Expectation and Envy

I have not posted in nearly three weeks, the longest I have gone since beginning this blog. I feel a little rusty and even somewhat hesitant, as if it has become unfamiliar. I also feel a bit guilty, as if I have neglected a duty rather than just taken a break from something that is, in the final analysis, a recreation. More about that later....

I have this tendency to think I have gotten to the point where there is little left to learn about myself or about my relations with other beings. I am, so the thinking goes, 57 years old, set in my ways, unchanging and set in stone. What a crock. How is it that this lesson I have learned nearly every day for those 57 years, that each moment shows me a new perspective on myself and the world, how is it that I can believe somewhere in my addled mind that this is not so? The mind is odd in this way always. It seems incapable of believing that a future that doesn't look anything like the present is possible.

I bring this up in the context of how I have been feeling in my interactions with my fellow human beings: my family, coworkers, people I meet on the street. I am undergoing a sea change in my attitude toward myself and it's not all that comfortable. I thought I understood a few things and have come to realize recently not only how wrong I was but how counterproductive it is to believe this.

I have very high expectations of myself and others. A mantra I like (not original with me) is this: "Expectations are premeditated resentments". Let that sink in for a moment. Everything I expect to happen is a set up for disappointment and its attendant sense of betrayal, especially when that expectation includes other human beings. I will be rewarded, I will be applauded, I will be reinforced in my opinion of myself. Even the idea that I will receive feedback of some sort is an expectation. Another aphorism: "You would stop worrying so much about what people think of you if you came to realize how very rarely they do". I have heard it said that expectation is a craving for things to be other than they are. Kathy points out that expectation can only be for the past or the future, since if we are truly living in the present, regret or worry (expectation for a different past or future) are not possible.

Thus my guilt about not having written here in three weeks. Circumstances made this inevitable (trips and obligations and obsessions, oh my!), yet I have an expectation that I will write every week (at the beginning of the blog it was every day—talk about unrealistic expectations!), and when I don't fulfill that expectation, I am somehow a failure as a human being; not just as a blogger (which would be silly enough). The efficacy of my very existence is called into question. A bit out of proportion, eh? As if you, those who read these words, hang on every output of my fertile mind and go into collapse without them. I suspect you survived intact. But my expectations extend to you, as well. You are to respond in a particular way. You are to recognize my essential correctness. You are to acknowledge my inimitable contributions to the world. Let me just tell you, you are not living up to these strictures. You are falling woefully short.

Of course, I don't think this consciously—I'm not quite that psychotic or quixotic or narcissistic. But somewhere in the murkiness of that part of my subconscious that determines my attitude toward the world, I I think I really do believe these things. I feel aggrieved much of the time. You are not responding as you should and it reflects badly upon me. I worry and plan and regret, never realizing, it seems, that my life has become these things. The mind has this idea that if I just fine tune this thing and tweak that one, my life will finally be perfect and I can then begin to live, to relax into it all. The biggest problem with this approach to life is that by the time such a well-adjusted life happens, if it ever does (highly doubtful), my life will be over and I will have lived as a tweaker and a fine tuner rather than as a fully awake human being.

Joseph Goldstein points out that expectation is not the same as aspiration. They both look forward to a future that is not the same as the present in some specific way, but expectation is an aspect of craving (the source of all suffering), whereas aspiration is a letting go of craving, a gentle placement of my spiritual boat into the stream. He also wishes us to understand that the practice of the Dharma is not the gaining of anything, but the letting loose of all things; gradually, but steadily and inevitably. Only there does freedom lie. He quotes a simple mantra which originated with Buddhadasa: : "Nothing to do, nothing to be, nothing to have." Liberation is that simple, if we let it be. Letting go is the answer, but it's damn hard to do, I must say, as if a great master said, "All you must do to achieve Nirvana is stand on the ceiling". The ceiling is right there, waiting to be stood upon, yet I cannot seem to figure out how one does it.

Envy is another aspect of this same egocentric complex of belief. One more saying I ran across: "Envy is a hostile form of self-pity". Yes, it is. When you get something good, my first response is "Where's mine?", not "I'm so happy for you". This feels like a sickness, yet it is my default response. I truly do wish to wish you well, to practice the ancient Buddhist principle of mudita, which is usually translated as "sympathetic joy". Mudita is not just the idea that we ought to feel good for others, but that since we are all interconnected, any joy you feel is also my joy, not just in some theoretical, spiritual way, but as literally as if you shared out your joy among all of us. There is no separation between us, but that's very difficult to feel sometimes.

