak Tibetan because I don't speak Scottish.

This part shall be known as the joke after one pint of home brew.

I shall go and refill my glass!

Normally, one is so negative about alcohol, but that is because one is
not drinking. One forgets what a good time one can have with a few drinkies after a whole day on the cushion. Aye, it's hard work all that sitting on your bum all day. You deserve to get completely puggled after such strenuousness.

I've just realised there's a spell checker thingy on this bloggy. They don't have flatheids wherever they stay. I'd like to go there!

The sensei and reverend has gotten there first. Well done, the sensei, for escaping from Tennessee without getting caught. Fat people will no longer be cannibalised in Chattanooga. Watch out Phoenix!

I have fond memories of the (no, it's not the time when I sing yous all
a wee song!) ... href="http://www.geocities.com/madyamika2000/index.html">The Real
McCoy. It's about ... this guy goes into this cave for six
years ... it's a Buddhist thing that ... anyway, I could write that bit
better now. That's a way I could write about deity yoga, etc. Somehow,
the one that starts with thejoe getting stabbed through the eyes might
not be much of a vehicle to carry the slight burden of what I know
about deity yoga.

The false sense of self has to go have fun as well. You can see this peeling off into a Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
dichotomy ... only after one and a half pints of this truly rancid, but
somehowscintillatingly wonderful beverage.

This spell checker stuff is going to make a big difference. I stopped being able to spell when I started blogging. I wonder why. A certain loss of acuteness.

So then I was trying to remember what I knew about Wilhelm Reich. Something about armour. I can't remember. What's the line, Jack? He said ninety percent of people can't get their rocks off right, Hotboy.

The mechanism that makes masses of people incapable of freedom is the social suppression of genital sexuality in small children, adolescents and adults. W. Reich. The Wall.

This is a bad translation. My bloggy chummy Onan might make a better fist of this. "The guilt experienced from the playing with one's sexual organs stands at the top the list of forbidden deeds.

If you'd like your bare naked photie pinned to my wall in the bare naked photie section (thank you in advance for your participation!) then just contact me in the usual way. HotboyMadyamikaSurfingTheOceansOfBliss.

Ra New Beginning!

2007-05-08T14:16:00.001+01:00

Since it looks as if I may not after all become filthy rich or famous, or even published, through the new book, I fear it is time to have another go!

I'd like to write a book with beautiful paragraphs, and proper chapters. I think mayhap not having proper chapters or even proper characters might have been the downfall of the last effort.

So I'm going to try to write a closely plotted crime book. You have to have a horrible incident at the beginning, I think, so that folk will know it is a crime book right off. You need a body; someone tied up and horribly mutilated, or something like that.

My horrible incident will come from something I saw on the telly, so it's true. This guy walks into this bar and stabs a joe who is sitting among his friends, his fellow baddies. He kills the guy by stabbing him many, many times, but stabs him through both eyes as well. The alleged perpretator was interviewed on the telly because he got off. The interviewer asked why he'd been arrested and the joe said there were only one or two other guys who could do such a thing, and since these guys were in jail already, the police thought it must be him.

So I've got an opening and a general scenario, but I have to work in a way to get an allotment into the story, and a buddhisty angle.

And make it dead funny. Hmmm? Not a crime book after all then, Hotboy. Well, Jack, since it'll probably never get published anyway, I'll just write what I like. Maybe it'll be my buddhisty, funny, crime book!

Ra Four Blisses!

2007-05-07T12:56:00.000+01:00

Monday 12:56 p.m.
The winds are supposed to enter the central channel. Then they're supposed to stabilise, then dissolve. During the last part you get the four blisses, I think. Hmmm?

And, yea, though I kicked the ball onto the roof for a bit by hitting on the home brew barrel last night, the meditations this morning were out of this world. I didn't even bother with breakfast. I knew while I was still lying under the duvet in the yoga nidra home brew recovery position that the meditations would be mighty! And so they were! Such bliss! Awesome bliss!

10:45 p.m.
This has been very much a red letter day for ra bliss. Oh, ra bliss, ra bliss, ra bliss! I felt very happy that something had changed again. Did you hit a different level, Hotboy? I think I might have, Jack. A coalescence of favourable circumstances, but basically down to a determination to get into ra bliss! Oh, ra bliss! Nothing else really mattered for a while in comparison to the way this juju was beginning to work. The colours blurred, the air thickened a little and nothing like that was going to bother you. Such bliss and heat and what a sense of comfort. And, yea, though later I crash and burn, today has been a bit of a triumph for ra bliss. There can be nothing more wonderful than this vajrayana! How can anything else even begin to compare?

For you flatheids too dumb to meditate ... it's just as good if you send me tenpercent off the top. Or a photograph of yourself totally naked. That would be good!

Ra Second Wonderful thing!

2007-05-07T00:43:00.000+01:00

Monday 00:44 a.m.
So after meditating and meditating for days and days on end, I rushed out to ra pub and had 3 pints of 80 shilling. Then I came home and, trying to think, put on the telly. Yo, it's a history programme about The Monarchy. It's got this joe talking about the Scots in 1637 and how they signed the Covenant. The film showed Greyfriars Kirk, with the gravestones, etc., on a nice summer's day.

So oft I go! Laden with the cannybliss yogurts, I eventuate into the Greyfriars Kirk. Fabulous! I've got an aisle seat ticket, but I go and get a piano stool and sit in at the wall at the end of the aisles.

There is a red seat. It says RESERVED on it. So this joe sits there and I'm sitting beside him on the piano seat and who is the coolest of us all? The joe who is ignoring me (because I am not a problem) or me. Obviously me because of ra bliss!

It's The Sixteen. They have arrived from wonderful bourgeoisdom! These bourgeois women! Laura Ashley babes! Then it looked as if they'd start to sing and I closed my eyes.

To be continued ...

9:45 a.m.
Dearie me! Anyway, they were singing music from the Sistine Chapel. I had no programme or whatever and had no idea what they were going to sing. But how wonderful it was! Allegri's Misere, I think it's called. Palestrina. The most fantastic concert I've ever been too. No musical intruments except the voice. When I recognised the Kyrie Eleisons, I started in with the juju with the Turin Shroud photie above the head, ra bliss pouring down through the body. And how somehow ironic that this amazing catholic music was being sung in Greyfriars where they came to sign the Covenant. It was dead ecumenical, so it was!

Ra Castles in the Sky!

2007-05-04T17:45:00.001+01:00

Friday 5:45 p.m.
Having only got one vote (and that from an alien!)(who couldn't vote in this planetary system!) in my quest for a seat in the Scottish Parliament, I think the time has come to re-adjust my expectations. Of course, had my book been out and selling zillions of copies, this election would have been a shoo in!

Let's face it, Jack. It's been months since the book got an agent and no chequies yet. Hmmm? What does it all mean? Downsizing! At least on the expectations front.

The political ambitions will have to go! Flatheids just don't get ra bliss and passing laws to force them to meditate is just a waste of time anyway. The too dumb to meditate are just too dumb to meditate!

The Hut Empire will have to be put on the back burner. Now in cyberspace there will not be a huge portal where blissheid could meet and meditate with blissheid the world over. This means the hut manager vacancy will have to remain just that, a vacancy, and neither will there be the need for auxiliary workers to sweatshop the jimmy wigs, hustle the souvenir potatoes, etc.

But the only thing I'll miss is the Australian Ladies Volleyball team practising outside the hut. Oh, the squealing and yelling and bouncing about!

So having failed once again to become a famous author (and politician)(and Mexican general), what have I got left? Well, two grand in debt, a nazi bike, a ramshackle hut, and a rowing boat!

What about ra bliss, Hotboy? Too right, Jack! For at the end of the day, what it comes down to is this: Can you or can you not, do ra bliss?

So it's into the rowing boat and off we go! Here comes the Unheard of and McDonald Islands hoving into view. I believe the old nazi who lived there has decamped to Polynesia. What solitude! What bliss! Oh, ra bliss, ra bliss, ra bliss!

Ra second time I got arrested!

2007-05-03T00:23:00.001+01:00

00:25p.m.
My auld maw said the insurance men were vital to these miners in Mossend. This was because the miners, some of them, could not read very well, or at all. And some of them were from abroad.

So you have not read my new book? Conduits of cash will spill passed me from this book, which will make me world famous by the way, but they will not stick. The money goes out.

Hurrah! for the josephines in my mandala. Hurrah! for the auld maw, of whom I am half, at least. What a privilege it is to be your son! Hurrah! for the Domestic Bliss! For she has provided everything for the ill-deserved but trying very hard not to be skint yet hopeless joe that I am. Hurrah! for the kiddo, who is entirely like her maw except for the necessary. And all the women in my mandala are supplicated, and prostrated to, and given offerings to.

My auld maw is completely and effortlessly compassionate. Let's face it, joes. There is something womanly about that. There just is.

And Hail! to my deep dear friends! Do not think I do not love you! Yea, though I be entirely crabbit, I do love you and have always loved you, and that's why I am so fortunate to have found you again, my lid, my elevation, my plane of existence chummies, my bonded heart to heart crabbit, greetin faced basturns!

I think I'd also like to sing yous all a little song!

Ra Poles!

2007-05-02T22:49:00.000+01:00

10:50 p.m.
I'd like to say hullo to the alien creatures from Outer Space who come to visit mayhap this bloggy. We know you're out there.
Thank you very much for everyone who is going to vote for me in tomorrow's election. I tried very hard never to learn how to speak in public because of my gigantic ego (Let's invade Poland!)(I can't spell Czecheslovakia anymore)(?), so don't expect much of that when I get into our wee parliament. I want to meditate in there. I've got my headphones (or noise blockers) and will sit in a full lotus in ra bliss throughout the whole time debates are going on. Occasionally, I will shout "Fung off Flatheids!", or "Where are the pole dancers?". I'd like to thank you in advance for your support.

Ra Parcel of Rogue!

2007-05-02T13:03:00.000+01:00

Wednesday 1:00 p.m.
As the single member and sole representative of the Amazing Bloggy Church of the Bad Boy Blissheid, I'd like to put myself forward as a candidate for the Holyrood election tomorrow. My manifesto is as follows:
1) Become independent and sell the country immediately to the Americans for £1 million for each Scot.
2) With these monies invested, every adult gets £300 a week dole money whether they are in work or not. To collect this all recipients have to meditate for two hours in the dole office. (which might look a bit like a secular temple!)
3) All drug laws scrapped. They're stupid and don't work. If people want to loll about smacked off their mammories, what's it got to do with the government anyway?
4) Make school voluntary after a kid reaches fourteen. Let my people go!

Points three and four are just to pad the manifesto out. Making all the flatheids rich in this single lifetime is bound to be a vote winner.

I don't have to go to work again till next Tuesday!!! Yippee!! What a fortunate creature I am, I am! What a fortunate creature I am!

Ra May Day!

2007-05-01T16:56:00.000+01:00

Tuesday 5:00 p.m.
Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer, we'll keep the red flag flying here! (James O'Connell) Up the republic and free beer for the workers!

It three hundred years today that the parcel of rogues sold us down the river. Well, it's 300 years since the Union of the Parliaments and nobody is celebrating! It probably won't last another ten years.

There's an election in Scotland in two days and it looks as if the Scottish Nationalists could end up with the biggest party in our own wee parliament. This is down to the war in Iraq and letting rich, capitalist basturns buy seats in the House of Lords. That doesn't look like socialism to me! Anyway, I'm going to give the Nationalists at least one of my votes on Thursday because I don't want to live through another Thatcherite era. It looks as if the Tory basturns could win in England in a couple of years time. At least three of the top posts in the shadow cabinet are in the hands of joes who are to the right of Thatcher. So when Cameron gets in, it'll be time for us Jocks to say bye, bye. Vote Labour (Gordon Brown will make a brilliant P.M.!) in the general election and the Nationalists for the local one. And free beer for the workers. May you live in interesting times, as the boy said!

Ra Carthage Must Be Destroyed!

2007-04-30T00:27:00.000+01:00

00:35 a.m.
Carthrage? Carthage? Hannibal? I once got offered a chance to go there when I was in Lybia, or Lybya, or Libya, or Tunisia. But I maybe asked the boy for the way out of town and anyway I never went to Carthage.I had an idea that the Romans might have got there first.

And Howard just pointed with his gun and said that way down Highway 61. The Inimitable Bob.

Oh, how wonderful it was to be in the theatre this evening! I don't know who wrote it, but some of the dialogue was just ten out of ten. The acting was jaw droppingly wonderful! It fitted in perfectly as a culmination of my wonderful day. But it was just brilliant. One of the times when it was just great to be witnessing something. I'm going to go again. I'd like to watch that from a different angle. I'd like to go and see that every night of it's run!

Usually, it's good, but it doesn't get to be that good that often! This is impossibly so!

Brimfull of wonderful ideas, I thought I should write a book about today! I think I might.

What's stopping you, Hotboy? Well, Jack, this is the start of the wonderful times. This the phase where you live in the heavenly zone. There will be better days than this, Jack.

Once when I was speaking to Gilliebabes in the Diggers about twenty five years ago, I told her I'd like to grow up to be a nice old man. I did not know then about ra bliss, or ra rapture, or ra ecstasy. I'm going to have so many days better than today, but today was a wonderful day. You don't have to grow old and be miserable at all! And if you want to see art, go and watch this show at the Traverse.

Ranother Saturday Night!

2007-04-28T22:30:00.000+01:00

10:30 p.m.
I want to be straight. I want to be straight. I'm fed up taking drugs and staying out late! Reckless Eric, I think.

This is the fourth night this week without any beers. Still a fat basturn, but did the best six three minute rounds of shadow boxing since it upped the times sometime last summer, I think. There's nothing like doing training when your feeling fit. So reassuring! So revivifying! Sometimes you've got to appreciate how lucky you are to be healthy!

