I'm going to say something worth taping. So, good evening. Nice to see you all. I take great delight in finding evidence coming out of our own culture of resonance with the teachings of the Buddha. And so recently, my daughter suggested that I read some MFK Fisher. I'm discovering these days that descriptive language is language which does not so easily carry unconscious or habitual judgment. And so I'm very interested in reading or listening to people who have a very developed sense of or capacity for description.

[01:06]

And I think MFK Fisher is definitely one of those people. She evokes a room or a meal or a situation very vividly. So I want to read a very short passage from this book that she wrote called Long Ago in France, written somewhat late in her life, but remembering her first three years when she went to France for the first time, I think when she was 20. And out of this passage comes the focus of what I'd like to speak to this evening and hopefully we can have some discussion together about. So she says, on the corner of one of the streets that went down from the plaza was Vano's, the main bookstore of the town.

[02:08]

It was the only one known to me then and it supplied all the university books. She was going to school at the time. Monsieur Venot was a town character and was supposed to be the stingiest and most disagreeable man in Dijon, if not in the whole of France. But I did not know this. And I assumed that it was all right to treat him as if he were a polite and even generous person. I never bought much from him but textbooks because I had no extra money. But I often spent hours in his cluttered big shop looking at books and asking him things and sniffing the fine papers there. And even sitting, copying things from books he would suggest I use at his work table with his compliments and his ink. and often his paper.

[03:10]

In other words, he was polite and generous to me and I liked him. When I told that to George and Henriette Cohn many years after I had stopped being a student, and after old Monsieur Vennault had died and left a lot of people, excuse me, a lot of money to a host of people nobody ever knew he would spit upon, they laughed with a tolerant, if amused, astonishment. And of course, I too know that by now I am much shyer than I was then, or perhaps only less ignorant, and that I would not dream of accepting so blandly an old miser's generosity and wisdom. When I read that passage a few weeks ago, it really jumped out at me because I think that for many of us, I know this has certainly been true for me and I hear about it or see about this pattern with the people that I practice with often, that we get caught by assumptions and expectations that we make in many circumstances in our lives that we're not aware of.

[04:36]

Not just about other people. We do the same thing with ourselves. So one of the hindrances to being able to see clearly, to be able to see what is so, is this clouding that comes from making assumptions that I am not aware of and consequently less likely to check out. and having expectations that I'm not aware of, and then there is so much suffering that comes when my expectations are not met. So what I want to bring up for our consideration this evening is the possibility of focusing on noticing when I have an expectation about something or someone. noticing when I have made some assumption or assumptions about someone, myself or another person, as a way of bringing this pattern into awareness, but also then to be able to work with the instance of making an assumption or having an expectation in a way that is less likely to lead to suffering.

[06:02]

I have a little study group with a group of people in Juneau, Alaska. We're studying the perfections, the six perfections. So every couple of weeks, this group of ten people goes to the Juneau library, where there's a conference phone, and they call me. And we talk to each other for an hour and a half about the perfections. So we've been working the last few months with the perfections. In particular, we've been working with morality or ethics, which of course plunges us immediately into the precepts. So we had our July discussion last night. And one person in the group was telling me about how he had gone for a walk the day before.

[07:07]

He had taken the day off and gone for an eight-hour walk. My sense of people in Alaska is that when summer comes, everyone gets a little hysterical and goes outside and runs around. When I was there in April, they were all getting ready to have the hysterical period. And as a way of getting ready, I heard lots of bear stories. Pretty scary bear stories. It made me a little reluctant to go outside at all. Anyway, my friend in the group was telling all of us last night about having gone off on this walk. And he had a lot of expectations about what the day would be like. that it would be beautiful and it would be calm and he would be calm and he would have a great time and he would see all these many beautiful plants and birds and he was all ready.

[08:08]

So he was quite upset to discover that he was actually quite tense that he had a lot of what this great translator of the Middle Length Sutras Maurice Walsh calls, worry and flurry. As he's walking along through this beautiful landscape is that his mind was just racing and chattering at him. So he had a pretty difficult time and described his day as internally quite terrible. He said externally it was very beautiful but the inner landscape was pretty, pretty disappointing. I was very struck by his description because of course clearly it was only all right for him to be happy or calm or at ease and he wasn't.

