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I would like to toss the author of this paean to passivity into the ocean. Yes, sure, clinging on to certain kinds of unrealistic expectations, in certain cont

by gomphus 15y ago

I would like to toss the author of this paean to passivity into the ocean. Yes, sure, clinging on to certain kinds of unrealistic expectations, in certain contexts (particularly personal relationships), can be fatal. But this is a truism that any idiot could tell you - and in this case the post is generalized to the point of meaninglessness. Suppose you encounter someone who is openly racist, dishonest or technically incompetent at their job, and no one is challenging him about it. Because it's bad to have expectations about public & professional behaviour, and even worse to actually impose them on others! Here's the core message: when the world isn't how you think it should be, don't have the courage to try and change it, or to speak out about how you feel. Suppress your feelings, accept everything just the way it is, and - just as long as you yourself behave well - all the bad energy will go away! Sounds to me like someone trying to justify being a total wimp. Like someone who's so afraid of experiencing any degree of anger or disappointment that they philosophize their way to vapidity and numbness. And I'm afraid that's my overall impression of people who embrace "zen" as a lifestyle paradigm, (rather than just a mindset for, say, a discrete programming project, for which it can work wonderfully). Zen has its place, but taken too far it becomes morally corrosive, and turns personalities to mud.

Produce 15y ago
I had a lot of trouble with this aspect too and your logic is perfectly valid but your assumptions are missing a key piece. Part of accepting things the way they are is understanding that you are an integral part of the world. This implies that not only do you have the power to influence it but that doing so is both inescapable and your duty. Telling someone that they are ignorant or incompetent is far more effective when you're not hinged on whether or not they will listen to you. If you are attached to the result, you will become a dictator. If you are not, you will become the most effective type of leader. It is far more effective to give someone the message and trust them to figure it out then to force them to change when they either don't want to or are not yet capable. If one person hits a bottleneck, there are millions of others who are capable of taking their next step with a little guidance from you. I completely agree that a lot of people fall into the trap you described.
- gomphus 15y ago
  You have broadened my thinking on this issue, but I'm not convinced that being "attached" to the result of an intervention is necessarily harmful (let alone something that makes me a dictator!). There are many ways to positively accommodate our natural emotional responses to things being other then we would passionately want them to be, into our continued efforts to make those things so. I agree with your comments on leadership (although I can think of some contrary examples), but leadership is just one area informed by expectation. I think I am guilty of further polarizing what was presented as a false dichotomy in the first place. It is not the case that either we live a life full of expectations that poison us when they are not met; or that we must be devoid of expectation and experience all outcomes with equanimity. Shades of grey predominate. That was really my beef with the article: its absolutism. Life requires a repertoire of attitudes and responses. It is futile and naive to say we must always adopt a principle of throwing all our expectations away. It is not so different from saying that the culture and technology we treasure could have been more painlessly attained in a world of wandering sadhus.
  - Produce 15y ago