Two Ton Tony Galento used to stay off the beer for two nights before he fought. Remembered him tonight when I was doing the physical jerks. Ah never heard of da bum! Ah'll moida da bum whoever he is!

Ra Walkout!

2007-04-27T18:14:00.001+01:00

Friday 6:15 p.m.
When I was working in the aluminium smelter in Fort William after my first year at university, I met an old joe called Pat Murphy. You don't have to ask someone called Pat Murphy what school he went to. Pat told me the last time he was in a chapel was when the priest told the congregration they had to back General Franco during the Spanish Civil War. (Franco was leading a revolt against a democratically elected government and was a fascist pal of Hitler).

I told Pat what did it for me was the basturn priest telling the congregation that, after all, the Pope was banning contraception, that this was a matter of conscience, but that your conscience had to be guided by the church. Wouldn't it have been great if someone had stood up and said, Go fung yourself!

So I went to see the auld maw today. Straight away she's going on about this bulletin that was handed out at the chapel, explaining Bishop Devine's attitude to voting for the Labour Party at the elections next week. The Bishop doesn't say who he's voting for, but it's not Labour because of the party's attitude to what he termed the family.

The Labour Party and the tims in the west have been hand in glove since the Labour Party started. The tims were all miners and steelworkers. I was told the Labour Party godfather in Bellshill walked out of the chapel during the sermon about how the congregation shouldn't vote Labour. Well done, Harry! Gone yourself, son!

It's like the ground just moved beneath my feet!

I met a very nice actor called John Greive who was in the first play I had broadcast, called The Marijuana Kid. He was well known, partly for acting in Para Handy. At the time I might have thought John Greive was one of these odd Scottish nationalist people (this was circa 1982) because, in the pub, he was rather adamant that there was nothing worse than a toady, and no worse toady than one who toadied to the English. (For those of you not fortunate enough to be Scottish, a toady is a sycophantic, engratiating, favour currying, little freepong!)

Ra Angry Man!

2007-04-25T17:01:00.000+01:00

Wednesday 17:02 p.m.
I was going to look up my old diary entries to sort out a time line about meditations, empowerments, etc., for this blog, but I would have had to flick through three diaries and I soon gave up. Up till last summer I still had the money to go to the Samye Ling a lot and the diaries are a lot about being there since socially nothing much has been going on around these parts for some time.

But timelines. Jan Ist, 2003. Took refuge with the lama. Had a strange empowerment to do deity yoga just the week before this in the temple at the Samye Ling. Sunday 6th April, 2003. Had my first and still one of the strongest, if not the strongest, inner heat experience. Since then I've taken a Dorje Sempa empowerment and a 1000 armed Chenrezig empowerment from Dr Akong Tulku Rinpoche. Finally, I took the Medicine Buddha empowerment on the 16th of March, 2007.

I stopped smoking tobacco (again!) at the New Year on 2002. This was very important because I first spoke to the lama about 1996 and he said I needed a guru then. I wasted the next six years because I couldn't give up tobacco (a habit I picked up again in Nepal!). There is something evil about tobacco. When you stop doing it, your meditations just go ballistic!

The entry in my diary on the day I took refuge on January 1st, 2003 starts like this: "My meditation this morning after breakfast did not have anyone getting killed, or punched in the face, or anything violent or angry at all. So every day it improves." I hope I can make some money so my daughter never needs to work in a salaried jobbie!

Ra Baby!

2007-04-23T19:12:00.000+01:00

Monday 7:12 p.m.
If you ever have the good fortune to be the primary carer for a baby, you will notice how fast they sometimes change. Often the baby you are dealing with one month will be quite a different kettle of fish from the one the month before. All you can do is keep pace with the baby and keep your eye on the ball. Otherwise, you'd miss the amazing developments taking place.

If you're having a problem or some worry with your baby, you might ask someone with a baby just a wee bit older, and they probably won't be able to tell you, or help because they've gone through that stage, and are now dealing with a completely different set of problems. It goes so fast, you forget.

Doing this juju reminded me of what looking after a baby was like. You think you know it, but tomorrow it's different again. An hour ago ra bliss jumped the gate, made off over the paddock and disappeared over the hill once again. Maybe writing this blog is a waste of time in terms of helping anyone with this juju. In over twenty years of raving about meditating to folk I know, I don't think I've really got a single one to meditate. Just goes to show what a truly fortunate, fortunate creature I am.

Now I'll spend an hour planning my new book!

11:01 p.m.
Though I might get old or be crabbit, depressed or sick, tonight I got such bliss, Jack. Such bliss! It looks as if you only have to do one thing right in this life. And if you're not doing it, just give yourself a good slap!

Rat Vase Breath Again!

2007-04-21T23:15:00.001+01:00

Saturday 11:15 p.m.
This is RaBlissBlog! Experiential mysticism! I don't know about anything. I don't believe in anything. I don't even believe in scepticism. I'm sceptical about scepticism. But I know what I know.

Hotboy, the Masai Warriors have hopped off the park. The creatures from Outer Space and the spam robots are the only current visitations. You're addressing only the most fortunate of fortunate creatures, Hotboy. You can say what you like!

The spam robots like ra bliss, Hotboy. The flatheids just don't get ra bliss. The flatheids are flatheids after all. Tell us about ra bliss, Hotboy.

If you were the usual sweetie eating progeny of the evil bourgeois, you will not like to be told you are a flatheid, who will never get ra bliss, or even any idea of what human beingness might be at all, because you do not meditate. I thought if I went on about ra bliss, these sweetie eating morons might start to meditate, but the flatheids are lazy and stupid which is why they are flatheids.

Just tell us about ra bliss, Hotboy. Okay, Jack, this one's just for you.

To get ra bliss you have to try.

Do I have the words? Incohate. Incoate. Unable to express ra bliss in words for flatheids ...

Ra bliss evolves. I started getting the white light and wind in my sails when I started getting up at six and meditating for over an hour before I saw anyone or went to work.

Or I got it when I started meditating three times a day, for a half hour each time, but only really got it when I started getting up early and doing the meditations then. It became established.

If you're not doing two hours a day, you're not at the races.

You may interpose with your little snide remarks now. You don't accept your ignorance. You believe in things. Especially things you think, your thoughts. You are a moron. Two hours a day isn't long. What a fool you are!

I can't describe it. Today ra bliss and ra heat made me think I might be a long way away from my comfort zone, which is how they surround me, the flatheids, the thoughts, the beliefs. Oh, ra bliss, ra bliss, ra bliss!

Did you get the first bliss of the four blisses, Hotboy?

No, I don't think I did, Jack. I probably wasn't even close. Was it hot, Hotboy? It was comforting and warm and delicious. The after-effects of the vase breathing moved on.

Emile Zola wrote wonderful descriptions. Even if I was Emile Zola, I could not bring you close to what it might be like to experience this level of ra bliss. And even if I could describe it to you, there is no point because as a dedicated sweetie eating fool, you wouldn't get up to do the hour and get into ra bliss.

Oh, what a fortunate, fortunate creature I am! What a fortunate creature I am!

Sunday 8:42 a.m.
I've been meditating since I got up about seven. I think I've cracked it, Jack. I can really raise heat! Lots of it! And sometimes ra bliss seems more like ecstasy! What a life! Shame about the too dumb to meditate, but it's not my fault they're flatheids.

Sunday 1:22 p.m.
I have to give credit to the Buddhas in the south west. Forming some kind of contact with the folk at the Samye Ling is the best thing that ever happened to me. But a lot of good things have happened to me.

I had an inner heat experience in April 6th, 2003, I think. This was a one off really. I first started noticing effects from vase breathing when I took to my hut for ten weeks about this time in 2004. So I've been trying to get into this vase breathing juju since then. Bang on three years since. Fears of blackouts, fits, completely screwing up the energy flow in your body, going mad, etc., etc., were swallowed. For this juju is the weirdest of the weird. But the more I do it, the more confidence I get in the lama. Compared to joes like that, I don't think I've even started meditating.

They say you should do this stuff under the guidance of a qualified master i.e. someone who has at least realised emptiness. I haven't spoken to the lama for a couple of years, but to do this stuff you should regard your guru as a buddha and I reckoned I might have to speak to him, but he didn't have to speak to me. And so it has turned out.

I'm just going to keep practising. Throughout this period from 2004 , I've probably been doing 30 hours a week anyway.

To be happier I have to do several things. I've got to start living within my income. That means I have to stop spending money and pay off my overdraft, etc. Also, I have to give up any idea of getting my new book, or any other book published. I'll probably have to keep my jobbie for the foreseeable and I probably won't get to the Himalayas again, but that's all right.

If you don't meditate and think you're happy, then I'm happy for you. Baiting flatheids is the most fun I get!

Rem Hard Times!

2007-04-20T16:45:00.000+01:00

Friday 4:46 p.m.
My auld maw was telling me she worked picking rhubarb on a farm in Mount Vernon (towards Glasgow) just before she got to leave school. She was born in 1919, so would have left school circa 1933, perhaps not the best time to look for a job. For picking rhubarb she was paid eleven shillings a week. She got a job when she left school in the Woodend Hotel in Mossend and worked there from eight in the morning till eight at night. She was paid £1 a month and food.

She said her brother got "fee-ed" out to a farm nearby. For that he was paid five shillings a week and had to live on the farm.

For those of you who didn't have any money before about 1971, five shillings is the same as 25 pence and eleven shillings is about 55 pence.

She said you had to stand in line at the farms and the farmer would pick you out or send you home with the ones he didn't want.

My auld maw thinks she'd comfortable in her old age because she's voted Labour all her life and I think she's dead right on that one. The Iraq war doesn't really concern her. She says there are no poor pensioners anymore.

There's only about fifteen daily visitors to this bloggy just now, but every couple of days folk arrive looking for vase breathing, or the vase breath. Doing the blog is worth it for that. I'll write more about vase breathing later.

Ra Home Brew!

2007-04-19T19:10:00.000+01:00

Thursday 7:11 p.m.
Dearie me! I was well pivo-ed by the time I wrote the last post, so today I decided to give up buying expensive beer for good and went to the Edina Home Brew shop for some home brew stuff. Lo! they now sell kits for wheat beer. Munton's Wheat Beer coming in at £11:50 for 40 pints. I also got a Tom Caxton kit because, when the kid was wee, I used to make Tom Caxton kits a lot.

After cycling back from the shop, I took a walk to the Botanic Gardens to read the Medicine Buddha Teachings. I was sitting with my back to the big mansion house there, facing onto a great view of the city, with the castle back in the middle. In the Introduction to the Practice it says: "the practitioner need not refrain from meat and alcohol". I wonder if they drink home brew in Tibet!

Though it did rain a bit today, while I was crossing the football parks in Inverleith Park, I couldn't help but notice how hard and dry the ground was. So I soaked the allotment again. Must be odd to do that in April!

11:24 p.m.
It doesn't get dark now till about nine. Tonight I was well into the secondary zone by then. There's the flatheid, the zone, and now the secondary zone. New sensations and variations on old sensations tonight. You interpose a thought: Mnnn? That's new! We're well passed weird by this time, Jack. Been passed weird for some time now, Hotboy.

They said he was a bit of a loner. He used to hide away in his hut for hours at a time muttering mumbo jumbo to himself. He said he was going to emanate as a deity. On many occasions he asked to be taken to hospital. He kept talking about shooting people. Shooty shooty. Does that remind you of anyone?

Ra supporting deities!

2007-04-19T01:07:00.000+01:00

Thursday 1:07 a.m.
The primary deity in support is the auld Maw. She does not see the faults. The littany of secondary deities is numerous. But the secondary deity is the Domestic Bliss. She has paid the bills and allowed us to arise, abide and decline without being embarrassed by the really disgusting and ugly bourgeois. How much, Lordy Lordy, do I despise and hate them!

Is that true, Hotboy? Do you hate them?

Well, Jack, this is just a bloggy, and no, I don't hate anyone.

All the useful folk in my mandala .... your mandala is everything you see in front of you,etc., ... are, of course, women!

Most of the really nice people I know are women. The domestic bliss and the kiddo must come into this. That's it! I'm going to stop speaking!

Thursday 11:51 a.m.
The slight malaise I felt yesterday disappeared as soon as I decided not to go to work today after all. Instead I meditated for a bit in the lobby this morning. Oh, what bliss! Surf's up, Jack! It certainly is!

Ra Visual Field!

2007-04-18T15:23:00.000+01:00

Wednesday 3:24 p.m.
So I've just finished a meditation session. This is with the eyes open gazing at the wall, looking directly as a photie of the lama. I've written before about the odd visuals I've been getting while meditating. Rather quickly everything takes a bit of a milky sheen and the outlines of things tend to become highlighted with light, kind of like in a negative. I used to think this was because you had your eyes fixed on something for a while, but these days this comes on rather quickly, as I've said.

Finding any explanation for some of this stuff ... well, it would be nice to have some!

After some time meditating, the air occasionally seems to "thicken up" just a little. This seems to me like the very juniour brother of the whacking great change of visuals I got with the non-self and emptiness experience. But I don't know.

You have to accept that you're dealing with the illusory nature of reality here. Onto this illusion you are trying in deity yoga to superimpose another illusion ... that you are a deity!

Some of the visualisations seem amazingly complex and it kind of takes the heart out of you a wee bit. God, I'm never be able to do that!

On the upside, I know you can manipulate the visual field to some extent and impose something and change what you are seeing. I've done this a wee bit twice. It's like reverse acid in that instead of it changing, you are changing it.

The downside is that I only discovered this effect after some heavy duty, day after day, spells of meditating down at the Samye Ling.

It's Wednesday after work and I'm feeling a bit tired and broke. Usually, I recuperate on a Thursday by meditating for six plus hours, so on Friday I'm brand new again. Tomorrow I have to go into work again. Dearie me!

