Daniel Brown and The Great Way

Just watched an interview with Dan Brown on something called Conscious. TV. He was plugging his new book called The Great Way, which sounds terrific. I'll have to get it from my Christmas. Here's a link to the interview.

Onwards and Upwards!

I've been dipping in and out of some interesting books recently. The Generation Stage of Buddhist Tantra by Gyatrul Rinpoche details vajranyana visualisations and made me realise once again that there's no chance of me being able to visualise anything in anything like that kind of detail in my current lifestyle.

But I'm still going to go through the visualisations that I do try, and have been trying to do for about eight years, because the bliss when it is coming streaming down from the extremely poorly visualised Medicine Buddha is better than anything. So it's working somehow.

The Three Principal Aspects of the Path, an oral teaching by Geshe Sonam Rinchen, translated and edited by Ruth Sonam, is brilliant in it's description of the correct view. That's in the last third of the book and it's something I'm going to read and re-read.

The Gelug/Kagyu Tradition of Mahamudra by H.H. Dalai Lama and Alexander Berzin is a book which has just landed on my lap at the perfect time. I've had this book for years and have read bits of it before, but now I feel as if I'm ready for it. The four lectures at the beginning by Alexander Berzin are brilliant and seem so appropriate right now.

I'm almost finished re-reading Anagarika Govinda's Way of the White Clouds. The examples in it of rebirth are very interesting indeed. I don't like believing in anything other than the illusory nature of reality, but after re-reading this book again ....

My meditations had a huge boost from visiting the Samye Ling for four nights during the recent Drupchen. When such a situation develops, there is always a little trepidation. There are wonderful amounts of bliss and you can feel the force much stronger these days. You have a tiger by the tail again. I think I have to bend my mind towards emptiness and lay off the symbols and channels for a bit. Or, at least, watch it.

Vase Breathing. The Vase Breath. Tummo. Inner Heat. The Six Yogas of Naropa. Channels and Drops!

When I started meditating about twenty six years ago, I had no idea it would turn out to be so pleasurable. But if you practice sufficiently, you will encounter masses of bliss. Shedloads! Bliss in mentioned a great deal in The Bliss of Inner Fire which is really transcripts of talks given by Lama Thebten Yeshe, the monk in the photograph, to his students. This book's publication has been controversial since doing these practices without guidance from a qualified teacher is probably dangerous. After reading that book, I wanted to take refuge and get empowerment to practice, and I use the methods mentioned in that book although I don't think my root guru, Lama Yeshe Losal likes me doing them. But I'm not sure. I've never had proper instructions for doing anything. I've been told to practice Dorje Sempa, which involves 100,000 prostrations, 100 recitations of the the 100 syllable mantra, etc., but I don't practice this properly, and use the Medicine Buddha instead of Dorje Sempa.

Also, Lama Yeshe warned me in the summer of 2010 that if I kept using the channels and drops visualisations, I assume with the vase breathing, that I would "unleash forces" I "wouldn't be able to control", that my mind would go into a bad place and I'd have to stop meditating. But after a few months my old ways began to re-assert themselves. So I certainly wouldn't advise anyone to practice like me!

I retired from my job share starting from the start of June, and now I don't have any kind of job at all. I'm going to concentrate on practicing my meditations as much as I can in future, after I get the ten books I've written uploaded onto Kindle. Some of these books are quite autobiographical and the ones which have much Buddhist content are:

In The Land of the Demon Masters, which is really based on Tibetan history and mysticism.

The Buddha and the Big Bad Wolf  which is about a Buddhist "pilgrimage" to Nepal and India, but has accounts of mystical experiences, and says quite a lot about The Four Noble Truths, Dependant Origination, The Skandas and suchlike.

TheBlissBook, which is about practicing meditation and The Six Yogas of Naropa as well as a story about working in an Edinburgh comprehensive school as a librarian.

The Real McCoy, which is my favourite book, is also very heavily influenced by Buddhism. The main protagonist goes and lives in cave for six years like the Buddha.

If anyone is interested in other post about vase breathing in blogs that I've kept in the past, they can find them here, and here, and here. Well, if you want to get out of your face on air, you can find out there! But remember that kundalini arousals that go wrong can make you mad and sick!!

Bliss!

If you accept that human beings are more or less the same; made of the same stuff, composed of similar mental aspects, etc., then if they were to do more or less the same things, you'd expect more or less the same results. If you trained to run fast, you might never win a race, but you will almost certainly end up running faster than you were. We have a lot in common, you and I.

