Saturday 28 February 2009

Unerudite!

Sunday 00:53 a.m.
The Dom Bliss gave me this book called Charkas, Energy Centres of Tranformation by Harish Johari, on the occasion of my fifteith birthday. It is a great book and you should read it.

I can't be bothered. This is not to say that it is better to be ignorant when you can read a book such as this. It is better, obviously, to know or not to know what this joe has got to say about the this and that. Knowledge is bound to be good. Ignorance is more profound.

I want to do the ignorance, Jack. I don't want the words, I don't want the concepts. I want to do this and see if that happens.

I can do the knowledge if there's a lot of people around me. Well, flatheids! This is something we can learn to do. Learn stuff, regurgitate stuff. But if you can get rid of the flatheids, you can just sit and sit and sit. This is the bliss! This is where the non-self is. I don't want to learn anything anymore.There's fung all to learn. I want to be alone, Jack! I want to be alone!

Bliss Bandit!


Saturday 1:10 p.m.

I've seen things... you people wouldn't believe:

Attack ships on fire off the Shoulder of Orion.
I watched Sea-Beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser gate.

All those moments... will be lost... in time, like tears... in the rain.

Time... to die....

From the android in Bladerunner. Poisonous came out with something like this last night in Milnes Bar, about being on the Mekong delta and suchlike. He failed to mention that he couldn't remember a damn thing about it of course.

There was just one or two occasions when there might almost have been a bit of decent conversation, an all too brief interlude. Then it was back to Brian Wilson trying to yank his new false teeth out. The dentist must have superglued them onto the roof of his mouth. I've got a sore arm and a bruised knee now from Brian Wilson inadvertently tripping me up in George Street. In future I'm going to stick to drinking on my own. I had a wonderful time getting pissed and blogging on Thursday night! Nothing broken though and I can remember getting home, so probably another draw, eh, Jack?

Still, you've got to touch base. Then escape the wreckage.

' Delight in the dharma surpasses all other delights.' I remember this from listening to the Dhammapada with the auld maw yesterday. The first meditation of the day was great. I'm going to spend the rest of the afternoon in the lobby.

Friday 27 February 2009

The Next Morning!

Friday 9:14 a.m.
I drank eight bottles of German beer last night, which is double my usual maximum. But I don't feel bad at all. I have an IQ of about fifty now, but that's quite nice as well. Had to see what I'd written first thing whilst under the influence.

Fantastic training for the binge drinking this evening. I'm meeting Poisonous and Brian Wilson at eight and will have my clip-on shades and my mobile phone headphones on, emanating as Blind Billy Bob. I'm going to drink soft drinks and sit in a half lotus throughout, checking out the secretaries, whom I hope will be in abundance, whilst remaining silent and vase breathing like a good one. Thus I will demonstrate my newly acquired yogic powers by making some gorgeous creature come over and ask me where my guide dog's gone. With your clip on shades in place you can sit with your eyeballs rolled up and no one will know any different. Hurrah!

Thursday 26 February 2009

Cat McGough!

00:34 a.m.
Cat McGough's big sister was completely out of your range gorgeous. Like a different planet 0f gorgeousness. Like big and older than you were and way beyond your expectations.

I'm on the bus and going off on a pilgrimage to Lourdes and we're setting off from Viewpark outside the chapel at the top of Laburnum Road and everyone is happy. It's a sunny happy occasion. I think I want to send Cat McCough a postcard and I ask out of the bus window what is your address to the Cat's big sister. She is just completely huge and dead healthy and deep fung beautiful. Of course, women like that just take the piss when you're skinny and fifteen or sixteen. So as the bus is starting to go away, I ask her for her address and she smiles and smiles, and you know she's taking the piss, and she asks why do I want her address, and I say I want to send your wee sister a postcard.

Cat appeared at the YM when she was a bit younger than you'd expect. She had a pal. I knew her pal's brother. Her pal, whose name escapes me, was wonderfully wry and amusing. The Dorothy Parker of fifteen year old girls. Now that I think of it ... doesn't matter ... she was far too smart and clever for me. Cat was skinny and young and baldy. Well, her hair was swept across her brow. She didn't speak much. At the slow dances, she just stuck to you.

I had a chance to dance with Cat every week. And that was okay. An acknowledgement. We know who you are and where you come from.

So there's a lot of snogging on these dancefloors for prods on the last dances, but we're not going there. But it gets to be Christmas and the mistletoe comes out and someone puts the mistletoe over me and wee Cat. And, oh, how much I hugged her. And she wouldn't let me go. Tony is standing dancing with her pal, the Dorothy Parker, and the snogging is going on and on and on, and she wouldn't let me go. Fixed. Hung on you. A wee skelf of passion. I had to tell her, and it was a ten minute snog, that I couldn't go out with her because she was only fifteen and I was seventeen. It broke my heart too, Jack.

Me and Tony were going to organise a party and we asked these two tim gurls from the YM if they would come. There's a game called Stations. You play a single and you snog who you are with and do that till it stops and then the girls move round, to the next station.

I fell into that girl. I so loved her. I was lying on top of her on this living room carpet and I thought that maybe my arm had moved a bit round too far, but I couldn't move it back, and I was kind of groping her unintentionally, and nobody stopped, and she was just so sucking my teeth out of my head and being so attractive and attracting to me that when I go to heaven, I I hope she will be waiting for me there.

I went up the road with her to her house half way up Laburnum Road. We started snogging in the close. No one has ever loved me the way that girl loved me. I started kissing her and it was like whack! She came in and held. Sometime there was a noise from above and I tried to flee, and jumped over the back fence, and fell, and knocked over the bin and so on, and it was a completely wonderful evening.

You should have stuck with her, Hotboy! I didn't know how to do that, Jack!

This is for the Spango Out of Bellshill Yogini!

Thursday 10:15 p.m.
Some beers in.

