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!!!