Reading about Kenchen Thrangu Rinpoche gave me a bit of a leg up, I must say! He's the tutor of the 17th Karmapa and he sounds like a very smart joe indeed. It's his book (Medicine Buddha Teachings)that I'm reading to see how to do this juju. So I'm a wee bit downhearted about the complexity of even the preliminary meditations and the boy says not to worry if you can't see them too clearly. He says you're not working with eye consciousness. It's mind stuff, so it might be the feeling that you are a deity that might count for more.

I suspect this is a sop for joes like me who can't really do it, or who have to go to the jobbie instead of meditating.

I keep trying to be happy with what I've got and just get on with it. I'm not the only joe in the world who thinks he's got better things to do than go to work! But sometimes I just want to run!

"And Howard just pointed with his gun and said that way down Highway 61". The inimitable Bob. So I'm off to the allotment for some more digging and blissing, digging and blissing!

Ra Fame!

2007-04-16T20:44:00.000+01:00

Monday 8:45 p.m.
So I'm going passed these hoardings on George Street, which are blocking off part of the pavement, when who is suddenly hoving into view and quickly going passed but Gordon Strachan. (He is the manager of the Glasgow Celtic Football Club for those not fortunate enough to be Scottish). As he was going by, I exclaimed: Wow! Gordon Strachan! and clapped my hands. He said: Hi! and then his head disappeared behind me.

Who'd want that, eh? Any nutter can jump out at you and do anything because you're famous. Say hullo, or shoot you. Worse still! With Gordon Strachan it'll be football supporters, probably drunken Rangers fans wanting to hit him and spit on him, and revile him, and all that. Dearie me!

It's the young girls trying to tear your clothes off that the spam robots are interested in, Hotboy.

So I said to my uncle, Peter Mackenzie, that I didn't want a photie of myself on the cover of the book he was going to publish because I didn't want folk to know who I was. He said: Don't worry, Hotboy. Girls aren't going to be chasing after you and trying to tear your clothes off.

Becoming famous might have it's compensations.

Situations vacant. No. 1. Hut Manager. (see preceding posts!)

No. 2. Famous Author Stand in Person. This is a front man job for a straight ten percent off the top. You have to be available with your body since you will be the photie on the back of the book, do the readings, etc. You walk around being me, more or less.

My chum Poisonous would be very good for this. Peter Lorre from The Maltese Falcon crossed with Truman Capote. And the shrink said he was normal!

The author stand in person will have a uniform. This will be the jimmy wig, the black beard, the Groucho Marx nose and glasses.

Who said franchise? Hut franchise! Author franchise! We're bound to clean up!

22:15 p.m.
True story. Between jobs in schools ... I'm walking down Raeburn Place in the summertime. It's just so nice. Lots of traffic though and the usual doubledecker Edinburgh bus starts to edge passed. Lots of traffic lights on this street. The bus is going to go passed and stop, go passed ... for a bit anyway. I'm feeling very good as I'm walking down the road. I'm attracted to the girls battering the back windows on the top deck at the back of the bus ... a wee bit of St Trinians here maybe ... then I try not to look as it seems they're battering the windows because they recognise me from the old school. I'm trying not to smile or smirk and just get along the road. But the bus goes passed, then stops and I come up to where it's at again. I'm trying not to smile, or give myself away at all. Sometimes I look over and this is very nice this. But I try not to look or be embarrassed. Onwards and the bus stops again and I'm trying not to grin. So I start singing the Mellow Yellow song I heard Donavon do at Brickershaw. "I'm just mad about 14 year old girls and they're just mad about me .. doo waa dooo!" Memories are made of this!

Ra Cycling Weather!

2007-04-15T19:49:00.000+01:00

Sunday 7:50 p.m.
So I'm walking through Stockbridge and noticing the buildings, pavements, buses, etc., arising, abiding and declining in mind. I struck me at the time that nothing I could see was made manifest by anybody with a university degree. They don't put up the buildings, lay the pavements, or drive the buses. Apart from those people with degrees in things like science, medicine, or whatever ... what is the point of wanting everyone to have a degree? The government says they want 50% of school leavers to go to uni.

My brother Silvest (row of forty medals on his chest, big chest!) was telling me he's been offered a chance to work in London to help build the stuff for the Olympics in 2012. He's a brickie and is 67 years old. They do not have enough brickies because we have turned them all into telephone senitisers with media studies degrees!

You'll probably end up getting told to see the shrink if you end up in one of these psuedo professional jobbies. Yesterday I was out cycling with Brian Wilson. Today it was Poisonous. We've all been to see the shrink. The shrink declared Brian Wilson sane (what a laugh!) and told Poisonous he was normal. This shrink will be getting paid eighty grand a year for this twaddle. Any fool could see that Brian Wilson is off his trolley and that Poisonous is a complete psychopath.

Yesterday I took the cyclepath to Leith and met Brian Wilson at the Shore. Dearie me. The boy's borderline schizophrenic at least. Round three corners, got lost, nearly got killed, couldn't find where we were supposed to be going, and back to the Shore for two pints for me. Today Poisonous was more productive. Take a psychopath with you every time. He shows up to collect me around three from the allotment, and he's dressed like he's just left the Afrika Corps. Mr Neatness.

Nice run to Cramond. We went into the Cramond Inn. What a wonderful pub! It's full of real ales and I bought two pints of beer for £3:64. A moral quandary. I last bought a pint of Guinness in Deacon Brodie's for £3:05, so I thought she'd only charged me for one. But, no! Pints of real ale at 4.5% for £1:82. There is a God in heaven after all!

I've decided to think of this day as the start of me writing a new book. After this, I'll write that down. The date. Then some staring and thinking.

Ra Auld Maw!

2007-04-13T17:59:00.000+01:00

Friday 6:00 p.m.
My auld maw was asked by my sister, when my sister was near to death, if she loved her. My auld maw said that anyone could say they loved her, but she was there every day making sure she was cleaned, changed and fed.

I was thinking about my auld maw when I was reading the sensei's book yesterday. She sprung to mind because I'm actually quite well behaved for a male Hotboy. And there's a lot of us around. He said: "Compassion is not about making excuses for a person's atrocious behaviour. Forgiveness is not about turning a blind eye. A compassionate view is a view that does not blame, but does not excuse, because it does not exclude."

Oedipus Smedipus! Who cares so long as the boy loves his mother?

It might be easier to develop compassion if you're brought up in a mining community where sometimes things are a bit tough for everyone. How much harder it must be for the evil bourgeois with the big walls around their families.

They're all going to hell. You know that, don't you, Jack? I thought there wasn't any hell, Hotboy. It's only for them, Jack. Christ said it was easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle ..., Jack, and the Nazi Papa dissolved Limbo. Where else are they going to go?

My auld maw was eighty eight today. I gave her a three CD set of Buddhist teachings and a wee purse containing half of the magical medicine from the Medicine Buddha himself. Mantra-ed for twenty four hours a day for seven days. The best presents are ones you can't buy.

I got home to a letter from the bank. I have inadvertently gone over my overdraft limit by £20 and have,it seems, incurred a penalty of £30 for this transgression. No wonder they're all going to hell!

Whilst sowing brussel sprouts last week ... I think the medicine is seeds. Tiny wee seeds. I could try germinating a few and multiply the factor of seediness by thousands by growing whatever they are. Or I could get hundreds of bags of similar seeds and put a grain of my seeds in it .... where's the Hut Manager? We'll clean up! We will! We will!

Ra Day!

2007-04-12T22:11:00.000+01:00

Thursday 10:12 p.m.
Felt fine at 7:30 a.m. due to the no beer policy and meditated in the bedroom, living room and lobby till the back of one. By this time I'd also read the paper, stood on my head, enjoyed immensely a Tai Chi set, baked the bread and made the soup. But mainly doing the juju. I tell myself that I will give up ra beer for a year now. This is well within my scope. Did it twice, at least, before. You know it makes sense. Tired out from all the digging, cycling, etc., but most optimistic.

In the morning everything is arising.

I had two things to do and I wanted to do something in the afternoon besides meditating. So I went out and got a bus up to Princes Street to get a present for my maw's birthday ... and, lo, the world had changed! It was the summertime! Never have I seen an April day like today. How wonderful! And horrible. We know we're going to get a real spanking for this one!

I'm in Bert's Bar and drinking coke and reading the sensei's book about Zen. Then I'm in the Botanic Gardens reading the sensei's book about zen. Then I sat in the allotment (like I did with his last book last summer) and I had to put my jacket over my head the sun was so hot. And I finished his book up there. Most enjoyable.

It's really a different kind of a thing. Now that I've had a while to think about it, it was more than a little bit unusual. It's new and I think it works. You could see it as a book and how it would work and sell.

I read a book by Kurt Vonnegut about four years ago. How much I enjoyed it! Liberal (US) and funny. Amusing. I saw Kurt Vonnegut when I was in third year at Edinburgh University. Was Adam House a place? The William Robertson Building? I had no idea who he was. Nick Phillipson was the lecturer who'd brought him. He did a wee burst of saying stuff at the end. I remember a lot of what he said actually. He said don't take a percentage of the gross. Take the money up front since these film companies just disappear. I read all his books later. He was bothered about not giving up the fags because they killed his sister, or something. Great voice. Well, thanks for the books, Kurt! That's a wee bit of froth on the edge of existence I'm glad to have been a witness to!

I've had few disadvantages. I'll have to think for a long time before I can remember what disadvantages I might have had.

Are we pack animals? You have to be admired and loved in the pack if you're a dog or else your head will drop.

After meditating for seven hours today, I lost heart and went out for the beer.

Ra Time for Sowing!

2007-04-11T19:21:00.000+01:00

Wednesday 7:25 p.m.
The main sowing and digging is just about done. So far, I've planted 206 half tatties in bore holes with fertiliser topping. Also, 750 onion sets, some turnips, brussel sprouts, and lettuce.

So I'm sitting in the hut and the floor is a cluttered, mucky mess. Last year I cleaned the floor, thinking I'd stay over there a few times over the summer. But I didn't. Maybe this year.

Last night I started reading the sensei and reverend's new book on Zen. The sensei can write and he knows his Zen so how can I fail?

The text is coming up funny here with html stuff looking primitive. Hmmm? I'll come back later!

9:50 p.m.

You hear stories of folk who meditate on their lonesome for ages having visitations from unwelcome entities. Them be monstrous. Your supposed to ask them to eat you if they want to. I suppose that's polite. Your first instinct might be to tell them to fung off.

The last time the red mist descended was about three or four years ago. Go and provoke somebody else. But before the red mist descends, I'm just a big scaredy cat. In fact, being a sensitive artist I'm even more of a scaredy cat.

So when the baddies come to the hut during the night, Hotboy, are you going to offer to let them eat you?

That might work, Jack, but I'll just try to keep a friendly and neighbourly tone in my voice. What if they poke you with sticks, Hotboy? And mock you? And revile you? Well, then, Jack, there's enough chibs in yon hut to fuel the Peasant's Revolt. It'll be Watt Tyler, ya bass! And them that dies will be the lucky ones!

So I only managed to watch The Passion till the flogging started. This doesn't look as if it's going to end well, thinks I. This boy is not going to get off, is he?

I remembered joking about this in a book I got published. This religious person was trying to explain to someone who'd never heard of Christ all about the crucifiction .. cruz ... cross thing of the all powerful one. The kid thinks the religious person is telling him a funny story, and interjects at the end that the guy on the cross takes off, cross and all, zooms over the crowds a few times, then off into the sunset. Just for a laugh.

Ra Back Tomorrow!

2007-04-09T21:00:00.000+01:00

Monday 9:00 p.m.
An emanation of the Medicine Buddha offered to make us lunch on Sunday, so I was in Morningside, in the midst of evil bourgeois land, sitting on a bench out the back garden when I had one of the top five meditations ever. Superbo! Fabuloso! Oh, ra bliss!

I think they were getting a wee bit worried inside and the emanation came out to see if I was okay. One of these days folk will be so used to me sneaking off to do ra bliss that it won't be worth a comment!

I was in Greyfriars Kirk on Friday night to hear the plain chanting person I know. There was a choral premier by the joe called James McMillan. He's a tim composer. I had my eyes shut throughout, but doing ra bliss with these wonderful sounds in the background was a bit special. Before anyone arrived, I got there and waited in the graveyard, sitting on a flat gravestone and gazing at the wonderful bare tree, very black against a darkening cloudy grey sky. It was hard not to be aware of the history in the space around you. Of course, if you'd been a tim there around the 1640s, the only way you'd be in that place was if you were hanging from one of the trees! Dearie me. Not fair at all, Hotboy! The democrat in me is presbyterian!

I've had an especially good weekend. It all part of the wonderful existence I'm leading now that I'm trying to practice the vajrayana. Why are you a flatheid again, Jack? Because I'm the spam robot, and your audience, Hotboy. Well done then, Jack. Well done.

Rem Miracles!

2007-04-06T16:49:00.000+01:00

Good Friday 4:50 p.m.
To get canonised by the tims you need a couple of verifiable miracles. This nun in France seems to have been cured of Parkinson's after praying to the deid Papa and a columnist in the Times was debunking this yesterday. Most adamant he was. Fair enough.

Is it possible to get a spontaneous remission from Parkinson's? No point in telling me it wasn't the deid Papa. What is the explanation then?

To be religious is to know that the facts of the world are not the end of the matter. L Wittgenstein. The wall.

The world, as so understood, contradicts itself and is therefore appearance and not reality. Bradley. The wall.

Something that has intrigued me for ages is the appearance of the Virgin Mary in Egypt in the late sixties. You can get the photie here. If I was writing in the Times about this, I'd start with the headline: What the fung is that? I can accept that it's not Christ's mum since she's been dead for a while, but what is it then?