The authoritarian Labour Party basturns ... and they made me !... say that they want to raise the school leaving age to eighteen. Where are our civil liberities now, eh? You have jail, the army, then school. These are places where you don't really get a choice. The school leaving age should be lowered to fifteen. I knew when I was going to become fifteen that some things had to change. When you became fifteen, you should go to the dancing.

How do you do that? I went to a single sex Catholic school, so I wanted to go to the dancing and had to find someone who knew how to do that. Among the fantastically talented football players I hung around with was Tony, who couldn't play football, but could run very fast. He was a pal of the Viewpark crowd I hung around with, but they didn't know how to go to the dancing. He had been to two dances in the Motherwell Town Hall, so he knew how to go to the dancing and I started going with him.

Me and Tony became a team. So we started going dancing together and he was my deepest dearest friend till from the time I went to the first dance with him till I was about twenty one. All the folk I knew when I was at that age were much nicer than the funged up, disturbed and bizarre progeny of the evil bourgeois I met at uni. The catholics of my youth were really nice folk.

Tony stayed with his parents and two other kids in Banyan Crescent off the Laburnum Road down Viewpark. His grandparents stayed in the house. They were wonderful, two old Lithuanian folk. His grandad had been in the salt mines during the First World War and his granny was a wonderful wee woman. We'd be going out to the dancing and she'd pull up his jumper to see if he was wearing a vest. I really thought she was great. She'd tell him to find a nice jewish girl. God knows what that meant. There weren't any jewish girls in Bellshill. I asked her once what Lithuania was like and she said it was flat and full of potato fields.

The Bellshill YMCA was built in the space when the picture house there got knocked down. It was across from the George picture house where I went on my first proper date. The YMCA is a kind of protestant freewheeling place. There are no priests or anything like that there. But is it not a den of iniquity like the Stute, the Miners Institute where they had a bar and you could drink there, I think. The YM was really for the under eighteens.

This is like the flesh. The vast majority of gurls who went there were from the mixed prod schoools, with some wonderful exceptions. There was a toughness about most of them which you didn't find in the lassies who went to the catholic senior secondary in Bothwell.

There was a part in all these dances where they sailed passed you in very short skirts, or psychedelic smocks with big legs, and this was about 1966/7 when hemlines were a bit neater than previously.

With Tony, I found how to negotiate going to a dance. I met Claudia Cardinali, the most beautiful fifteen year old girl at the bus stop as I took Tony there to catch his bus to Viewpark. But maybe that's for later.

A lot of my school chums didn't make the step into going dancing when they were fifteen because some of the places had a bit of a reputation for violence. Would you be safe?

The only folk going to the Bellshill YM on Saturday nights from our school were me and Tony. There were fights every week. Everyone was sober as well. The bouncers frisked you before you went in, checking for blades. Sometimes gurls took blades in in their handbags. They might have been called steel combs, sharpened ones. Anyway, you got searched every time you went into the Bellshill YM and I loved that. Getting searched makes you feel like someone. You have arrived. You are going to the dangerous dancing.

Getting 'lumbered' and getting 'claimed' were two expressions to know about. Getting a lumber meant you had picked up a girl, probably to walk home. Getting 'claimed' meant someone had come up to you and said: 'You're claimed, pal.' That probably meant you had to fight someone when you got outside the dance hall.

No one ever did this to me and my pal Tony. We were just lucky, I suppose. And he was from Viewpark and I was a joe from Bellshill who played football so I knew a lot of the joes from Viewpark. But maybe we just didn't fit in and nobody cared about us or who we were.

The dance hall is a gym really. They've got a stage. There is a single row of seats around the gym hall kind of space. When the fights kicked off, and they did every week, you moved back and jumped up on the seats so you could get a better look at the fights.

At the time in Glasgow, before the drugs, before the smack, there was a lot of gang trouble, but it didn't really happen in Bellshill so much. But once or twice things did erupt.

Once with all the claiming that went on, the traffic got stopped outside the YM . There's traffic banked up either way with folk bleeding and nutting each other. Wonderful to see and walk passed and to be uninvolved.

Bands you'd heard of played there. Tamla Motown. One Saturday night the Marmalade played there. The girls couldn't keep from attacking the stage. Ob La Dee Ob La Da. All the bouncers had to man the stage and thrown the orgasmic hysterical teenage girls back into the crowd, what a tough job for a dirty old man! This meant there were no bouncers out in the hall. This so-called Bellshill team, who miraculously ignored me and Tony, went round the hall and beat up all the interlopers, all the joes who were not from Bellshill. Bits of hair and splodges of blood and scalp skin adorned the floor.

But did you get a chance to fall in love there a find true romance in the place, Hotboy?

There was a cross at Bellshill then. To get Tony to his bus to Viewpark maybe you had to walk that way and wait for the bus. As I was walking towards the bus, I saw this wonderful, wonderful looking girl. We were fifteen, so she would have been fourteen and a bit not filled out. But she was gorgeous. I was walking towards this bus stop and looking at this wonderful vision and thinking who can you be, you wonderful, wonderful creation. As we got to the bus stop, Tony starts to speak to her. She was called Della Ward. She was the wee sister of a guy who was in the same year as us, a product of an Italian mother and a Lithuanian dad. I just loved her, love at first sight. Of course, I couldn't speak to her. I was unable to show her my final Hotboy self. I was just completely lost in how beautiful she looked. And she really did look beautiful.

In another culture, the marriage could have been arranged. They might have said to her parents that the boy is shy, but he has brains and he will get off the floor at some point and be able to love and look after your daughter like there's no potato fields or poverty or anything anymore.

I saw her sometimes from then on until I was about twenty one odds. Eventually, I would hardly say hullo to her. Maybe sometime in another lifetime I give you all my money and all my clothes and all my thoughts, and my body, speech and mind, but I wasn't ready for such a gorgeous, waste your mind, bite the pillow emanation this time. Anyway, her maw was gorgeous as well and a happy josephine. Her daughter will have been happy as well.

Why didn't you get someone like that, Hotboy? You give them your arm and leg, Jack, but they'll still make your cry.

Lent has been deferred!


