Monstaville Book I. Chapter 44

44

“Keep your cool and you command everything.” – Anon.

Pigsy tries to use me to make himself feel powerful and especially show his girlfriend he’s powerful, which means he is not powerful and feels inferior.

Perhaps he is easily intimidated yet also feels humiliated by it. He may just view my studious and conscientious personality as a threat; my intelligence, my mind. He does not live in that world. It is the unknown and therefore scary for him. He therefore wants to be rid of it, to banish all reminders (although he had problems with the other tenants where he lived previously as well, so perhaps he has similar problems with various types of people, wanting to feel superior to them, impose his will on them or scare them off. He is just physical and emotional. A child of a man, albeit clever too. So he set about intimidating me with his physical power, using alcohol to try and demonstrate his power and use one confrontation to cause fear and thereafter make it easy for him to exercise power so he avoids any challenge because he can’t handle the fact that I have an authoritative air.

He expresses his animal nature. He is a beast, like the lowest level of humanity. Lust is his God - sex and animal aggression.

Elwood P. Dowd (James Stewart): Harvey and I sit in the bars...have a drink or two...play the juke box. And soon the faces of all the other people they turn toward mine and they smile. And they're saying, ‘We don't know your name, mister, but you're a very nice fella.’ Harvey and I warm ourselves in all these golden moments. We've entered as strangers - soon we have friends. And they come over...and they sit with us...and they drink with us...and they talk to us. They tell about the big terrible things they've done and the big wonderful things they'll do. Their hopes, and their regrets, and their loves, and their hates. All very large, because nobody ever brings anything small into a bar. And then I introduce them to Harvey...and he's bigger and grander than anything they offer me. And when they leave, they leave impressed. The same people seldom come back; but that's envy, my dear. There's a little bit of envy in the best of us.

- Harvey (directed by Henry Koster, 1950).

Elwood P. Dowd (James Stewart): Years ago my mother used to say to me, she'd say, ‘In this world, Elwood, you must be’ - she always called me Elwood – ‘In this world, Elwood, you must be oh so smart or oh so pleasant.’ Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant. You may quote me.

- Harvey (directed by Henry Koster, 1950).

“Cleverness is always a barrier. And it is not intelligence - it is a false substitute. An intelligent person is innocent. You can cheat an intelligent person very easily, but you cannot cheat a clever person because the clever person himself is a cheat. So never think that cleverness is of any value; it is based on fear. The logic behind cleverness is: if you don't cheat others, others will cheat you. So remain clever and always protect yourself, and before somebody attacks you, attack them, because attack is the best defence. This is the logic of cleverness: always pretend that you know, even when you don't. Always remember that intelligence is very innocent, and cleverness is not intelligence. Politicians are clever people but not intelligent. You can deceive intelligent people very easily because they will always be innocent, they will be true. But cleverness functions as a very protective barrier - so drop cleverness. And nobody can force you to drop it.” - Osho.

“There is no greater misfortune than underestimating your enemy. Underestimating your enemy means thinking that he is evil. Thus you destroy your three treasures (simplicity, patience, compassion) and become an enemy yourself.” - Laozi.

“Somehow our devils are never quite what we expect when we meet them face to face.” - Nelson DeMille.

You must strive to express your true self.

To be your real self.

And, obviously, that is love and light!

So you must relax and be simply your spiritual light. Shine. Don’t engage or feed his paranoia and aggression. Ignore him.

You have to be your Buddha nature, your original Self...and under these conditions it is the perfect test.

"I say unto you: fear, greed, anger, everything is allowed.
You just come a little closer, enter the temple.
The very entry burns out all that is false in you.
Only pure gold remains."

- Osho.

“Another name for life is choice. The choice to be free or bound; celebrate or lament; protect or trust; live or die. The bridge between heaven and hell is always open for traffic, until we decide to choose only love.” - Alan Cohen.

Monkey (Episode 24, ‘The Forces of Jealousy’).

Tripitaka: An old piece of wisdom says ‘defeat can be turned into victory.’ If you only change your mind, change what you want and retreat becomes an advance.

                Love is a force almost as powerful as fire. Without love we should be cold. Without fire we should be alone in the dark. Yet, for each there is a proper season and a golden mean. Love which fears [?] flow is jealousy and becomes a curse.

                The Way is neither in the Earth nor in the sky. The Way is in the middle, the Jewel in the heart of the Lotus.

Compassion

The Daoists recommend commencing meditation with compassion, to start in a good vein and merge with the Dao, the universal whole. And Osho explains:

“Buddha has insisted again and again that while you are meditating, always remember compassion. Don’t forget compassion. It is very to forget compassion while you are meditating, so continuously remember. And when you have come to the fulfilment of your meditation, don’t forget compassion. Bring it back to people. Grow in compassion and meditation so simultaneously that when meditation brings you home, compassion takes you back to the valley, back to the foreign lands where barbarians people dwell, where they will not understand your language, where there is more possibility that you will be crucified. But that is nothing - for an enlightened person to be crucified is nothing. It makes no difference. If crucifixion can help people, he will love to be crucified. Whatsoever will help people, he will love to do it.” (Quoted in a Daoist magazine).

