Off Putting!

Sunday 9:43 p.m.
There was a joe who might have been coming to meditate with me on Thursdays. I sent him the following as an email, but it seems to have put him off. Dearie me!

Dear Joe,

Been thinking about you coming over to meditate on Thursdays. What a good idea! I read this book once about a Britisher who was lecturing on the sutras when they'd been published in English, and doing it on beer and speed. Then he went to Thailand supported by interested parties and spoke to the Theravadin abbot. He said he knew about the sutras okay, but wanted to do the meditations. So the abbot let him stay in a bamboo box in stilts and set this monk to look after him. After a couple of days, the monk told this boy that he wasn't to leave the box, and that if he left the box, the abbot wanted him to go back to England. THis is the hardest thing. So he could leave the box to go to the loo and that was that. He was tasked to put four symbols into his body. I think this took him six months. After that, he appeared on teevee and was the first English Theravadin monk anyone could remember.

I've been doing this meditation stuff for a long while really and there is no point in bullshitting you about it.It's not easy especially if you haven't practised it before. If you want to meditate on Thursdays with me, you're going to have to give up three hours of your time to do sitting meditations. You will have to go through everything I told you about when we first talked about this i.e. calming meditations, analytical meditations and Medicine Buddha sadhana, which are visualisations. If you just fancy fannying around with twenty minute meditations, it would be better for me if you didn't pick Thursdays since that is my meditation day.

You can come to see me and smoke dope and drink if you like, but if you want to meditate, you've got to meditate. I do not practise all the various kinds of meditaions there are, but I do know what I told you about.

It would be very good for me if you came down to meditate with me since I would try harder. It would be very difficult for you. However, it is supposed to be easier if you're doing it with someone who has had experience and should be faster for you than for me since it took my decades to get even this far. It's supposed to be like lighting candles off candles.

But it's not easy. Learning to stand on your head and sticking your toe up your nose is far easier, but it is not yoga; it is gymnastics for old people. The Higher Yoga Tantra is the deep, deep juju. It's perfect for smart basturns like me and you. And there is nothing better you could do. But there is a commitment involved. If you can't at least be quiet for three hours at a stretch, don't pick Thursdays. Hope to see you on Thursday then. I could write out a programme and you could check on the Medicine Buddha Sadhana on my blog, which I might have wrote when I was more sober than I am right now! All the best.Hotboy