What I'm interested in is not about being holy, or even being good, it's about what happens when you do stuff. What results are experienced?

You have to start by getting yourself into a comfortable position and repeating mumbo jumbo to yourself. At least, that's what I did. After doing that for about ten minutes a day for a week, once I felt as if I was in an unusual mental space, and noted it, and that mental space disappeared immediately. You might not get back to that space for some time, but at least you've been there once. This is your little fish. It's on the end of your fishing line.

So you start to fish and the little fish sometimes comes closer to your normal consciousness, and quite often moves away, but the more you fish, the closer it seems to come.

In the course of time, you may begin to feel odd movements inside you body as you sit. Eventually, these odd movements, which are like a kind of massage, fill out into something that feels like an inner and outer envelope attached to your body, or being revealed by your mind in your body through meditating over a long period.

You should be able to feel this arising and be able to sink into bliss almost as soon as you start meditating, but probably not until you've been practising for several years. The qualities you might associate with the bliss change of course. There are all kinds of flavours and forces involved. But always through the years of meditations piling up, the bliss seems to get stronger and stronger.

What do this tell me so far? Well, not very much, but it does prove to me that there is in our human mind a vast great ocean of bliss, which can be accessed by sticking with some very simple, not to say rudimentary, methods.

When you chip chip chip down through your mind by concentrating on a sound, you eventually come upon the bliss, or the bliss develops somehow by you doing this. Isn't that a wonderment! If not, it's at least interesting.

Encountering huge volumes of bliss, of course, can't help but make you realise you knew even less than you thought you knew when you started out!!

Getting into the bliss!

      

  I started meditating over twenty five years ago, and since then I've been telling anyone who cared to listen about the wonderments occurring from meditation, and nobody, almost nobody I know, meditates. So I'm not writing this blog to convince anyone about meditation. More people read poetry than want to meditate. That's just the way it is. You have to be really lucky to want to meditate. At least, that's what I think.

          Several of my novels and plays were very much influenced by Buddhism and meditation and this blog is a companion blog to http://johnmckenzie.blogspot.com/, so that if anyone who read those books was interested ... I also want to a quiet space to ruminate about meditation and such like. If you want to connect with me over matters arising in this blog, there are a lot of ways you can do that without using the comments section.

          If you were a religious person and believed in things, you might say you were meditating to get finally off the wheel of life, to get out of this repeated round of existences, all marked by suffering, and experience nirvana. You might say that.

          If you didn't really believe in anything, you might say that you meditated to help you with all the stresses, etc., accumulating day in and day out. Meditation is a big help for these things, and should lower your blood pressure, help improve your concentration, and whatnot.

          Nobody ever asks me about meditation. Sometimes I tell folk though that they should get into meditation to experience the bliss, or to get access to the bliss. This is not why I meditate, and I did not know there was bliss to be had when I started meditating, but getting access to some layer of mind where bliss resides, even if the access to this layer is somewhat haphazard, is a wonderment.

         You can make your own bliss. You do not have to have outside stimulation for this. It's not something that happens from  outside your mind and body that makes you feel blissful. It seems to be that the bliss naturally arises when you meditate sufficiently. It seems to be a part of your mind. It seems to be part of the process of uncovering your mind, and I don't think it is avoidable if you meditate enough.

          When you are stuck with the western view of anatomy, you don't have explanations for what happens to you in meditation. You may wish to seek other explanations of what we are composed of. At the end of the day, these other explanations might not be of much use to you, but if you want to see one from yoga, it's here

           If you hardly know anyone who meditates, but you are finding yourself occasionally in very blissful situations, it's a comfort when you see some people even talking about bliss, far less talking about us human beings being composed of five sheaths, the bliss sheath being one of them..

Pragmatism

"Wonders are many, and none is more wonderful than man." Sophocles.

If you accept your basic ignorance, or your lack of complete knowledge, it's difficult then, and maybe even a bit stupid, to start believing in things. Actively disbelieving in things makes more sense to me. Having faith in something that someone has told you doesn't make much sense to me at all.

It seems to me that what's left is cause and effect, which is what we seem to have to live with, and what works and what doesn't work. What I mean by this is what makes you happier. We are conditioned by punishments and rewards and we must surely hope to do things that will give us rewards and a great reward is surely more happiness, or more positive feelings.