Monkey (Episode 22, ‘Village of the Dead’).

King Monkey’s subjects are his thoughts, over which he is the supreme ruler. They are loyal to him and would die for him gratefully. Towards the end, however, even Monkey is willing to die for his master, Tripitaka, his Higher Self, the childlike monk, the pure Beingness of original Buddha nature.

“Buddha taught that we are what we believe, and all that we are springs from our thoughts...The world is a trap for fools. Only he who sees goes free.”

You make the world with your own thoughts. What you called forth out of chaos took on reality. (False passions, illusions, phantoms gave them form).

Tripitaka’s Buddhist teachings:

“Evil destroys itself if you don’t resist it. Resisting it is engaging it and feeding it, so it grows.”

Conclusion:

“Sometimes, to fight evil is to strengthen it. So a sage may merely pass it by. There is danger in this. To compromise with evil clouds the clarity with which we should strive for the good, as Tripitaka found when the pilgrims came to nightmare land.”

It’s where the demons go to live out their evil ways. Their idea of fun - entertainment - is fighting to the death, etc.

Retrospective inserts.

‘How to get people to be nice.’ (A blog by Betty St. John, April 28, 2008).

“The Shinto Religion of Japan states that human beings are essentially good.  It is the belief of the Shinto that all evil is caused to humans by evil spirits. When a person is born, or even conceived, that tiny being is certain of one fact. This is the fact that he is very, exquisitely good. What has happened? Evil spirits have interfered once again in the affairs of mankind. The problem arises when the spirits in question, are too well entwined into human affairs. Such a spirit will prod living humans into re-enacting the cruel deeds of the ghostly former life. Pieces of the spirit will work into a human body causing that living person to lash out in petty, mean or even horrid acts against his fellow humans. The natural proclivity to violence in a person will make them far more susceptible to the influence of evil spirits. So every time you lose your temper, you will find that negative spirits will find you to be ideal company.

                The most common such act in modern society is the practice of threatening driving. The inconsiderate driver may appear merely rude to our way of thinking. Yet, miles and miles of highways and lesser roads are strewn with the spirits of those who have died in the operation of an automobile. In fact, the operation of driving is tantamount to the wielding of a weapon. To practice the driving of an automobile as a form of domination is no different than to run through the town square, brandishing a gun in a threatening way. In this rather banal and pointless way, entire towns are falling into the grips of evil.”

Interestingly, the same day I read this blog, I witnessed a despicable act in town while walking back from the doctor’s. A guy carrying two shopping bags stepped into the road to cross when the coast had seemed clear but did not continue to look around since it felt safe. The traffic lights a little further up the road turned green at that point and two black girls driving a red Smart car deliberately sped up to the unprepared pedestrian and slammed on the breaks, missing him by inches. The driver then shouted, ‘Out of the way bitch!’ as the shocked man continued to make his way across the street. She and her friend then laughed as they drove off. It was purely an excuse to feel powerful whilst apparently justifying their behaviour by accusing the guy of being in their way which he was not. Any self-respecting citizen would have driven more slowly through the busiest part of the high street and stopped politely to allow the man to cross the road - especially since he stepped into the road before the Smart car was even in sight. Anyway, don’t get me started on the number of people playing loud music in their cars with the windows down around here. The police are powerless to even say anything it seems.

We have our own artistic mythology on the subject of possession by evil spirits in David Lynch’s disturbing series, the ‘supernatural drama’ Twin Peaks. Lynch opened up a possible dimension in which some scary characters continue to live as spirits and conveyed it to us in a compelling way. These entities are still connected to the earth plane and entwined with the lives of human beings they can reach, whose weaknesses they can exploit and onto whom they are able to project - and inflict - their twisted, violent, rapacious and murderous horrors. We cannot help but be affected emotionally by his work and we ought to be left wondering if this is a little closer to the truth than we would like to imagine or acknowledge.

Pisgy is a monster right out of Twin Peaks (Bob)...or that nasty creep Bobby Peru (Willem Dafoe) in Wild at Heart (1990). He should be David Lynch’s pet demon! "Y'all take a listen, you'll hear the deep sound comin' down from Bobby Peru...Am I scarin’ you?...I’ll tear your fuckin’ heart out...!"

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.” - Friedrich Nietzsche.

“Through violence, you may 'solve' one problem, but you sow the seeds for another.” - The Dalai Lama.

