Buddhism Archives • Kari O'Driscoll

Tag Archive for: Buddhism

On Expectations

Digging Deeper, Spirituality/Mindfulness

Expectations may be one of the biggest roots of all suffering. And yet…

Is it possible to be human and not have expectations? Can we really move through life without having some subconscious idea of where we’re going and what it might look like when we get there?

I have been thinking a lot about expectations lately. My life does not look like I expected it to when I was a kid. It doesn’t look like I expected it to when I was in college, or as a young adult, or even two years ago. My children are not doing the things I expected them to be doing, nor is my mom. Ultimately, that is both pleasant and sad. There are things going on in my life that are devastating and others that are so amazing and wonderful that I am grateful over and over again in any given week.

A big part of grief, I think, is letting go of that picture I had in my mind, realizing that life is not going to be the way I thought it was, and recognizing how much I rested in it, relied on it, planned for it and trusted it. I find it amazing how often I lend some weight and solidity to my expectations, even though they are merely schemes cooked up in my brain with no substance whatsoever. I can believe a certain thing so unquestioningly that I build entire systems on top of it and then spend overwhelming reserves of time and energy reworking those systems when the bedrock beneath them turns out to have been sand.

But in order to move forward, expectations are a requirement, aren’t they? Or am I confusing expectations with goals? Perhaps that’s it. Maybe I need to be more mindful of the difference between desire and assumption. Just because much of my life does go according to plan is not a reason to lull myself into thinking that all of it will. And it’s true that often, when things fall apart, I have some pretty amazing experiences that help me grow and become a better person, simultaneously, I’m holding expectations for other parts of my life.

Maybe it’s impossible to not assume that there will be certain givens in my life. Maybe, without those mental mirages, I wouldn’t ever bother to get out of bed. Maybe, as long as I can continue to recover from the loss of expectation, grieve for it and learn from it, it’s not a bad thing. Maybe this is just the way it’s designed to be. Our human brains crave coherence, predictability, structure. We want a story that makes sense, puzzles with all the pieces contained in the box. Most of us would choose a safe, complete scenario over one whose ending is altogether uncertain, and so we are built for expectations. And while I know the Buddhists say the trick is to not get too attached to them, that is sometimes a tall order (especially when we’ve crafted those stories in our minds so well we don’t even recognize them for what they are – stories). Maybe accepting the fact that we’re going to get attached to some of them and learning how to breathe and get curious and remain flexible when they fall apart is a more realistic plan. At least for me.

April 24, 2017

Taking Another Look:Corrected

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M.C. Escher knew it.
The Dalai Lama knows it.
Timber Hawkeye talked about it. He puts it this way:

“The opposite of what you know is also true.”

Not, ‘the opposite of what you know is true, but also true.

It was rather an arresting comment. If there had been anyone in the room whose attention was drifting, that sentence brought it back.

“The opposite of what you know is also true.”

I think the most important word in the sentence is ‘know.’ Because so often we fool ourselves into thinking that what we know is absolute. Finite. Provable. Truth with an uppercase ‘T.’

Timber expanded on the notion by giving examples. He saw a TED talk by Derek Sivers, who talked about traveling in Japan and asking for an address so he could find a particular place. He was given the name of a block. He asked for the name of the street.

“The streets don’t have names. They are simply the empty space between blocks. The blocks have names.”

He was confused. Clearly there was some language barrier. The person giving him directions asked, “What is the name of the block you live on?”

His reply: “The blocks don’t have names. The streets have names. The blocks are simply the empty spaces between streets.”

See?

He offered another example from the same TED talk. In remote, rural China, each small village has its own doctor. Every morning, the doctor makes his rounds of the houses in the village, collecting coins from a box hung near the front door of each house. If he comes to a house where the box is empty, he knows that someone inside is sick and his services are needed. You see, in this model, the doctor is supported by the entire village for keeping them healthy. He is not paid when treating them for an illness and, thus, is given an incentive to prevent everyone in his village from getting sick.

“The opposite of what you know is also true.”

Since hearing this phrase and digesting the examples, I have seen it in action. I was reading an article about a documentary film that followed homeless teens in Seattle and came across the story of a young girl who left home after being molested by a family member. She talked about how filthy her mother’s house was, with rotting food and dirty laundry strewn throughout, and what a relief it was to live under a bridge in the city because it was actually cleaner than her home. She found places to wash and brush her teeth and worked hard to keep herself presentable and live according to her standards of cleanliness. It was only a few weeks before she realized, however, that being young and female on the streets makes you incredibly vulnerable and that not washing or paying attention to how she smelled was the best way to prevent herself from being raped.

