Expectation

It's 1AM. The night was dark and the silence was thick. The soft cracking noise of the old mechanic fan was the only thing left with him and the night. Shadow was everywhere and loneliness grew inside his heart as fast as a body falling out of the cliff.

Ok, I will stop bullshitting right here cause you are might now yawning and say sth like :"Ok, it's midnight, and it's Hieu's gay time. GG man." May be the fantom from The Fantom of the Opera had picked the right time to compose his music since after midnight is a good time for us to rest and think about something. The silience and the solf darkness can raise many great ideas from you. I have a lot of friends who love the night cause simply they are some kind of olw. But tonight I have to thank the night, cause it gives me something great, the passion to compose this blog.

As you may know, many people have been searching for the question why people are suffering, and how to avoid those suffer. In many philsophers and religions, Buddism and especially Buddha have found, to me, the best explaination for the suffering of human being and how to resolve those pains. Today, I will try to present another path which to me quite similar to what Buddha said about suffering and a way to try avoid that. I hope u will all enjoy the blog.

Buddha propose a theory that people are suffering from life because they have so much attachment. However, the explaination he used for attachment was quite vast and therefore most of his solution seems to be impossible. I once had a conversation with a friend and he said that if human had no attachment, there would be no development. We human might be susceptible to the invasion of some kind of alien and be slaved. His argument was not correct because if we have no attachment, we would not really care if we would be enslaved or not. So if there is an attack from some kind of alien, we would not even care, and since we do not care, our life and death will be so light and solf. However the question makes me think that it would be impossible for a person with a brain to escape all the attachment. If Buddha breached to stop the attachment, why would BUddism (or at least modern Buddhism) keeps saying about defeatingthe demons and saves people. Therefore, get rid of all the attachment would be very impossible and not really practical.

The word "attachment" made me think a lot about the subject and thank to the night, I have a quite good idea. I do not disagree with Buddha about the attachment because it is true. But in order to narrow it down for people to easily understand it, I would say that all of our suffering comes from expectation. Let's make a little review about expectation. Expectation is the feeling or the thought that you have about certain things in life. You imagine a result that would come along with a consequence, in another word effect and result.

We always have in our mind the effect and result reaction such as work hard with getting a lot of money. A lof of money is coming with happiness. A higher degree will guarantee a good job and a better place in the society. Those are all our expectation about certain thing. That is how our brain works and that is how suffering was born. As a ying and yan, suffering comes along with happiness. When you expect something, there would be two outcomes. One is wat you expected comes true, and the other way is not. So from here you get into the cross road of feeling the pain. We do not have to talk about when what you expected comes true because you will get a euphoria felling about yourself. If you get that all the time, we would not even need to write this blog. But the story begins when we dont. The feeling of what you are expected do not come true just like, if we have to analyze to the core of the feeling, the feeling of being betrayed by your own friend or for yourself which in fact another kind of expectation.

Lets take some brief examples that I have seen in my life. A guy who love a girl with all his heart. He expected her to feel the same way about him and stay with him forever. But then there was something that the girl could no accepted from the boy, and so she left. The boy felt frustrated because all that he had done for her, he expected that she appreciated. Another example is a son who loves his mother so much. The mother who had always raised and taken care of him expected him to be her baby forever. But time passed by and the boy left for a wife. He could not spent as much time for his mom like he used to do. The mother's expectation got disrupted and she felt so sad.

From those two examples we can see that expectation can be the root of all our suffering. As humans, we mostly always think about certain thing in life is just one way. What I mean when I say one way is that we only have the cause and effect system in our mind. Even for people who work in the research field, they mostly think about all cause and effect which creates their expectation about certain results. So because we only think about one out come of a circumstance, if the out come is not as we expected our feeling gets hurt and we turn into the dark side of our emotion. It totally depends on the degree of the circumstance to make our disappointment great or tiny. Some people can either accept and get over it, some could not and hold grude in your mind. From there we could see that expectation is the main reason for all our hard feeling about certain thing. We can now sit down and look through over our life and also compare our expectation with the attatchment of Buddha. One example can be clearly shows that is buying a new car. Most people get a car not only for its motility but also to prove their ranks and class in the society. The car to them is not a vehicle but a ornament which can be use to decorate their trees. So they expect getting a car will make people respect them. Therefore they want to buy a good expensive car. In order to get that, they expect a job that pay enough to buy that car. And so on so far from there we can trace back. Those are all the attachment that we have in life. All the lust, hate, happiness... that Buddha talked about. Our expectation on certain thing creates a domino effect which goes backward and gives us a lot of attachment. Along with those backward dominoes, we could have more other expectation domino branches which take us to another kind of attachments.

We can see now expectation is the root of our suffering, agony and pain. But how do we get rid of that? and the big question is can we get rid of that? In my perspective, there would be two way to solve the problem. Both of them are very hard, but possible. Since our expectation is the root, we can get rid of that simply by not expecting anything at all. If we do not expect to get to work fast, we will not need a car. If we do not care out our status, we will not need a 1 milliion ranch house. The second proposition is that we can expect all the outcomes. Since the pain comes from the impair between the results and what we expected, if we can somehow expected everything, I mean that we truly expect it will happen like that, we will never disappoint with whatver the outcomes are. Therefore we will always live in happiness.

The blog getting long and boring, and I am falling asleep. So I left you guys all right here and hope you will all have your own idea about what I said.