Thursday 8:31 p.m.
When I told Jack the Spam Robot that I might be donning the Viking Helmet with Brian Wilson tomorrow night, he stole the rowing boat, took the mobile phone and emailed this photie from the West Indies. Why would he send me a photie of an eggplant plantation? He's probably gone schizophrenical.

On the way to the sackcloth and ashes this evening, I was struck by a blinding light, a revelation. And God, for it was he, said: Hotboy, do not ever again put any nicotine into your lungs. If you do that again, I will surely make you suffer, and die a grim lingering death that takes ages and is very stupid. You've been getting away with murder, dancing the dance of death with the Nicotine Dragon over this last wee while. This is your task. Just stop it! Stop that and I will let you drink beer after beer. Hurrah! So I bought five (not four!) bottles of beer from Peckhams.


So I emailed Jack back and told him that he should go to Pakistan and get me some resin, which this time I will not smoke but eat up like a good boy. This is why I have lived so long. Eating bob hope. Eating bob hope can keep you off the piss ... first bottle down ... make the telly bearable ... and give you a wonderful night's sleep.

It's very important to find your tao. I don't know quite what that means, but it is very important.

I would like to be of benefit. To be an example of a right way Joe. To give everything up, and one day I hope to, I'd need to get away from the flatheids. Whilst amongst the flatheids, I fear my tao is to show that you can get the bliss and not be a saintly kind of person. I am afraid that might not ever be me.

I got here .... this evening before I sallied forth to the off-license ... I knew I was in the heat zone where the non duality will arise ... by behaving like what?

By behaving like moi! And after being a pissheid, potheid, and lecherous basturn all your days, Hotboy, what are you going to get? Well, Jack, if I live long enough, I'm going to get it all. Or, if it is a long, long process, a fung of a lot of it. More than you can imagine right now, that's for sure.

Two beers down!

Why is this, Hotboy? I have no idea, Jack, but being surrounded by the too dumb to meditate sometimes does my head in. I don't think you have to do anything else but sit down and meditate. You've got to play the mind game. The mind game is obviously the only game in town. They are descended from monkeys, Hotboy. Maybe some of them aren't descended enough maybe. This and grace are the only explanations. Thank God we don't believe in explanations because if they really are too dumb to meditate and some of them are still monkeys I think I'd like to go back to my own planet now.

It's all about you, isn't it, Hotboy? Moi, moi, moi!

There are probably one or two nice people come to this bloggy. It gets hit about forty times a day, so some nice people must come here occasionally. It's no fung use being nice. Ponies are nice. Bunny rabbits are nice. It's nice to be nice, but you're not going to get to be half way towards being a human being unless you start sitting quietly and maybe mutter some mumbo jumbo to yourself.

I've invited Poisonous to the drink fest with Brian Wilson tomorrow night. Of course, I've started a bit earlier so I can be stopped by the time this comes round tomorrow. Only able to point to the clip-on shades and the earphones and have a few pints and say I'm not the man I used to be.

Don't read any more of this. It is not for you. It is a vehicle for a drunk person, so with three beers down, I must go out and buy two more. That would make seven beers in one night. Fung anarchy for the U.K.! Then I may lie down on the carpet with my mobile phone headphones attached and ask the dakinis to do their worst.

Wednesday 25 February 2009

Lent


Wednesday 10:40 p.m.
I'm going to try and take a weekly photie with the mobile phone from the same spot on the allotment. I couldn't meditate outside today because it was so windy and wet, but it had turned out quite nice when I came out of the hut. The photie was taken about 4:30 p.m., much the same time as the snowy one. Seasons turn and shadows move.

Since it's Lent I might as well give everything up. I phoned the pizzaman yesterday, but there's still no soapbar. This must be the worst drought since around 1994 or thereabouts.

Aren't mobile phones wonderful! They've got earphones for the radio. I thought I might have to take my noise blockers to the pub sometime this weekend since Brian Wilson wants to go out for a drink. I can do the bliss to the classical music station and it'll block out all the nonsense about the creekit and the Beach Boys.


I haven't seen Poisonous for a while. I might invite him to come along since I don't expect to be saying much what with the classical music and the eyeballs rolled up. I can disappear then once Brian Wilson has had a few pints of yon petrol based Danish lager poison shite, as soon as he starts on about the creekit anyway. I must try and remember which bar we go to. I'll probably have to go back the next day and ask the bar staff if anyone had handed in a set of false teeth. Yes, I'll leave right after he does that trick where you put your bottom lip over your nose. I don't think Poisonous has seen that one yet.

No work tomorrow! I can meditate all day! Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah!

Tuesday 24 February 2009

After the dust settled!

Tuesday 3:03 p.m.
Now that I've had time to reflect on it, the meditations have become totally stunning since my two nights at the wonderful Samye Ling last week. They've gone through the roof again. Amazing what listening to a bit of gong bashing will do for you! I get more time to myself this week as well with our friend not being in respite care now. Yahoo! What a time I'm going to have with my life from here on in!! What a fortunate, fortunate creature I am! What a fortunate creature I am!

Monday 23 February 2009

Monday Evening!

Monday 10:59 p.m.
I could feel my addictions switch today. I smoked the last of the dope last night. Tonight, I wondered if I wanted nicotine. Nope. I got home and instead of reading the Times and falling asleep, I trained, showered and meditated. Afterwards I felt a bit tired. There was something waiting for me. I think it's called normality. It's not bad and it's not good. It's waiting for the evening to pass. Without any nicotine, dope, drink or anything. Normality is so bland.

So I ended up buying four cans of wifebeater because none of the shops around here had any Erdinger. Because I can't stand the bland.

The bland is like family life except when it's stopped being interesting, like when they've all moved away.

I think you may need a very strong sense of self, a real affirmation, to want to lose it. If you have a weak sense of self due to being brought up among the evil bourgeois, with all the marching up and down, the clean shoes, and the anal repression, I don't see how you can possibly be equipped to destroy the (false) sense of self ... because that's the only thing you've got and all you have and all you can hold onto in this life.