[09:16]

And I wonder how many of us have that kind of experience. of not having what's actually so fit our press release. And of course the great paradox is that the more I resist being with myself as I am, the more I'm in that place in a kind of stuck way. There's something very powerful about the kind of turning towards what is so that comes from observing, identifying, and naming. Oh, I'm upset. Oh, I notice some tension in my body. Oh, I notice that my mind seems to be full of lots of worrying and chatter. Oh, feet on the ground, inhale, exhale. Even naming what is so leads us to that moment of a kind of release.

[10:23]

Have you ever woken up grumpy and said to whoever is in your household, I seem to have woken up grumpy this morning? And the grumpiness somehow fades a little bit just with that acknowledgement. That naming, oh, I woke up a little grumpy this morning. So my friend last night was not so thrilled when I suggested to him that he might cozy up to that aspect of himself which is a little uptight or worrying or whatever. And I said to him, it sounded like there was a lot of judging going on. And he said, oh. He hadn't noticed. So I think that the realm of expectation and assumption leads us to that kind of turning away from ourselves when we aren't the way we want to be or expect it to be or the situation or the other person doesn't turn out to have arrived quite in the way that we had in mind.

[11:45]

Now, I'm bringing this particular set of patterns up because my experience is that these patterns plus the close friend, if you will, of habitual judgment, these are the patterns of the mind that are obstacles to our being present, to our being present in the moment, no matter what is so. And these patterns lead to so much suffering. So much suffering. How much of our suffering comes from our refusing to see what is and our insisting on what we wish it would be? I had a very sad telephone call from someone today. This young woman and her husband came to see me from Southern California a few months ago.

[12:56]

The Buddhist teacher who was going to do their wedding ceremony admitted to both of them that he'd been married a couple of times and didn't think he was somebody that could give them much advice about what getting married was about. Maybe they should come see me. I seem to have a better batting average than he did. So they flew up to see me and we had made an arrangement to meet for an hour and a half. And they came filled with, each of them, a lot of expectations and assumptions about themselves and about each other. And it was just, you could see, trouble waiting to happen. So I was pretty straightforward with them about what I noticed.

[13:59]

And we worked together for a couple of hours and then they went off to have lunch and sort of chew on our discussion. And I said, if you want to come back and talk some more after you finish lunch, I'm happy to meet with you some more." So about an hour and a half later they came back ready for more punishment. And we worked together in the end for almost a whole day. And they left and said later that they had found our conversation about what they were looking forward to as a consequence of their decision to marry, that they had found our discussion quite helpful. And in fact, a month ago, they did get married. So this morning, the husband said to the wife, I want a divorce, and I'm going to move out after work this evening.

[15:09]

I'm actually a little surprised at my response to having the recent bride call me and tell me this story. It somehow struck something in my heart. And I've been thinking about these two people all afternoon. I actually talked to both of them subsequent to receiving this message. And I'm not surprised and I'm very sad. They went into this marriage with a lot of assumptions and expectations that weren't particularly good matches. We sometimes do that in our lives, don't we? We're so determined that It is going to be the way I want it to be, that we may even compel ourselves into a situation where all of our friends can see that we're headed for trouble, but we insist, no, it's going to be just fine.

[16:37]

When my husband and I first started spending time together and I realized that something serious was afoot, I decided that I didn't trust my own eyesight for exactly this reason. So I decided to listen very closely to what my children and close friends had to say about what they observed. It's kind of a nice idea, unless, of course, your family and friend says... Probably not. And what I realized was to have that process really work, I had to really deeply be willing to hear what I didn't want to hear. And most of us don't want to hear what we really don't want to hear. So this stuff that happens as a result of our expectations and assumptions directly has the direct consequence of a kind of blindness.