    Really, it depends on what your goal is. The point of enlightenment is to stop suffering, so if you're trying to do that then our emotional responses must be transcended. If you're not, then what you say makes more sense. I think that the target audience of this website is people who have the goal of transcendence. The interesting thing is that detachment does not remove the shades of grey, it's not about removing anything and more about accepting it. It's the difference between having a favorite colour and having every colour as your favorite. In the latter case, you don't care what the weather is, you're still smiling. In a world of wandering sadhus there wouldn't any development of culture and technology since they would all be dedicated to reaching enlightenment, which means that none of them would have attained it. It would be a world of people with the same goal which nobody has actually achieved. I think that after enlightenment has been attained, people do the same things as we do now, just with infinitely less friction. The saying goes - "Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water." Some minds are inclined towards science or cultural development or computer programming and the same would apply to them.
JoeAltmaier 15y ago
Most of that is your expectation of what the author intended. I didn't read any of that. Just this: try to improve the world, try to help others perform better. Emotionally respond to the result, sure. Then ... let it go. Live and learn. Try something different next time. I've met folks who live this way. They are not wimps. They are strong, and resilient. What is a wimp? More like, someone who is afraid, who lashes out at things before they understand them, staying in their disfunctional rut rather than risk any emotion other than anger.
ianterrell 15y ago
> philosophize their way to vapidity and numbness I've often felt that the Buddhist "no desires" and "no mind" concepts are akin to the trivial solution in polynomials or vector math: set everything to 0! That it's one solution does not mean there are not other, non-zero solutions.
- gacba 15y ago
  You've fallen into the classic trap: Buddhism does not espouse nihilism (the negation of all things), Buddhism simply asserts that what you think is your reality, isn't. That's not to say that NOTHING is real or that you don't experience something, it's to say what you put stock in is very much not worth doing so.
  - ianterrell 15y ago
    No. My statement was short, but that's not what I said at all. And while I'm not an expert, I've read extensively on the subject (20 books?), am actually quite familiar with and fond of eastern ways of thought, and am well aware of common misconceptions. My main point, though, is in striving to be desire-free. (To the adept, this is an upaya, a clever means of potentially pointing out the truth, not the truth itself. However, it's an oft used one.) In the case of this article, being desire-free is translated into being expectation-free. They're the same idea to the author. I'm not discussing what reality is here, or what it is not, but am looking at the idea that desire causes suffering. I've imagined this phrased as a set of coefficients indicating quantity for all desires in the world, i.e. x1 is how much you have desire d1: x1 * d1 + x2 * d2 + ... = Suffering In the classic Buddhist disciplines, one eliminates desire (whether as an end goal or upaya is up to you to decide, or more appropriately, ignore). To phrase it again as math, it's the trivial solution to the equation above: 0 * d1 + 0 * d2 + ... = No Suffering My hypothesis is that the coefficients need not be 0 to find a non-suffering answer. (And, in fact, I do believe that's what Buddhism teaches, or shows, eventually. But all of the above holds.)
    - jdp23 15y ago
      It's a lot more complex than that. Check out Lama Yeshe's Introduction to Tantra: Transformation of Desire -- http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Tantra-Lama-Thubten-Yeshe/dp/0861711629 http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Tantra-Lama-Thubten-Yeshe...
thomaslangston 15y ago
I think this method of thinking does have that pitfall, but it does have a tweak that I find useful. You can throw away expectations about how things are, without stopping work on making things better. Anger is not useful without action.
yankoff 15y ago
Absolutely agree. To make an assumption about the world, test it and find out you were wrong is way better than to not make any assumptions and just being passive. And what upsets me more is that such 'zen' philosophy become more and more popular. Like relax, lower your standards, don't have expectations, don't care for work too much, go play soccer. This is how western civilization fades away becoming more lazy and less competitive. Why is it bad to constantly challenge yourself and the world around you. Humans are great because they can change the circumstances and not to surrender to them. Although often times it comes through terrible mistakes, but the process is moving forward.

