Living Without Expectations

[DesertBob]

I remember what a close psychotherapist friend told me when I was going through my divorce: "Saner you're a "fix it" kind of guy--you see everything as fixable. But everything is not fixable. Romance cannot be fixed nor can life.

You come to me thinking you can fix what it took you and your spouse five long years to fuck-up-- a lot of which you were not responsible and could do nothing about-- with a hand full of roses and therapy. You can't adapt. you cannot fix this. Your perception is faulty because your perspective is limited. You cannot adapt your perceptions any longer. Your love affair with this women is over! You cannot fix this my friend! You must gain perspective, get a broader view or you will die."

Yes, that was basically my exit from marriage #1 -- the recognition that my wife was SOL and there was nothing I could do for her. Or probably anything she could do for herself, either, which has pretty much been borne out in the subsequent decades. Some people are just screwed / doomed. Christianity told me nothing is hopeless, all things are possible with God. T'weren't so. A bitter lesson at the time. However it saved me time and suffering with marriage #2 when I realized that for entirely different reasons, she was doomed, too. I couldn't save her and she couldn't save herself. I was therefore able to let her go when she needed me to do so. She literally needed my permission to give up and die from her many ailments. I would not have allowed that sort of trip to be laid on me in my previous life, but she was too weak to do it for herself and she needed me to be okay with it -- beyond a certain point, she was holding on mostly for me. In retrospect it was one of my better moments when I acquiesced and said, yes, I agree, you're fucked. There's no purpose to be served by soldiering on -- not even for you, that I can see. She was visibly relieved ... a week later she was gone. In my work in hospice I hear lots of stories like that, of people holding on my sheer force of will, just needing their loved ones to let them go.

 

I suppose my problem is that in letting go of things like that I've also let go of much of my identity and haven't found things to replace it with. I've found new roles, of course, that occupy my time, but not new passions or new vision. I just keep acclimating to a sparser and sparser landscape, keep lowering the bar. Quiet time -- the sort of thing AM advocates -- has become something of an enemy to me. I used to seek it out, now I find the silence deafening rather than peaceful. The place I used to go to meditate, was filled with my hopes and dreams, the things I had to look forward to. Now I've arrived at what used to be my future, and the stuff I anticipated being here isn't here, and won't be. There's less time, less certainty, in what remains of my future. There are some consolations prizes, for which I am grateful, but all in all, I wouldn't have bothered.

[asanerman]

I suppose my problem is that in letting go of things like that I've also let go of much of my identity and haven't found things to replace it with. I've found new roles, of course, that occupy my time, but not new passions or new vision. I just keep acclimating to a sparser and sparser landscape, keep lowering the bar. Quiet time -- the sort of thing AM advocates -- has become something of an enemy to me. I used to seek it out, now I find the silence deafening rather than peaceful. The place I used to go to meditate, was filled with my hopes and dreams, the things I had to look forward to. Now I've arrived at what used to be my future, and the stuff I anticipated being here isn't here, and won't be. There's less time, less certainty, in what remains of my future. There are some consolations prizes, for which I am grateful, but all in all, I wouldn't have bothered.

 

~Bob,

 

With the help of Parker J. Palmer's insight, all that comes to mind is:

 

Words like these

...demand that we reject simplistic answers, both "religious" and "scientific," and learn to embrace mystery, something our culture resists. Mystery surrounds every deep experience of the human heart: the deeper we go into the hearts darkness or its light, the closer we get to the Ultimate Mystery...But our culture wants to turn mysteries into puzzles to be explained or problems to be solved, because maintaining the illusion that we can "straighten thing out' makes us feel powerful. Yet mysteries never yield to solutions or fixes--and when we pretend that they do, life becomes banal but also more hopeless, because the fixes never work.

Embracing [our] mystery ...does not mean passivity or resignation. It means moving into a field of forces that seem alien but is in fact one's deepest self. It means waiting, watching, listening, suffering, and gathering whatever self-knowledge one can--and then making choices based on that knowledge, no matter how difficult. One begins the slow walk back to [life] by choosing each day things that enliven one's self-hood and resisting things that do not.

 

The knowledge I am talking about is not intellectual and analytical but integrative and of the heart, and the choices that lead to wholeness are not pragmatic and calculated, intended to achieve some goal, but simply and profoundly expressive of personal truth. It is a demanding path, for which no school prepares us.