[17:54]

Since I started paying attention to assumptions and expectations, one of the things I've begun to discover, for example, with expectations, if I just ask myself now, oh, I have such and such an expectation about what's going to happen when I go to Palo Alto to meet with all of you. If I'm aware of having some expectations, I then have the opportunity of asking myself, well, are these expectations realistic? Is there something I might do that would make my expectations be more likely to come about? You know, I want my husband to ask me to go to the movies. I can want that probably until I'm a very old woman.

[19:02]

If I don't mention it to him, it's not likely to happen. He's not the moviegoer in the family. So I'm not in any way suggesting that there is something wrong with having expectations. What I want to suggest, what I want to invite all of us, including myself, to consider is the benefit of being aware of making some assumption or having an expectation. That is bringing up into conscious awareness this pattern. So after our discussion last night, my friend with his miserable walk said, well, I don't even know where to start. How am I going to begin to notice when I have an assumption that seems hard to do? I think that's right. I think it is.

[20:05]

I think that my suggestion is to start with expectations first. I think it's easier to recognize them. It's easier to recognize when these patterns in someone else. So you can do a little eavesdropping and spying on your friends. It's also easier, I think, to notice that you had an expectation or were making some assumptions after the fact when you look back on something. And if you're willing to see Oh, I had an expectation before I went to see so-and-so. That retrospective, looking back, if I'm willing to do that without some judgment about, oh, why didn't I see that sooner? Why didn't I see that before I went there? If looking backwards is soon enough, that is, you're not judging what you're seeing,

[21:13]

then what will gradually happen is you will begin to have some awareness of an expectation closer to the moment of it arising. That process will happen in the natural order of things, I think. So I think you can slip into a certain amount of awareness about your own tendencies with respect to expectations and assumptions retroactively. I think that one of the patterns that leads to an enormous amount of suffering, particularly in very close relationships, in marriages and couples of all sorts. We get into a lot of trouble over and over again because that's exactly the relationship in which we have all kinds of assumptions about each other, especially if we've been with that person for a long time.

[22:20]

Oh, I know so and so. My husband and I have been together, much to my amazement, for 16 years. And I'm in big trouble when I think I know him very well. Because, of course, he's continually surprising me. I've lived with myself even longer. And I make all kinds of assumptions about who I am and how I am and what I do or don't do or what I'm good at or what I'm not good at. So this process that gets us into a certain kind of difficulty in our relationships with other people also gets us into a great deal of difficulty in our relationship with ourselves. Because it is this pattern of assumption that keeps us from being willing to be surprised at our ability to do something that we haven't before been able to do.

[23:28]

How often do we say, oh, I can't do such and such. How about, up until now I haven't been able to do such and such. You leave a little door open to be surprised. There's a great commentator on Buddhist psychology texts who describes the whole kind of aim of the path as cultivating our ability to see each thing, be present in each moment as though for the first time. What Suzuki Roshi called beginner's mind. That is not the mind that is cultivated from the ground of assumptions about what will happen. It's the ground that arises from the mind of don't know.

[24:34]

It's the mind that arises from a willingness to be surprised that something or someone will be completely different than they've been 522 million times before. My old mother, who is, well, we think she's 87. Nobody really knows, least of all my mother. She is my continual teacher about this because I have many ideas about what she's like. I can almost write the script of what it will be like when I go to see her. Horrible. I've been taking her to the eye doctor a lot because she's having trouble with her lower left eyelid, which keeps turning in, you know. You get older and the skin stretches and it does all these strange things.

[25:37]

It's wonderful. And when we first started doing this series of doctor's appointments, the first time I took her, I hadn't seen her for a little while, and I really, you know, we forget pain, and I'd forgotten how unrelentingly critical she can be. And from the minute I met her until we came back to where she lives was an unbroken stream of comment about what was wrong. What have you got on? Turn around. What are you wearing that for? Look at that long car. Is that your car? Why do you have such a long car? And it went like that. We got to the doctor, and the very clearly licensed and trained assistant came in to do the preliminary eye exams, and my mother was completely uncooperative.

