Monstaville Book II. Chapter 43

43

“The ideals which have lighted my way, and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty, and Truth. The trite subjects of human efforts, possessions, outward success, luxury have always seemed to me contemptible.”

- Einstein.

Spongebob (to the evil Manray): “Good people don’t rip other people’s arms off.”

Manray then demonstrates that he has been rehabilitated: “Oh, boohoohoo. Oh sob. Oh cry. Oh woe is me. You don’t know what it’s like being evil for so long. Oh-oh-oh, how I wish to be good. If only some kind heroes would show me the path to decency.”

He cons Spongebob into trying to teach him how to be good so that they will let him go. Spongebob and his pal believe they have succeeded in transforming the monster.

Spongebob: “Just look at him Patrick - the picture of goodness.”

Seconds later...

The evil Manray: “Hehehehe. The only thing I’m good at is being evil. So long suckers!”

                (Spongebob Squarepants, ‘Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy III’).

“Don’t threaten from the outside because it always strengthens people who are difficult to deal with.” - Tony Benn.

In war, if you are under attack and there is nothing you can do to defend yourself or retaliate to try to silence and deter your enemy - say you’re being tortured even - all you can really do is try to get away from the onslaught or minimise its impact on you. At the same time, you can try prayer or affirmations. You can accept the situation and choose whether or not to take revenge at a later date (if possible) - which your enemy probably has not considered.

Overcoming

Water overcomes the stone;

Without substance it requires no opening;

This is the benefit of taking no action. 

Yet benefit without action,

And experience without abstraction,

Are practised by very few.

- Laozi (Daodejing 43 translated by Tang-Wudaozi).

An episode of The Simpsons.

A scientific demonstration by different people on a stage: Ordinary salad dressing with pungent vinegar and so forth blocks the bully senses. Another demo using selected pheromones: Lisa Simpson sprays nerd, dork and sweat on herself and the bestial bully girl is let out of the cage. She roars with rage and storms towards Lisa but stops dead in her tracks when Lisa sprays the bully repellent on herself. Unfortunately, she runs out of the sample spray and the creature attacks all the geeks in the audience - as well as the viewer!

“Do not, I say to today’s women, please do not mistake sensitivity for weakness. This was the mistake which almost doomed our culture. Violence was mistaken for power, the misuse of power for strength.” - Anaïs Nin (my literary - but, unfortunately, not literal - mother! In Favour of the Sensitive Man: And Other Essays, Penguin Books Ltd., London, U.K., p.54).

 

Anaïs Nin

On weak ground: ‘God bless the weak for they shall eat dirt.’ [Dunno where I found that - The Simpsons maybe?].

‘The Geek Shall Inherit the Earth.’

“There was a time - yes, my children, the legends are true - when J.R.R. Tolkien was not cool. Really. Very much not cool. Also video games, and Spider-Man, and the X-Men. There was a time, not even that long ago, when you could get beaten up by jocks in the woods behind the backstop for being down with the X-Men. Not that this happened to me personally...The point is, things like that don't happen so much anymore. Over the past few years, an enormous shift has taken place in American culture, a disturbance in the Force, a rip in the fabric of space-time. What was once hopelessly geeky - video games, fantasy novels, science fiction, superheroes - has now, somehow, become cool. It's as if the economic hegemony of the geek in the 1990s, when high tech and the Internet were driving the economy, has somehow been converted into a cultural hegemony. Rappers and athletes trick out their Hummers with Xboxes. Supermodels insist in interviews that they used to be losers in high school...For the ectomorphs among us, it's a great time to be alive. Napoleon Dynamite is a cult hit. There are women, it is said, who find The O.C.'s Seth Cohen sexy, and men who feel the same way about bespectacled SNLer Tina Fey, to say nothing of emerging Harry Potter hottie Emma Watson. And Orlando Bloom - hello? Dude's an elf?...It's not hard to see how this happened. It's partly good business: nerds are highly employable, bursting with disposable income, and the entertainment industry has discovered them as a prime demographic to be marketed to, the same way it discovered teenage girls after Titanic. On a deeper level, there's something about the nerd's principled disdain for (or inability to abide by, same difference) ordinary social conventions that strikes Americans - a nation of nonconformists - as noble.” (From an article by Lev Grossman, 25 September 2005, www.time.com).