 

-from

Letting Your Life Speak

[my words]

 

I have spent much time on "the dark side of the moon." "I could feel nothing except the burden of my own life and the exhaustion, the apparent futility, of trying to sustain it." My time spent on "the dark side" was called "situational depression" of which Palmer addresses in the above quotation. Mine responded well to inner work, self-knowledge, choices, and change. I still to this day do not know how or why I found the energy to live my way through! I simply stand on the boundary of your journey with my up most respect and concern!

saner

 

 

 

 

[DesertBob]

Seeing others as ourselves is a high ideal, I know this because I have felt it all my life. However, it is out of balance. If I have believed that I should love my neighbour as myself, and that everyone is my neighbour, and I have a healthy self esteem I will treat everyone with the respect I believe I should be treated with. Which would be just peachy if everyone felt the same way, but they don't. You just end up running on empty because you are not playing by the same rules as others.

It happens that I've been reading Schopenhauer this weekend and your musings remind me of his discussion of dialectic ... that in an ideal world you would look to have discussion in order to expose your own ignorance rather than to cover it up by proving your point whether it holds up or not. But even if you do this, your opponents almost never will, and you end up savaged by them. Thus, regrettably, it becomes necessary to learn to play dirty in order to survive. Put another way, he says that if in discussing an issue with someone who disagrees with you, humility says you would assume YOU were wrong, not your opponent, but this is not the default assumption people have. Therefore, he concludes, people are basically venal and self-absorbed.

 

This, in turn, reminds me of the mindset of Christianity that I have come out of -- that people are basically bad / sinful and need saving. Fundamentally, each for their own reasons, Christianity, Schopenhauer and apparently Galien, are pessimists about human nature.

 

Despite the established fact that I am most certainly not Mr. Sunshine, I am not quite prepared to accept this judgment on its face. It's true that people, in the main, are shockingly limited in their awareness, their devotion to dealing in reality, and their long-term perspectives. As a result, they tend to make decisions that are short-sighted, self-absorbed, and/or just plain Stoopid. That said, I don't attribute this to venality. Assuming people's basic needs for food, shelter and safety are met, and they have some measure of hope and stability, I think most people want to do well and mean to do well. The fundamental problem is ignorance and lack of vision. People are not lost in the sense of heading straight to hell; they are lost in the sense that they don't understand how the world actually works and how to navigate within it. So they operate out of fear rather than out of love. I can forgive that. I suspect that you can too. However, one does grow weary of it, admittedly ...

[DesertBob]

My time spent on "the dark side" was called "situational depression" of which Palmer addresses in the above quotation. Mine responded well to inner work, self-knowledge, choices, and change. I still to this day do not know how or why I found the energy to live my way through! I simply stand on the boundary of your journey with my up most respect and concern!

saner

Embracing mystery as such, I don't know about, really, but I do keep plugging away and I am open to just about anything within reason that gets me through the day. Time will tell!

 

Thanks for your concern and interest and insight.

 

--Bob

[Antlerman]

Antler:

It's quite amazing how all areas of our lives are affected when we move out from that place, including how negative events affect us. That was the point. Where is the locus of our self-identity? If it is my own eyes, through my own ego (all that we look to that identifies us as "me"), then we have much to protect, and much to loose, and much to fear, and much to resent. If is is our true Nature, then it is from that place we are able to truly see others as ourselves. They are not other to us, and we fail them as well.

 

I just found another quote from Meister Eckhart that says what I am saying, and which addresses the question of "living without expectations".

“Spirituality is not to be learned by flight from the world, or by running away from things, or by turning solitary and going apart from the world. Rather, we must learn an inner solitude wherever or with whomsoever we may be. We must learn to penetrate things and find God there.”

 

This is what I mean. And to clarify, "finding God" is finding "you", your true Self. One eye. One love.

 

Hmm. Think we might have to agree to disagree on this one Antler. As you know I don't think there is a one size fits all approach to life, because we are all different people.

If I were talking about methods or paths, then I very much agree that one size doesn't fit all. What I am talking about though is universal in the sense of stages of human development. It is universal that maturity for example brings common advantages over being a pre-adolescent. That is in fact a one size fits all thing. A mature adult simply thinks and perceives differently than a child.

 

If I had no locus of self-identity within myself I would have topped myself years ago. Trust me it was touch and go there more than once. Seeing others as ourselves is a high ideal, I know this because I have felt it all my life.

I touched on this in another thread and you seemed to be upset at the time as you deleted all your posts in it. I hoped it had nothing to do with what I said, but I'll risk it again here. I mean no offense to you, but when you say you have been selfless all your life, always thinking of others first, this is not normal. This shows a problem. We become selfless as adults by having passed through the necessary stage of developing a healthy ego which is first created by defining what "self" is through in fact being self-centered. Self-centered is healthy, normal, and necessary for good ego development in children.

 

If you somehow never were able to go through this stage of development, then you in fact would struggle enormously as an adult, becoming a doormat for others for instance. I said before, that for those like this, it is necessary for them to give themselves permission and go back and be selfish. To remain selfish as a developing adult is a problem, but to have to struggle as an adult to say "I deserve this", shows something got missed in normal ego development.