The words keep kicking around in my head, finding me in the quietest times and in the loudest. Much like stubbing my toe, I keep bumping up against my own ideas of what I “know” and challenging them. I suppose that, before this, I would have seen a filthy young girl on the street and assumed she was either mentally ill or been disgusted by her – maybe both – instead of thinking about what it must be like to go against your own convictions in order to simply survive.

Yesterday, I came across this photo on Facebook:

At the original site, there were comments ranging from “right on” to nasty, blaming, shaming diatribes from people who “pulled themselves out of poverty without any social services.” My first instinct was to rise to the defense of the person who posted this photo, and then I stopped to consider what I “know.”

I know what my experiences are. That is all I can know. I don’t have to know everyone else’s reality or even strive to. All I have to do is realize that there are limits to my knowledge and that, while it feels terribly, starkly real, it is not “Truth.” Except for me. And so I cannot go out into the world trying to spread “Truth.” I can only go out into the world with compassion and a desire to understand and expand my own experience and knowledge and not make any judgments or actions based on my own brand of knowing.

Because the opposite of what I know is ALSO true.

November 13, 2012

And Now, For Some Refreshingly Un-Political Information…

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Last Thursday I went to a book-signing in town. Not so unusual, except for the way this one went. I found out about it from a friend who knows the author, Timber Hawkeye, and went in part to explore a new bookstore I had yet to go inside, and in part to support a fellow writer.

The book is called Buddhist Boot Camp and the author recently gave his first TED Talk. He has a website, a Facebook page, and a blog, none of which I had encountered. I went in knowing little of him and, in retrospect, I’m glad I didn’t spend an hour or two boning up on who he was before I went.

Upon entering the room, I saw a short (6-inch) plywood-wrapped-in-carpet stage at the far North end with rows of chairs facing it. Typical book signing/reading, right? Until the author stepped down from the stage and began rearranging the chairs into a circle. As people filed in, around 40 or so, we all chose chairs and waited. Timber spoke, “I haven’t ever done one of these before, so I don’t really know how it goes, but I do know that I want to hear from you all tonight. I don’t want to be on a stage – this is not about the messenger, it’s about the message.”

For the next hour and a half, we proceeded to share stories of meditation practices, our individual journeys to Buddhism, and ask rather frank questions of Timber (such as, “Who named you ‘Timber Hawkeye?’ – the story is an entertaining one that I won’t ruin for you in case you ever see him speak; ask him yourself).

The message in this case is pure, unadulterated, unencumbered by ritual or dogma, Buddhist principles. The book itself is short and the chapters are each only one page long. Whether you are Buddhist, Muslim, Jewish, Christian, some or all or none of the above, the topics explored in “Buddhist Boot Camp” are simple, basic, and resonate deeply. I came home wishing I had bought several copies to give as gifts (I still may) and determined to spend a little time each day exploring one of the ideas in the book. By the end of the week, I had resolved to spend a little time each week discussing one idea with Eve and Lola.

I often wonder if I am doing my children a disservice by not incorporating some sort of formal spiritual practice into their lives. I know that as a child I was thrilled with the mystique and drama of Catholic rituals, but couldn’t really reconcile them with the patriarchical dogma that was delivered in a vengeful, punitive way. Ultimately, when my parents divorced, it was a relief to leave the church. I have, from time to time, talked to the girls about Buddhism, but Timber’s book may be just the ticket to helping my girls more fully understand why I am drawn to these teachings as a way of life.

November 6, 2012

From Catholic to Buddhist in 40 Short Years

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Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Klamath Falls, Oregon

My spiritual journey has been, well, a journey so far in my life. I’m certain that on the day I was born, nobody expected me to have a spiritual journey. They expected to baptize me in the Catholic Church, raise me in the Catholic Church, and bury me after a lifetime spent in the Catholic Church. I guess, technically, that’s a journey, but it stays pretty well within the same track, or at least I (and my mother) always thought so.

Until I was eight or so, this worked out pretty well. Enter: divorce. We were fairly rigorous Catholics, going to Mass on Wednesday nights and Sunday mornings, taking confession (at least my parents did) and signing us kids up for catechism classes. The path was preordained. Until my folks split up. And the Church politely asked us not to return. Bad example for the rest of the parishioners and all that.

