More On Civil Disobedience by Comic Book Shaman chapter 2

More On Civil Disobedience
by Comic Book Shaman 
chapter 2 (approx 5300 words)

Chapter 2

To Be Present in Every Moment

86
Breathing

Present Moment, Wonderful Moment

Present moment, wonderful moment. Everything we can do, say or feel we may only do now, in the present moment. What is done, said or felt in the past is history and in future is speculation. The now is where it’s at. Now is when we can experience gratification (also pain of course, but remember that if a thing is true, its opposite is also true.), and experiencing gratification is what everyone wants.

87

Now or Never

We may enjoy anticipation or relief or suffer dread or regret only in the present moment. Any given stream of moments may contain an infinite variety of emotions. Our minds exist in the now. Although it existed in the past and will continue to exist in the future we can only use our mind in the now. The practical effect of this is that notwithstanding all of one’s knowledge and experience, now is when we must be able to make use of our mental resources for them to truly gratify us.

88
Lazy Distraction

I’m not saying that you can’t reconsider a thing after the fact, but only that you look good and feel good if your answers are on the tip of your tongue. There is not a person in the world that wouldn’t rather be seen and thought of as smart. Sadly many people are unjustly thought of as other than smart because their minds are not functioning in the now, and they process the pertinent information only after it was called for. This is not the effect of a mind that is necessarily malfunctioning or inferior, but one that is distracted, preoccupied or lazy.

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Preoccupation

Exercising the brain is a very real, effective and gratifying activity. Preoccupation supposes activity of the brain but its effects may be positive, harmless or negative depending on the character of the thoughts. If we are considering aspects of our knowledge and understanding in service of our work or activity it is probably positive. If we are preoccupied with anticipation, mental gratification or in review of some trivial data it is probably harmless, but if we are consumed with feelings of dread or regret or shame or inadequacy, such mental labor is definitely negative.

90
Emotional Variables

In practice our thoughts come at random, with positive, neutral and negative emotions arising in combination. The more we have the habit of thinking deeply about our interests and concerns the better able we are to process the huge volume of data a human being collects in her brain, the smarter we appear and in fact are. It sounds simple and indeed it is, but its simplicity is based upon complexity. The emotional variables I have already described; anticipation/dread, relief/regret, pride/shame and competence/inadequacy are only four pairs of isolated examples of the obstacles to clear mental functioning we face every day. The combinations are infinite and this factor is what makes the minds working so wonderful and can equally make it sad, angry, unhappy, depressed or terrified.

91
Breathe Deeply

Fortunately our brain is connected to our lungs, and awareness of our breath can bring calm to a tired, disturbed or racing mind. The brain requires oxygen for proper function. When you consider your breath your breathing becomes measured and more medicinally effective, and as a bonus negative mental formations dissipate. Of course they may return again and again, but returning to your breath is always calming and when we are calm our mind functions in the most clear and effective manner.

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Optimal Distraction

To bring up data, consider a problem, answer a question, accomplish a task, perform a labor, settle a dispute or create an artwork with a calm state of mind is to perform at optimal efficiency. Distracting emotions, however positive or negative heap variables upon our mind and deteriorate its performance. Each of us has an optimal performance level if we can only reach it, but we are each separated from it to individual degrees by our concerns and emotions.

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Don’t Give Up

This is the nature of personality. How our minds process our data, emotions, beliefs, understandings and experiences manifest in our personality and it determines how we see the world and how the world sees us. We all have our strong points and our faults that balance one another for the most part, and it is understood that no one is perfect. But we would like to be perfect and each of us attempts to be perfect in at least some small aspect of our lives. So we try and fail. No disgrace, start again. There is no disgrace in attempting to reach a standard and falling short. The tragedy is when we give up for feelings of inadequacy, regret or shame.

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Personality Development

If you try to do something at a certain level and are unsuccessful for lack of education, understanding, experience or ability, do not despair. Setting the bar a notch lower may bring success and a platform from which to reach your higher goal in time. While we are learning, experiencing or doing our mind develops and our skills become sharper. Our attention to positive aspects of life and striving for self-improvement brings intellectual development that combats many negative emotions and improves our personalities.