So I'm sorry about all the bad things I've said in this bloggy about the progeny of the evil bourgeois, and how it would be better if they just topped themselves ... and all that stuff about the too dumb to meditate ... because it's not really your fault that you've now made the choices about not meditating and all that. But it is!


Bland is good for you. Doing the bliss maybe requires stepping out from yourself and after all that evil calvinist toilet training I can see that it was wrong for me to pick on yous like that. So I am sorry. Please accept my apologies. I know why you don't meditate now. It's not because you are stupid although not meditating means you become stupider as you get older. It's that once you get locked in with the petit b0urgeois, well, once you're in there, there's nothing anyone can do for you!

What do you think, Jack? Fung them, Hotboy. Go and write a book. Stop wasting you time on the bloggy. Blogging is another addiction. I must give it up!

Monday morning blues!

Monday 10:21 a.m.
If you work half time, but your week starts at half eight on Monday morning, that's pretty brutal for anyone. Like a lot of folk, Monday morning is the nadir for me. On Monday morning I wish I'd done something sensible with my working life. On Monday morning I wish I had a book publishing event somewhere on the horizon, so I had some hope of getting out of gainful employment, or at least not finding it so all there was. On Monday morning I think I'd better start working on Cold Killing (which I haven't been working on at all!) so that I don't feel that I have to work here till I'm sixty five or dead. God alone knows what Monday morning would be like sometimes if you didn't have the bliss. On Monday morning you tend to think things like at least I can do the bliss. I know I am a fortunate creature, but on Monday mornings sometimes it doesn't feel like that. I want to go to hospital, please! I want to go to hospital!

Sunday 22 February 2009

Springtime will come!


Sunday 5:50 p.m.
Photies taken in Inverleith Park today. The crocuses beat the daffodils hand down.



When the springtime will come
Oh, won't we have fun
We'll get out of jail
And we'll go on the bum!

Saturday 21 February 2009

The Nun!


Saturday 9:55 p.m.
I think everyone who lives on bread and soup and bananas and marmite and cheese, and no more magic vegetables, should go for their lunch to the Samye Ling. You just go for your lunch. I think it cost a fiver. There is also puddings. Nobody stops you eating. Nobody stops you meditating either. Nobody ever says that looks a bit weird.

Apart from Jesus Christ, all the folk on the bit of the wall in here I meditate in front of are Tibetans. Kalu Rinpoche, Dr Akong, 16th and 17th Karmapa, Dalai Lama and the lama at eyelevel. With my mobile phone in hand, today I asked Teresa if I could take her photie. I send her a letter most times before I go there to tell her about the bliss. I always ask her not to reply. So I took her photie and I'll try to get her on the wall. She's Scottish, I think. She's a woman. I think she spoke to me once when she wasn't there, but that was probably just me. With today, I reckon I might have spoken to her for two minutes tops. Doesn't matter. She's my guru as well. Apart from that, I didn't say much to anyone.
Saturday 9:09 p.m.
Happenstance. The Gatekeeper to Nirvana tells me the timetable is skewed because of the week of gong bashing to clear away obstacles and whatnot being performed by the sangha. I'm not sure what that means.

I get into the temple about two and the lama is there. Also, his apprentice, I imagine his heir apparent, is sitting to his right, and to his right is the Venerable Big Indian, then two other Tibetans who aren't always there, and then Teresa. This is quite an array of spiritual muscle. They're in order of ascendance. Across from them are nuns and such, but I can't see them from where I am.

They are chanting and making the ambience while I sit with my eyes closed and try to do my thing. This is wonderful and unexpected. This goes on till six, with a break of about twenty minutes. It starts the next morning at eight and goes on till six. After the soup, I go back for the Chenrezig prayers and stay till closing time, which is ten. You get two hours alone in the temple with the vase breathing and whatnot.

I've really no idea what they're doing.

They're clearing away obstacles. There's only three or four folk looking on, or in my case, doing the bliss. I'm getting blown away. Getting blown away for hours and hours at a time.

It's not like a river because it's not going anywhere. It's like a section of a river which is continually going upwards and it's bright and thick and warm in an odd kind of way, and distending. Sometimes you're trying to put visualisations into this and sometimes they're far better than they used to be, but then in the midst of the chanting they start giving it laldy with the giant horns and cymbals and gongs and drums, and that's the state you want to be in to appreciate that ritual music. It rips right through you. Everything is continually fantastically blissful. Of course, you get tired as well.

Obstacles No No!


Saturday 8:15 p.m.
I was thinking about a problem the sensei might have with his book getting made into a Hollywood blockbuster, and this was that there might have to be a part that flashes back to child sex abuse scenes. This puts it in the wrong certificate rating for the megabucks, so I thought he could allow it to be a flashback to an extended scene where Angelica Jolie (for she is the heroine of the movie!) is having lots and lots of sex with this old drunken Scotsman person who has inveigled her into this by standing on his head whilst pissed. This targets the older demographic dirty old men who usually never go to movies.

Then I wakened up after having this extended dream where I was basically Angelica Jolie talking to Brad Pitt in their living room while having a drink but not fooling around. It was a long, long talk about Jennifer Aniston and commitment and all that. Brad didn't say much. I don't think Brad and Angelica are going to be married for much longer.

I'm sorry, Angelica, but I'm not on the market at the moment. So what happens is that Angelica Jolie has an alert system like a cuttings manager for her public relations profile and they occasionally check out the blogosphere for mentions of Angelica Jolie's name. In fact, the more Angelica Jolie's name comes up, the more chance they've got of finding this.

Angelica Jolie is a very handsome woman and a brilliant actress and enormously talented and filthy rich. She is also an artist and understands the struggling artist bit. So when her public relations people bring this bloggy to her attention, she thinks that maybe she should give me about £10,000 a year for a fifty fifty split on the books and some private meditation consultations. Also, just kind of praying for her constantly whilst in the hut.