I've been to Lourdes twice. A scientific commentator went there with a BBC show a wee while ago and he went on about miracles. The example he took was of a woman who got out of her wheelchair and was cured of Multiple Sclerosis. Of course, the scientific bloke said that remission for MS did happen and this wasn't the proof of any miracle. Well, fair enough. But they've got a museum in Lourdes and they've got photies of a joe getting cured of cancer on his tongue, the before and after shots. Very impressive. I wish the scientific commentator had picked that one. Tell me what happened then?

The so-called scientific people approach this stuff with such arrogance! They think they know something about something. The do not understand that they are looking at the world with their heads jammed right up their backsides!
I'm sure the explanation for these things will be far more wonderful than are dreamt of in our philosophies!

When I was a kid, we had a three hour service to go to on Good Friday. You couldn't wait for them to get the job over with. Three hours is a long time to wait around, especially if you're nailed onto a cross.

Compassion and altruism is the basis of the path.

I've felt a wee bit moved today on several occasions. I think this is because I've been using the photie on the head on the Turin Shroud as part of the juju I do. He's the tenth in line guru. So you imagine the photie above your head and get it into a white line and bring oodles and oodles of ra bliss down through your body. This is very good indeed, especially after practising on the first nine. Jesus Christ who suffered and died for me is my guru. Lamb of God who takest away the sins of the world have mercy on us....

So, if you were a Christian and wanted to meditate, but didn't like all this Eastern malarkey, I'd totally recommend something like that. Get that image in front of you and then on top of your head, the white line coming down through your body, etc. It doesn't matter that it's not Jesus Christ. Kyrie Eleison, Christe Eleison is a great mantra as well. It was in the best bit of the Tridentine Mass.

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

I'm going to force myself to watch Mel Gibson's snuff movie on Sunday night. The Passion Of Christ. At least the first five minutes!!

Ra Beer Monster Reduction Update!

2007-04-04T20:49:00.000+01:00

Wednesday 8:50 p.m.
Just back from the allotment... and what fantastically brilliant weather!... and before soaking in the bath, I weighed in at eleven stone thirteen pounds! A loss of four pounds since the last weigh in and this down to eating less of my home made bread! Oh, what nutritious breid! Half of a one and a half kilo bag of wholegrain flour. Yeast, water, salt. A wee touch of sugar to get the yeast going. That's it. Surely, another case for the putative Hut Manager.

So I'll make any rich people a loaf of this super bread every day for say ... make me an offer. If Amazon can deliver next day, why not? Totally hand done, of course. And mantra-ed over, and with a grain of the cosmic, magical medicine from the Medicine Buddha in every loaf!

I'll be worth a fortune in no time!

For if you bake bread with indifference, you bake bread that feeds but half man's hunger. Kahil Gibran. The wall.

I was thinking of bringing a touch of millennialism into the Amazing Bloggy Church of the Bad Boy Blissheid. Like, the weather was wonderful today! Very, very unusual. This global warming will be great for Scotland in the short term. And then ... one day the Gulf Stream shuts off and it's freezing cold for months and months around these parts. Everybody dies! Except, of course, for the blissheids with the yogi joe central heating systems, known as ra inner fire. And thus will end the reign of the flatheids! Of course, it'll have to wait a bit since I couldn't dry off a postage stamp at the moment! Anyway, yous have all had it if yous don't meditate, so there!

And don't think you can get into the hut with me! It's just for me and the Australian Ladies Volleyball Team and that's it!

Is it fair to frighten people for their own good? Does the Nazi Papa really believe there is a real place called Hell with the eternal damnation and all that? Or is he just trying to freak people out for their own good?

For the aliens from Outer Space who come to this bloggy and have been following the ABC of the BBB one step at the time route to being able to get out of your face on air... it is now time to move to step two!

For the spam robot who can't remember anything...Hello, Jack! The first step went like this. You sat with a straight back and said Mumbo Jumbo to yourself for as much as you could. Then, when you weren't doing that, you sometimes said to yourself: It's just a lot of old photons.

For step two you still say Mumbo Jumbo to yourself as much as your can when you're trying to meditate, but when you're walking about you should say to yourself: It all arises in mind, abides in mind, and declines in mind.

You don't have to think of the wee individual mind or the GREAT Big Mind for this. Where else can anything, or any thing arise?

Remember it's not about truth this. It's about being a bit more comfortable. So I was walking up Lothian Road today and the town looked great in the great weather. It just felt very nice that everything arose in mind ... blah, blah. Because it was the same with you, or your view of yourself. You are arising, abiding and declining, etc., along with everything else. It was a very in it together feeling. Embracing. It felt as if something had started to work. So I don't feel as if I own anything on Lothian Road. And I in the same way don't own the feelings I'm having. Arising, abiding, declining. Like thoughts. They are just there.

The lama told me to do mahamudra meditations, but I didn't know what he was talking about at the time. Now, I've forgotten what it means again. Anyway, I've been doing them more since I read the Moonlight On Mahamudra book last year down at the Samye ... in the wondeful summertime. Can't wait!

This is the fourth day without a beer again. And again. Don't you think that might have something to do with you losing the fat, Hotboy? Such admissions are heresy in front of certain women and needlessly encourages their condemnation of the innocent male passtime of sitting half pissed in front of the telly, Jack. So let us not talk of that again.

Oh, there's nothing so lonesome, lonely and queer! What a terrible place is a pub with no beer! Yon digger.

Ra Sensei!

2007-04-02T19:54:00.000+01:00

Monday 7:50 p.m.
I've got another book to read! The sensei and reverend has written a book about Zen and he's sent it to me, which was very good of him. Last summer I spent a very pleasant few hours up in my allotment reading "When It All Turns to Dust". I really enjoyed reading that. So far I haven't been able to get a British agent for it, but I've only tried about six or seven. Another four hundred to go!

I actually had a conversation up at the allotment this evening. This young joe, who is new to allotmenteering, stopped to chat. I told him I really did it for the hut. I told him I liked sittting in the hut and if I disappeared in there for a couple hours, don't be surprised. He asked me if I wrote in there. What an odd question! Do you write in there? I said no, but I did write.

I don't seek out folk at the allotments because it might seem peculiar to the evil bourgeois that I sit in there so much. But it's no problem now! Of course, I'll say I'm a poet. Poets are weird. Also, some of them look fung weird. The sensei is a poet. Says it all.

What if they ask to see some, Hotboy? Fair enough, Jack. I'll tell them I'm a male escort. I hide in the hut so that none of the dissatisfied customers can find me!!!

Rem Flatheids Again!

2007-03-31T12:29:00.000+01:00

Saturday 12:30 p.m.
Hello, you Masai Warriors, spam robots, alien creatures from Outer Space, and those sad Eastern gentlemen seeking hotboys! This is RaBlissBlog! Here to detail developments in ra bliss!

Oh, ra bliss, ra bliss, ra bliss! Everything was working so well this morning! You take a breath, squeeze, let go and you're in the zone, Jack! You're in the zone!

No, you're not. Mostly morons and other flatheids come to this bloggy and you aren't getting ra bliss, are you?? Why is this? This is because you are a stupid basturn and too dumb to meditate.

Thank God, it's not my fault, Jack. That's all I can say. So do you think the flatheids should meditate, Hotboy? No, Jack! I think the flatheids should blow their brains out. They're not using them anyway. Especially, the old ones about my age. What is the point of being over fifty and not being able to access ra bliss? What is that about? What a waste of human beingness! You evil bourgeois, planet guzzling, complete waste of space! Just blow your brains out and do the planet a favour!

So you're not meeting up with any of your deep, dear friends this weekend, Hotboy? They're all past it, Jack. Baldy, no teeth, heading ... indeed, plummeting towards the grief, sorrow, lamentations ... suffering in this life. It might be hard work sometimes investigating ra bliss, but the alternative is so appalling!

Yarooo!!! Yaroooo!! I can hear the long horns on the viking warships in the Firth Of Forth calling to me. You've just been paid. Don the viking helmet, and sally forward and onwards. But, yea, though the flesh is weak, the bank balance is even weaker and I shall proceed to the diggings, then ra blissings, digging and blissing all afternoon. What a fortunate, fortunate creature I am, I am! What a fortunate creature I am!!

Rat Vase Breathing Again!

2007-03-29T13:40:00.000+01:00

Thursday 1:40 p.m.
It was about this time of year in 2004 that I discovered some kind of connection between breath and bliss. So you squeeze a breath round a symbol below your navel and let go. Maybe you should try it and see if you get something!

I was spending all day in the allotment and was off work then for ten weeks. So one day I just tried a vase breath and there was a little intimation that something quite different was starting to happen after the outbreath. This connection between breath and ra bliss is, of course, completely wonderful and a fantastic thing for the human beings who are not too dumb to meditate.

I cannot guarantee what effect I can get vase breathing, but now it is starting to bring the heat and has already brought some weird and wonderful new sensations and experiences. Now, we are hitting another zone somehow. Not always but sometimes. Occasionally. You do feel almost like a different thing when you go into this zone. If meditation could be described as transcendental, this feels like that.

Not a day for the allotment today. Overcast and wet! Because the kiddo is home for the holidays, I've spent the morning here in my bedroom and not in the lobby. Back to ra bliss!

00:34 a.m.
I do not know what I have done to have such a wonderful life!

Ra Goddo!

2007-03-28T17:56:00.000+01:00

Wednesday 5:55 p.m.
"Recently, there has been a lot of backsliding and soft soaping about hell. Now, I am here to tell yous that hell is real and eternal!"

The headmaster's opening statement at a school assembly. Quite took my breath away at the time. Looking around at the wee first years, boy, were they impressed. Mouths hanging open everywhere!

It's a bit tricky punting a benificent deity with this kind of hell! So the God who is good and loving, and knows everything, allows folk to have red hot pokers continually stuck up their bottoms for eternity. Eternity is a long time. The universe has cooled down and there's maybe only a vastness of photons, yet somewhere there still will be the red hot pokers going like the clappers. A wee bit disproportionate that! He also allows people to be born when he knows they're going to end up in this eternal damnation. Dearie me. Shurely shum mishtake!

So no intellectual rigour then, Hotboy. Flatheids, Jack. Just another bunch of stupid flatheids.

Of course, we in the Amazing Bloggy Church of the Bad Boy Blissheid don't have any beliefs. The only thing we believe in is not believing in things, especially thoughts!

One half of the allotment is dug and planted with onions and tatties. I'm way ahead of everyone else because I don't like gardening. It just stops you taking much better forms of exercise.

I'll be going out to visit friends and watch Scotland play Italy at the footie. So, I'd just like to take everything back that I said about God. Because I think another miracle is required here. Okay, God. I believe in hell and the benificent deity and any other set of palpably ridiculous contradictions. Just make it three nil to us, right?

10:46p.m.
Tried my best! We got beat 2-0. God is Italian!

Rose Hellish Things!

2007-03-27T19:18:00.000+01:00

Tuesday 7:17 p.m.
The nazi papa has done it again! He says hell is a real place where you will burn in the inferno for eternity. I love this guy! No backsliding and soft soaping going on here! First he gets rid of Limbo, in case any non-catholics think they can escape the burning for evermore, and then he gives us back hell! Brilliant!

Is is under the ground? I bet it is! I mean, you can tell by the volcanoes that it's quite hot down there.

Shame he only mentioned one hell. I think in the Tibetan tradition you can go to hot, cold and intermediate hells. Also, occasional ones. Maybe these are ones you occasionally drop into between lives spent raping and pillaging. But they don't last forever for these buddhisty people. What a cop out! The demons should be sticking the red hot pokers up your bottom endlessly!

I think ... as the sole member and single representative of the Amazing Bloggy Church of the Bad Boy Blissheid ... I'll just go to heaven instead. And I'm refusing to die first. So you've got the load of old photons out there, and the organic apparatus for contacting it, and some kind of mind or consciousness at the receiving end. Change any of these three things and the world changes, or how it appears changes. Unless you want to poke about with your eyeballs, or live in Neverland with Michael, you've only got the consciousness to work with. That's what happened to Gopi Krishna, I think. He got the heavenly vision. Hmmm? Might take a while to purify your consciousness, but what else are you doing anyway?

Rose Afflictives!

2007-03-24T12:05:00.000Z

Saturday Noon.
Here's how it's starting to work through the analytical meditations.

It's about 11 a.m. and your sitting in the lobby facing the postcard of the Medicine Buddha, which sits with a nice yellow background provided by the wallpaper. Soon after you begin to meditate, your visual field starts to alter a bit; things seem a little less solid and more shoogily.

You look for what you want to negate in yourself (where is the permanent, unchanging Hotboy?) and then in what you want to negate on the postcard of the Medicine Buddha (it looks like one thing but is a composite). There is no separate thing in here and there is no separate thing out there.

Esssentially, you are a thought, and the postcard is a thought, and the wall is a thought, feelings and emotions are also thoughts. You might try getting a particular emotion into your mind at this point, and have a look at it.

Perhaps it seems to lack as much force as you'd expect. The idea: I hate that basturn, for instance, maybe now just seems like an idea or thought which arises in mind, is maintained in mind, and will decline in mind. You kind of lose ownership. It's not yours anymore. It's just more crap arising. So bye, bye to that afflictive emotion.

But, Hotboy, I do hate the basturn and I'd like him to die a long, slow and intensely painful death. I do not wish to forgo the possibility of gaining some satisfaction from wreaking vengeance on his sorry arse!

In that case, Jack, you should contact the putative Hut Manager and get the basturn on the list of those to be cursed. I could do some cursing tomorrow morning because I'll probably be hung over and very crabbit. £10 will put a pluke on the end of anyone's nose. Most unsightly and embarrassing.

I was wanting to set more manuscripts on fire to help the tatties grow. The first big jiffy bag contains the drafts of a radio play I wrote about 1983. Clocked Out. That can go. The next bag had the early drafts of the first book I got published about 1985, City Whitelight. They were done on an Imperial 66 typewriter. How odd to see the typeface again after all these years!

