EP 30-How Evil Are you? Karma Will Educate You

Transcription of Living the Tao – Episode 30

Title: How Evil Are You? Karma Will Educate You

Introduction to Karma and the Nature of Evil

Welcome to Living the Tao, a spiritual podcast that explores how ancient wisdom, practical perspective, and deep truth can empower you to live your best life.

In this episode, Taoist Master Mikel Steenrod describes how working with karma is the best way to understand the power of choice—including evil. After all, the universe is made of choice.

Accumulating Karma Through Consistent Action

To set out to accumulate karma, your actions must be consistent. That’s really the only rule. As you start to do that, karma will educate you.

So you’ll do something you thought was incredibly good, only to find out that you actually did evil for the first time in your life—like significant evil. Or you’ll set out to do something you thought was just outrageous and off the wall, and suddenly find out, “Ooh. Hey that had good points to it.”

You pursue consistency. You have a natural ability to know those things anyway. You just make a decision and you start going for it. And the act of doing it will educate you.

Just start wherever you’re going to start. In the beginning, you’re really learning consistency of action. And you’re learning what the nature of karma is. You won’t accumulate a massive amount of karma at that time—you’re just learning the process.

Seeing the Choice Structure

As for seeing the choice structure, if you do the first six practices, you will activate your natural ability to see the choice structure.

And it will occur in an entirely unintended way, usually stupidly, and it’ll be fantastic, and it’ll be a complete waste. But you’ll like sit down to order Chinese food and realize the elaborate net that surrounds your order of Chinese food. And you’ll see it stretch out before you in the huge span of infinity and go, “I really should be doing something with this.” And then it’ll disappear, and that’ll be enough for you to know that it actually exists.

Then eventually you’ll be able to feel the tension of it as you go through. And it will almost be like having—the net’s already inside of you. You can just track the lines in your head. You can actually feel their movement and go from there.

For most people, their first insight is visual. It comes up as some sort of visual stimulation of the visual centers in your brain. So you can actually physically see the choice structure.

But when you get past that need, what you do is you feel the movement of the net as you go along. And if you want to explore it into the future, you can do that too, because you have a right to assert your own choices. Choices are competitive by nature, but that’s just taken into consideration.

Understanding the True Nature of Evil

If you’re worried about a path to evil, as you begin to pursue the path, you will start to come to understand the true nature of evil. What that really boils down to is the willful extinguishment of choice structure. And that’s a whole different issue than choice structures competing.

Most people aren’t capable of evil, simply because what they regard as evil is actually crazy, which is a whole different thing.

The Karmic Nursery: Most People’s Starting Point

The second thing is that you have to be consistent. And most humans—so most people—are in the karmic nursery.

The karmic nursery is where your actions—the consequences of your actions—don’t really matter, just like in any nursery. If you’re throwing poop at somebody, you know you’re bad for the day, and they sit you in a corner. If you’re really nice, you’re nice for the day and they put a little hat on your head. But it’s the nursery. It doesn’t really matter.

If you want out of the nursery, then you have to do the things that come with being out of the nursery so that you’re actually taken seriously. At that time, your choices have gradually increasing power and gradually increasing effect and responsibility. So you’re held accountable for what you do.

The reason that people are in the nursery is that during the day they do a little good, they do a little neutral, and they do a little evil. The sum total of that is zero or slightly evil. Because most humans are slightly evil. They can’t be evil-evil. So they can’t be deliberately evil. Yeah, they’re like 0.2 evil on a scale of plus ten to minus ten.

Karmic Poles: Positive, Neutral, and Negative

Evil for Taoism isn’t represented by a pole of influence. Basically, there are three karmic poles: there’s a plus, a zero and a minus.

More advanced practitioners think about them this way: initially, the plus is good, the zero is neutral, and the minus pole is evil. Many things we think of as evil fit into the evil pole. Your ability to make choices that have power is dependent on how much you accumulate in any one of those poles.

You can only accumulate in one of the poles at one time. If you undertake consistent evil action, you acquire evil power. And the same thing goes for the vein of good or neutral.

What Accumulates Karma?

To understand what evil is, we have to understand what accumulates karma. Karma is accumulated by your interaction with others, your environment, and with yourself—including how you treat yourself and how you interact with sense information.

Karma is not a reward for giving someone a chocolate bar. And it’s not hugely complex. You have to work within the poles to see what’s accumulating when.

The neutral pole is the most difficult, because it’s the most internal. It’s mostly about how you address or work with sense information.

With the Taoist karmic system, as you get into the pole and you start working with it, you can see what the interactions are going to be, and then you start preferring actions in that pole, and you accumulate power there.

There isn’t a list. If you want a general guideline of how to accumulate good, just be a Buddhist. Most of the stuff you do will be good, and you’ll be at a net positive gain.

If you want neutral, you have to go into the mind disciplines—deep meditation and the art of stillness.

Action Over Theory

Karma is really accumulated by what you do with the structure and interaction of choice. We experience those as particular actions and particular feedback, but the real mechanic is the interaction of choices.

You can influence choice without doing anything physical—but you can’t do that in the beginning. That’s why neutral power is both the most difficult to understand and the most powerful.

Why Positive Power Matters Most

The calm that comes from meditation is a natural outgrowth of the mental state it creates. But positive power gives you the ability to act more than anything else will.

Imagine an island with a volcano next to a sewage plant—and a beach where lobsters cook themselves and fish flip into pots. Every day, you choose where to build your house. One is more useful to you than the other.

Positive power is not about walking around being cheerful. It’s about occupying yourself with what went well, with gratitude. You grow a plant where it can thrive, not in lava.

Sensory Hygiene: The Role of Environment

Hygiene is the control of sensory information. Religious systems use it all the time. What you put in strongly influences what you get out.

You yourself can create and control your own hygiene. Alter your environment so that it reminds you of the outcomes you want. It doesn’t do all the work, but it creates positive pressure.

Invocation: Hygiene Applied to Speech

Invocation is the repetition of statements. It’s a second-tier activity that’s actually based on first-tier principles.

There are three primary invocations:

1. Gratitude – Repeat what you’re grateful for.

2. Blessing – Direct goodwill and positive energy toward others.

3. Ward Against Evil – Use phrases like “no evil shall enter” to shift choice structures.

Each invocation alters your internal state and shapes how you interact with the world. As you practice, the phrases evolve and the effects deepen.

Final Takeaways

Spend most of your time on the first level. Not because it’s easier, but because it’s more productive. Use positive power and hygiene to prepare the ground. Then use invocation to reinforce and expand your spiritual trajectory.

Some methods will resonate more than others. That’s why you try different practices until you find what opens the door for you.

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