Turn the other cheek?

It is interesting being in a position to see a continuous sequence of different people in a setting that lends itself to watching their behavior.

It amazes me to see how many people set themselves up for difficulty and conflict over what is essentially nothing.

Here's how it frequently goes.

A person will choose to occupy a location that blocks a pedestrian thoroughfare and then ignore the people around them.

The flow of pedestrian traffic will start to back up and someone will politely ask the blocking person to excuse them, and that person will look at them but then ignore them.

The traffic flow will continue to back up as more and more people have to wait for the oportunity to get around the blocking person.

The blocking person knows that they are interfering with the flow of traffic but chooses to assert themselves and their imagined right to interfere with the traffic flow.

Then someone comes along and points out that the person is obstructing the flow of traffic and request that the person move along, to which the blocking person responds to the advising person by telling them to mind their own business.

The advising person then wisely contacts whoever is in authority for the area being blocked, and the authority comes and tells the blocking person to move, to which the blocking person asserts their imagined right to be where they are. If this is happening on private property the authority will typically try to convince the blocking person to move along. But if the blocking person refuses to move along, the authority will (in Nevada, anyway) eventually Trespass Warn the person and then about five minutes later handcuff the person and turn them over to the police. The police will then generally cite or arrest the person, but either way they are now forced to leave the premisses and never come back under threat of immediate arrest, and are now in an un-winnable situation where they have to pay fines or pay lawyers to prevent them from paying fines.

And this is the best case scenario.

A more likely outcome is that someone that is being blocked will wait until they are right beside the blocking person and then beat them like a bad dog, and then walk away. And someone else will hang around long enough to tell the responding authorities what it was that led up to the beating, but will mysteriously be unable to provide any description of the person who did the beating.

So what exactly does this all have to do with turning the other cheek?

As with the admonishment that 'should your left eye offend you, pluck it out', it is unlikely that it was meant literally.

You should, instead, adopt a behavior pattern on your Heaven Path travels that assumes that when you are struck you will have no other recourse but to turn the other cheek.

In other words, if you behave in a manner that will provoke people to hit you, assume that your only reward will be that you will have to now lead with the other side for the next hit to avoid the significantly greater damage that will come with taking a second hit on the cheek that is already been injured.