What Did You Expect?

When you reflect on your situation—home, relationships, work—the easiest things to report are the troublesome things, or the extraordinarily good things.  Both strike your awareness with more immediacy than the majority of things that just work.  The adequacy of their “working” manifests by going unnoticed.  So, for example, when asked, “How are things going?” it would be very odd to say, “Water comes out of my faucets; and the toilets flush.”  More common would be the catastrophe, “the water-main to my house broke!”  Or again, no one would reply by saying, “my house is the same color it was last month,” but anyone would say (if it happened), “we just had our house repainted!”

What’s going on here?  All the many things operating as expected, these go without comment.  We build our lives around what we can count on, on the things that are stable.  It would be exhausting to re-think everything, every time action was needed.  In turn, this sets us up to be always aware of what’s not going according to expectation.  Things go wrong constantly, and the effort to correct them can be wearisome.  Even things that go better than expected, while it feels good, it mingles with our instinctual dependence on stability, and generates an expectation that this better-than-expected outcome ought to be the “new normal.”  No matter what happens, all is effort, striving, and some sort of conflict.  No matter what, something always fails expectations.

The ubiquity of this experience finds expressions like this, “If only we had some peace and quiet.”  Writ large—and it can be after many years of wear—this becomes a yearning for an end of strife, and end to suffering.  It becomes so engrained that when asking people what they would really want, their answer mostly finds shape in terms of their current set of problems.  “I want a vacation,” being the euphemism for, “I want a break, an escape, from all these troubles.”  I’ve heard more than one clergyman comment that addictions of various kinds tend rather to be more common than uncommon; that the ubiquity of addiction denotes a distinctive trait of this generation.  Specifically, the craving to escape is widely shared and acted upon.

Extending this to the ultimate questions about life after death, morality, religion, then the popular response fits mainly into the category of “end of suffering.”  Without fail relatives and friends will say of their departed loved one, “he’s in a better place,” or similar variant.  In short, hope finds expression in terms that negate present woes.  Positive statements of things hoped for are much rarer.

This doesn’t strike me as a momentous thing to say—at least not upon saying it.  But it is!   Simply to hope that bad goes away limits truth to individual experience.  There are (at least) two halves to reality:  good things and bad things.  Experience knows the bad, is more intimate with it than with the good.  Quite simply, we can’t know by experience what ultimate good might be; efforts and extrapolations, while interesting, result in amalgamations like unicorns an minotaurs.  Being obvious concoctions rather than truth, they are easily dismissed.

Consequently we approach ultimate good from the underside, by negating what we know best, settling on any number of elaborate versions of one basic idea, “I need a vacation.”  We want Nirvana, without the messy details.  We don’t want Eternal Life, or at least, the idea of it isn’t anything we can get our minds around.
But what if we could taste real life, fullness, and goodness, now?  That would give us a little bit of experience to correct our negative one.  It is my belief that our generation needs exactly a taste of the full life.  The Oprahs and Chopras of our time resonate very loud in the culture—meditation to find a peaceful place, meaning a state of being without conflict, without trouble.

I also know that experience of fullness will, nevertheless, be inadequate.  It leads to better extrapolation, but all extrapolations fall short.  So, we need revealed truth, a thing outside of experience.  What lasts exists outside of us and our limitations; things that last necessarily exceed our experience, so we can only learn of them from outside sources. 

More puzzling, still:  we cannot understand them even when revealed.  And yet, that’s what we most want and need, a hope in something real and transcending our experience.  A real thing, not the absence of bad real things.

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