I said to my soul,
Be still, and wait, without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing.
Wait without love, for love would be the love of the wrong thing.
There is yet faith;
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought,
For you are not ready for thought.
So the darkness shall be light
And the stillness, the dancing.

—TS Eliot

Judith Ragir once said that the key to freedom is to "allow the universe to satisfy me". Everything I need is here. It is enough.

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P.S. I cannot include photographs in this blog the way I did before because, as part of their misguided attempt to bring everything under the banner of their operating system (which is obnoxious), Google made most of their images unreproducible on any other platform. Of course, this is their right and I wish them well, but I miss being able to break up the unremitting text a little with visual accents that have some relevance. I have a passion for photography, though, so I hope this will motivate me to include more of my own photos here. The problem, of course, is not so much having photographs to hand as having any that are relevant to the text. I will do what I can. All of the photographs in this post are mine.

A Spiritual Giant

I sometimes feel as if I am misrepresenting myself in this blog as some kind of spiritual giant, perhaps giving the impression that I am serene and peace-loving, that I never create discord and am never in conflict in my heart. None of this is true. I struggle a lot. I am very judgmental and believe myself to be right most of the time. I think your opinion is based in ignorance and that if I can just educate you adequately you will change your mind to my way of thinking. (Arrogant much?) Anger seems to be on my back burner much of the time. I am frustrated by work and family struggles.

If only you knew how ____________ I am! (Take your pick: sad, clever, intelligent, loving, bad, angry, depressed, wonderful).

I am confused. A lot. When I feel confused or frustrated I resort to anger. Quite often. I am deeply imperfect. I sometimes feel deeply guilty about all this. So what gives me the notion that I can write a blog about things like spiritual awareness? I struggle with this question, not so much as it regards me (I already know how imperfect I am so am not too worried about it; besides, you can choose to read it or not), but as it pertains to other spiritual teachers. I look at them and see, in some cases, anger, in others, intolerance, in yet others, egregiously bad behavior and think, what business do they have being teachers?

This reminds me of a story I heard about Sharon Salzberg, a prominent American meditation teacher. When she was seeking to be ordained as a teacher by her master (I think it was Sayadaw U Pandita, but I'm not sure), she was very young (in her early 20s) and he noted that, asking something along the lines of, "Surely at your young age, you could not have realized the end of suffering." To which she responded, "No, but I know with great certainty that there is an end to it", which answer fully satisfied him.

I know there is a path. I know that the terminus of the path is the end of suffering. I also know that every waystation along the path is a place of greater peace, filled with light, kinder, less judgemental. I (like everyone else, I suspect) wish the end of the path would arrive sooner, or at least that I could get close enough to be less of a grump, less uncertain, less sad. But that's not the way it works. I am on this path. This path is a good path. I hope with all my heart that others will want to pursue this path. That is why I write about it. Not because I am near the end of it, but because I know where it leads and that it is a place of peace, harmony, balance, caring, openheartedness, kindness, generosity, and deep faith in the rightness of the world as it is. And because I have seen progress, in myself and in others. It is enough.

Put the Lime in the Coconut

My visit to the doctor last week yielded some fairly ambiguous results. I am, despite my best efforts, getting older (go figure). I have nothing seriously wrong with my shoulder, which is, of course, good news, but also means that all I can do about it is work hard with a physical therapist. Damn. One can always hope for a quick fix, eh?

My labs told me pretty much what I already knew. I am what I call "pre-pre-diabetic," meaning the labs that measure such things say I am not yet there—in fact not even very close—but am trending in the wrong direction. Whereas my fasting glucose was just barely outside the range of normal, I would not consider myself in no danger whatsoever unless my result were smack dab in the middle of normal. I find little consolation in a result that was just barely on the other side of desirable. As I mentioned in my last post, my HDL was also slightly low. That does not bode well for the future, either. I am only 56 so must assume that, if nothing changes, I will eventually be facing larger problems.

*Sigh*

Of course, my immediate response is panic. I must eliminate all bad foods, all sugar, all fatty foods, all saturated fat....Silly, of course, especially the elimination of saturated fat, at least a small amount of which is essential to my physical well-being. When the small mind is in charge, nothing will do but an all-out assault on the Problem, whatever it may be.