[26:50]

She didn't like being there. The office is in a converted school. It doesn't look like a doctor's office. Where are we? What is this? We're in the hall. This isn't a waiting room. It's just endless. So the young woman was trying to test her eyes. Do you see one finger or two fingers? She did the one and two fingers thing for a few minutes, but then when it came to the eye chart, I don't see anything. It's just a big mirror. Finally, the young woman just left. with the eye exam incomplete and we just sat there for 45 minutes when we would have been busy with the examinations until the doctor came in. So we had two or three visits like that. And of course, with each successive trip, I looked forward to the trip less and less and less. And the last time we had to go, I thought, I think I'll take the dog.

[27:51]

So I took our little black skipper key. She's very small, very affectionate, loves sitting in my mother's lap, licking her cheek, mooning at her. And of course, my mother was completely captivated by this dog being very sweet to her. And we had this absolutely sweet time. What a beautiful car. Is this your car? Isn't that young doctor nice? He's so nice to me. I mean, it was just amazing. How could I have forgotten that taking the dog as this, you know, this sweet little dog who just snuggles up to my mother and thinks she's the best thing since ice cream. And of course my mother is just smitten by that kind of sweetness and snuggling and affection and it's very dear.

[29:07]

So I went, you know, with this expectation that we were going to have another one of these grim trips to the eye doctor. And we had an absolutely sweet morning. I really thought about it for a long time. How much of my mother's irritability or habit gets fanned a little bit by my expectation that that's how she's going to be. And worst of all, when we have those kinds of expectations about ourselves. So, I would like to invite you to hang out with noticing, just noticing, without judgment, observing, identifying, and naming expectations.

[30:14]

And then maybe a few weeks later you might add assumptions. And just see what you notice. Don't try to fix anything. Just observe. There's another passage in MFK Fisher's book. It was in the preface. I thought, boy, this is going to be a good book when you've got a line like this right in the preface. She's talking about this period of time that the book is about. It was there in France, I now understand, that I started to grow up, to study, to make love, to eat and drink. to be me and not what I was expected to be. It was there that I learned it is blessed to receive, as well as that every human being, no matter how base, is worthy of my respect and even my envy, because he or she knows something that I may never be old or wise or kind or tender enough to know.

[31:29]

That's a Dharma teaching. So she's talking about respecting others, but we can't do that unless we respect ourselves. And when we have a lot of expectations and assumptions about ourselves that we're not aware of, and particularly when they are not accurate, when they're either inflated or very negative, that mental process leads to an enormous amount of suffering. So what I was suggesting to my friend in Juneau yesterday was that he be willing to go on his walk a little grumpy or a little tense or with some worry and flurry that he take those states of mind those constrictions in his body with him with kindness.

[32:39]

And he might be surprised at what would happen. There's a koan in the Zen tradition that Suzuki Roshi used to talk on once in a while. He liked it a lot. the kind of core phrase or turning phrase in the koan is, when you're a cold Buddha, be a cold Buddha, and when you're a hot Buddha, be a hot Buddha. He talked about it a lot when he got sick. You know, when you're dying, be dying. Wholeheartedly be who and how you are in any given moment. So I wonder if there are any things that some of you would like to bring up for us to talk about for a few minutes.

[33:45]

Yes? I'm just starting to teach again after not having done it for about 20 years. And I was teaching children before and found that the power And where do we get such sensitivity to it? May have come from behavior in parents and teachers with children. Because education almost is expecting things from the child. It draws that out of the child. And I taught violin for a long time and would let the bad notes go. and expect that most of them would be all right and then find out how the good ones were made and let the negative ones go. And that kind of expectation will pull out of people remarkable things if you're teaching them, if you're trying to take them to another place.

[34:49]

Yeah, I think that's true. And yet living is not necessarily going to another place. Well, I also think that there is not quite the same territory but related, which has to do with intention. And I think that particularly in the Buddhist tradition, there is a very clear acknowledgment or recognition that intention is very powerful, that clear intention is very powerful. And I think that what you're saying about expectation is right. I know that's certainly true in terms of meditation practice. I remember when Tassajara first started and there was this practice called Tangario, sitting without any schedule or bells or anything. The way you would be admitted to the practice period would be to sit for five days. And everybody else would come in for some chanting and bowing and lunch.

