Precedentes judiciales

Faced with disappointment, it is all too easy to fall into a pattern of negativity. The day after receiving troubling news about a pro-motion, you may walk into a planning session and realize that your voice is not being heard, your ideas are not given credence, and your state of awareness is dimmed. You are preoccupied with the question, What went wrong? Look around you. It is written all over their faces, isn’t it?

Maybe not. Maybe you are just imagining this, retreating into a shell of paranoia. If you think people react solely on the basis of your most recent successes or failures, this will feed anxiety, creating a vicious cycle of inner turmoil and outward misunderstanding. How did you end up so out of tune with yourself and unaligned with your community of peers who help determine your reputation and the recognition you receive?

Why does it seem that the more you try to achieve a goal through direct means, the more elusive and evasive it becomes?

In the words of a Paul Simon song,

• You know the nearer your destination, the more you’re slip, slidin’ away.

You seek to understand why such a gap has opened up between what you expect and what occurs. Were you trying to attain too much or underselling yourself and striving for far less than you could achieve? You might look for the source of the problem in a

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particular person or group. Amid the constraints and concerns of interpersonal relations, you may feel that you are being de-ceived or betrayed by forces on a higher or a lower level of the organizational chart.

There are people who, Buddha-like, help because they believe in your cause and others who become allies only because they feel they have something to gain. Furthermore, there may be those who appear to work against you, with only their own interest at heart. An apparent supporter may turn out to take advantage and wound your sense of dignity. Or a supervisor, who seems extremely positive so long as you are producing results from which he can benefit, suddenly turns cold. Sometimes the very people you have the most faith in, or who appear unquestionably trustworthy, may suddenly seem culpable or responsible for your decline. When their behavior is examined, however, it often becomes clear that they are well meaning yet simply have a different agenda or sense of timing. Detractors may also be revealed as hidden Buddhas who only seem standoffish because they are committed to recog-nizing and rewarding merit without regard for personal interest.

Senpai had an associate who appeared bright, cheerful, and cooperative just up to the point where they achieved what they wanted. Then they, or the elusive, intangible sense of resolve and commitment to a project they represented, vanished into thin air, never to be seen or heard from again. The faucet was turned off and nothing flowed from it. This failure spoke poorly of Senpai, who would find himself in a double bind of being left in the lurch with responsibility for making up the associate’s workload while also covering for their lack of follow-through.

Visualize a small box sitting on your desk. If you look down, you can see the top clearly. You also see at least a significant part of three of the box’s sides. The fourth side can be seen if you rotate the box or if you get up and walk around to view the other side. It is accessible but only if either your or its position is changed.

What you cannot see at all is the bottom of the box, where the

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sun never shines, whose hiddenness may give it a mysterious al-lure. When you finally are able to turn the box over and see the underside for what it is, you may be aghast to discover that it is dark and corroded. It is as if you suddenly realize that termites are devouring the foundation of your home. By reconciling to this discovery, you can begin to exterminate the scourge.

In Zen folklore, spirit possession or the invasion of your psy-chic space by a magical, shape-shifting Fox that passes itself off as human is an infallible sign of delusion. This usually afflicts some-one who has a tendency to stray from the straight-and-narrow path. The Fox is great at pretending to be real. Although there are bound to be telltale signals of its true nature, as the ensnarement unfolds the victim rejects warning signals, including those of-fered by a neutral outsider. Like the chorus in a Greek tragedy, there is usually an observer present, who is unaffected by the Fox’s guile and guises and offers a word of caution that goes unheeded.

Observers may be supportive although their power to bring about change is much more limited than that of a Buddha. Yet, the vic-tim usually imagines that the observer is merely jealous, and ig-nores the signs of illusion and deception swirling about. In traditional folklore, a warning to beware is the very last thing the entranced person wants to hear while in the thrall of illusion.

Nevertheless, the observer’s clarity and insight based on the abil-ity to see all sides evenhandedly offers a crucial lesson in spiritual awareness.