How's she going to know who you are, Hotboy? Well, Jack, she'll phone up Richard Branson and he owns Virgin Mobile and she'll ask him for my number. Is it that easy to find out who you are, Hotboy? Though I don't know who I am .... the phone will ring. It's not switched on. That's an obstacle I hadn't counted on.

Going Home!

Saturday 11:08 a.m.
Just finished the most fantastic meditation there. Heat, bliss, light, gong bashing and them big horns. What more could a body ask for? This Makhala stuff is supposed to clear away obstacles. Well, it was working for me!

I was thinking about the sensei and reverend today. He's got an agent for his book, Dust for short, at last. Surely, it'll be published now and, hopefully, made into a movie, and he'll be filthy rich. Couldn't happen to a nicer bloke! Have to go now as the money is running out! May all sentient beings be happy!

Friday 20 February 2009

Samye Ling Friday Lunchtime

Two things which are going to be tricky for a rational sceptic like moi are the ideas of grace and the role of the lama in the juju. This is from Kalu Rinpoche.

"Grace is a sublte notion and is hard to understand. It is comparable to electric power, invisible and very powerful. In this comparison, the Buddha, the source of grace, is like an electrical power plant and the lineage that transmits the grace is the wire. As long as the wire is not cut, the bulb can be connected to it at any place, and the bulb is lit."

"Even in the hot season, the sun cannot make a piece of paper on the ground catch fire... The Vajrayana consists of inserting the magnifying glass of the lama between the Buddhas and bodhisattvas and the mind of the disciples."

In the middle of the 19th century, if you'd told someone that in a hundred years the air would be full of radio stations and all you'd need to hear music anywhere was a wee box with the right connections, folk would think you were off your rocker!

I'm not interested in the truth of anything. I want to know what works, or if I can get this juju to work. If you can get it to work, who cares why it works?

Why are we here, Jack?
Are we here, Hotboy?
Good point, Jack! I think I'm here. Don't know about you.

The Samye Ling Friday morning!

Friday 10:19 a.m.
They're doing Makhala prayers all week here. Hurrah! That means the high heid yins are sitting in the temple giving it laldy while you sit there with the gong bashing and prayers washing over you whilst you do the juju. I couldn't have timed my visit here any better if I'd bothered to time it at all!

Read in some footnotes of Kalu Rinpoche book that thye completion stage of this juju is dissolving the visualisation into emptiness. I thought it was blasting heat up your whatsits and then going off in the space ship to another planet far far away, so what do I know? Very little. Just don't use this stuff in my bloggy as if I knew what I was talking about.

The one joke I know is appropriate to my relationship with the lama. I won't be speaking to him this trip I don't think.

There's a monk sitting beside him now who bears a strong family resemblance except he's a foot taller. I guess he'll be the abbot here one day.

I know this joke because I spent three days in a tent trying to meditate on the Holy Isle about 13 years ago. I had a copy of the Observer with me and read it through and through. This joke was in it.

This joe is driving past an indian reservation and see a sign: Memory Man! Answer any memory questions for five dollars! So the joe goes into the tepee with the memory man sitting there. How, says the memory man. How, says the joe. Then he can't think of anything to ask. Finally, he says: What did you have for your breakfast yesterday? Eggs, said the memory man. That'll be five dollars please.

The joe is very pissed off by this and goes away. A couple of years later, he's going past the reservation again and sees the sign, and thinks he'll get his own back this time. He goes into the tepee and says: How. Scrambled, says the memory man.

I really haven't got anything to say to the lama. Hello covers everything.

Wednesday 18 February 2009

Bye Bye!

Thursday 00:35 a.m.
I'd like to say bye bye to the Nicotine Dragon. You have taught me more than anything else about the frame for thoughts to be formed in. But bye bye! I'd like to say bye bye to the Beer Monster. Oh, how we have laughed and played. Oh, how much I love you! But bye bye! And I'd like to say bye bye to the Australian Ladies Volleyball Squad. What a time we've had with the squealing and yelling and bouncing up and down! But bye bye! Here comes the bliss! Here comes the bliss!

The Lama and moi!

Wednesday 9:02 p.m.
I just knew I'd start to lose weight once the ingredients for the magic soup ran out and, lo, it has come to pass. So I'm just starting on four bottles of Erdinger, purely as a means of stalling any drastic diminutions.

I thought you weren't going to drink beer at home anymore, Hotboy? This is true, Jack, but there's always a middle way!

I got an email from Froggy McDuck telling me the longest he'd managed to meditate was 12 minutes. This reminded me of what it was like to start trying to meditate and it is not easy. Also, there doesn't seem to be a reason for doing it.

Having a mind and using it and never training it is a fung disgrace, Jack. Or, at least, a terrible shame.

The first time I had an interview with the lama was about 1997, nine years after I'd had a brief meeting with his big brother. The lama was radiant that day. I thought it might be because he'd not long been on a 49 day in the dark retreat, but he was radiant anyway.


I had several questions to ask him. What is the bright light? What is it that's trying to pull you up? I remember getting hold of my shoulder and pulling it up. What is that? I had three questions written down and I don't think he answered any of them. He told me I needed a guru.

Wasted the next six years thinking there was no point until I stopped smoking tobacco in the joints. (I think I'll just spark the first one now, Jack). I should have jumped into his arms!!!

After the six year hiatus, I think I might have had interviews with him about four or five times, the last time being when I had the mega inner heat experience, shortly after the 6th April, 2003. I haven't spoken to him since. I asked him what the etiquette was in seeing him and he told me to ask to see him when I had a problem. I haven't had a problem. My problems are due to lack of giving things up, lack of purification. I wrote to Teresa once that my job was to get my mind into some kind of state so that he could help me, and I still think that.

I don't often feel at a disadvantage when I'm talking to folk, Jack. I've been fortunate to speak to folk who are more talented, smarter, etc., but I've only felt like a complete idiot speaking to that man. Imagine you want to dance and you're speaking to Fred Astaire! You want to learn how to box? Here's Marvelous Marvin! You're not only not in the same league, you don't even know what the leagues are like!