 

What I an talking about in Ehkhart's quote and all the rest I am saying assumes a healthy ego moving to the next step. It is not applicable to someone who has yet to develop one. To quote Echart to a child of 12 would be completely inappropriate. In that sense of the world, it isn't a shoe that would fit. It's talking to mature, healthy adults struggling to continue grappling with the vastly larger questions and angst of existence as an adult.

 

 

I just spent the day yesterday at the funeral of a woman in a small town of 300 whom they all praised as the most giving, selfless woman they've ever known. To those who actually knew her, though she always went out of her way to help everyone, she also allowed everyone to take advantage of her. The perception of selfless is often actually not. I call that both a good heart, and a tragic victim. I hope this doesn't offend you. I don't know you, but I know from what you've said here and in other threads, it sounds like you struggle with being able to define appropriate boundaries. That's great, and you should work on that, but it helps not to confuse with with what is healthy to do at a certain stage in our normal development.

[Noumena]

Through reading everyone's thoughts and experiences here, I've discovered a frequency I've never known before. Hope you don't mind my eavesdropping . The view from here is sensational! I'm tuned in. Thank you.

[Galien]

 

If you somehow never were able to go through this stage of development, then you in fact would struggle enormously as an adult, becoming a doormat for others for instance. I said before, that for those like this, it is necessary for them to give themselves permission and go back and be selfish. To remain selfish as a developing adult is a problem, but to have to struggle as an adult to say "I deserve this", shows something got missed in normal ego development.

 

 

No shit sherlock It is a sad fact of life that many people have their emotional development and any chance of a healthy emotional life stolen from them by their abusive parents. You can plug up the holes, but the vessel is still broken.

[Antlerman]

 

If you somehow never were able to go through this stage of development, then you in fact would struggle enormously as an adult, becoming a doormat for others for instance. I said before, that for those like this, it is necessary for them to give themselves permission and go back and be selfish. To remain selfish as a developing adult is a problem, but to have to struggle as an adult to say "I deserve this", shows something got missed in normal ego development.

 

 

No shit sherlock It is a sad fact of life that many people have their emotional development and any chance of a healthy emotional life stolen from them by their abusive parents. You can plug up the holes, but the vessel is still broken.

Yes, I know others who struggle with this. As I said those in that place may have to go back to what got stolen from them and try to develop afterward what was necessary to go through earlier. One of the basic rules of development is you can't skip a stage. If that happens, as in what you've described, before you can move on, you have to go back and learn what was needed to be learned earlier but wasn't. It's a process of developing on top of what was developed earlier. It's like rungs on a ladder. You can't skip a rung. The next rung is built on the previous rung.

 

So as I've been saying, when someone has a firmly established sense of self which is defined by a set of boundaries, "this is me, that is not me", then the next stage is to move that sense of self to include others as self. If you yet have no real established sense of self, then you can't possible view others as yourself. You can't include others inside something that is not defined yet. You have to first define yourself. "Love others as yourself," is meaningless to someone who has no relatively clear sense of self. You have to first love you.

[DesertBob]

Yes, I know others who struggle with this. As I said those in that place may have to go back to what got stolen from them and try to develop afterward what was necessary to go through earlier. One of the basic rules of development is you can't skip a stage.

That is a nice tidy theory but I have encountered situations where in practice it doesn't cut it. My "stepson" suffers from GAD (Generalized Anxiety Disorder) and when he can't function he can't function. It's not for sure that he is going to make it through his first year of college. He's blowing off therapy appointments because he's obsessing about homework. There are developmental stages he hasn't been through that he should have been by now, simply because he's not ready for them. If indeed he ever will be ready for them. He may not be able to reach, even with difficulty, the critical mass necessary to function as an adult. If he doesn't, he'll be depressed around that and will be accruing the problems and stigmas that arise from not fitting into the proper slots that society provides for him. At some point you get to a place where you're so far off / behind that you will never be "right". I've been through this all before with my first wife's mental illness and my second wife's arrested personal development because she was having to divert all her energies into just surviving much of her adult life.

 

Some people are SOL. I don't know why we have to put on a brave game face and pretend it's not so. I'm even SOL in ways that are important to me. There isn't a silver bullet for this stuff. You often can't, in practice, go back after the fact and re-do things without massive investments of effort for uncertain results. At some point you just end up doing without.

[Antlerman]

There isn't a silver bullet for this stuff. You often can't, in practice, go back after the fact and re-do things without massive investments of effort for uncertain results. At some point you just end up doing without.