95
Paramount Distraction

Perhaps the greatest influence on our personalities is our libido. Excluding purposes of reproduction, ones attraction to another person or people and the desire to have a partner is universal. Our personality equations are precariously complex dealing on our own. With the introduction of a spouse everything is compounded exponentially by the reality of two wills combining to co-habit. Today most relationships operate and find some equilibrium by compromises on the part of both partners. In this section I address heterosexual relationships because they are most common and pose specific problems, and I have not observed Gay relationships to be much different except perhaps more stressful.

96
Gender-Neutral

The first problem is that man and women are opposites. When a thing is true, its opposite is also true. This I suppose is an axiom of kharma. Men stick out and women take them in. this is a cold fact of reproductive plumbing and an enveloping reality of human personality. What I write about the roles and activities of men and women I write as gender neutral because what is true of men is also true of women, and vice versa.

97
Happy Ever After

I feel I can best address the affairs of the heart by relating my own hopes, expectations, experience, shortcomings and satisfaction in pursuit of the opposite sex. I like girls; especially pretty ones, and particularly smart, pretty ones. I can’t help it, I do. My regard for such women goes back to my earliest memory and it has always been my desire to have their attentions. So what did I wish to do with these women and girls? As a child the only thing I knew to do with a girl was to marry her and live happily ever after. This was the earliest and primary use of a girl as I understood things, and I suppose this has never receded much in my personality.

98
Have Your Way

Having a mother and three sisters I could appreciate the labor they performed, while I, the sole male progeny, was spared toil cleaning house and in the kitchen. 1958 was in the dying gasps of a particular sort of female subjugation. I next became aware of the fooling around aspects of boys and girls. Over reliance on the forever after bit soon soured girls on my attentions, and self-image problems from overweight and general weird dorky-ness largely excluded me from girls during adolescence. Then I learned a trick! If a girl thinks you know what you are talking about she will talk to you and get close to you as long as you can keep her entertained. I derived from my experiences that some women are driven by a yearning to know more, and that if you can answer the questions she holds closest to her heart you can pretty much have your way with her.

99
Hoodwink Effect

You see I discovered that someone had written down everything there is to know about women, in Sanskrit, a thousand years before Christ, and nothing’s changed a bit. The secret to having any woman you desire is to make yourself into the person she wants to be with. Only be careful of what you become in getting what you want. Time and again I would expend great effort and expense to in effect hoodwink some young lovely to where I wanted her, only to commit the act and find that penetration changes everything. My individual will, which brought about the relationship, would run into her will and invariably we would degenerate, post haste.

100
Get a Haircut

When knowledge and experience exceed comprehension mistakes repeat time and time again, until hopefully you reach an understanding. My understanding came finally when sex became repellant, because it changed a valued friend into a demanding shrew. I lost many of my best friends through penetrating wrongdoing. I was left to embrace celibacy by my realization that I simply could not afford a girlfriend. My innate abilities allow me to survive at a certain level. Compromises in my integrity and conformity to conventions I deplore are the key to financial and sexual advancement, but my reluctance to cut my hair and get a serious job leaves me at particular economic disadvantage.

101
Emotional Peace Range

One has the option of sponging off a chick. Certainly easy enough to do in our culture in which women are in such pain that they ease it with approval and acceptance from men. But if you take from them you ought to make them happy, and may be, or pretend to be other than you would like to be. Even in times when I was economically ahead and could provide the support a woman needed, I was confounded by the fact of her free will and made miserable by foolish things, which twisted my personality and disrupted my practice. Truly if one’s goal is utter peace and mental tranquility she must proceed in celibacy, without the distractions of spouse and family. Fortunately the range of emotion between total peace and cheerful tolerance is great indeed, and everyone may find a place in this range with practice and determination.