I've told myself I don't have to speak to him. To do this juju, you're supposed to regard your guru as a buddha. You don't have to speak to a buddha. Also, all I could say really is that I haven't done the prostrations and I haven't done the recitations of the 100 syllable mantra, and I haven't given up anything bad so far.

You have committed fornication. Ah, but that was in another country and, besides, the wench is dead. Beer kicking in! Anybody know who wrote that?

I nod at him, a wee bow, whenever I see him. He nodded at me at the drupcho last year. He nodded at me! I thought he knows who I am! Hurrah!

Maybe I've got a problem coming up. Maybe I haven't done this juju in the right order and something bad will come from this. So, maybe Teresa this time asks me if I want to speak to the lama and I say yes. What will I ask him this time, Jack?

I'd like to ask him to swop minds. My mind is full of moi, and all kinds of other stuff that you don't really want to know about. In a puff of breath, I've got his mind instead of mine. I've no idea what it would be like having a mind like that. I've done enough meditating to realise that much.

So what should I say? I'm sorry for being an asshole is a given. I don't think I should ask him anything personal somehow. Or flippant. I shouldn't ask him if maybe his big brother had seen anyone flying about. I shouldn't ask him if he's ever witnessed miraculous events. I suspect he might have, but that's a frivolous question. We're living in a miraculous universe. In a way, we've all seen miraculous events. All the time.

Fortunately, despite myself, I've had nothing but wonderfulness from doing this juju, so if I get to speak to him maybe it would be good if I could tell him a joke. I only know one joke. I'll tell you my joke if you leave a comment asking for it. Otherwise ... there's really nothing to say. Except that Froggy McDuck is doing the right thing. 12 minutes if you haven't done it much is quite a lot. He's got screaming wanes and a jobbie and whatnot. He just has to keep doing it.

I'm heading for the Samye Ling tomorrow! What a fortunate, fortunate creature I am, I am! What a fortunate creature I am!

Monday 16 February 2009

Bathtime Bliss!

Monday 9:46 p.m.
Been an excellent day today with the only downside being the odd jagged taut nerve internal screaming caused by the nicotine dragon's complaints. Can't believe I'm entertaining that basturn again! Tapering off so I can go down to the Samye Ling on Thursday morning on cloud nine.

The Domestic Bliss gave me two nights (in a room!!) for my birthday. Hurrah! Hurrah!

It's really good for me to be meditating with other folk like I do with the nun on Mondays. About six other people showed up. I'd been jogging this lunchtime, so I had a bath.

Regular readers of this bloggy (Hello, Jack!) will know that bathing is one of my favourite things in this life. Check out the bliss time. Superbo! Now, Jack, was it really better than before? I've fallen into the bliss that blows your arms and legs off in that bath, but this time the bliss was richer, thicker. I wasn't so much sinking into the bath and the bliss; more like the bliss coming up and over you. In your face bliss. Oh, ra bliss, ra bliss, ra bliss!

Vase Breathing Meditations and Bliss!

Monday
I'm in an empty room, but I can move my hands and legs and talk, etc. I doubt if I could handle MS as well as our friend - and she is a shining example of grace under pressure if ever there was one - but I might go into such a decline at least with more tricks up my sleeve.

The mind game is the only game in town.

Most of the regular visitors to this bloggy don't meditate. Dearie me! However, if you stick vase breathing, vase breath, tumo, gtumo, or any of those kinds of things into Google, one of my blogs tends to come up on the first page. This is most unfortunate since I'm only a beginner with this juju. So I must assume that not many folk are blogging about The Six Yogas of Naropa, doing the bliss and such like. However, most of the folk looking for vase breathing in Google probably meditate. Hurrah! Those people don't really need much else. If they just keep meditating, they'll get into the bliss at least, if they're not already beyond that.

Vase breathing is simply done. You breathe in, swallow, squeeze down and then pull up from your pelvic floor. Concentrate on a symbol four finger widths below your navel in at your spine. Hold then shoot the breath.

I assume not much happens until you get the connection between breath and bliss, or between your usual self and this envelope/sheath thing I was going on about before.

I was getting shedloads of bliss long before I started on this vase breathing/deity yoga malarkey, so you certainly don't need that to get bliss.

Vase breathing might be seen as something for folk who want to boost the bliss.

I just did a vase breath there to help me describe it and .... flatheids don't even get the bliss, so how can you expect to describe this to them? It feels engaged and beautiful and warm just now on the outbreath. This is nothing like the sensation you get when you do pranayama as a flatheid. This is getting out of your face on air.

I'm not telling you this stuff because I've read about it, or somebody has told me. Rajujublog is about experiential mysticism. This stuff is happening to me.

If you meditate, you will get bliss. If you can get out of your face on air, you can get bliss even if you're sitting watching the telly. You just do the breathing. You have to concentrate a bit, but it's not like what you're trying to do when you do certain types of meditation. Vase breathing and it's effects don't seem to require that depths of concentration.

Without vase breathing ... if you meditate and get bliss, the bliss will zoom up if you just lean forward and straighten up. You can bring this effect on just by dipping your head sometimes.

What I haven't mentioned in a vase breathing post before, I think, is about these weird zones that seem to be emerging. You can have this kind of sheath or envelope ( and both these sound far too substantial) and then when you shoot the breath sometimes it seems as if your consciousness as gone a little further. It's like a zone of more weirdness. This is freak city! I want to hear the gongs bashing when I find myself for a few seconds in there. It's like an extension. You really feel like this is where you want to imagine yourself as a deity. This hasn't been happening too often, but the frequency increases as it does with all aspects of this juju. Forwards and backwards, but always in the end just a little bit forward.

I've been starting in with more heat. There is non-duality in there somewheres!

Those who say, don't know. Those who know, don't say.