Until that point I hadn’t questioned much about religion or faith. I didn’t know anyone who didn’t go to church on Sunday and I frankly loved the ritual of church, if not the time spent there on sunny mornings. I loved dipping my fingers in to the font of holy water at the entrance to the church and crossing myself like I saw the adults do. I loved genuflecting before entering a pew and memorizing the steps that went along with different prayers – when to sit down, kneel and stand. I loved the music and the stained glass and knowing when to say a solemn, “Amen” or “and also with you.”

After my folks got divorced, Dad seemed to have no issue not going back to that church and sometimes, especially in the summer, took us to his version of church on Sunday mornings – a short hike near Crater Lake or up Mt. McLoughlin with a few quiet moments to stop and enjoy the view while he prayed and thanked God for our time together. I much preferred that kind of church to the ones my mother tried out thanks to recommendations from friends – a new one every weekend we spent with her.

By the time I was in high school I had thoroughly catalogued the hypocrisy I saw in my own family and friends Monday through Saturday and decided that church and religion seemed ridiculous. I still liked the music, but there was little ritual in any of the churches we attended and I cringed at some of the messages of punishment and anger I heard over and over again. I was relieved when I got a job at a local resort that held a huge Sunday brunch because I could beg off of church – we needed the money more than Mom wanted to admit.

I had also become increasingly interested in science and liked the ordered, logical view of the human body as a machine. I renounced religion of any kind and decided I was an atheist. I didn’t see any reason to think there was an afterlife and was openly disdainful of anyone who seemed to be simply tolerating their time on the planet until they could get to some paradise. I was determined to create my own paradise now – hedge my bets because I would be really pissed off if I discovered there was no Heaven after I had waited decades to get there.

Philosophy classes in college further solidified this view for me. I took a comparative religion class and was astonished to discover how many really strange theories there were about different leaders and prophets and how malleable morality could be depending on which one you adhered to. Couple that with the more complex science classes I was taking and I was definitely convinced that humans were basically machines. Yes, we have emotions, but I was certain there were discoverable physiological processes that could account for those. This view did not diminish the wonder of nature for me a bit – in fact it increased it more than anything. The notion that there were so many variations in this mechanistic view of the world – that DNA could be expressed in so many different ways from a strawberry to a hyena to a human with Down’s Syndrome – that was truly miraculous to me. And, ultimately, explainable with enough scientific knowledge. Who needed religion?

And then Buddhism hit me. It was not one of the religious views I had learned about in college and I knew very little about it, but about six years ago I started writing book reviews for Elevate Difference and was assigned a few Buddhist texts. I also began taking yoga classes and heard more about Buddhist beliefs there. The entire idea that a spiritual world view could exist without worshipping some deity or other was fascinating. The tenets of peace and equanimity and love appealed to me greatly – especially in their inclusion of every other sentient being on the planet. I was determined to learn more.

Today, I guess I would say that my spirituality is more deeply rooted in Buddhism than any other world view. And while I still love the idea that the human body is a machine, and live that reality every day by trying to feed it well and rest it appropriately and work all of its parts with some regularity, my notion of it has expanded to include a spiritual component. I don’t know exactly how I would describe it – a soul? some invisible connection between all sentient beings? I’m not sure. But I heard an explanation on NPR (where else?) a few weeks ago that has slowly been settling in to my bones. I can’t for the life of me remember what program or who said it or even what the context of the conversation was, but the question was whether animals have souls or not. The answer came by way of analogy: If you have a computer that is broken and you take it apart to discover why, you can fix it and put it back together and it will work (assuming you knew at you were doing) the exact same way it did before. If your pet (or your sister-in-law or your favorite dogwood tree) is ailing and you take it apart piece by piece and put it back together exactly the way it ought to go, it won’t come back to life. There is something more, something extra, something intangible that we sentient beings have that defies mechanical explanation.

In my atheist days, this explanation would have thrown me. I am certain I would not have known what to do with it, given that I had an entirely mechanistic view of humanity. You die and you’re dust. Period. Nothing else.

Today, I’m not so sure. Some might say it’s because I’m getting older and facing my own mortality, but I would like to think that one day I’ll be back in some other form to finish this journey of mine. If I get to choose, I’d like to be a very pampered indoor cat who spends its days chasing bugs and sleeping in the sun patch at the end of the bed.

September 1, 2012