But what is most fascinating for me is the shift in my relationship to food in a broader sense. This has been the theme of much of this blog. It is clear that I, that most of us, do not use food merely for sustenance. It is a social force, a source of comfort, a pleasure, a joy. Fat and sugar are two of the surest sources of pleasant food experiences. Nothing inherently wrong with any of this, of course. But when one's health is impacted, whether that health be spiritual or physical, different choices must be made. And from the point of view of the Dharma it is in facing those choices that the rub comes in.

The questions become these: am I living my life in full awareness of my relationship to food? Or do I wander through life trying to use food to solve insoluble problems? Is my response to discomfort (pain, undesired emotions, stress, unhappiness) to reach for food, as if it could take this away? Am I, in other words, hungry for something other than food and trying to use food to feed that hunger? Am I eating with mindfulness or eating to mask things of which I ought to be mindful? In response to these realizations, am I going overboard in the other direction, into the heedlessness of obsession over "healthy" foods? (I put that word--healthy--in quotes because if I run after bodily health at the expense of my spiritual growth, that is far from any kind of health I truly desire).

The even more significant question is this: why am I doing all this? Why should I struggle to achieve any understanding of this or any mastery over these impulses if the outcome is nothing other than more struggle at the next level? The Buddha had a vital and unequivocal answer: spiritual attainment is possible for all of us, in this very lifetime. The impression is sometimes given that in order to achieve anything like enlightenment, one must strive for lifetimes upon lifetimes. This may be true. On the other hand, there are many stories in the life of the Buddha where he speaks a few words and people are struck enlightened, just like that.

Perhaps it would be helpful to define what is meant by enlightenment, at least in the way I am using it. Enlightenment is a state of being in which there are no preferences, no reactivity either for or against, complete and utter acceptance of the way things are. It is ultimate peace and serenity. But it is not passive; far from it. Enlightenment is total engagement in the ways of the world with a loving heart that does not judge but seeks to nudge others toward the ways of peace, justice, and harmony, all in the service of guiding them toward their own enlightenment and toward the enlightenment of yet others. The Bodhisattva (an enlightened being) does not sit idly by when violence, injustice, or prejudice rears its head, but works in ways that are loving and kind to change them, reflecting back their opposites (gentleness, justice, inclusion) as an antidote to the poisons that threaten well-being and peace. Enlightenment sees these unskillful mindstates and actions not as evils but as unwitting barriers to ultimate joy. Both victim and victimizer are struggling in a darkness that can be illuminated.

To get back to the question of whether it is possible (or even desirable) to achieve enlightenment in a flash, or whether it takes lifetimes: the answer is yes. Either is possible. Any time span in between is possible. But here's the kicker—as can be deduced from the definition above: one of the keys to enlightenment is not desiring it. Since striving toward this state is antithetical to the state itself (even the idea of "toward" is inaccurate), it is impossible to set a goal of being enlightened and then to work diligently for it. At this point, the small mind wants to throw in the towel and give up. What? A pot of gold at the end of a rainbow that I cannot work toward? Isn't enlightenment like the PhD of spiritual growth; I jump through enough hoops and pass sufficient trials and then am awarded the crown?

Well, no. In fact, desire is one of the barriers to enlightenment. So, what's a human to do? I believe with all my heart that the journey toward this ultimate mindstate beings with acceptance. We start there and work from that solid base. (A dictionary definition of acceptance I like: "to receive something offered, especially gladly"). We are as we are. Life is as it is. Reacting against (or for) any of it only creates suffering, divides the world into the camps of "wanted" and "unwanted", with us as both the arbiter and the one who strives incessantly to have the one and reject the other. The state of acceptance is a radically different way of viewing the world.

In my mind's eye I see a man who imagines himself in a pit. Out of the sky food is constantly falling. As they fall into his pit, the man immediately evaluates these foods as good and stores them away or as bad and throws them out. He does this constantly. He does this so assiduously and unceasingly that he never has any time to enjoy those tasty morsels he has stored away. His judgment is so clouded by prejudice and ignorance he often throws away the very best that is offered. What the man in the pit doesn't realize is that he is not in a pit. He is on a vast plain, infinite in its scope. He is in no danger of being overwhelmed by what falls his way; he can let it be. He need not judge what is good or bad, but can taste of each and find that which is pleasing or instructive or freeing. Some of what he tastes is bitter, but he need not reject anything on this basis. He can ask one simple question: is this nourishing? And he will find that all of it is. It is enough.

(P.S. If you find the title of this post perplexing, that's the prescription the doctor gave in a Harry Nilsson song).