The Last Samye Ling Post

Friday 9:18 p.m.
I started this new blog when I got back from the Samye Ling about a month ago partly because I thought there had been enough progress with the meditations to warrant a new beginning. Well, this weekend marks the end of my six week summer holiday and I thought I should maybe give a resume of how things are going with the old juju.

There's a bit in the lineage prayer they say here at the start of meditation sessions which goes on about asking to be able to meditate without support. I assume that means without anything particular to fix your concentration on. This, I assume, corresponds to what Tilopa was going on about in the poem quoted a few posts ago. I've been doing this a bit here. Well, if you're meditating for about eight hours a day, there's time to try whatever you like! Anyway, that's been a wee bit of a revelation. You close your eyes and the bliss comes on and you just leave it there. What I'm geting is not really what you're aiming at since there is still the subject/object dichotomy. It's a mind on mind meditation. But I have enjoyed this a great deal. You've got to have a calm enough mind to get into it since you're just going to get wrapped up in the stupid thoughts otherwise.

A few weeks ago, I had a look at the Blazing and Dripping section of the Bliss of Inner Fire, the book that got me into this stuff to start with. I haven't really got near that yet. You have to have the symbols pretty sharp for this kind of a thing, but I have been moving the attention up from symbol to symbol after the exhalation part of the vase breath. These days the effect when you get to the chakra in the middle of the brain has been very impressive. Great bliss and fantastic expansion.

I've been trying another interesting visualisation. I can't remember where I got this one from, but it might have been reading Alexandra David-Neel the last time I was here. You start by just resting in the bliss and leave it there for a bit. Just leave it. You have some kind of boundary lines where the outline of your head seems to be, except a bit expanded. Then you fill the temple. Then you fill the valley the temple is in, and you try to see the valley. See towards Lockerbie and the rest of Scotland. Go out to the blue planet, the see the solar system, the milky way, the 15 billion galaxies, the universe and then go back in, step by step again. I think Alexandra David-Neel says you should do this with the heat, but I'm not getting enough heat yet.

This place is too noisy! Kids!

Everything in the meditation line has been progressing well recently. No doubt if my discipline wasn't so lousy, it would progress faster, but I'm not going to beat myself up over that. You could always do better.

I'm not going to aggravate myself about the Unfortuante OneS, the UFOs. People who meditate are few and far between. I thought if I told folk about the bliss when I started getting loads of it, they'd meditate, but that's not the way it works. I know folk who take the happy pills, which end up making your brain look like a walnut, and they won't meditate because .... I won't say it! Anyway, they don't and they won't. They are just not as fortunate as me, obviously.

I doubt if I'll give up my bad habits any time soon. What I've got to do is get more retreats in. I'm fortunate in the friends I have even if they are too dumb to meditate.

I expect to feel pretty exhausted by the time I get home tomorrow. Tired but happy, he returned home. Allah Akbar!