The Zen Master with Sticks

I remember a day in the Fall a few years ago when I was waiting for the elevator together with a colleague and I pointed out a new artwork to him which depicted a beach somewhere in Cape Cod with a beautiful cloud formation and when he asked me what I thought it stood for I answered, 'the sky is the limit'. 'Strange', he responded, 'it makes me feel insignificant. The painting seems to portray the perspective of an insect'. On that day he was laid off given that our firm had to downsize in the aftermath of the global financial crisis.

We humans are psychics at times. We feel it in our bones when a negative event is likely to hit us even though we consciously would never admit it. I have been a Tao traveler for a number of years now and have observed something odd. I observed that days when you pursue your not-so-holy activities tend to be more stressful than others. Does that mean that the Tao punishes us very much like a Zen master with a stick, ready to swing it at the poor student whenever he has missed a Zen moment just to hammer the necessary alertness and awareness into him? 

Possible, but unlikely. I rather think that you cut into your own power supply as you develop a bad conscience. So the day would have been challenging anyway, but you felt that trouble was heading your way so you felt more inclined to let your more destructive nature run its course. And as your energy dropped in the aftermath, you experienced the consequences as more harmful as otherwise would have been necessary. Viewed from that perspective, it indeed looks as if the To beats you up over your missteps.

 I remember once someone saying in a spiritual forum that you could kill a man in the morning and still ascend to Heaven in the afternoon. Well, I don't know about that, but I get the idea that if you somehow can get rid of your guilt, your energy should manage to rebound since the Tao always welcomes you with open arms very much like the prodigal son in the Bible.

So I could imagine a very advanced soul who deliberately hurts the Devine order and then makes a symbolic act of cleansing and his sins are washed away in the process and the laws of karma are disengaged. Of course, if this is all too intellectual or questionable for you, you can always follow the advice of the Buddha instead: 'Just do the right thing', and you will be all-set along your Way. Unfortunately it doesn't really work like that. A spiritual path is like everything else in nature, for every two steps forward there has to be one backwards. Just make sure that in the aggregate you are headed in the right direction otherwise the Zen master will get you with his stick in the end.