Bullies will be nice in public. They put on a great performance that will fool anyone and make their victim look like the black sheep because they are bitter and humiliated and this is yet another bout of being made to bow to the bully’s ego. The victim knows that yielding to other people’s pressure to be friendly and give the other guy a chance, and to make up, is simply letting the bully off the hook. So, after the ‘show,’ he carries on with his behaviour. He is, as ever, destructive towards both himself and others, ‘massacring’ everyone he finds to be suitable targets. Bullies are able to turn on the charm because they are overly extroverted creatures and deny that they have a problem. Moreover, they need to justify their displays of power.

 

Eminem’s genius: instead of putting others down, he disses himself. He confronts his skin colour, for example. He is bold but not aggressive or competing with others in order to prove himself. How can you get angry at someone who disses themselves? At the start of his career he entered hip hop MC battles in a very black, segregated area of Detroit, which took a lot of balls. He was ambitious, hungry for success, but he also helped to unite blacks and white people. [Notes from a TV documentary, I think].

Bullies deny their own aggressive behaviour which ignites the fire then blame the victims and tell everyone what they’ve done as if they have been the attackers when, in reality, their actions were taken in self-defence. That is why it is vital not to fight fire with fire. If everyone knows such truths, however, if such information becomes common knowledge, then perhaps things will be different in future and humanity will see a greater prevalence of justice.

The Dalai Lama has always lived by the principle of non-violence. He has cooperated with the Chinese Government and finally agreed that Tibet is part of China. The Chinese Government, however, being a monster, continues to label him a monster. This is an example of how stubborn the ignorant aggressor can be. The beast is too afraid to look at itself, to acknowledge the truth; for that, inevitably leads to change, and change can be a painful process. It is no wonder that the Tibetan people are at their wits end and are losing faith in their leader’s approach to the Chinese tyranny, turning to violence during the 2008 riots. However, as a reminder of the example he sets not only for his own people but the whole of humanity, see Appendix III.

Fire (element): ‘I don’t accept any of this shit. I just want what I want - and that’s it!’

People like Pigsy derive power from taking your energy. They want and intend to disturb you, to cause disturbance in order to trouble you, to hurt you and reduce your quality of life.

“I have learned silence from the talkative, tolerance from the intolerant and kindness from the unkind. I should not be ungrateful to those teachers.” - Kahlil Gibran.

A Buddhist friend told me that a group of people buried the Zen monk Ryokan alive because he disagreed with them. When asked why he didn’t complain, he said it was because it didn’t make any difference to him whether he lived or died.

Retrospective inserts.

“Cut past your complaints (you have rehearsed them enough) and get right to your solutions.” - Betty Perkins (Lion Taming. The courage to deal with difficult people including yourself, Tzedakah Publications, CA., U.S., 1995, p.111).

‘Everything Serves Love’ (notes from ‘Who Are the Ascended Masters?’ a talk by St. Germain and the Ascended Masters channelled through Ashamarae McNamara, 12 June 2009, www.awakeningfromwithin.com).

• You increase your sweetness, wisdom, money, laughter by giving it away. Hoarding it, keeping it to yourself, being ‘too humble,’ is uncomfortable; it gets stuck. Give it away and then it comes back.
• If they gave you an odd look, reprogramme yourself in that moment and then they change and become more open later. It gives them hope.
• A cranky, miserable person is someone who is screaming - begging - for love the only way they know how. They know no other way but than to attack you.
• Your mission in this life – your sole mission in life – is to love, to express the embodiment of love that you are. Every experience is only there for you to express love. If you express it you will get it from within you. How simple is that? There is no complexity in life. I increase it (love) and all good comes to me. I want for nothing. Everything serves love. If I want money it is there. Everything is in service to love.
• You have a magical wand in your hand. Wave it. Say, ‘Thank you,’ and more of the sustenance that supports you comes in. ‘I don’t have that’: wave your magic wand. When you condemn [and if you are complaining or being bitter about the past or looking at what you don’t have, etc] you rob yourself. It is like opening a tap and letting the water our down the drain. The simplest alchemical tool is to love others – silently. Love knows everything. All in Creation exists within love. Sacrifice your pride, your arrogance (‘I know it’) to love. To do that you must share it. What you share grows.
• May you always seek the Light/Love/God in your heart first. May that be your guru (‘Gee, You Are You’). Turn within for everything. Don’t rely on a guru, etc., for example, an Ascended Master!’

“People whose souls have no acquaintance with melancholy are those whose souls have no presentiment of metamorphosis.” - Soren Kierkegaard.

“Self-importance is the motivating force for every attack of melancholy. Warriors are entitled to have profound states of sadness, but that sadness is there only to make them laugh.” - Carlos Castaneda (The Fire From Within, Simon & Schuster, New York, U.S., 1984).