THIS POST WAS WRITTEN BY JOHN McKENZIE WHO HAS TEN BOOKS ON KINDLE. THE ONES CLOSELY CONNECTED WITH BUDDHISM, MEDITATION, BLISS, VASE BREATHING, TUMMO, ETC., ARE
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Buddha-Big-Bad-Wolf-ebook/dp/B005AIP7QE/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1319126284&sr=8-1
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Buddha-Big-Bad-Wolf-ebook/dp/B005AIP7QE/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1319126284&sr=8-
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Land-Demon-Masters-ebook/dp/B004XJ7OEO/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1319126424&sr=1-1
http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Real-McCoy-ebook/dp/B0054H4MO4/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1319126490&sr=1-1

Sunday 15 February 2009

Happy in an empty room?

Sunday 6:10 p.m.
I'm dying to go to work tomorrow because there's going to be nobody there but you and me, Jack. You'd have to walk a long way along spooky darkened corridors to find moi esconced in my wee glass box.

During the weeks of respite at Liberton Hospital, I don't meditate so much, but going to see our friend with the MS is a bit of a joy really. She always looks pleased to see me. I get to talk incessantly for over an hour about anything at all that comes into my head. But on Thursday she was sharing the space with someone who could still talk. I told this other patient I was bit uncomfortable with the racism when I was in Birmingham. Aye, she says, England is full of blacks and pakis.

Today the room was empty apart from our friend. I told her about my mobile phone. Soon after, I went away. She seemed happy enough to see me and happy enough to see me going.

It was a nice day and not too cold at all. I really enjoyed walking along the Meadows today. Walking is a fung miracle, so it is.

Friday 13 February 2009

When the levee broke!

Friday 7:30 p.m.
Whilst trying to find a middle way through the soapbar drought, I decided that it would be okay if I only drank beer when I was in the pub. And Lo! Once again the dakini appeared and said: Well done for first of all pouring all the home brew down the drain and then resolving only to get pissed in the pub! I grant you once again two wishes.

Hurrah! I said: Well, could I have a half ounce of nice resin this time since yon skunk is a terrible gateway drug for nicotine? Also, how's about going for a few pints in solidarity with the Consortium of Pub-Going, Loose and Forward Women?

The effects of the vase breathing went off the scale again this afternoon and evening. Don't ask me why, Jack, because today I wakened with this semi-amnaesic sense of disquiet. I suspect I was trying to find out if the dakini's mother might be a millionaire supporter of struggling writers, but I definitely don't remember saying I wanted to do that to her. The next resolution has to be only drinking beer whilst in the pub, but not that much!

Wednesday 11 February 2009

First Diggings!


Wednesday 10:57 p.m.
I went up to the allotment today and meditated in this position for an hour. Then I dug over the brassica patch, and now I am completely knackered. But sober and straight. Hoping not to be so much of the latter tomorrow.

In India, according to the Times, The Consortium of Pub-Going, Loose and Forward Women will be sending the basturn Hindu radicals pink knickers on Valentine's Day in response to the said basturns beating up women who go to the pub. In 1969 they wouldn't serve women in the bar of the Men's Union at Edinburgh University. Someone I knew invaded the bar, stood up on a table and demanded a drink, and got chucked out. How times change!

Tuesday 10 February 2009

On Becoming a (financial) Failure!

Tuesday 10:10 p.m.
We have to live with the consequences of decisions we make in this life. Pondering such things while looking at someone's blog this evening.

I could retire in two years so I must be old. I checked out what kind of pension I'd get. £1300 a year or thereabouts. Anyway, I couldn't give up the jobbie with just that. I was hoping against hope (as usual) that getting a literary agent might take me closer to making some money, but that's three books he's tried to sell in the last two and a half years and, through no fault at all of his, the money has not been landed on. I've given up hoping.

In the course of a few years from my middle thirties here are some of the things I did to advance my so called literary career.

1) Told the boy who was running Fontana (who'd published a book of mine) that I couldn't write a novel every eighteen months because I had a baby to look after.
2) Knocked back the chance to write the Archers.
3) Knocked back the offer to go to Manchester to write plays for this director I knew who was given a artistic director's job there.
4) Showed up drunk for a meeting with the boy running probably the biggest agency for playwrights in London. (Fung him. Kept me waiting in the pub for over two hours while he was making his future work elsewhere.)
5) Walked away from the BBC radio people at the first sign of any hassle at all, which really upset them though that was unintentional.
6) Told the boy interviewing me on Radio Scotland that I was a werewolf because I thought: Fung it! I'm not doing this shit.

On the other hand, I have a great many warm and happy memories of looking after my daughter and looking after my daughter instead of making money probably helped me put meditation at the centre of my life, and not writing.

Realising non-self and emptiness is the only thing worth doing in this life.

Would you not have liked to be remembered as a rich and famous writer, Hotboy? Jack, five thousand years from now they won't even remember Jesus Christ. And nobody read the books I wrote anyway.

The game plan has to be not wanting the things you could buy with the money.

Nokia 2760

Tuesday.
From a discussion board concerning connecting the Nokia 2760. "This model does not support a cable connection."

"The basic nokia 1xxx & 2xxx models don't usually support data cables or user firmware updates. They are designed to be cheap and affordable because they are nokia's budget range."

Well, there it is. Apart from telling folk you are on the bus, it's a pile of crap. I guessed as much.

There's a mobile phone mast pretending to be a tree in the creekit ground outside my back window. Why is it pretending to be a tree? (I'd take a photie of it using my mobile phone, but ...) Is it zapping my brain with microwaves so some kids can tell folk they are on the bus? Dearie me!

Monday 9 February 2009

Lean, mean, agile, mobile, hostile!

Monday 11:14 p.m.
This is an image (whenever?) which has been uploading for the last half hour. The Dom Bliss sent it on my mobile to see how these things work, and it did come to my computery thing, but has just waited ... and waited... and waited.

The first noble truth is the truth of frustration.

The weather was Baltic, but I hopped on the bus to go a couple of stops so I could go and meditate with some people at the Dzochen, or the Dzogo, or the whatever the fung it's supposed to be called in Great King Street. Since I had never used a mobile phone outside the house before to make a phone call ( and then only once), I phoned the Domestic Bliss, starting out with that age old favourite: I'm on the bus. Hello, I'm on the bus.

