Dr. Forbush Thinks

I’ve written about expectations before. I don’t remember when or in which post I told this story, but I believe that I have told it before. I may have written about it trying to make another point, but the story tells how and why I began to think about expectations.

When I was an undergraduate I was in love with a woman, a student at the school. I was attracted to her bright cheerful outlook on life. Nothing seemed to phase her. She wasn’t a brainless cheerleader; she was a bright young woman with tremendous insight into life. She told me things about the world that I hadn’t even imagined. She recommended books that I read and learned quite a bit. I read about an Indian Yogi and a book on human psychology. Some of the ideas went against my preconceived view of the world, but these ideas always got me thinking.

The problem with our relationship was rooted in our disagreement about how we saw the world. We both seemed to be naïve about how our relationship should develop. She seemed to be looking for some mystical connection that she felt didn’t exist. I felt a strong mystical connection and I expected our relationship to deepen. So I began to create in my mind the way things should play out. And, since we talked a lot we continuously talked about the problem with our relationship. And, finally after some long period of discussion she told me this: “You just have too many expectations.”

At that moment I hadn’t even thought about my expectations. Obviously, I had many expectations, but I just hadn’t thought about them as expectations. In fact, since they were expectations I just expected them to be the way my world was. Yes, I did have expectations. I expected that I would finish college, learn what I needed to know to get a job in some science-related way. I expected that I would meet a girl, fall in love and have a wonderful life. I expected that I would continue to explore and discover the world with travel as well as observation. I expected that all these things would help me live the wonderful life that I expected to have.

But, the next statement that I heard from her changed the way I thought about everything. It was a simple observation that both enlightened and baffled me. She said, “If you don’t have any expectations then you will never be disappointed.”

Reread that sentence again and think about that. It is certainly true. If you don’t expect to pass a test, then how could you be disappointed with failure? If you don’t expect to graduate from school, then how could you be disappointed with not graduating? If you don’t expect a happy life, then how could anything disappoint you? If you don’t expect anyone to fall in love with you, then how could you be disappointed with no one falling in love with you?

Suddenly, the whole picture came into focus. This giddy young woman was a bubbling spring of happiness because she had no expectations. She was on a karma stream. She did nice things for people without expectations, and she was rewarded without expecting it. I began to ask myself if my problems were only problems because of my expectations instead of my lack of luck or skill.

Well, this idea is not a Western idea. In America we believe in setting goals, planning and accomplishing those goals. We set goals with expectations in mind; particularly we expect to reach our goals. We plan our actions based on the expectation that each step will be accomplished. And, we become disappointed when we don’t reach our goals. We can argue that this cycle of goal orientation is what made America strong, and we can argue that this cycle of goal orientation is at the root of the stress in so many Americans today.

It is clear that all of us can not live in the extreme version of this life with absolutely no expectations and still have the society in which we live in. Maybe the society that we would have instead would be a little bit more laid back and a lot less technical. Maybe a Hippie Commune would approach life in this way. But, the question that would bother most of us is: “Where does motivation come from if we have no expectations?” Why would someone choose to excel in anything that they do without the motivation to excel? The woman that I was dating was certainly motivated, but it wasn’t from her own expectations.

In fact, as our relationship gradually withered I discovered that she did have very few personal expectations, but instead she had a multitude of parental expectations to satisfy. She was free to live in a world believing that she wasn’t disappointed because she never expected to satisfy her personal expectations. But I became aware that my relationship with her wasn’t part of her parental expectations for her. And, even though it took me some time to realize this when I finally did I was already in another relationship and it really didn’t matter. I no longer had any expectations that the relationship would work out. And, I wasn’t disappointed. It was an ironic ending to a doomed relationship anyway.





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Don't forget what Stephen Colbert said, "Reality has a well-known liberal bias."


Cross Posted @ Bring It On, tblog, Blogger and BlogSpirit



Relationships, Love, Culture

Two thousand years ago the Pharisees were selectively enforcing the laws. Not much has changed between then and now, except who the enforcers are and what laws they choose to enforce.

In Matthew 15: 1-14 the Pharisees approach Jesus and ask him why his disciples don’t wash their hands before eating. You can read this yourself in any version of the Bible you choose. I am condensing the story instead of quoting a particular version because the story is clear and the details are immaterial. The Pharisees want Jesus to be hung by his own rope, so to speak. They want him to admit that he doesn’t follow the Bible literally. Of course he doesn’t, and instead of saying that he tells the Pharisees that they don’t follow the Bible literally themselves. He sights the example of Exodus 20:12 Deuteronomy 5:16 Exodus 21:17 and Leviticus 20:9 where the law clearly states that a child who does not honor their Mother or Father should be put to death. Obviously, God thought that this was quite important, because it is mentioned four times in the Bible instead of the single case of homosexuality alluded to in Leviticus.

The problem with the Pharisees isn’t that they didn’t know the Bible; they knew it quite well. The problem was that they selectively enforced the Bible with their own agenda in mind. They found the laws that suited their needs and the enforced them for their own needs. But they knew that if they had enforced the law regarding the capital punishment of children they not be quite so popular. In fact, the enforcement of this law could mean the end of Judaism as a religion, no matter what God wanted in the laws written down in the Bible.

The Pharisees of today also selectively enforce the Bible. They seek to twist the words of the Bible to fit their own needs. For example, they raise “foul language” to the level of sin. They do this when they know that there is a distinct difference between the reference to sexual activity or excretory function and using the name of God to curse someone. Somehow the culture has combined these two completely different things into the cultural taboo of “foul language.” These people then use religion as a sword to hold over the FCC and demand that they censor the airwaves.

But, the entire first ten chapters of Leviticus go into detail of how an animal sacrifice needs to be offered up to God. If the book of Leviticus were truly a sacred book of law, we would see the preachers on TV offering animal sacrifices every night and then eating the meat as God commanded it. But continued selected enforcement of these laws proves that these new Pharisees continue to hold to their own agenda and not God’s will.

Instead, when they look for a reason to go to war they find exception to Jesus’ teaching of love by quoting something like: “The LORD is a man of war: the LORD is his name.” Exodus 15:3. Jesus spent some time explaining how one should turn the other cheek when provoked, but when the government these people support decides to wage an unnecessary War killing thousands of innocent people they continue to justify these actions by selective enforcement of the law. They literally decide what they want to do and justify it by finding the appropriate verse from the Bible.

The selective enforcement of the Bible is actually good for the most of us, it is only in the hypocrisy of the preachers who claim to take the Bible literally that there is any problem at all. These people can’t imagine that the two versions of the creation story shouldn’t be taken as literally true. But somehow they reconcile this passage from Exodus 31: 14-15, “Yes, keep the Sabbath day, for it is holy. Anyone who desecrates it must die; anyone who works on that day will be cut off from the community. Work six days only, but the seventh day must be a day of total rest. I repeat: Because the Lord considers it a holy day, anyone who works on the Sabbath must be put to death.” If God really meant that the creation happened exactly the way it was explained in the Bible, then why didn’t he mean that people who didn’t observe the Sabbath should be put to death?

Well, the modern day Pharisees of today continue to be blind leaders of the blind and they will both fall into the ditch as Jesus pointed out in Matthew 15:14.




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Don't forget what Stephen Colbert said, "Reality has a well-known liberal bias."


Cross Posted @ Bring It On, tblog, Blogger and BlogSpirit



Politics, Religion, Christians