by gomphus 15y ago

Produce 15y ago

I had a lot of trouble with this aspect too and your logic is perfectly valid but your assumptions are missing a key piece. Part of accepting things the way they are is understanding that you are an integral part of the world. This implies that not only do you have the power to influence it but that doing so is both inescapable and your duty. Telling someone that they are ignorant or incompetent is far more effective when you're not hinged on whether or not they will listen to you. If you are attached to the result, you will become a dictator. If you are not, you will become the most effective type of leader. It is far more effective to give someone the message and trust them to figure it out then to force them to change when they either don't want to or are not yet capable. If one person hits a bottleneck, there are millions of others who are capable of taking their next step with a little guidance from you. I completely agree that a lot of people fall into the trap you described.

gomphus 15y ago
You have broadened my thinking on this issue, but I'm not convinced that being "attached" to the result of an intervention is necessarily harmful (let alone something that makes me a dictator!). There are many ways to positively accommodate our natural emotional responses to things being other then we would passionately want them to be, into our continued efforts to make those things so. I agree with your comments on leadership (although I can think of some contrary examples), but leadership is just one area informed by expectation. I think I am guilty of further polarizing what was presented as a false dichotomy in the first place. It is not the case that either we live a life full of expectations that poison us when they are not met; or that we must be devoid of expectation and experience all outcomes with equanimity. Shades of grey predominate. That was really my beef with the article: its absolutism. Life requires a repertoire of attitudes and responses. It is futile and naive to say we must always adopt a principle of throwing all our expectations away. It is not so different from saying that the culture and technology we treasure could have been more painlessly attained in a world of wandering sadhus.
- Produce 15y ago
  Really, it depends on what your goal is. The point of enlightenment is to stop suffering, so if you're trying to do that then our emotional responses must be transcended. If you're not, then what you say makes more sense. I think that the target audience of this website is people who have the goal of transcendence. The interesting thing is that detachment does not remove the shades of grey, it's not about removing anything and more about accepting it. It's the difference between having a favorite colour and having every colour as your favorite. In the latter case, you don't care what the weather is, you're still smiling. In a world of wandering sadhus there wouldn't any development of culture and technology since they would all be dedicated to reaching enlightenment, which means that none of them would have attained it. It would be a world of people with the same goal which nobody has actually achieved. I think that after enlightenment has been attained, people do the same things as we do now, just with infinitely less friction. The saying goes - "Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water." Some minds are inclined towards science or cultural development or computer programming and the same would apply to them.

JoeAltmaier 15y ago

Most of that is your expectation of what the author intended. I didn't read any of that. Just this: try to improve the world, try to help others perform better. Emotionally respond to the result, sure. Then ... let it go. Live and learn. Try something different next time. I've met folks who live this way. They are not wimps. They are strong, and resilient. What is a wimp? More like, someone who is afraid, who lashes out at things before they understand them, staying in their disfunctional rut rather than risk any emotion other than anger.

ianterrell 15y ago

> philosophize their way to vapidity and numbness I've often felt that the Buddhist "no desires" and "no mind" concepts are akin to the trivial solution in polynomials or vector math: set everything to 0! That it's one solution does not mean there are not other, non-zero solutions.

gacba 15y ago
You've fallen into the classic trap: Buddhism does not espouse nihilism (the negation of all things), Buddhism simply asserts that what you think is your reality, isn't. That's not to say that NOTHING is real or that you don't experience something, it's to say what you put stock in is very much not worth doing so.
- ianterrell 15y ago
  No. My statement was short, but that's not what I said at all. And while I'm not an expert, I've read extensively on the subject (20 books?), am actually quite familiar with and fond of eastern ways of thought, and am well aware of common misconceptions. My main point, though, is in striving to be desire-free. (To the adept, this is an upaya, a clever means of potentially pointing out the truth, not the truth itself. However, it's an oft used one.) In the case of this article, being desire-free is translated into being expectation-free. They're the same idea to the author. I'm not discussing what reality is here, or what it is not, but am looking at the idea that desire causes suffering. I've imagined this phrased as a set of coefficients indicating quantity for all desires in the world, i.e. x1 is how much you have desire d1: x1 * d1 + x2 * d2 + ... = Suffering In the classic Buddhist disciplines, one eliminates desire (whether as an end goal or upaya is up to you to decide, or more appropriately, ignore). To phrase it again as math, it's the trivial solution to the equation above: 0 * d1 + 0 * d2 + ... = No Suffering My hypothesis is that the coefficients need not be 0 to find a non-suffering answer. (And, in fact, I do believe that's what Buddhism teaches, or shows, eventually. But all of the above holds.)
  - jdp23 15y ago
    It's a lot more complex than that. Check out Lama Yeshe's Introduction to Tantra: Transformation of Desire -- http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Tantra-Lama-Thubten-Yeshe/dp/0861711629 http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Tantra-Lama-Thubten-Yeshe...

thomaslangston 15y ago

I think this method of thinking does have that pitfall, but it does have a tweak that I find useful. You can throw away expectations about how things are, without stopping work on making things better. Anger is not useful without action.

yankoff 15y ago

Absolutely agree. To make an assumption about the world, test it and find out you were wrong is way better than to not make any assumptions and just being passive. And what upsets me more is that such 'zen' philosophy become more and more popular. Like relax, lower your standards, don't have expectations, don't care for work too much, go play soccer. This is how western civilization fades away becoming more lazy and less competitive. Why is it bad to constantly challenge yourself and the world around you. Humans are great because they can change the circumstances and not to surrender to them. Although often times it comes through terrible mistakes, but the process is moving forward.