The danger is that our reaction to a shockingly hideous and dramatically unfamiliar atmosphere in which we find ourselves living awakens grotesque nightmares within us and gives birth to an ugly little monster in our subconscious mind no matter who we are or how happy we were in childhood. As David Lynch found out when he moved to Philadelphia: "’...when I was there it was a very sick, twisted, violent, fear-ridden, decadent, decaying place,’ he explains. ‘There was racial tension and just...violence and fear. I said to someone, all that separated me from the outside world was the brick wall, and they started laughing, like ‘What more do you want?’ you know? But that brick wall was like paper’...’You try to become as far away from the outer skin as possible and stay inside. And brick walls become like paper in your mind, they're not a protection at all. So many things come into your house. You try to become very small inside yourself.’” (www.geocities.com/~mikehartmann/ehabout.html). If you go into your feelings about these dark things, you start changing, he says. So that’s where he says he had his first ‘thrilling thought.’ The reaction to negative conditions that permeate one’s life and sleep unseen, may haunt one’s soul at a subliminal level, causing emotional disturbance behind the scenes which may eventually come down from the attic and have to be dealt with. “He is the happiest, be he king or peasant, who finds peace in his home,” wrote Goethe.

"’It was a strange life,’” Lynch recalls. “‘For the first time I really lived beneath the surface. I was never aware of anything normal. I was only aware of this world of fear and art. I lived inside that cocoon of fear...I lived at 13th and Wood, right kitty-corner from the morgue; that's real industrial. At 5:00 there's nobody in that neighbourhood. No one lives there. And I really do like that. It's beautiful, if you see it the right way...as you go around in Philadelphia you see things and thoughts begin to form...I saw a woman in a backyard squawking like a chicken, crawling on her hands and knees in tall, dry grass. I saw many strange things...I saw a grown woman grab her breasts and speak like a baby, complaining her nipples hurt. This kind of thing will set you back...a large family was going to a christening of this small baby. And a gang came swooping down on the other side of the street, and attacked the family. And in the family there was a teenage son who tried to defend the whole bunch, and they beat him down, and they shot him in the back of the head.’" (ibid.).

That was how Lynch’s first eerie film Eraserhead came about. From an amazon.com review: “Henry Spencer (Jack Nance) is a regular guy forced to live in a rotten industrial neighbourhood. His wife is tired of their baby's constant crying and goes home, leaving Henry to do the right thing. He dallies with the Beautiful Woman Across The Hall, but The Baby frightens her off.” He loses his wife and is left with this vile little monster to which she gave birth. “Henry's world collapses around him...but he ends up in the arms of the Lady In The Radiator, who has been singing songs about Heaven to him all this time...Charlie Chaplin once observed that if you exaggerate any human hardship enough it becomes funny. Henry's life is so bad that it becomes ridiculous and verges on slapstick comedy.” Another Amazon review states: “At its most simplistic it's Lynch's fears and horror concerning ‘family’ and ‘industrialism’ taken to the nth degree.” Lynch: "’When you look at a girl, something crosses from her to you, and in this story, that something was an insect which grew in this man's attic, which was like his mind. The house was like his head. And the thing grew and metamorphosed into this monster which overtook him. He didn't become it, but he had to deal with it, and it drove him to completely ruining his home.’" (www.geocities.com/~mikehartmann/ehabout.html). Jack Nance remembers, “‘David went through a spiritual crisis when he was making Eraserhead. That's when he developed his program of meditation.’" (ibid.).

Caine (David Carradine): “No man has fear until fear comes to him.”

                - Kung Fu (Season 2, Episode 7, ‘The Tong,’ 1973).

[Coincidentally] “Everyone in this world does what we have to, to survive.” - Trisha (TV chat show host). Trisha’s way of trying to make the nasty, aggressive black women in the audience more understanding with regard to the large woman who doesn’t like clothes and takes hers off in public.

“When a man embarks on the warriors' path he becomes aware, in a gradual manner, that ordinary life has been left forever behind. The means of the ordinary world are no longer a buffer to him; and he must adopt a new way of life if he is going to survive.” - don Juan (Tales of Power by Carlos Castaneda (Pocket Books, New York, U.S., 1974).

“Turn your face to the sun and the shadows fall behind you.” - Maori Proverb.

AAt the height of laughter, the universe is flung into a kaleidoscope of new possibilities.@ - Jean Houston.

“You come here and you come here and you come here for the vitality and the intensity of the emotional feeling. That is all. All of these scenarios that you create, all of the stories - you do it for the feeling. Now instead of the feeling being fear you can change that so that the feeling is love and joy and laughter and play and play and play and play and [short pause] play! [Soft laughter]. And remember that laughter indeed is the greatest aligner, hmm? Do you know when you have a good old belly laugh, there is no past and there is no future? There is only that glorious NOW with all of your energy centres open. You are BEING all that you can BE in that now! This is supposed to be good fun. It is called Enlightenment, not enheavyment. [Laughter].” - P'taah (channelled through Jani King, March 2011, www.ptaah.com).