Eventually, the person undergoing an infatuation or bewitch-ment comes to a mobewitch-ment of discovery. When an all-too-obvious betrayal becomes impossible to ignore, this unwelcome insight liberates the mind from the hold of ignorance and attachment.

In folklore, this happens when the fox’s tail lying just beneath the kimono or robe is exposed and the shape-shifter reverts to its original vulpine or nonhuman status. The revelatory moment leaves the victim to struggle with the realization that they have been hampered by so much deception.

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In the case of the delayed promotion or the unwanted assign-ment, is there a Fox behind the disturbance? Why did the super-visor change her mind? Perhaps an anonymous colleague spoke against you to the committee while pushing his or her own agenda?

Will you ever learn the identity of a colleague who has a knack for seizing on the vulnerability and weakness of others?

Sensing a Fox, however, is actually a sign that you have fallen into a state of disappointment, discouragement, and disillusion.

A friend of Senpai was devastated when a colleague with whom she had been closely associated seemed to undercut her. The two of them were preparing for a breakthrough project. She had the expertise and would do the lion’s share of the research, whereas he had the influence and did the networking, especially in pre-senting their file to the appropriate supervisor.

The day came when their project was to get the hearing they had been hoping for. She waited for him to return from the meet-ing to call her at 4:00 PM with the results. The phone rang at

Fox shrine at Toyokawa Inari temple in Tokyo.

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exactly 4:00 but it turned out to be someone else. This seemed like an odd coincidence. By 5:30 there was still no call from the colleague. Senpai’s friend suspected her colleague had claimed all the credit. To paraphrase Dylan,

• They’ll fox you, and then they’ll say “good luck,”

They’ll fox you, when you get hit by a truck.

The Fox’s casual indifference to your plight resembles, but is fun-damentally different from, that of a lofty Hermit who is beyond the cares of the world. But it turned out the colleague had learned of a new level of complexity in planning and was busy consulting with other parties before he did eventually get back to Senpai’s friend.

In Casablanca, lead character Rick played by Humphrey Bogart is devastated when by surprise he sees his former lover (Ingrid Bergman), who had jilted him in Paris. Reminiscing, while their favorite song is being played on the piano, he utters the words of the single most famous scene in the history of film,

• Play it, Sam. Play it again.

As the plot thickens, Rick learns that Bergman’s character had deserted him out of loyalty to her husband, a leader of the Nazi resistance movement, who was freed from prison. By the end of the story, however, neither Rick nor the viewer is completely clear about her intentions or whether she has been manipulating his feelings for ulterior motives, whether noble or not. Was she Fox or Buddha?

To use a simple metaphor, perhaps you have reached for a chocolate chip cookie without really paying attention and picked up a raisin cookie by mistake. So long as the cookie is just sitting there its real quality is unknown. You cannot tell what a cookie tastes like from touching, looking at, or even smelling it. Whether it is appealing or repellent cannot be determined until the mo-ment you bite into it. Once you take a bite it is too late to avoid an unpleasant taste. In the immortal words of Forest Gump,

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• Life is like a box of chocolates; you never know what you’re going to get.

The inseparability of Fox and Buddha is highlighted in Zen tales, which show that the Fox and the Buddha often manifest in similar guises and dis-guises. For strategic purposes, they conceal their motives and appear as something they are not. The real in-tention of allies and adversaries alike lies beneath the surface.

The Fox poses as a supporter to get what she wants. The greater the Fox’s ambition, the more she tries to appear like a helpful Buddha. Fooling you is what being a Fox, who does not want its mischief told or its methods divulged, is all about. However, an observer with nothing to lose can look at the situation objectively and may have been aware of the Fox all along. Borrowing from the Fox’s repertoire of duplicitous techniques, the Buddha poses as neutral or impartial so as not to appear to play favorites. The Buddha depends on parables and allegories, but cannot always ensure the transmitting of his message is done properly or to the desired effect.