The wish that it be made known that "I was the author" is the thought of a man not yet adult. The Dharmapada. The wall. I certainly wasn't me who wrote City Whitelight. That joe evolved and disappeared a long time ago.

This joe has had a most happy morning and will now go to the diggings!

Ra Bathtime Bliss!

2007-03-23T21:11:00.000Z

Friday 9:15 p.m.
The water was well passed the cooling down stage by the time I got out of the bath a wee while ago. I'd been lying there for an hour and a half. From the last thirty odd years I've been doing really hard physical jerks at least four times a week, and from this have grown to truly love lying semi-exhausted in baths. Imagine how unsurpassingly wonderful it is when you're lying there with very little consciousness of your body in a great big expanse of ra bliss! Oh, ra bliss, ra bliss, ra bliss!

Since I completely gave up beer on January 10th, I've managed to cut my beer consumption by over fifty percent. And I hardly eat at work. And I've been out there running up bleeding giant hills! And shadow boxing my brains out! And I haven't lost one ounce, not one bleeding ounce of fat after all the howdedo. Still, twelve stone three pounds. Fat basturn!

It's because you've been meditating more, Hotboy.
You're my only friend, Jack.
Will I make the match with Jack Dempsey then, fattie?
Fung off!

Rose Karmic Bonds!

2007-03-21T15:50:00.000Z

Wednesday 3:50 p.m.
What with having the afternoon off work .... in order to facilitate the Beer Monster Reduction Programme ...another four days with no beer, Jack! One day at a time, Hotboy! ... I set off looking for the Honeyblend Herbal Smoking Mixture. You don't want to know why. Anyway, I'm standing at the counter when someone says excuse me. Whilst waiting for the Medicine Buddha empowerment last Friday, someone said exactly the same thing. Then said it a bit later. And, lo!, it was the same babes! She was wanting by me to get behind the counter. She works there. I had to look three times. Actually, I looked about eight times, but she was engaged in some task and didn't look up.

When I've got the face transplant, the set of Sean Connery/Clint Eastwood gnashers and I'm back to my fighting weight, I'll go back there again. I'll make sure I get served by her.

Can I help you?
Em, (I look a bit quizzical) have you had a Medicine Buddha empowerment?
Why, yes! How did you know?
After a while, you can tell.

That last line is a killer, Jack. You have to be a buddhist to know what a killer line that is. But after that, I'm a bit stuck. She's bound to ask me what I want. What will I say?

And what can I get you?
A packet of strawberry flavoured condoms, please.

You see, Jack! It might be a bit too early in the relationship for a line like that. Anybody out there know of a killer line to follow the first killer line?

When I sat up this morning to start my meditations, there was so much of ra bliss that I couldn't really go through my normal juju routine. I just succumbed to ra bliss. It was so profound and wonderful. This is all of three seconds after you've sat up. A gobsmacking start to the day!!

There is a great auspiciousness in the air just now. It's a shame you can't do anything about people being too dumb to meditate. But there it is. I'm off to the allotment!

9:36 p.m.
A strange person asked me what an empowerment was. Buggered if I know. Juju. They say there's an unbroken line of transmission from the original Buddha traceable down to the joe who's giving you the empowerment, and he's supplying the juice. They say you need them to do tantric stuff, etc., blah, blah, google it. You don't need an empowerment to do the Medicine Buddha sadhana, which is the visualisations and general juju that goes along with it. The strange person could start doing this sadhana at the same time as moi. The book I have is on the net. Free. Then we could levitate together! And what a perfect position he is in! Hasn't even got a proper job! Unfortunately, too dumb to meditate. Dearie me!

I think this is the way it's supposed to work ... grief, sorrow, lamentations ... suffering in this life ... and generally afflictive emotions going chop chop bang bang non-stop ... caused by a false sense of self. Accept your fundamental ignorance and the illusory nature of reality. Enter the deity! Imagine yourself as a deity and this illusion should weaken the first illusion, which is what is funging you up. The afflictive emotions should dissipate. You would be left with a happy, smiley face.

The spam robots only want to hear about ra bliss, Hotboy. Well, Jack, the name of the game is to be able to collect the Four Blisses, it seems. I had an amazing time in ra bliss this morning, but I am nowhere near collecting even the first bliss, said to be the absolutely, amazing and truly fabulous dose of ra bliss. We spam robots .... is there more than one talking spam robot, Jack? .... We spam robots think that human existance sounds like a load of crap apart from ra bliss, Hotboy. Damn right, Jack! Damn right!

Ris Wonderful Day!

2007-03-18T12:36:00.001Z

Sunday 12:35 p.m.
Due to being a bad boy and staying up too late, I've just finished my first hour's meditation of the day. Oh, ra bliss! Such a cloud of profound and still yet whitey and oh so blissful bliss!! As I sit here I can feel expanses of something pushing against my skin in a most re-assuring fashion.

Anything else that may occur of an seemingly advantageous nature, such as becoming filthy rich from my new book, is completely unnecessary. I've got everything I need right now. I can do this juju, albeit with greater obstacles, whether I have to keep going to work or not. Meditations like the one I've just had are so on the money!

A nice Mother's Day to all you mothers out there!

6:50 p.m.
Whilst encased in the full Beer Monster Reduction Vehicle, I've just done the best six threes session of shadow boxing ... well, since I started doing then again, probably last summer.

Fears, anxieties, neuroses ... these are sometimes centre stage and in your face a bit. Well, the strength has gone out of the ones I was putting up with a few days ago. It's like a real confidence has taken centre ground and the fears and neuroses can somehow bounce off that ... at least, today anyway. It's as if I know what I'm going to be doing for the rest of my life and I am happy with that. Satisfaction, satiation, contentment ....here we come!

Ra Medicine Buddha

2007-03-16T21:50:00.000Z

Friday 9:51 p.m.
Around Christmas time in 2002, I went down to the Samye Ling hoping to take refuge and get an empowerment to do deity yoga. The temple there looks at its best when it's dark and wintery outside; all browns and goldens, dim reds and yellows. It was my first day there and the lama was giving a talk to all the folk who'd showed up to spend Christmas away from the InSanity Clause. They run a beginners course then and the temple was full of folk, most of whom might be beginners.

Previous to this, I'd sent the office a letter telling them about reading The Bliss Of Inner Fire and how I wanted a guru and an empowerment to do the great vajrayana. So I'm sitting there in the temple when the lama .... the lama has an informal speaking style. He just talks. He often looks amused. Anyway, I'm listening to the lama when he suddenly says: This is an empowerment to do deity yoga. I thought: What? So he says this is an empowerment to do deity yoga and I can't believe it. I look around at the folk there and ask myself if they're hearing this. If they are, it won't make much odds to them because most of them won't have an idea of what deity yoga is. So why is he saying this? Then I'm locked on him as he explains about this white globe of light (He pretends to hold this up as if it was above his shoulder) and the different coloured rays going out of it and into your body.

I was amazed at this because I thought it was just for me. And I couldn't really believe that.

I said in an earlier post that I wasn't empowered to do deity yoga with the Medicine Buddha, but then I remembered that occasion. In fact, I think that was an empowerment to do the juju with any deity going; a general empowerment.

All the "real" empowerments I got from his big brother. I asked the lama if he could give me something which would be like a seed since my family circumstances precluded any monky business or any long stays in caves. So he said I need a Dorje Sempa empowerment. I did feel pleased. This is an empowerment maybe involving a commitment to do 100, 000 prostrations and 100,000 recitations of the 100 syllable mantra. Of course, I have done none of this.

I thought that was a real guru thing. Like, I asked the lama for something and he gave me something.

"The Way of the White Clouds" is what you want to read if you're interested in getting zapped during empowerments. It's a climax to a lot of hard work on your mind.

Well, we're not anywhere near there yet!

The Royal College of Physicians, it might be called. 9, Queen St. Strange to walk along there. It's right beside Radio Scotland. Once, I had my feng shui. I had about six scripts produced there and it's only a quarter of an hour's walk away.

It has a beautiful, beautiful main hall, this Physicians place. It must be one of these Playfair jobs, one of these amazing Edinburgh buildings you're never in. Greek columns, oil paintings, brilliantly ornate ceiling. I have no excuse for never having been there before. It is a beautiful spot to sit in. This is where the boy who some may regard as the emanation of the Medicine Buddha, Dr Akong Tulku Rinpoche is going to give this empowerment. How did someone have the feng shui to put this together? I mean, this is Edinburgh and this is a medical town. Surgeon's Hall is fabulous as well.

Though it wasn't that full, the most beautiful woman in this big, big room asked if she could sit beside me. My eyes were closed and I'm in the half lotus (I do sit like that if I possibly can!) and usually folk stay clear if you do that, but I moved aside and she sat down.

A springtime story!

She was really sweet! She had four silken scarves. She sat with her left hand in her right palm, and she was there for the empowerment. She asked if she could sit down and she said excuse me twice and I grunted maybe once and a half as I let her get by. I could have gobbled her up in one mouthful. Let the empowerment begin!

We were there to enhance our karmic bonds, Jack.

Dream on, Hotboy!

The Medicine Buddha is represented, as usually happens with buddhas, by a postcard. But it's the best postcard because the Medicine Buddha is the same colour as lapis lazuli, a kind of gorgeous blue. And the postcard is kind of psychodelic and that helps since the visual field hits unusualness these days in seconds flat.

But what a wonderful thing to be involved in and how fantastic that it happened at all. Of course, I was blissed out of my face throughout really. The amazing surroundings and the weird juju that was being enacted with great good humour, I must say, from the rinpoche, made the whole thing just a fabulous way to spend a couple of hours.

I got a wee plastic bag of cosmic medicine. The Doc says it has been matra-ed over for seven days at twenty four hours a day. It's in grains. It's grains of something. If you're starving, one grain can appease your hunger for a day. Total hut management failure here of course. I've got the juju grains from the emanation of the Medicine Buddha here. How much a grain? When you're dying and have to humiliate yourself on the cross of self to save yourself, you can ask me for a grain then. You're not getting any.

I might give it to my auld maw. Saw her today. She didn't like the Bishop of Motherwell saying he wasn't voting Labour. No respect for the clergy. Never did have really. She'd appreciate the magical qualities though.

Ra Congress!

2007-03-16T00:26:00.000Z

Friday 00:25 a.m.
I have planted 750 onions. My clothes are going on fire. They are called Marks and Spencer training bottoms. If your weight yo-yos ... yes, for fat basturns!

It said there was only ONE American Congressman who did not believe in God. Most folk I know do not believe in God. I assume in the Labour Party who govern us, well, I hope most of them are atheists. Or humanists. Believing in an afterlife means you put up with crap! Obviously, the best thing is for the folk who want to rule over you to think it might be a good idea if you had a good house and some money in the here and now.

We, who are trying to emanate as deities, however, may be allowed a different view.

No, same view!

If we, in the Amazing Bloggy Church of the Bad Boy Blissheid do not believe in any things, we cannot, of course, believe in God. How ridiculous!

Absolutes do not dependently arise; they do not interact with other things and they do not change. They are things which, surely, must not really occur, or else I'll have to go back to the beginning.

The flatheid side of moi couldn't really settle today. Agitations. The blissheid side of moi was totally fabuloso. Maybe six or seven hours meditating today. But I just need to totally calm down.

Have we been having any fun, Jack?
Yes, we have, Hotboy! But the Masai Warriors can only jump for so long, and time beats on ... you have to produce the goods. Are we any nearer to perfect peace and total satisfaction?

I shouldn't think so, Jack. But I think I could curse people pretty soon. I can concentrate and stare, and stare, and stare. Hours and hours of this. Hubble Bubble. If the Hubble Bubble Hut Manager could only be found, we could clean up!

If you'd like me to try and wreak total devastation around where you live just leave a comment and I'll get onto it!

Ra Gilberts!

2007-03-14T22:44:00.000Z

Wednesday 10:45 p.m.
This deity yoga juju is a twenty four hour a day job. We're in the upper circle at the King's tonight, right at the front so you can see into the orchestra pit and lean back and look up at the ceiling. There are four distinct faces in the centre piece on the ceiling. Somebody must have painted them. I wonder who he painted. Then the music started. Because it was Gilbert and Sullivan, the curtain doesn't rise for ages, and you can go to sleep looking up at the ceiling then if you like. Or close your eyes and do the juju.

You're trying to pretend you're a white light being in the middle of maybe something like a big wedding cake. Sometimes you open you eyes a bit and see just down and away at the end of your nose all these pirates, or policemen, or girls in nice dresses. The cast seemed to be enjoying themselves. All was well with the world.

Because it was Wednesday night and we were in the upper circle, there weren't too many people around us in the front row. I got into a half lotus. I settled into the fabulous bliss. Sometimes I whacked a vase breath in there. Ra bliss went lava-esque. It flows, or maintained a steady flowing without flowing anywhere. And I thought: What a fortunate creature I am, I am! What a fortunate creature I am!

Rem Stories!

2007-03-13T19:45:00.001Z

Tuesday 7:45 p.m.
Globules of .... who knows .... flowing up and under my chin as I sit here, lifting, stretching. This juju is great, so it is!

Great fire up at the allotment this evening as darkness fell. Newspapers with the added typescripts, mainly from the Buddha and the Big Bad Wolf. I must have had hopes for that book once! Even although I suspected it wasn't very good.

I read the first twenty odd pages of the book I'd almost forgotten about, On Becoming a Living Saint. Unfortunately, after the first sentence, (I HOPE YOU DON'T MIND GOING TO JAIL WHEN YOU'VE FINISHED READING THIS BOOK) the whole thing deteriorates and it seems like a whole lot of under-written crap. Like the one Serpent's Tail published and the new one, it isn't written in proper paragraphs, chapters, etc. Why try to re-invent the wheel? The next book I write is going to have proper sentences, and paragraphs, and chapters.