102
The Nature of Housework

The roles of provider and homemaker are obscure shadows of a stage in human development when such were necessary and expedient. Many of us in America and around the world have transcended this reality and face a new reality. The labors necessary to maintain a home are constant, demanding and must be performed by someone. The nature of housework is that it is a body of not so difficult but tedious and time-consuming work. A husband’s occasional undertaking of the household chores may leave him thinking the work is simple and undemanding, but the reality of its uncompensated, unappreciated and unending demands on the homemaker are oppressive to the mind and a drug to the spirit.

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What’s Inequitable?

If one spouse makes all the money and the other does all the housework there exists an inequitable distribution of labor. Both the tedious labor of mundane existence and the more rewarding labor of economic prosperity should be shared, because the rewards of doing the simple labors of housework for ourselves keep us in touch with life. Any person who enjoys the role of homemaker may certainly excel in it and be happy, and one may be perfectly enlightened without touching housework. It is merely a bone of contention in many problem equations. The inequity exists only when one party thinks it exists.

104
Superior Satisfaction

For happiness, intellectual and personality development we must have some goals or interests outside of simple subsistence. Achieving our goals and pursuing our interests brings a particular satisfaction, found nowhere else. This type of satisfaction is often confused with the temporary relief of suffering we may experience from material gratification of our desires. Pursuing sex, using drugs, following fashions, excessive devotion to religions or other dogmatic beliefs, acquiring material objects or lording our superiority over others are all examples of behavior rooted in suffering. I do not assert that these things are wrong, only that they exist as separate realities within people and are variables that make up the equations of our personalities.

105
Personality’s Breath

I do not advocate a prescription to the constitution of any personality other than my own. The basis of the efficacy of my thesis is free will. But I do assert that personal inattention to our personalities as precise, mathematical propositions, over which we have total control, is the root of much suffering. The understanding and exercise of each personality is one step towards its prosperity. Our personality is akin to breath. It operates automatically to sustain us, and if we give it due consideration it may serve us well.

Compassion

106
Valuable Transmission

It is easy to have compassion for children. They are small and weak and inexperienced and cute, so we have great patience with them, particularly our own children. We love our children, and the compassion we feel for their suffering compels us to protect them and teach them to be prepared for life. Our view of life is what we transmit to our children as best we can. Depending on our station in life we may see it as full of opportunity or full of hardship. This range of perception is transmitted to children of all sorts, from the richest and the poorest of parents. Generalizations are not possible or sensible because every case is individual. This is the range of personality.

107
On Inbred Morons

From wherever we started to the present moment our personality steadily rises as we learn and develop. Some of us are fortunate to have formed balanced and developed personalities in childhood. Unfortunately some children are not so lucky. Some children have no role models that love them and can put out for them. They may acquire personality deficits, in ethics or hygiene or education or what have you. Many grow up and marry, if they’re lucky, to a balancing personality so that they may develop together. Compounding undeveloped personalities down through generations is detrimental to all concerned but may be observed everywhere. This is also the result of free will, and our right to be inbred morons is inviolable, but it isn’t necessary.

108
Don’t Give Up

Each of us has the potential to improve our minds and personalities, but it can be difficult labor sometimes. Sorting out one’s personality equations is a task for a lifetime, and cannot be accomplished with a days’ labor, but one day’s deep pondering of one’s personality will certainly suggest avenues to understanding of solutions to our problems. Negative emotions such as fear, jealousy, inadequacy, regret and longing are a few guideposts to investigate in seeking self-improvement. See yourself with compassionate eyes, and clearly see the thoughts, speech and actions you take that cause these emotions to arise in you. Recognize your deficits, be they in education, training, experience or self-confidence and try to visualize a means to overcome them. You will probably find that some things you can change immediately by moderating your desires. Other aspects may take years before you finally conquer them, but you will if you don’t give up.

