This Quiet Life!

Sunday 9:39 p.m.
The Domestic Bliss came home tonight to find me doing this in the lobby. She's got a lot to put up with, so she has!

Apart from her, I've only seen the auld maw and Auntie Kathy since I departed the jobbie on Wednesday. The auld maw has become a rugby fan after watching the Irish crowd giving a fantastic rendition of the Fields of Athenry on the telly.

I had a wonderful, wonderful meditation today at around lunchtime. When I've been down at the Samye Ling, I've often wondered why I never see any of the monastics doing vase breathing during the .... well, anything. I suppose the novices don't know what it is, but the juju masters never do it. Today, during this meditation, I thought why bother? Surfing the oceans of bliss! There's just something opening up, and you just go there and be there, and it is just fantabulous, and you don't need or want anything else.

I know most of the folk who leave comments on this blog don't do sitting meditations and that's a real shame. Despite being a disgrace to the juju, I'm still hammering away there and I might still be doing about forty hours a week most weeks.

But the Pitch Inspector comments that it's not the meditations that bother him, it's the six hours a day that I tend to do. Well, I didn't always do that much. I'm not expecting anyone to be like moi. I started trying to do ten minutes a day. But I did it every day. When I'd got up to an hour and a half a day, I started getting substantial amounts of bliss even although this was a total surprise since I didn't know then that meditating would inexorably lead to the bliss. In fact, I'd never heard of the bliss.

So as far as I know from my own experience, it takes three times a day. You don't need to do an hour and a half either. But an hour and a half isn't very much. I was doing a half hour before going to work, a half hour at lunchtime and a half hour when I got home. I was leading the life of the usual joe; smoking dope, drinking beer, and using tobacco in the joints at night. But I tried to meditate three times a day, about twenty minutes a time could do it.

If you want to play a musical instrument well, you should practise six hours a day anyway. If you want to write books, you will write six hours a day. Most folk don't have six hours a day. I got ten seconds of non-self and emptiness meditating an hour and a half a day. Straight forward calming meditations that was. I didn't even know what analytical meditations were then.

|If you don't want to meditate, that's okay. You will have plenty of company. If you want to try to make something of the opportunities having a human being mind gives you, you should meditate. If you don't and you're given the black spot, well ...

When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains
And the women come out to cut up what remains
Just roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
And go to your Gawd like a soldier.

If you never experience it, you'll never miss it. Flatheids don't know they're flatheids!