The story about the joe wanting to become a window cleaner by selling dope is buried in this morass somewhere. Yes, storylines! I should really hold off from writing anything and develope storylines, etc., but I probably won't. But I definitely should. Maybe I could just steal someone else's. Jaws is a straight lift from Moby Dick. Write a sci-fi Moby Dick. Horrible big space monsters that excrete drugs chased after by pirate like spaceships, one of which is captained by Ahab, the one legged nutter. Moby Dick, like Germinal, started with this joe walking into town. "With a rapidly beating heart ..." that's the start. Just add another 100,000 words and give me tenpercent off the top, please!

Ra Quotes!

2007-03-12T19:10:00.003Z

Monday 7:10 p.m.
What a great start to the day today! Times like Monday morning and Wednesday afternoon are when you can really tell how you're getting on with this juju. This morning I was awake before six and the meditations were going so well that I felt like taking the day off work to meditate. Of course, I went to work and with having to talk to flatheid after flatheid and all the business .... anyway, think positive. Before August, I will have a publisher for my kidbooks and for my new book and will resign. Hurrah! Hurrah! Let's hope!!

I only managed to read the first line of the old "novel" I hacked together a decade ago. It says: I hope you won't mind going to jail after you've finished reading this book.

I also found an old copy of Alma Mater yesterday. There were two quotes at the start of the book, which I later lost. So I'll put them in here just in case I lose them again.

Alma Mater is a book about the second two years of a university career which started in 1969. The year before I went, Malcolm Muggeridge resigned as rector (this is a student representative in Scottish unis). God, as I was watching this drama unfold while still at school... anyway, Edinburgh University turned out to be so much more disappointing than Malcolm Muggeridge made it sound. So here's the quotes at the start of the book. I'll get them put onto my webpage version whenever.

Newman : "A university is an Alma Mater, knowing her children one by one, not a foundry, or a mint, or a treadmill. "

Malcolm Muggeridge: "Yet, how infinitely sad; how, in a macabre sort of way, funny that the form their insubordination takes should be a demand for Pot and Pills, for the most tenth rate sort of escapism and self-indulgence ever known! (On resigning as University Rector, January 1968)

The flat is empty apart from me till Wednesday. Bring on the dancing girls!

Ra Improvements!

2007-03-11T19:33:00.000Z

Sunday 7:33 p.m.
I went looking for the story I was telling you about, the one about the joe who wanted to deal dope so he could become a window cleaner. I used it in a "novel" I threw together from odds and ends about ten years ago.

This entailed searching through piles of old manuscripts in the corner of my room, mostly rejections for The Buddha and the Big Bad Wolf as it turned out. Then I found the first forty odd pages of this "novel". What a title!

On Becoming a Living Saint
Reflections on Religion and Drugs
Or
How to legalise dope.

The one I got published about 11 years ago now was supposed to be called:

On Becoming a Man
Reflections on Sex and Violence
Or
Are you boys cyclists?

I called it that because one of the best books I ever read was Reflections on Violence by Georges Sorel, a French anarchist who later turned fascist. I can just remember good things about the book though.

They paid young people like me good money to go to university and read books like that. What a fortunate creature I was!

Yes, I feel much better than I did this time last week. I've given up beer completely now, apart from yesterday and Wednesday. The meditations continue to develope in a fabulous manner. They really do. It just gets better and better and better. But it's hard too. The trip to Bellshill usually breaks up the intensity of it. It's heavy duty juju, all this staying in and meditating most of the time. Brilliant results though. I think I'll away off and wallow in the results!

Ra Whereabouts!

2007-03-09T13:27:00.000Z

Friday 1:26 p.m.
Here in the Amazing Bloggy Church of the Bad Boy Blissheid, we ...

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

Nothing exists outside your own mind.

How can nothing exist outside your own mind?

Where are the deities then, Hotboy?
They're in your mind, Jack.
And the moon also exists in your mind, Hotboy?
Where else could it exist, Jack?
It could be in orbit around the earth, Hotboy!
It is in orbit around the earth, Jack.
I know. The first Scotsman on the moon, Neil Armstrong, jumped up and down on it.
And he didn't think it was in his mind?
He thought it was under his feet, Hotboy!
I can see how he might think that. It's still in his mind though. He's not thinking with anything else. Thoughts don't occur anywhere else but your mind. When you're thinking, what else could you be using?

Is this a paradox, Hotboy? It might well be one of those, Jack. Things exist and don't exist simultaneously. You don't get more paradoxical than that. Well, an electron being part of the wave/particle duality is a bit of a paradox, and all the flatheids don't seem to have much trouble accepting that one.

You've got a problem if you're stuck with your mind being between your ears. Maybe we could call it mind, or Mind, or MIND.

All things arise, abide and decline in mind.

I was doing a bit of deity yoga today, as you do, when I wondered where the deity was. I thought: It's in your mind, Hotboy. Then everything was in my mind (Mind, MIND) for a moment and this felt very good. A little touch of realisation maybe. Just lost the individual self for a wee bit. It went out. It came back after a wee while. One day I hope it goes out and stays out.

Why is that, Hotboy? Well, Jack, when that happens there will be nothing to worry about and no one to worry. There will be no sentient beings. Or, you could say, there will be sentient beings, but although they will appear distinct, they will not be separate.

Surely, this is as close to heaven as you could expect to get on this earth.

None of the above is true, of course. We don't do truth here on RaBlissBlog. If we don't believe in things, how can anything be true? The Amazing Bloggy Church of the Bad Boy Blissheid has no beliefs. We deal in results. We want to be happy. Or, at least, happier!

When I started this bloggy, I think I was having a problem with vase breathing sometimes. Like, juddering sensations on the outbreath and feeling like a I was going to black out even holding my breath for a little while. I was meditating for over three hours this morning. Sometimes I had a wee problem holding my breath because of the amount of ra bliss I was generating. What a fortunate, fortunate creature I am!!

I'm off to the allotment on my nazi bike!

Ra Rationale of Cheerfulness!

2007-03-08T10:27:00.000Z

Thursday 10:26 a.m.
Reasons to be cheerful:
1) My body and mind fill with bliss and rapture with increasing frequency. I am a HotboyMadyamika and I can surf the oceans of bliss. This beats everything hands down!
2) I have a root guru.
3) I have a literary agent, Mr Adrian Weston.
4) I have managed to survive working part time for nearly three years now.
5) I live rent free in the middle of a beautiful city. I can't imagine wanting to live anywhere else.
6) I've still got the girlfriend I had when I was nineteen. I get on well with my daughter.
7) I've had my ten seconds of non-self and emptiness.

Here's some juju I've been practising recently with great effect. You imagine the deity in front of you. You get it placed above your head. (I am still crap at these visualisations, but this still works) You imagine a white stream of ra bliss coming from the deity and going through the top of your head. This bliss continues to fill your entire body while pollutants, etc., are expelled. Unfortunately, bliss is just a word to a flatheid, but I can't help that. But we've got oodles and oodles of ra bliss filling your mind and body in a great expansion of ra bliss.

Say to the deity: Cure me of all my addictions. After a while, the deity says: Hotboy, you are cured of all your addictions. This feels truly fantastic! Then you get the deity into a white line and dissolve it into yourself.

That'll be ten percent off the top, please. Now, I'm away to Bellshill.

12:50 p.m.
When I got to Waverley Station, I discovered there was a strike on. Bugger! Still, free beer for the workers!

This is RaBlissBlog!!! Oh, how ra bliss jumped up this morning! Week on week, it just gets better and better. Fantastic effects from vase breathing this morning. Lots of lovely warm feelings in the abdomen. And ra bliss, ra bliss, ra bliss!! No question of me not getting blissed out when I lie flat these days.

10:10 p.m.
Planted 200 onions and sat in the hut. It was cold and windy sometimes, and the hut door rattled a bit. I need another bit of string. There's a bit of twine at the moment wrapped round a wee brush, and that hangs from the nail the twine is wrapped round ... the door doesn't shut right. This is the sort of job for the putative hut manager.

I put out the bird nest box and it's on a safer nail than the one it was on last year.

I don't like gardening. I sometimes like looking around at the sky while having a wee rest from the digging. There's a big sky at the allotments. I don't think there are any tall buildings anywhere near. You can move your head from side to side and get a sweep of sky from treetop to distant treetop. This is all the fun you get gardening.

I read The Times. That was more or less it. No time for anything else. No time for beer. No money for beer. No beer.

Ra Reasons to be Cheerful!

2007-03-07T13:32:00.000Z

Wednesday 1:30 p.m.
Reasons to be cheerful. 1) It is Wednesday 2) I have no diseases at the moment 3) It is not raining 4) Dearie me!

How did I ever do five days a week? I told my job share partner I might go looking in the jobshop for jobbies over the next few days. Waste of time of course. Still, I need a break or something.

Thank god I've got one! I'm going to hava wee kip and then go to the allotment, and meditate and dig.

6:20 p.m.
I think this is the eleventh year we've had the allotment. Wasn't my idea, certainly not! I got forced to have a look. I'm feeling a bit hungover as I look down at this big piece of dirt. "I wonder who the fung is going to dig this then?". Of course, the answer was moi! I was told when I was a kid that if I did well at school, I wouldn't have to work outside. God knows how much writing that dirt has cost me.

It's in a better state now than it's ever been in the springtime due to me working part time over the last couple of years. I'm going to try not to run out of onions this year. I'm going to plant six hundred. It won't be enough!

By Friday I'm normally very happy. I haven't had a beer on Sunday, Monday or Tuesday nights. Celtic are playing A.C. Milan down the pub tonight. I can't see it anywhere else. Hmmm? Last sixteen of the European Cup. Hmmmm?

Ra Plot and Losing It!

2007-03-06T17:23:00.000Z

Tuesday 5:21 p.m.
It was at the this time of night after working all day that I'd come here and write my two kidbooks. How the hell did I get the energy for that? Anyway, needs must.

I've decided that - since there's nothing I'm burning to write about - I'll work on storylines, or plotlines. The first one I'm going to work on is about a little guy who gets involved with big criminal types, stumbling from incident to incident, and ends up with the money/girl, or whatever.

I'm going to build this story from a beginning someone told me about. Here's how the first chapter goes.

The joe wants to get into dope dealing to finance his ambitions to be a window cleaner with a ladder, pails, and a white van. His dodgy pal sets this up for him, so one day he's standing on a pavement and gets picked up by this dealer who lays a kilo of hash on him. He's to pay later. The joe takes the dope home and takes his dog out to the park for a walk. There he stashes the drugs, but as he walks around the top of the park, several men in suits run into the park, point at him, take the drugs from where he's put them and run off. End of chapter one.

A humourous adventure story of derring-do if ever I saw one. I'd like to get a boat sunk out on the Forth. Maybe the joe gets marooned on an island in the Forth. In the end, maybe everybody dies except him. He'll have to end up with enough to set up a window cleaning business, of course. Or something like that. What do you think so far?

Ra Lonely Financial Zoner!

2007-03-04T18:18:00.000Z

Sunday 6:20 p.m.
I ate one of my teeth on Wednesday. Makes you think. So I just spent all the rest of my overdraft. It was a blow to the poor people. How are the poor people supposed to spear and cook the geese in Inverleith Pond if they can't afford the teeth to chew them? What if we hadn't any spears? Geese gummed to death.

One thing I've never tried to write is science fiction.

When Adolfphus Nannbugger MenziesMilngavieavitch looked up from the mutilated corpse of Albert McClonkiedickheadson, he saw A Very Long Name in a hot air balloon, accompanied by his ritinue of nasty dwarves and robot sex slaves, come over the hill.

I have written a dirty book before!

Best to draw a veil over that really.

I think I'd like to write something unusual, interesting and funny. I've never tried to write a funny book before. I'd tried to write funny bits into books. How's about a funny book with a really strong plotline?

Relaxing and trying to get in among the populace has been a big failure. I've no money left. Bad thoughts arise. I've consumed expensive dental treatment. Regret, paranoia, etcetera. And I've got to go to work tomorrow. Is this some kind of a joke, God?

Ra Ideas Factory!

2007-03-02T20:47:00.000Z

Friday 8:45 p.m.
The sensei and reverend sent me an email saying Bomber was alright the way it was. I finished reading it today. I liked the first chapter, as I said, but after that it's just a lot of shifting the furniture around. All the okay bits were late additions, but I can't see me going in and re-writing that. So I'll have to get an idea. Where do these writers get their ideas from? If I'm not going to re-write Bomber, I'm back to the question of how many dwarves, and will anyone escape by hot air balloon?

When Adolfphus Nannbugger Milngavieavitch looked up from the mutilated corpse of Albert McClonkiedickhead, he saw A Very Long Name come over the hill in a hot air balloon, accompanied as usual by his retinue of nasty dwarves.

Are you allowed to say nasty dwarves? Nasty, vertically challenged folk!

Rose Zones!

2007-03-01T11:54:00.000Z

Thursday, Noon.
This is RaBlissBlog! Here to tell you flatheids all about ra bliss. Unfortunately, it is very hard to describe sensations or feelings to people (i.e. flatheids!), especially when they will never have an analogous experience of them due to being too dumb to meditate. But one day some joe or josephine who does meditate and follow this juju path may happenstance upon RaBlissBliog and this might be a help to you, you fortunate creature, you!

Setting the scene. The flat is empty. I should be on my own till about eleven this evening with any luck. Last night I was so knackered from trying too hard that I slept, more or less, from eight in the evening till about two or three hours ago. So I am well refreshed.

I guess I should reiterate a bit.

You're a flatheid, but you start meditating regularly and finally odd things start occurring. You will experience various degrees of bliss and feel strange movements begin to manifest in your body, except these movements (and feelings) seem to occur in an aspect of your body/mind that you did not realise was there before. At this point, you are not longer so flatheided and have experience of other mental and physical "zones." Years of occasional wonderful experiences await you at this stage.