Meditation obviously works in this regard. Meditation does take the stress away and makes you smile more. That's just my personal experience, of course. If you meditated, you might go completely bonkers. What do I know?

I'm interested in what works, or what you can get to work. That's why this post is called pragmatism!

For about six or seven years I've been trying to do deity yoga, which basically means that you visualise yourself as a deity, and more importantly for this post, you visualise a deity in front of you. This is what, I think, is a bit different in Tibetan buddhism. 3D visualisations. It's supposed to be a very powerful way of combining method and wisdom, which is to say, emptiness (things not existing as they appear to exist) and meditation (concentration, focusing).

I must say that after trying this for seven years and doing it practically every day, I'm no nearer achieving a three dimensional visualisation than I was the day I started. This is not to say that I don't think it can be done. I'm sure it can be done, but you'd have to be working at it pretty much full time, I think.

Meditation isn't the sole preserve of buddhists. St Teresa of Avila describes doing much the same thing with Jesus Christ. She managed to get Jesus Christ to be in front of her and to speak to her and to tell her that he would do anything for her because he knew that she loved him. This is described in The Interior Castle, I think. She said you started with the hands. Get the hands first (I suppose this would be the hands together as in prayer) and progress to the rest.

I think I'm maybe supposed to be doing this with Dorje Sempa, but I've been using The Medicine Buddha, and I can't do either. But I think if the circumstances were right ... I also think you could do it with Donald Duck. It's your attitude that counts. It's a projection.

I think the difference between St Teresa and Tibetan Buddhism is that St Teresa might have thought it was Jesus Christ. I think in Tibetan Buddhism once you have the deity in front of you, you have to know that it's just an appearance, even although you might have spent an awful long time getting that appearance. I imagine that once you have that appearance, it should tell you something about how everything else is also mere appearance. I think we're trying to impress ourselves with insubstantiality here, as in nothing exists in the manner of its appearance.

I might have this all wrong of course, but I did use it while writing In The Land of The Demon Masters. The sage in the cave tells the heroine how to create a big scary monster, and what he tells her is how you do deity yoga, I think. Have the vision in three dimensions to the stage where you can even walk round it.

Once when I was a week in Purelands, which is a satellite of the Samye Ling, for a week in the winter, I was stuck there in this room from about four in the afternoon till the next day. No radio, no telly, just some dharma books. During the day, down at the centre, I was hardly speaking to anyone either... I know there is a change which occurs when you do mental calming so that you seem to be able to project colours and shapes much better than you imagine. Afterwards I thought of it as reverse LSD. It's like being given a toolbox to perception. This is before I even took refuge. This is where I have to go if I can make any money from selling books on Kindle.

I've just been reading this a little later. St Teresa says in one of her books that she can't tell the difference between spirit and mind and soul, and would leave that to more erudite folk than her. So it's a bit of a cheap shot and patronising to say what she thought about the vision of Christ that she had in front of her. Because I don't know. And she might well have.

Scepticism

Bertrand Russell wrote that to be an thoroughgoing sceptic you had to be sceptical about scepticism. I think he also said that after twenty years of being sceptical, he was relieved to believe that the table in front of him was a table after all.

What he was talking about is not the kind of scepticism I'm interested in. When I'm sitting at a table, I have no doubts that there's a table there...I assume what Russell was talking about was the table being a mental projection and nothing else. Maybe he wasn't. My problem with the table is that I don't have full knowledge of the table. I'm convinced enough by the buddhist idea that all you can say about the table is that it is called a table and you can say was it does. Name and function. It's called a tea cup. It's for holding tea.

What anything is actually made of is open to question. So the table is made of wood. What's the wood made of? Molecules of something? What are they made of? Once you've got down to the molecular, atomic and sub atomic levels, you've really lost the table in a mess of quantum paradoxes.

I like the idea that we are dealing with appearances and not reality. This isn't just a buddhist idea. I first came across it while researching the Vatican's attitude to Galileo. It seems they did not mind at first what he was going on about because his hypothesis accounted for the appearances, or the way things appeared to be. What things appear to be and what they really are ... well, that's not the same thing.

We do not have full knowledge of the table. Our senses are telling us something and it might not be true, but it certainly isn't complete. When we look at the table, we cannot tell if it's warm or not, for instance. If we had infra-red perception, like a snake, we would be told that.