109
Development or Medication?

After the negative emotions try examining the things that make you feel good. Determine if your pleasures are positive and apt to lead you in directions you want to go in or if they cause suffering to others or to yourself. Are you pursuing avenues of improvement or medicating pain with your decisions? Discovering the answer to this may be difficult, even painful for many people, and may entail a good deal of mental labor to arrive at the truth.

110
Guaranteed

We are often reluctant to take on a new task, especially one that appears difficult, and that we think we may not be able to accomplish. This method of personality examination and development cannot fail to be effective, but we must proceed with caution. Your meditations will no doubt isolate any weakness in your character, but you must then form a workable plan to correct them. If you knock out the props on a particular vice, you may find that it supports various other aspects of your personality that may in turn crash around you.

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Suffering Alcoholic

For instance an alcoholic may use her drinking to support her self- esteem, to relieve pain from work, family or social situations, or to ease her minds repeated returning to explorations she may be mentally or emotionally ill-equipped to tackle. Alcohol medicates all of these factors and compounds them causing great pain in our mind and suffering to our existence. If we can isolate our problems and ease them one at a time in whatever method we may devise, little by little our suffering will ease and our dependence on alcohol may diminish.

112
Melt Your Pain

Eventually compassion for one’s self transforms into compassion for others. In examining why we are hurt by or become angry at the words or actions of others we always arrive at why? Why did he say that? Why did she do that? The answers are invariably rooted in the other person’s desires, responsibilities, fears, jealousies, pain or meanness. Compassion recognizes and appreciates these reasons, and melts the reasons for their pain within us. Although compassion may not kill our pain entirely it will reduce it to a manageable level, so that with practice and the passage of time we may leave it behind. It is the carrying of our pain with us eternally that weighs us down and inflicts our suffering.

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Right Livelihood

Have it Your Way

The sort of livelihood that is right for a person who feels compassion, seeks prosperity and has developed her personality varies with the individual, but may be described as right livelihood. It does not depend on laws or rules or guidelines but comes from within a person to decide her actions. In seeking right livelihood for ourselves we certainly establish our own laws, rules and guidelines, and this is how it may properly be achieved. Our practicing compassion tells us if and when our speech or actions cause suffering or hardship for others, and also if these consequences are positive or neutral or negative. Compassion and right livelihood do not demand that we devote ourselves to not causing, or even relieving suffering in others. Only that we do not engage in negative or criminal thought, speech or activity.

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Thoreau Explained This

As I live my life rightly and work hard, pursue my interests and hurt no one, it is in no way just that I be forced to support, prolong or participate in what I feel is injustice. Very often in life we are presented with injustice as part of our life, employment or activities. Sometimes we may appear to benefit from these injustices, and other times we feel repressed by them. Public schools are a good example of this fact. Although public schools are intended to give everyone a basic sort education, but a combination of factors make certain schools better than others, and the school you or your children attend may provide adequate education or it may not. Right livelihood demands that we seek the best education possible for ourselves, and our children. If our school is inadequate we may work to improve it while we provide the necessary incentives to learning to ourselves, and our children. If we encounter obstacles to improvement of our public schools we need not devote ourselves to correcting them. Such battles may consume a person’s life, and there is nothing right about that. Better to concentrate on us, and our children to develop in them the comprehensive understanding of life that its prosperous living demands.

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Present Tyranny

It is onerous indeed to be forced to support a poor school system, especially if you do not wish to use it and deplore the results of its use by others. Our present public school system was formed to meet the needs of a bygone state of human development. Our continuing to maintain it is only a political expedient, but our being required to support it is tyranny.

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Compounded Injustice

Those in our society that recognize this and have the means, send their children to private schools which are not ruled by central bureaucratic administration, compounding the injustice and separation from opportunity suffered by less advantaged persons. Right livelihood may demand that we separate ourselves from tyranny and in no way give it our support. For, to be forced to pay for an injustice to be committed is the same thing as committing it our self. Unfortunately we are compelled by the State to materially support an injustice we may deplore. If we follow our conscience and refuse to pay the school levy we risk disruption of our lives and confiscation of our property. Although concerted and expensive assertion of our rights may exonerate us in the end, the price is dear, and the effort required great, and we may have better pursuits for our attention.