' Your image is corrupt or in an unrecognised format.'

The Domestic Bliss got me this piece of crap because it was Christmas and she has too much money. I couldn't afford to buy a mobile phone. I can't afford to run a car. I can't afford to go the the Mediterranean rat towns in the summertime to watch the unfungable and drink that which shouldn't be drunk. Hurrah! At least, I got that right.

There is no soapbar. I can't drink every night. This gives me a problem with what to do in the three hours before bedtime. Once upon a time, I was always stoned. That I do like. If we lived in a decent country .... anyway, getting used to doing nothing ... I'll have to start reading books, knocking my pan out training, having long baths. Dearie me! Fortunately, we can habituate to anything!

Saw The Wrestler yesterday. Then saw Mickey Rourke getting a Bafta for it. Got a lot of time for such a guy. He demostrates Irish charm. One of my brothers has that. Something kind of sometimes lights them up. Usually women. JFK had it, but not as much of it as my brother Silvest, row of forty medals on his chest, big chest!

Sunday 8 February 2009

Birthday Blog!

Sunday 12:52 p.m.
I started blogging four years ago today. It is also my birthday and I am 58 years old now. To mark this, I was hoping to stick a video on here of me doing my headstand into a lotus and sitting down trick, but the mobile phone crap shit piss ... why can't it just go on fire?

It's six years now since I ran out of my expected life span and six years since I took refuge with Lama Yeshe. These have been great years!

Resume: I'm into the bank for overdrafts and credit cards for about two grand. I take home about £750 a month, which I think is about the national minimum wage if I was working full time. However, I do not work fulltime, but halftime. Hurrah! Though the jobbie I have is actually a very good jobbie for me, I wish I didn't have to go to work at all. I've got too much to do.

A lot of folk don't live to become fifty eight. If I die in the coming year, I can't complain. What percentage of the population can do the bliss? I doubt if it's one percent. I'm a fung star, Jack, so I am. Because at the end of the day what it comes down to is this: Can you or can you not do the bliss?

Despite everything, the meditations increase in power and scope. I will press on.

Friday 6 February 2009

Splifflocations!

Friday 6:22 p.m.
The auld maw told me she'd seen Harry Houdini in the Pavilion in Mossend when she was about seven. She might have told me that before. I'm getting so old myself I can't remember now!

The skunk's just dying on me. I'd smoked half of it before I realised how strong it was. Was pretty spifflocated whilst watching a Horizon programme about the old cannybliss. Some of the best programmes I've ever seen have been done by Horizon, but this one was really a total disgrace. They've got the boy who started smoking skunk and then got them voices talking to him.

What's the matter with hearing voices, Hotboy? Don't worry, Jack. I never listen to a word you say.

So the poor basturn has got schizophrenia and stops smoking the skunk and still hears the voices. Smoking dope might make you a bit paranoid, but give us a break!

Then they had the feckless basturn whose life was ruined by skunk because he smoked ten joints a day and couldn't be bothered getting off his arse to do anything. This reminds me of Harold MacMillan's response to the boy who was going on about the evils of unemployment. Harold, being a posh basturn, said there was nothing the matter with not having a job. Most of his friends had never done a day's work in their lives. Give me unemployment and a steady supply of skunk and I'll write a novel a year no bother.

For the millionaire who is reading this and didn't fancy the boxing mitts for a hundred grand, how's about this one then? Just give me £10,000 a year and a steady supply of skunk and we'll go fifty fifty on any proceeds from the novel a year. But you get bugger all of the proceeds from the video of my floating about, which will happen sometime after I get a cable for my mobile phone thing.

Due to being constantly skunked out of my box, I was unable to get off my arse to do anything of course. But yesterday as the skunk was dying I went out for my six mile run. Really slow but most reassuring. I'm going for a long cycle with a young person tomorrow to demonstrate that smoking dope all my life has done me no harm, apart from completely funging up my lungs, and then there's the twitch, and the tremors, but apart from that ....!

Tuesday 3 February 2009

Worktime Bliss!

Tuesday
Once upon a time, when I reaslised there was some bliss to be had, I looked on it, and still look on it, as being like reeling in a fish. What you want is to close your eyes and the bliss to just be there. Imagine this will happen to you and how pleasant this would be. Of course, I can't believe that anyone could read this bloggy and even then be too dumb to meditate, so I'm sure having access to the bliss is something we will all have sometime.

Why are you buttering up the flatheids, Hotboy? Tell them they're funged! Completely funged!

This week I've been helped with the bliss in getting to work. I'd been meditating since about six yesterday and it is snowy and blowy and pretty horrible at the bus stop, but I've got that one well timed and, as soon as I sat down on the bus and closed my eyes, well, that was straight into the bliss all the way to Princes Street.

So the weather is really miserable and horrible now in the Princes Street bus shelter, but there's no one else there, so I do the tadasana and a couple of breathings, and I was actually feeling warmth from this. Closed my eyes and sat down for a moment or two just to change from the horribles outside to the wonderment inside.

The big bus journey on the No. 12 is always good even if the weather's rotten because I can close my eyes then for about half an hour. This is the way to get yourself prepared for the jobbie. Even if the flatheids are troublesome, you can always nick into the bog and fall into the great oceans of bliss.

It must be awful having to put up with bliss, Hotboy, particularly since it really is just one of the side effects. Yes, Jack, it is hard having all this developing bliss to call on, especially when surrounded by the flatheids who are too dumb to meditate, unlike the spam robots who come to this bloggy.

Sunday 1 February 2009

Sunday

Sunday 10:21 p.m.
I got steamboats in the pub last night and, thus, perhaps ruined my hard earned reputation for abstemiousness, decorum and good manners. What do you think, Jack? If you never got battered and got home okay, call it a draw, Hotboy.

Despite that, I thought I was having the best meditation of my life this afternoon. I don't deserve it of course. Having the best meditation in my life happens quite a lot with this juju. What a fortunate, fortunate creature I am!!