Once you have taken refuge and empowerments, I don't see how you can claim total personal responsibility for what happens after that, though of course you still have to put the cushion time in. When you're a non-meditating moronic flatheid, there's really not even much point in talking to you about zones and bliss and whatnot, but when you're at my stage (which is very much still the beginner), you have to admit that you have no idea where this juju can lead you in terms of mental abilities, siddhis, and whatnot, so you just hope you will not crash and burn, and if you are about to, maybe you can get some help. Obviously, if you were brought up in this tradition, had a justifiable faith in the juju, etc., this would be much easier. But here we are.

Different things are beginning to occur, which is why I should take this opportunity today in making a very poor stab at describing what might be going on. Something else has checked in. It has come with what little access to heat I have. In the after-effects of the vase breathing this morning a very strange zone arose. There's a slightly more substantial feeling here. It feels easier to imagine you are a deity in this state. Remember, you have to feel proud, vajra pride, and the mandala you are in should have some kind of radiance, according to what I have read. I'm still very very poor at these visualisations, but you just go back and back and back over them time and time and time again and eventually a little improvement becomes evident.

I'll go and meditate till 2 p.m. and decide what to do.

4:30 p.m.
I went to Bert's Bar to read Bomber, a book I last re-wrote god knows how long ago. How pleased I was! I got through four pints of IPA (3.8%) and managed to read 104 pages. If it ends up as good as this, I won't bother re-writing it. It's not bad.

The main character is called Simon Sweik. He's called Simon Sweik because I lifted the name from a book called The Good Soldier Swejk, or Svejk, or something Czech. It's an old book about this joe stumbling around Austro-Hungary at the time of the First World War. Nobody ever asked me why I called the joe Sweik.

The baddie is called Sildwick. I have no idea why he's called that. There's someone called Camille. I must have thought that was exotic. There's someone called Lexie. He called that because my friend Jerry know someone from the wild west called Lexie.

I thought the trouble with the book was that there wasn't enough rationale for the guy to be into vengeance; not really enough character development there really. Hmmm? The book's okay so far, but we've just come to the end of the first act and a bit really.

Susan Hiltz is the name of the girl.

Three men of even older provenance than me were sitting reading books in Bert's Bar. Paperbacks. I was the only one who was reading a book I'd written myself. I wanted to give one of them my book and tell them to put away the crap they were reading for my book was much better. They would not have believed me. My book is not published. It is in a folder.

I would like a criticism of the book before I re-write it. If anyone out there reads it and sends me a few lines about it, I'll change the names to suit them. Of course, the book will get published one day. I remember sending the first chapter to some agent who said they didn't like the main character. There are half witted fools out there deciding what you get to read. The filters don't work. Cos the vandals took the handles.

Ra Springtime Will Come!

2007-02-28T17:03:00.000Z

Wednesday 5:00 p.m.
From the Wobbly song book. Might be Joe Hill. "When the Springtime will come, Oh, won't we have fun. We'll get out of jail, and we'll go on the bum!" I got paid. I've decided it would be better to stop beating myself up, be a bit more relaxed, go out, and beat up other people. Or, be more engaged. Sometimes it feels as if you can get too much of this heat and ra bliss and emanating as a deity malarkey. Let's have fun and fool around!

It seems unlikely that I will become a buddha in this lifetime. Unfortunately, this is the only one I have. If you're stuck with a false sense of self, you have to accept that.

'When we can see, straightforwardly and non-conceptually, the nature of our clear light mind and remain totally absorbed in this nature without ever regressing from it, we have become a Buddha." The D.L. The wall.

8:00 p.m.
We went a walk up to the allotment though it was already beginning to be dark. Cold wind, lilac in the sky. Two motherfungin giant ducks were standing by the pond on the way back. Strange geese. Why don't the poor people eat these things? They didn't have anything like that round about where I was brought up. Why don't kids spear them and eat them at campfires? Things can't be that bad.

Ra Third Day!

2007-02-27T18:58:00.000Z

Tuesday 7:00 p.m.
I watched the start of this reality show last night about the beginning of a six week Islamic retreat in Spain. There's a British asian there who believes that time is money and who seems a real chop chop bang bang, let's get rich, kind of a joe. As part of the retreat, they want folk to sit in silence for an hour. This joe cannot for the life of him think why he should spend a whole hour sitting in silence. What is the bloody point of that? he might have said.

There seemed to be quite a few devout religious folk there. Pretty rigourous, some of them. Not once did anyone mention ra bliss! No one said to the stupid flatheid that if he sat there long enough, he would surely get access to ra bliss, and would probably be able to eventually access it when he wanted to. I wonder why none of these religious people ever mention ra bliss. Is it because they do not get ra bliss? It looks as if it doesn't matter how many different kinds of funny hats you put on, or whatever ridiculous vestments you wear. That's not going to get you into ra bliss! I will continue to watch this programme because it's a good insight into Islam, and as soon as someone mentions ra bliss, I will say Hallelujah! But they're not going to, are they?

As the sole member and single representative of the Amazing Bloggy Church of the Bad Boy Blissheid, well, I can laugh at all that!

It's the third evening of giving everything up again. I'm just away to a first night at the Traverse.

Rat Giving Up Giving Up Again!

2007-02-24T15:37:00.000Z

Saturday 3:40 p.m.
Due to having some visitors, I had to give up giving up last night, and duly succumbed as usual. There was nobody there I hadn't known for thirty years. Poisonous went yellow for a while then had to have a bit of a lie down. It was just like old times. He crashed out on my bed. Ten years ago he would have slept on the kitchen floor. How civilised we have become!

I missed Poisonous performing for the first time, a debut, at the Festival Theatre last Sunday during the Chinese celebrations for the New Year because I was throwing up at the time. He had five lines, all in Chinese. I asked if he'd based his portrayal on Obi Wan Kenobe, or whatever Alec Guinness was called in Star Wars. He was playing a monk. The boy needs an agent!

I'm here at this time on Saturday afternoon because I've decided to become a writer. I wonder what I could write about. It's a short step from here to the point when you have to ask yourself if you're going to have dwarves, and if so, how many? I wonder where these writers get their ideas from?

I've just had one! It's a piece of cake this writing business. My idea was to sell the names of the characters. If you want your name to be used for one of the characters in my new book, it'll cost you twenty quid. If you'd like any of the baddies called after your boss or whatever, that'll be another twenty quid. You'd have to write a Russian novel so that everyone has three interchangeable names. Here's the start>

When Adolphus Nannbugger Milngavieavitch raised his eyes from the ploughshare, he saw A Really Long Name come over the hill ..... That's at least £120 in the first sentence. This writing lark could turn out to be a money spinner! I'm going to be rich! Rich, I tell you! Rich!

9:05 p.m.
Some cheapskate's has been trying to take advantage of my good nature! Here's the new first sentence to my new novel.

When Adolphus Nannbugger Milngavieavitch raised his eyes from the now mutilated corpse of Albert McClonkiedick, he saw a Really Long Name come over the hill .... That's much better! A crime book! Pots of money!

The Edinburgh skyline from the seat overlooking the pond in Inverleith Park has seven or eight projecting objects, mainly steeples. There is a castle over to the left a bit. The big steeple on the cathedral in Palmerston Place is the most prominent and nearly bang in the middle. So you fix on that. My hands are resting on Kidnapped and I've got the hood up. Although I'm sitting in a half lotus, I'm trying not to draw attention to myself by pretending to be normal.

"All alone in Central Park, I was walking after dark, I must be crazy ..." Rolling Stones.

It wasn't dark at first and the sky was in various shades of grey. Between the skyline and Comely Bank Road, which is the first road after the pond and the park, there's a band of buildings facing you. They seem awful far away and the lights are out . Then it gets dark and the lights in the windows start coming on. It's very nice sitting there. It gets pretty dark. I'm starting to think about getting mugged, but this is silly since Inverleith Park is not Central Park. But it was getting dark. I became aware of someone coming off the main road out of the park and coming up behind me and a wee bit to the side. He stopped. I slowly swivelled my head and this joe says, " Sorry, sorry, I thought you were somebody else ..." and turns and runs off down the road.

If you're going to mug me, pal, you'd better not be on your own. Or have private health insurance because I hear those public wards can get a bit hairy when they turn the lights out at night. For I am not a very good buddhist.

Realising the retreating figure was none other than Albert McClonkiedickhead, the notorious penguin pervert, I took out the steak knife and started off in hot pursuit. A flashback! Already I've got a flashback! Pots of money! Pots of it!

00:30 a.m.
What a lovely weekend I've had! Of course, tomorrow I'll have to give everything up again. C'est la vie!

Ra Beer Monster!

2007-02-22T15:52:00.000Z

Thursday 3:50 p.m.
Yea, though I forswore the pleasures of ra beer about January 10th, I have partaken in ra beer on about six occasions since then, and got pissed once. This is not quite the same as giving up beer for a year. And I'm still a fat basturn and still skint. However, today I've been meditating from when I got up until about just now, and sometimes it seems that I may need a little something extra in my life besides meditating, and giving up beer, and going to the jobbie. For, on a day like today, I'm still knackered from yesterday's physical jerks and do not feel like running six miles. Neither do I feel like doing any more meditating just now. What I really need is a wee hobby to fill the odd space. Maybe I should become a writer again. Maybe I should walk down to Bert's Bar clutching my free copy of Kidnapped, get quietly sozzled and seek inspiration!

6:00 p.m.
The Tao. I was chatting to the kiddo at the Samye Ling about your tao. Start with the stoics. You're like a dog being pulled by a cart. In this life. Nothing you can do about that except make it comfortable. Being comfortable in your skin. No prizes here for that one!

I could have been a footballer. I didn't care. Short sight checked in. Well done.

If there had been a boxing club in Bellshill when I was a boy, I'd have taken up boxing and been quite good at it. This would have been a disaster. Well done.

I could have done better academically, and become one of them. But not smart enough and didn't like the basturns. Well done.

I might have made pots of money from writing, but I wasn't smart enough and didn't like the basturns. Well done.

We know that it is possible to aspire to perfection. Jesus Christ was a joe. The buddha was a joe. St Teresa was a josephine. We're not excluded from this. We have to be one or the other. Is this your tao? If it was, it hardly seems likely that you'd just come back from Bert's after doing three pints of extremely nice real ale. Hmmm? Sometimes it seems one needs to find a place to be comfortable. Born to be comfortable! Born to be comfortable!

I think it's time to start another book!

11:40 p.m.
No, it's not. There are too many good books out there. So today. I had three pints and a smoke. Bad boy! Sat down and waited for the homecoming. It went into another zone! Couldn't believe it. Then, in the spirit of ecumenicism, watched the huns and had four cans of wifebeater, and more smokes. Tentatively, sat down again. Wow! What is this? Purification and accumulation?

Well, there is it. What do I know? Here come ra bliss! Here comes ra bliss!

Ranother Day!

2007-02-19T19:33:00.000Z

Monday 7:40 p.m.
As far as diseases go, I'd recommend this gastric bug to anyone. One day of disease and the next you're okay! You think it's going to be upchucking for days on end, but by this afternoon I was fine. How odd!

I went out for a wee walk to check out the legs. I posted off the two kidsbooks to Mr Adrian Weston, that literary agent of great taste and perspicacity. He might like them. You never know.

I picked up a new pair of specs today from Mr Wardie of Raeburn Place, an optometrist highly recommended for his affable style and charming customer relations!

I was wondering if I was still diseased as I emptied my pockets of odds and ends into a public bin on the pavement beside the bus stop. I found this written on a piece of paper:

Colours, sounds, smells and so on are not really in the objects themselves, but are impressions produced in us by the action of material particles on our sense organs. Hmmm?

I think it's from a book for kids about consciousness. It might be from Descartes. (Bugger all do I know about philosophy!). He's into the dualism between mind and matter, with these two interacting in the pineal gland. Well, a fair poke at the problem considering when he lived. There aint have been some clever basturns!

"This material world has no reality apart from its reflection in the deliverances of our sense organs." I like that! It was on the same bit of paper. It's from a joe called Berkeley. He was into something called Idealism.

Samuel Johnson said he could refute that by kicking a stone. I love this guy Berkeley. He could be called The Matrix Berkeley. I don't see how you can possible prove that he's not right although what he says doesn't seem "sensible". Tell it's not true, bloggies! Tell me it's not just all happening inside my head!

8:10 p.m.
I do love beer and I miss it sore, Jack. Just one day at a time, Hotboy. Did you hear that basturn on the telly? We drink beer here on earth because in heaven there is no beer! That didn't help at all, Jack! Not one little bit!

Ra Fire Pig!

2007-02-18T14:27:00.000Z

Sunday 2:30 p.m.
It 's the start of the Tibetan New Year. The Year of the Fire Pig. It's also the Chinese New Year. I celebrated by throwing up my breakfast about an hour ago. If it hadn't been for that I might have gone to the Festival Theatre to see my chum Poisonous appear on stage ... but he wouldn't say as what. Be there as Hong Kong Phooie, dressed in a karate suit. I do hope someone gets a photograph.

9:40 p.m.
Spent most of the day on the couch preparing for my demise. This is a rehearsal for the black spot time, complete with back to back showings of The Life of Birds, an Attenborough show, on one of the digital channels. Digital channels? Anyway, there's this lyre bird that can imitate anything, and it's doing the sound of the buzz saws chopping down the neighbourhood. Although we don't do God here on RaBlissBlog, sometimes it looks as if somebody must be taking the piss. Anyway, I hope to be fine by tomorrow morning. Or I'll go to work and start vomiting around the place to show my commitment. Probably succumb to the couch. Basturns! Basturns! Basturns!

Ra Bye Bye Samye!

2007-02-17T09:43:00.000Z

Saturday 9:40 a.m.
I haven't been doing much vase breathing when I've been here. I never do. This is because most of the meditations are done in public. The eyeballs rolled up, the jaw at an odd angle, such things are probably enough for the public to be going on with.