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Mob Protection

Many of us are driven to various extremes by the pain of this injustice. Some come to scorn material things and structure their existence in primitive ways to avoid participation in society. Most live more normal lives, and pay their taxes as mob protection to maintain their property, but with trepidation, and suffer in doing so both emotionally and financially.

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The Root of Oppression

Many people pay their taxes enthusiastically and think the government should do more for us. These fundamentally misunderstand the structure, strengths and limitations of the constitution of our government. Such people believe that problems are mysterious and are only solved by luck. This property we have of self-consideration without regard for self-improvement is highly prized by the tyrant. All of the power and gratification that a politician may enjoy in office comes from the ignorant acceptance of the status quo by people unable to recognize the ultimate root of their oppression.

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Concentrated Appropriate Behavior

Right thought and actions bring understandings that dispel negative mental formations that screen the truth from us. Greater understanding brings a reduction in fear and inadequacy and allows us to speak of injustice, and this is the first step to its remedy. Right livelihood imparts appropriate behavior and speech, making us ideal friends, neighbors and citizens. Our concentrated appropriate behavior and speech may act as a switch to prevent us from causing suffering to others, or as a dynamo to power accomplishments without limit. Just as we all have limitations we each have potential remedies for improvement. It all depends on the many things that arise before and within us as obstacles.

Dependant Co-Arising

120
Practicing Meditation

Emotions arise up from within constantly, sometimes incessantly. They are the result of all sorts of physical and mental stimulation we experience in the course of our lives. Practicing meditation in any or all of its many forms helps us to understand and reduce the imposition of negative emotions into our minds.

121
Same Ol’ Suffering

Consider that suffering exists. Consider that suffering may be as slight as needing a tissue or as great as having lost one’s mother. Whatever its cause, suffering is by nature the same, only our perceptions make it seem different. It is valuable to be able to set a degree to suffering, and to determine whether suffering is cause or result of a particular situation.

122
Personality Inter-Connected to Nature

In examining our suffering we may find its causes. Beyond the obvious causes there may be deeper, hidden causes that may require their own meditations to discover their cause. This inter-connected nature of human personality is true of all of nature. We may find strength in the mysterious but wonderful workings of nature, and understand the same can be true for personkind, if we each had developed personalities.

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Hosannas Amen

Well guess what? Enough of us do have developed personalities to run the world in an entirely more appropriate manner. We do it already to a great degree. When Buddha and Jesus and Mohamed and Thoreau and Dr. King JR gave us their messages they were dreams and portents for the future, but the future has truly arrived. It is only a matter of time before universal understanding of the situation on this planet is achieved through advanced research and the Inter-net. Little Janey has access to more power in her ‘smart phone’ than Ike wielded at Normandy. Fundamental shifts in reality must bring a search for the fundamental new truths, which are its foundation.

124
Mental Clutter

This understanding can be exhilarating, but its truth does not make a society change itself. All will happen in the fullness of time. A year, a decade, a century, each leaves its degree of progress. Progress that once took a century to become prevalent today can prevail over night. Each of us holds the power to make a material contribution by undertaking right livelihood. But in living right we still experience pain from life’s realities. Emotions arise within us, appearing like mushrooms to create obstacles within our minds. Meditation brings the ability to recognize these emotions as they arise, and enables us to dismiss them so that they do not clutter our minds.

Community

125
Production and Consumption

The solutions to all of our problems, the world over, are in our community. Our right livelihood is observed and practiced in our community, and we observe countless other practitioners every day. We combine to provide all essential services in towns, cities and various communities everywhere. Most are delivered privately, but government, at its various levels provides some services. We each contribute to our community with our labor and production, and also with our consumption. We live, we work, we eat, we shop etc. The manifestations of our work and consumption are the roads and buildings and automobiles and everything else that people create. Everything comes to us through work and sacrifice to save and create capital, employing capital for advancement, and continuous work and attention to right livelihood. From the lowliest young artist to the greatest corporate CEO these principals are identical, and the young artist who grasps them may ascend to such a high position.