If you were a buddha, it is said that you would have full knowledge of the table, but since I am not a buddha, and I'm not liable to bump into one soon, I am left with my fundamental ignorance of the table.

I embrace my ignorance
I don't believe in any things
Especially thoughts.

I do not believe in thoughts because they are not what they appear to be. You don't have full knowledge of the thoughts you are thinking. You cannot see the conditioning, or the conditions and causes, which had led to this thought, or these thoughts, arising. The thoughts are not separate. They seem to be separate thoughts, but they can't be. Nothing is separate and it's only logical to say that things are interconnected, or interdependent.

If you start with your basic ignorance, it is difficult to say that you believe in anything. If you don't have full knowledge of it, if you don't truly know what it is, how can you believe in it? How can you say you have faith in something?

My main point is that I don't want to believe in anything, or things, or something. I want to know. Even although I will never have full knowledge, I want to know more, speculate less, and believe in nothing at all. I believe in disbelieving. I believe in ignorance. To me, so far, there's nothing else you can believe in i.e. I know that I'm ignorant.

This gives you a problem every time anyone tells you something is true. In Tibetan Buddhism you might hear that there are six classes of beings, such as, gods and demi-gods, hungry ghosts, etc. Do I believe in that? Certainly not. This is not to say that I don't believe in it either. Frankly, I don't care if there are hungry ghosts or fairies, or leprechauns.

I'm trying to think if I believe in anything other than ignorance. I think I believe in cause and effect. You do one thing and something else seems to follow. This might be true, but it is rather difficult to observe. It seems to be that way.

The photograph is of the Nagarjuna statue at the Samye Ling.

Skewed Path

This is a brief resume of where I'm at as far as meditation is concerned.

         I taught myself to meditate about twenty six years ago when I was about thirty four. I knew it was something to do with repeating a mantra or sound to yourself, so I settled on the word Susquehanna and used that as my mantra for about nine years or so.

          I liked learning to meditate as soon as I started it and tried as fast as I could to get my practice up to sitting for an hour. I couldn't sit with a straight back for an hour, and I couldn't even sit cross legged for long at all, so I kind of reclined on the floor supported by tons of pillows. I noted that odd things started happening after I'd been doing that for about forty minutes ... red or white pulsing up my spine, etc.

          I started getting white light and some bliss from about the age of forty one or two. This coincided with another attempt to stop smoking and to do this I started getting up at six in the morning so I could meditate for an hour before going to work. I was amazed at how energised this made me feel. Going to work with the wind in your sails! I think it felt better then than it does now, probably because it was new to me. I was meditating for about two or three hours a day then.

           When I was forty five, I had two experiences of non-self and emptiness; quite a minor one which was followed a few weeks later by a much "stronger" one. I've never had anything like that again.

            A few months later I went on what I hoped to be a Buddhist pilgrimage to Nepal and India - an account of this chaotic trip is in The Buddha and the Big Bad Wolf, which will be published in book form or appear on Kindle sometime in 2011 - and gave up using Susquehanna and started using Om Mani Padme Hum and Om Ah Hung Vajra Guru Padma Siddhi Hum.

             Over the Christmas and New Year of that year, 1996, I spent a week in Purelands, just a wee while away from the Samye Ling, and had my first meeting with Lama Yeshe Losal. I wanted to ask him mainly about the stretching and lifting sensations I was getting in my body while I was meditating. I wanted to know what that was. He didn't tell me! He told me I needed a guru, but I had started smoking again by then and didn't feel able to ask him to be my guru for another six years.

              I took refuge with Lama Yeshe at the start of January 2003 and I went through a refuge ceremony with Dr Akong Tulku Rinpoche a year or two later.

              Various things were pushing me in this direction, but a major spur was reading The Bliss Of Inner Fire by Lama Thebten Yeshe. This made me very keen to follow the tantric path and in the book it said you'd need a guru for that, so I took refuge.

              I didn't realise when I bought the book that there was a controversy about its publication. Perhaps there is information contained in this book which shouldn't be in the public domain. I don't know. I'm not a fan of secrets, or esoteric knowledge, or anything like that. At the same time I appreciate that if it was easy to make a nuclear bomb, it might be better for the world if everyone wasn't told about that!

              Lama Yeshe said I should take a Dorje Sempa initiation and I did that. Later on, I took a lot of other initiations and the one I liked the most was the Medicine Buddha initiation I attended at the Physicians Hall in Edinburgh.