Yes of course you're right. What I am talking about is also true, but in a very general sense. I didn't want to tease it all apart into all sorts of details to make the post some massive tome. I hinted at what you're saying when I said, "Love others as yourself," is meaningless to someone who has no relatively clear sense of self".

 

Yes, of course you can't go back and relive your entire skipped childhood! What you do is try to sufficiently address and have enough handle on the basic skills or needs to integrate them into yourself in order to build on them. You will never have the full benefit of having gone through that stage in a healthy way where they developed naturally, but it holds that they can't be skipped. To be clear, some areas aren't necessary to go back for, but others are. You will always have holes where a childhood should have been, but you can get enough sense of it after the fact in revisiting those areas in order to build to the next.

 

Plus I agree, in this vein, that you shouldn't have to dwell there and you should at some point 'just move on'. Most definitely. But it's moving on after you've got at least enough to move on with, even if you can't possibly hope to 'fix' was was broken. Dwelling in the past is unhealthy. But ignoring it is as well. You have to just get enough of what you need, and then leave it behind. The future is ahead and that's where you try to move to.

 

These are of course general rules that apply across the board, but how each individual follows them will never be clean and simple or perfect or neat and tidy as the model itself. Someone should never expect the execution of life to follow any model, in anything more than very general ways.

[DesertBob]

Yes of course you're right. What I am talking about is also true, but in a very general sense.

I understand. I think really that you and Galien are both right, you are just talking about different facets of the truth. And I wanted to be sure that Galien would feel heard and not think you're being flip, because I know you're not -- you understand that there's not a magic wand that makes the past go away in some blinding flash of insight and bliss. Now that you've said that explicitly I would hope that her truth has been honored.

[Antlerman]

Yes of course you're right. What I am talking about is also true, but in a very general sense.

I understand. I think really that you and Galien are both right, you are just talking about different facets of the truth. And I wanted to be sure that Galien would feel heard and not think you're being flip, because I know you're not -- you understand that there's not a magic wand that makes the past go away in some blinding flash of insight and bliss. Now that you've said that explicitly I would hope that her truth has been honored.

Thank you. Yes, it's difficult to translate all these into any easy post. I already have a hard enough time trying to condense things like this without trying to explain every detail to cover every possible question that might come up. My tendency is to try to say it all at once and why my posts can get to be rather burdensome for this format. Maybe I should just write that damned book finally.

 

 

Edit: To add a thought to this about Bliss you brought up, another topic I've vowed to start forever now but never have is Peak Experiences and Adaptation. The essence is that those windows of Bliss open us to what is in us, what is available, but to grow into that is a long process of adaptation. You cannot simply just go "I see God!" and be magically whole. Those moments serve to draw us towards itself, as a goal of being itself, but the work has to happen one rung at a time towards that. It is possible to attain that permanently, but it is only through growth, not by a magic one day I'm whole thing.

 

I can definitely attest to realizing it in myself much more now than I was years ago, not in just fleeting moments but every moment. The funny thing is, somehow we think it will just be there one day, when in reality you become that. You become that through growing into that. Sometimes it goes in sudden advances, but that is how evolution itself works as well... and now I'm trying to explain it all at once again....

[DesertBob]

To add a thought to this about Bliss you brought up, another topic I've vowed to start forever now but never have is Peak Experiences and Adaptation.

I for one would find that topic of interest and hope you can find the time for it :-)

[Antlerman]

To add a thought to this about Bliss you brought up, another topic I've vowed to start forever now but never have is Peak Experiences and Adaptation.

I for one would find that topic of interest and hope you can find the time for it :-)

OK, I think I will do it now. I'll see if I can't find time the next day or so. I'll put it here in the Spirituality Forum. I actually meant "Structural Adaption" to be a little more specific in detail about it.

[Galien]

Yes of course you're right. What I am talking about is also true, but in a very general sense.

I understand. I think really that you and Galien are both right, you are just talking about different facets of the truth. And I wanted to be sure that Galien would feel heard and not think you're being flip, because I know you're not -- you understand that there's not a magic wand that makes the past go away in some blinding flash of insight and bliss. Now that you've said that explicitly I would hope that her truth has been honored.

 

Thank you Bob, that made me cry. Just to know that even one person hears me means so much.

[DesertBob]

Thank you Bob, that made me cry. Just to know that even one person hears me means so much.

You're not hard to hear at all :-) And you're welcome.

[Noumena]

T.T These conversations have made me want to be a better me. I'm so sorry for being so ignorant, flippant, arrogant, and dismissive toward you, Galien. I don't want to be like that ever again.

[Galien]

T.T These conversations have made me want to be a better me. I'm so sorry for being so ignorant, flippant, arrogant, and dismissive toward you, Galien. I don't want to be like that ever again.

 

 

It's okay Noumena, none of us are perfect. This world tends to make us those things.