126
On Child Molesters

The obstacles to community harmony include fear and lack of compassion. There are many examples, but I will illustrate with child molesters. Surely child molesters represent the lowest and most debased a person may become. The reasons for their actions are rooted in their personality. Regardless of their actions they are reacting to powerful mental formations that control and confuse their minds. Such a person may be helped and perhaps cured, but only by compassionate acceptance, not acceptance of their inappropriate actions, but simple acceptance of their humanity, and of them being troubled and needing help. Most child molesters would benefit from a period of compassionate incarceration at productive labor. As a released former child molester returns to the community it may properly be notified of the fact.

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How to Fix ‘em

Upon learning that there is a former child molester in your neighborhood, a thing to do, if we feel we must do something, would be to go to his house with our whole family and knock on his door. Tell him politely who we are and what we have heard about him, and that we are prepared to forgive him. Plainly state our concern for our children and emphasize that our family has no fear or animosity towards him, but that we will be watching him closely for inappropriate behavior, and will not tolerate it. Such a visit would give your average child molester more dignity than he has ever received in his life. It is a thing that promotes self-awareness and self-confidence and turns us away from misdeeds. In considering what compassion can do for the most debased of us we may perceive the wonders it can do for the rest of us.

128
More Fear

Of course we have other fears for our children and for ourselves from crime and bad influences which exist in our community. As with child molesters, these concerns have their causes and remedies. The primary cause of these problems in every case is individual.

129
Free the Workers

In communities that are prosperous the incidence of crime is reduced and comes largely from outside. In communities that are depressed by poverty or disharmony crime is more prevalent and concentrated. Without the constraints of regulation and taxation anyone who needed services performed could easily hire someone to do them at a price satisfactory to both parties. Everyone would find opportunities for occupation, which provides valuable experience and a work ethic on which one may eventually build a career.

130
Can’t Do What?

Under present regulations we may not legally employ the multitude of unemployed and under employed people who would love to sweep our business, do our housework, our yard work, wash our cars, mind our children, cook our meals or entertain at our parties. We are required to record each transaction in detail and pay a tax on it or be subject to civil penalty. We are told this is for our own good but it benefits only the tyrant and his cronies, who profit by the inequities of the system. This fact excludes too many of the least advantaged and the least developed of us from finding employment that can support us with dignity and fulfill us intellectually and emotionally, and makes crime an attractive proposition to so many of us.

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Good Neighbors

Next we consider free will and good neighbors. We own our property and are free to use it as we wish. That having been said we must understand that our neighbor also owns her property and may do with it as she pleases. As neighborhoods concentrate problems of clashing wills become a consideration. We deal with this by means of zoning regulations, property covenants and various other means of deciding the appropriate common uses of private property.

132
Be Nice

Good fences make good neighbors, both physically and metaphorically. Of course we are free to believe and act as we wish, but we must be careful not to inflict our beliefs, interests or concerns upon our neighbors. We must be aware of our actions, our children’s actions, our animal’s actions and of any noise, smoke, fumes or projectiles that may be emitted from our property and which may affect our neighbors. We may decide that some things are better carried out off of our property at a more appropriate place or time.

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Sweet Charity

Finally a community must address the issue of want. Jesus told us that there would always be poor people. He understood human nature and recognized that it takes time and effort for some people to realize where their interests lie. Even after we have overthrown government regulation and taxation, and opportunities are prevalent and available to everyone, some of us will still be defeated by our mental formations, and unable to support ourselves. Fortunately the compassion, concern and desire to help these people is widespread among us. Services to sustain such people will materialize from the private concern of free people who control our income and choose to allocate a portion voluntarily for their support.

End of Chapter 2

Published under Creative Commons License; (attribute) Contents copyright 2014 by Comic Book Shaman (Donald Rex), all rights reserved.

Intellectual property, take only as necessary.