[35:56]

And so you'd get to get up then with great gratitude to chant and bow and sit down again and have lunch and a little tiny short break after each meal. But other than that, you just sat. And it was up to you to figure out how long you could sit, and then when would you bring your legs up, and how are you going to do five days of just sitting there? A few hours to sleep at night, but just sitting there. Well, it was a pretty daunting practice. But with every group of people who did it, it was less daunting. It somehow became a possibility. And it definitely has to do with expectation. There was some sense, oh, well, there are all these people who did it before me, so I guess I can do it. Interesting.

[37:06]

Yeah, it's exactly the same thing. But I think making some distinction there where there is at least some quality of intention with expectation. And of course, as a teacher, your expectations are hopefully you're aware of them. It's not what is unknown or unconscious. And I think that makes a huge difference, makes a very big difference. Yes? I thought about expectations before, but you see what happens that even if you notice that you have expectation of some sort, it's like, okay, I know I have the expectation, but you still would go ahead and expect. I never quite figure out how to deal with that. Well, I'm not lobbying for not having expectations. I'm really proposing that there is some benefit in being aware of having them.

[38:12]

Because with that awareness then comes the possibility of, was this just pie in the sky? Or is this something that might actually happen? And are there some things I might do that will increase the likelihood? I'm not in any way proposing that we walk around in our lives not having expectations, but I do think that when we aren't aware that we have them, then later when we think about some situation where things didn't go very well, we think, oh, I was expecting this and I got that. And we feel taken by surprise, or our feelings are hurt, or we're disappointed. And then we realize, well, it's because I arrived at the party expecting, you know, a formal event, and everybody was in shorts. I think that we have many times this idea that there's some realm of perfection that we should all, if we were doing it right, would live in.

[39:23]

Perfection, right? The perfection is exactly the way things are. Perfect in the sense that there are causes and conditions that lead to things being the way they are right now. And what I discover is I have much more capacity to be with many things that I think of as, oh, I couldn't do that. And a lot of my inability to be with what is difficult is this idea that I can't be with what is difficult. I think it's why meditation practice is so powerful because we begin to have some experience of what happens when I'm just with what's arising. I'm not stuffing it and I'm not expressing it. I'm just with what's arising. And I discover that I can sit here steaming mad about something and I don't self-destruct. I don't melt into a puddle. I don't cause radiation burn on the people sitting around me.

[40:30]

Oh, and it not only rises, it passes. It rises and passes. So it's not that we need to be in any way different than we are. Can we be willing to notice how we are? Can we notice what we do? Can we notice what our thoughts are? and what follows from our thoughts, which is all the rest of it. Yes, back there in the corner by what I guess is a piano. Yes.

[41:34]

Yes. And I'm just drawn to the correlation of what you're speaking about and what our expectations are of people who work for us, or people we work for, and how in that philosophy it basically says what you believe creates reality. And so it was very enlightening. you were probably going to meet me, you were probably going to behave in that way. I had an expectation of him to behave differently in a way that I would like him to behave, that I somehow in my own being created an opportunity for that to happen. Or at least to have the openness to being surprised. Yes. In closing, I want to recommend two books to you if you don't know about them.

[42:36]

Recently, I was accused of probably getting a cut on the royalties because I keep pushing. Every few weeks, I have a new book. But for those of you who don't know about Sharon Salzberg's book on loving kindness, I want to recommend it very highly. It's a remarkably useful and effective book, I think. She takes the practice of loving kindness and really opens it up and guides you through the stages in the practice. So you can use the book as a kind of meditation manual to guide you through the loving kindness meditation itself. And she does it extremely skillfully and well. The other is a book that, it's called Loving Kindness, the Revolutionary Art of Happiness is the subtitle. And the second book I want to recommend to you, for those of you who are interested in these things, is a book by a man named Mark Epstein called Thoughts Without a Thinker, Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective.

[43:42]

And he looks at Western psychology as his kind of frame of reference, the Wheel of Life. And he does it very clearly. It's an extremely interesting book. Thoughts Without a Thinker, Mark Epstein. Yes. It's nice to see you all. You've mushroomed since the last time I was here. Thank you very much.

[44:10]

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