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Offbeat – 25 April 14

The roadrunner is not the most interesting character in the cartoon. It’s Wile E. Coyote who gets the laughs, and the pain.

Karma is fun. I still have a huge fondness for Roadrunner cartoons, and particularly Wile E. Coyote. The script never varies. Wile E. sets out with the desire for a meal, and a cunning plan in his head, then something interesting happens to make me laugh out loud. I know I should be doing more edifying stuff, but I always have time for that particular five or six minutes of pleasure.
Kids should be made to think about what they see when they watch those cartoons. There’s something very significant about them. Call it the most basic lesson in karma. “If you do bad stuff, bad stuff will happen to you, so be cool and do no evil. Remember what happened to little Johnny when he tried to burn down the health food shop. Now you can carry on laughing.”
The principal extends easily. If you don’t bother throwing away your rubbish, it will get a life of its own, start to smell and sooner or later you will get to stink. That means you will have no friends.
If you mess with the environment by polluting, Mother Nature is going to clout you around the ear with climate change and the beach house you are so happy with will be washed away in the rising tide.
If you steal everyone is going to get irritable and hurt, and lock you away so you can’t steal, and the folks you get locked away with will steal from you.
It holds just as true on a personal level. If you are mean to people, they will be mean back to you, normally sooner rather than later, after which they will cut you out of their lives. If you get personal satisfaction from being mean, expect a whole lot of bad karma until you finally get it right to lose your fetish.
And don’t try to defer it by pulling a Machiavellian stunt that gets two people to fight with one another, because then you will get hammered from both sides as soon as the dust settles and everyone sees clearly. Nobody is keen on fighting, and nobody wants your complexity in their lives.
One other thing. Time is a fixed progression and there is no going back. You live now with the things you did then. If you think you can buy back what you did, it’s not going to help. The anger and revulsion will still be there after the brief interest in the money or gift goes away..
Thinking about things, happiness at its best is the most simple thing. It’s the smile of a lover, a friend or a family member. It’s a dog wagging its tail at you or a cat rubbing up against you. It could be something as simple as a few minutes relaxing on the kitchen step with a cup of coffee.
There are plenty of opportunities. Find a reason to smile and enjoy the moment. If there are things in your way to achieving that, don’t dwell to long on ways to manipulate the situation if it is to the detriment of others. Move on and find other reasons to be happy and content. No, throwing money at it won’t help either
The very basic karmic principle is not the reciprocal nature of good and bad deeds. It is absolute simplicity. The more complex your needs, the more people and things have to be involved. That means that a lot of factors have to be manipulated and sooner or later something is going to go wrong, or someone will get rubbed up the wrong way. If your needs are simple and personal, you can give friendship, help and smiles without desire for reward, because they will come back to you.
There might be a downside. If you live in an open, honest way, people might take you for an idiot, and try to abuse you. You will be excluded from whatever they are trying to get, or you might feel like a pawn. The point is that you become a mechanism in their bad karma though, so it is something that will hurt you. If you take that to heart, the person becomes a drain on you and you know what to do. The real trick will be not to harm the person when you need to expose motives, secrets and schemes.
There’s an incredibly valuable lesson in this. The roadrunner is not the most interesting character in the cartoon. It’s Wile E. Coyote who gets the laughs, and all the pain.

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