But I did a couple of wee vase breaths before taking this break. What bliss! Oh, what bliss! When I finish this, I've got another hour before I have to get out of my room and I'll spend it in the back temple doing the deity yoga juju. Of course, I dipped into a book I've got with me last night when I was waiting for the kiddo in this cafe, and realised, as usual, that I know bugger all about deity yoga. Keep me alive for a couple of years and let's hope!

I spent all yesterday afternoon in the temple. There was a lot of gong bashing going on of course, but for some time I felt in a state of wonderful contentment and satiation. My emperor penguin mode when you don't want or need anything else. This is a wonderful feeling and another one never shared by flatheids.

I can never repay what I've been given by this place. One summer when I was here I felt truly happy for days at a stretch. I told a flatheid about this when I was out at a social event. The flatheid said: Are you not happy now? There's little point in talking to flatheids about ... well, anything. True happiness and contentment. Dearie me. You're as well talking to the wall as talking to a flatheid about that!

The last couple of times I've left here I've felt some regret. Back to the needless insecurities, anxieties, and those too dumb to meditate. I need to get to the hut, Jack! I need to get to the hut!

Thank God the auld maw gave me £100 so I could think about getting the kiddo here. She's done a lot of sketching and says she's enjoyed being here. If someone else gives me some money sometime, I'll certainly bring her down here again. What the world doesn't need is another flatheid. There's plenty of flatheids to go around!

9:55 p.m.
And how did you land on this shore, brother? The chat at the bus stop just outside the Samye Ling. Family breakdown, unemployment and disease. The same old story. A manual labourer. Now, he sometimes spends whole days meditating in the forests roundabout, or sometimes up by them there hills. I wondered if he'd got down to ra bliss, but was too polite to ask. He landscaped the gardens. After paying for everything, he had fifty quid a week to spend. He was going into Langholm to have a pint of Guinness and place a few bets on the horses, as you might on a Saturday afternoon. What a fortunate, fortunate creature he seemed to be!

Ra Samye Day Two!

2007-02-16T10:31:00.000Z

Friday 10:45 a.m.
There's been a lot of unusual gong bashing activity going on at the temple over the last two days. I asked someone why there wasn't the usual programme. It's the Tibetan New Year on Sunday apparently and special gong bashings are performed for five days in advance.

It's great if you dig the ritual music! I was in there for two and a half hours this morning. Oh, ra bliss, ra bliss, ra bliss! When I came out for a break, I found the kiddo sitting in the cold sketching the temple. I told her nobody would bother her if she sketched in the temple.

The man who set up this centre forty years ago is in the temple leading this chanting. Dr Akong Tulku Rinpoche. Hmmm? I wonder what kind of mind he's got? I think he was an abbot at four. Then he comes to Scotland and we have this marvellous temple ... a real work of art so it is ... and all these buddhists like me running about the shop. Imagine going as a refugee somewhere, skint, and ending up with all the stuff he's done. You've got to take your hat off to some people!

It's a wee bit of a different trip this for me as I don't meditate all the time with the kiddo here. We had a chat in the new lounge in Johnstone House for two hours last night before going to bed. That was nice. She lives a frugal life being a skint student. I'm so glad she didn't turn out anything like me!

Now I'm filled up with reviving instant coffee, it's off to the temple for me till lunchtime.

Ra Samye Ling!

2007-02-15T15:29:00.000Z

Thursday 3:30 p.m.
This is RaBlissBlog coming to you from Bliss Central, the wonderful Samye Ling here in the borders of bonnie Scotland!

The kiddo came down with me. I'm so pleased. She doesn't meditate, of course, but has a sketch pad, so she can sketch stuff when it's not raining on her, or freezing her butt off!

The first time I came to the Samye Ling was the first of May, 1988. This was the first day I had control of the kiddo after the Domestic Bliss went back to work. You could say in some way this marked the end of my life as a prospective filthy rich writer and began my life as a meditator. So what good fortune that was!

I just want the kiddo to have an interesting time here.

The journey was great! I walked up to Princes Street and from where I live, most of that is uphill. But there's not many buses at half six and walking up to Waverley Station was okay. The train takes an hour to get to Lockerbie. Closed eyes and a straight hour in ra bliss.

I went into the back temple at quarter to eleven. Someone was already sitting there. After an hour and three quarters, I'd changed my position once, but she hadn't budged. She was still sitting there when I got up to go for my lunch. How folk manage to sleep in lotus positions is beyond even my imaginings. I think the longest I've sat without moving is two hours.

I don't spend enough time at the Samye Ling, but I'm here now and I've got the kiddo with me! Yippeee!!!

Ra Emperor Penguins and Moi!

2007-02-10T13:49:00.000Z

Saturday 1:55 p.m.
We're not doing individualism here. This is an anarcho buddhist collectivist bloggy. We don't want to feel separate, alienated, and would like generally to put some distance between us and ..... grief, sorrow, lamentations .... suffering in this life!

I have the same moon as the rest of the human beings. I do not have the same moon as a bat. I share my kind of consciousness with the rest of the human beings. The moon is in my mind, mainly, but when I die, it'll still be there in much the same way for the rest of the human beings.

The main difference between me and the rest of the human beings lies in what we are thinking about, in the kind of thought which is arising. If you take away the thoughts, I share with the other human beings a certain thoughtless awareness. There is a kind of consciousness or awareness there in which the thoughts seem to arise.

It is possible to see this kind of human awareness/consciousness thing as being shared .... I mean, actually see and witness this sharing .... because this kind of thing happened to me once at a party. You'd lost an individual sense of sense and joined in the self everyone else seemed to be sharing. The joes and josephines there were having their different individual thoughts, but they seemed to be joined and sharing some kind of basis.

This was a very temporary and minor example of non-self and emptiness.

I know it might be difficult for your usual flatheid to imagine what it might be like to have a wakeful state with no thoughts in it since flatheids generally live in a state of almost constant thoughts arising, most of which are misapprehended, idiotic and, fortunately, almost immediately forgotten.

Meditation is initially about mental calming that seeks to spread out the time, or enhance the gap, between thoughts.

Once about three years ago, around this time of the year, I was sitting on the island in front of the stupa at the Samye Ling. The weather was overcast and cold, and really quite thoroughly miserable. But it wasn't wet, so it was okay to sit there. With your eyes open, what a horrible prospect! So you just close your eyes and you're in ra bliss. There's light and ra bliss. Though you are sitting in the midst of the not very nice weather, you are feeling extremely pleasant. When thoughts arise, you let them go, cut them off, or transform them. You don't want the thoughts really. Bugger the thoughts!

If you were to be joined by your usual flatheid, discontent would arise almost immediately. What are we doing here, Hotboy? It's horrible here! Why don't we go and look for some sweeties somewhere?

Fortunately, I was joined not by a flatheid, but by an emperor penguin. The emperor penguin said, Hotboy, you're just like me. Come with me to the Antartic and, boy, will I show you a time!

It seems to flatheids like a cold, living hell. There is no sunshine and it never rises about zero for months and months. Sometimes you can see the stars in the sky when you're huddled with all these other emperor penguins, but quite often there's nothing to see except white-outs and darkness. So most of the time your eyes are closed.

Do you have a pineal gland? Yes. you do! So when it gets dark the way it's going to stay dark for months, your pineal gland will maybe put your body into almost hibernating condition. You are maybe not hiberating, but you're not really awake either. You're maybe in a between kind of state.

In the time between being awake and being asleep in the human beings, this is a time very similar to meditation, according to how your brain waves or whatever are manifesting. You also get a glimpse in this passage period of clear light mind, which is landing on the money as far as this juju is concerned.

I hope the emperor penguins are in some kind of meditative state. They don't move much. Organisms that don't move much seem to be fairly satisfied and content. They don't seem to need much, or they'd be moving. Emperor penguins don't seem to have much language and they probably don't have many thoughts at all during this wonderful time in their lives. Maybe the odd image of a fish floats by!

Not wishing to be separate but in some kind of union, maybe you should start with some kind of unity with the flatheids, and then move onto the emperor penguins. Then maybe try to include cats. Do cats meditate? In that dozy bit between being awake and asleep, maybe a cat and I aren't all that different there in terms of our minds and even feelings.

If you don't have thought arising, but just awareness, what can be the difference?

The flat is going to be empty except for moi all today, all tonight and all tomorrow. I'll try to be good, but I may not succeed!

Ra Birthday Boy!

2007-02-08T11:29:00.000Z

Thursday 11:28 a.m.
It's my birthday today! I feel quite irrationally pleased about that. Also, it is also the birthday of RaBlissBlog! Since it is my birthday, I may celebrate tonight with a few bottles of beer! How unusual! Until then .... thanks to everyone who's landed on the bloggy and especially thanks to anyone who's read anything off the web page I set up.

The meditations started this morning about half five. After fifteen billion and fifty six years, I can now put my hand on my heart and say that I can do ra bliss and I can do ra heat! Because of this, what's left of my life is going to be just bloody wonderful! What a fortunate creature I am!

I'm just away to see my auld maw, without whom none of this would have been possible!

7:30 p.m.
Been to the pub with the kiddo. How fortunate! Asked the boy in Peckmans for the packet that says SMOKING KILLS. Second packet in five years! It's the carefree mixtures of my youth for me tonight! I shall take the kiddo to the Samye Ling next week. I feel so happy and so fortunate because one of these days I will know how to think. And what to think about! Everybody should meditate. Everybody should have access to ra bliss. But it they don't, I don't mind just doing it myself! So I'd like to finish now by singing yous all a little song ... no, I have to go and get my tea!

Ra Wonderful day!

2007-02-07T15:04:00.000Z

Wednesday 3:05 p.m.
After the meditation I've just had, I know that my life has not been entirely wasted. Yea, though I have walked around with my head stuck up my backside for most of it, and, yea, I have been a bad boy time without number, today ra bliss was so fantastically extraordinary that I must have done something right! Ra bliss has jumped the gate, raced across the paddock, and disappeared to frolick among the deities in the middle distance. So let's sing the praises of ra bliss! Oh, ra bliss, ra bliss, ra bliss!

Heard about two people, both far younger than moi, succumbing to the black spot today, Jack. And it was a great shame and one of the endings not very nice at all. But what is worse, Jack, is that they were flatheided at the beginning, flatheided in the middle and flatheided right through the gruesomeness at the departure gate. We're not going to be like that, are we now, Jack? Well, not moi anyway, Jack. But the too dumb to meditate, flatheids like you, Jack, are just never going to get ra bliss!

What a beautiful day it is outside! You can keep your rat towns in the Mediterrannean today alright. With the crystal clear and the coldness, it is a perfect day today in chilly Jockoland! But it will not be chilly for me since I sit here writing in the full Beer Monster Reduction Vehicle, minus the bin liner. This is the day to take to the roads and do the six miler. It's probably been a year since I did that run.

I'm going out and I may be some time. If I fall down dead in Ravelston Dykes, I don't want anyone to think there was anything sad about my life. If I die today, my life will have come to an end after a period of great wonderment. At my funeral, I would like all the flatheids to be handed revolvers and invited to blow their brains out on the spot. Because they do not know anything about being a human being, or the glories to be had and enjoyed in this life. Oh, ra bliss, ra bliss, ra bliss!

7:00 p.m.
Speaking to the person who does all the work at my job today, I thought maybe the two sweatshirts, tee-shirt, and two layers of wool might be enough to run in, without the bin liner. We don't want to seem odd, now do we, Jack? Anyway, I weighed in before the run at 12 stone four and finished it bang on twelve stone. Four pounds of sweat is, I think, about three plus pints.

Most enjoyable run. Just under fifty minutes for a fat boy! The area around about the junction of Craigcrook Road and Ravelston Dykes Road has a wonderful atmosphere about it sometimes. It really has. I have no idea why. The fairies must dance there in the moonlight.

10:25 p.m.
The living room was empty till quite recently. So I've been doing a lot of juju this evening. In front of me on the carpet lay two A4 diary notebooks with the Kalachakra Mandala stickers on them. Further on, there was a big calendar photie of the Karmapa. It's the real Karmapa. Some of the photies of him as a kid are photies of a very striking kid. Then I had one of him as teenager and you could just tell. Some cats got it, an' some cats aint!

Do you ever feel lonely being the only member of the Amazing Bloggy Church of the Bad Boy Blissheid, Hotboy? No, Jack. I'd like to get a lot lonelier for a bit. I think it's time to get the rowing boat out and head for the Unheard of Islands!

Rat Pineal Gland!

2007-02-06T22:25:00.000Z

Tuesday 10:25 p.m.
I've only had five evenings with the beer since a month ago. Considering the last eighteen months, practically teetotal! So I got on the scales this morning .... twelve and a half stone again! What? You can't put on a half stone in a week! Shurely shum mishtake! Anyway, no beer tonight for Hotboy regardless. What fortitude!

Spent some enjoyable time just there with the pineal gland. It's right in the middle of your head. There's supposed to be chakras located near between your eyebrows and at the crown of your head, I think ..... but in the juju I'm doing you have a symbol to concentrate on right in the middle of your head. I think that's the location of your pineal gland, which it seems you're stimulating doing kundalini yoga, etc. It did strike me as odd that the Tibetans put the symbol there and not where the chakras might be conventionally placed. Is this a coincidence, Jack?

The pineal gland might be associated with something called DMT, which is a naturally occuring hallucigenic. Maybe this has something to do with the light, etc. Maybe you could forgo all this sitting around on cushions (becoming a fat basturn!) by eating the pineal glands of the dearly departed. You might have to go someplace like Liberia or Sierra Leone for that. I wonder if monkeys have pineal glands. Will there be a vegetarian option?

Ra bliss has been just outstanding today. Surf's up! Surf's up!