               Not long after taking the Dorje Sempa initiation I had some kind of inner heat arousal. I've never had anything like that since.6th of April 2003, I think. It was a bit of a hot ethereal arising up to and fanning out into the chest area. I've described this in TheBlissBook. Nothing comparable has happened to me since.

                There aren't a lot of representations of Dorje Sempa, but the ones of the Medicine Buddha are very numerous, so started using that in my visualisations. I was practising the instructions given in the Bliss Of Inner Fire, including the vase breathing, the channels and symbols, etc.

                 The Dorje Sempa stage seems to include doing 100,000 prostrations and 100,000 recitations of the hundred syllable mantra and I stopped doing them practically before I started. But the other two foundation practices seem to be included in the stuff I got from The Bliss Of Inner Fire.

                  Lama Yeshe told me to do Dorje Sempa. I also told me once that ... "you will get everything from calming meditations.' Once he told me to do mahamudra meditations though I wasn't sure what that was at the time though I might be a bit clearer on that now.

                  So I wasn't doing what I was told to do. Also, he told me to ask to see him if I had a problem, not otherwise, but I wasn't encountering any problems apart from those engendered from smoking and drinking, so I didn't ask to see him for six years.

                  I get long summer holidays. I've got a hut on an allotment in Inverleith Park where I can meditate in relative peace and quiet. I try to do my best during these holidays. At the start of them last summer I went down to the Samye Ling to see Lama Yeshe, hopefully to get his blessing for doing my summer meditations.

                  He told me to do Dorje Sempa. He told me that all the stuff I was doing with channels and drops and whatnot would lead to me "unleashing forces you will not be able to control" and that my mind would go into a "bad place" and that I would have to stop meditating.

                   I found this very, very frustrating. I started doing prostrations, which I don't like doing. I've only done about four thousand since last summer. I haven't brought myself as yet to learn the hundred syllable mantra, which I think would be an onerous burden and a waste of my time. So I know I have a problem here!!

                   And all the things he warned me about concerning the channels and drops and vase breathing have all crept back into my practice.

                   I was reading Living with Kundalini by Gopi Krishna once in a storm bashed tent down at the Samye Ling once and was very glad I had a guru. This book is quite graphic about the horrible things that can happen if you have a bad kundalini arousal and quite mirrored what Lama Yeshe warned me about.

                   I am quite careful these days when I'm doing vase breathing and don't do a lot of it. The after-effects are quite astonishing sometimes and I am starting to get some heat, but my visualisations are very poor, and I've come to think that I'll never get close to getting near them unless I get an opportunity to do a proper retreat.

                   Lama Yeshe told me last summer that I couldn't do this stuff if I had "any kind of job at all". I turned sixty this year and I could retire if I had any money. This has been the main impetus to getting the accompanying blog to this one set up ( http://johnmckenzie.blogspot.com/) and for putting the ten books I've written over the years on Kindle.

                    I realise that just now I'm messing around with very fundamental aspects of my physiology with vase breathing and such like. This is not what I've been told to do and I'd like to say right now that if anything goes wrong, there's no one to blame but myself. My main problem seems to be trying to do stuff before I'm ready for it!!!

Great Photie!

I've tried to take a photie of the one in the foreground several times, but this photographer got it spot on!

Disclaimer!

I think I should say at the start of this blog that I don't really know anything about Buddhism, Tibetan Buddhism, or meditation, particularly Vajrayana meditations. I've just read a few books and I've forgotten most of what was in them. This will really be a blog about experiential mysticism, except I won't be able to describe anything properly, partly because describing sensations to someone else is quite hard if they've never experienced these sensations, and partly because you can't really describe sensations anyway.

But this blog is really to help me sort out in my mind what's going on, a place to reflect about this and that.

If  you want to know anything about meditation, Buddhism, Tibetan Buddhism or Vajrayana, I suggest you connect with someone at the Samye Ling down in Eskdalemuir in Scotland. That's what I did.

Another Beginning!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbB6r4p6BJk
Wednesday 10:00 p.m.
                                   If you click on yon link, I think this is where we are trying to go here.

                                   I've set up this blog partly because I'm in the process of uploading my ten books onto Kindle. Two or three of them are very strongly influenced by, if not about, Tibetan Buddhism, so I wanted anyone who was interested in these books to be able to find this blog if they clicked on my profile.