No Expectations

No Expectations by Ajahn Brham Papers come in now. So this evening I am responding to an email which I got. Or rather I don't have email, but our secretary has email. Email would kill me. Go to much of it. But they, uh, someone asked me from overseas if I can give a talk today on expectations. Uh, because sometimes they feel that the way they, uh, expect so much of their children or their partner out of life causes lots of suffering, a lot of pain, a lot of disappointments. And they asked me to talk something about the Buddhist idea of expectations and how they can be used wisely, and how they can be, uh, used unwisely in creating a lot of problems for us. So this evening's talk is about on expectations. And of course, you know that when we have any expectation at all that's looking into the future and second guessing the future, which is what we mean is we think it's going to turn out this way. We expect it to turn out that way, and it limits us quite drastically into the options which we have for the future. So much so that with too many expectations, we become unadaptable. It's one of the trainings which I have had as a as a monk over all these years of a simple living monk is to try and have at least expectations as possible just to get by, because it's been rammed into me in my early training that you just don't know what's going to happen next. And this much of our training was to live on the edge, as I say these days, on the edge between the past and the future and the present moment, where no expectations can occur simply because that one doesn't know what's going to happen next. And, uh, life is a monk you think will be very settled, very easy. Uh, just a general routine. Our teacher was always changing the routines, not just changing the routines, but sometimes you'd be happily meditating in your heart, and a monk would come up and say, I don't. Cha says you got to move. Which meant moving to another part of Thailand, and you had half an hour to pack your things and leave. And before you knew it, you had a completely different monastery in a different part of Thailand. So that you couldn't really settle down in the sense of having a nice nest somewhere, thinking that there you can be happy ever after because life was always throwing you up new things. The point of that training was that adventure was always asking us to be 100% adaptable to circumstances which we'd never expect because all expectations, what we expect, what we think it will be, it always turns out to be something else. And indeed, when I read some of the old Buddhist sutras, that was one statement which I came up with is a saying of the Buddha, which meant so much to me. It should be more widely. What more widely, more widely disseminated. When the Buddha once said that whatever you think it will be, it will always turn out to be something different. It was a great statement by the Buddha, a very wide ranging general and so accurate. Whatever you think it's going to be, it'll always be different. Isn't that the story of our life? Just know when you went to school, it's not exactly what you expected it to be. Just when you went to work. It's not exactly what you expected it to be. And certainly when you got married, that wasn't what he expected it to be. And even when you retire, or when people become monks or when they go to another country, it's always completely beyond our ability to predict. And that's why the life is to see the unfolding of the unexpected. Now, once one accepts that as a basic truth, whatever you think it's going to be, it always turns out to be something else the result of understanding just how profound and how true that is, is you stop thinking so much because most so much of the thinking is complete waste of time. 99% of our thoughts just miss the points and are completely unproductive. But the problem is, we think so much we get into the habit of thinking and half of thinking is expecting something for the future. The other half is worrying about what's already happened. Doesn't leave much time for actually living in the present moment, actually being here right now. So, so much of our expectations to thinking about what might happen next are completely irrational, and they should be stopped if at all possible. But if we are going to expect in the future. It's just too common for us because as one of the points which I keep on mentioning here on a Friday night, that because of our conditioning, we just search for finders, always looking at the faults in things, and then we're looking at the positive side of light. If you are going to expect anything, why not expect something good to happen, the bad happening or the good happening? Neither will happen. But if you're going to expect anything out of respect the good, it's just as unlikely to happen as the bad. But at least you're having a good time thinking about it. The point is, if we're going to expect anything, we expect the good. But there's something more. Just than thinking about good things happening in the future is positive, and it's fun in the moment. It also tends to bring about good things, whatever we expect. Too often we actually bring into being when we expect our politicians to be fraudulent, to be corrupt, we actually get fraudulent and corrupt politicians. If you expect your partner to be sort of, uh, uh, an insensitive, then that's what you get. If you expect life to be unhappy, season that what you get. There's something about the way we expect the future which we actually bring it about. I think even quite a few talks also recently about how that we are the creators of our future. The Buddha called it craving, desire, wanting. This is actually how we create our future. And expectation is, uh, inherent in any expectation is the type of craving or type of wanting these things to happen. This underlying the expectation we think this is going to happen. So we actually very often we bring it about. And because of this, if you are going to expect expect a positive and your life will go a little bit more in the positive direction. For those of you who haven't read that book, which I wrote, open the Door of Your heart. There's a key story in that which, uh, links in to the whole problem of expectation. And that's actually the story of that experiment, which was done in the school in United Kingdom over 30 years ago. And those of you who know the story, please bear with me, because it keys into the whole idea of what expectation is and how it limits us, and how it actually brings about what we expect. This particular story was an experiment done in a school in which there were two streams of the same year at the end of the year examination. They'd never published the results. Instead, they split the children into two classes. But you would normally expect the top half to go in one class, the bottom half to go in another class. But this year they split the two classes up as evenly as they possibly could, but they never published the scores. They just assign one child to one class, another child to the other class, and only the principal and two educational psychologists knew that they'd been split up evenly. They chose teachers who had equal ability, classrooms with equal facilities making everything as equal as possible except calling one class A and the other one class B, and it's part of our culture. We think that class A means the top half, class B means the bottom half. And that's what the children thought. That's what the parents thought. That's what the teachers thought. And so for one whole year, how many children went to school, went to class B, and they thought that they had done poorly in the examinations. The teachers taught them at a lower level. The parents never expected so much from the kids. And of course, the opposite happened in the class A at the end of one year when they gave the end of the year examination. Again, the children in class A perform so much better than the children in class B, even though they had equal ability, as far as you could tell from the year before, children in class A surpassed the class B children. In fact, when I read the report, they did just as you would have expected if they had been the top half chosen a year before, what had happened is they'd become class A children, but worse, the children in the in class B, there had been some really high fliers the year before. Now, because they were called class B children, they had lower expectations of themselves. The teachers did not expect so much from them. The parents did not expect so much from the class B kids, and so they became class B children. There was a very telling, uh, experiment in psychology, in positive or negative reinforcement, in the way that what we are expected to do is what we usually live up to or live down to. And when I first heard that as a school teacher, and actually just before I was a school teacher, that it really sort of shocked me and it just showed me just how expectations can determine sort of the outcomes of our future. So if we are going to expect anything, expect on the positive side, at least you're giving more opportunity, more a chance of those good things coming about. But that takes a whole change of our attitudes, because we are conditioned to be such findings, to think all the things which might go wrong, all the things which might happen, which is not going to be good. In particular, this person who wrote this email said, why is it we expect all our young people to either be drug addicts, to be alcoholics, or to go binge drinking, or to slack off at school or to do all these other things. If that's what you expect of our youth, then perhaps that's what they become. They live up or live down to our expectations. Believe we expect the opposite. There may be something else happens. Just the whole idea in Buddhism. Expectations. It's just looking not at what the person is, but what they should be or what they might be. It's not really seeing them as they actually are in this moment. When we look at a person not as they are, but what they want, we want them to be what they should be. This is actually where we are divorced from the reality of the moment. We live in a world of shoulds and mights rather than the world, which actually is part of my job as a monk, of being a counselor is just bringing people back to real life. When they've got a husband, they don't get on with what to expect. I keep saying, so this is what husbands are like. You try and change one or all the same model. If you've got a wife you sort of unhappy about it, just say they're all the same. So. But we expect something much more. We expect the one which we choose to be the special one. Where are we? Yeah, well, we expect our children to be the special one. We expect ourselves to be special. Did I? Was it here like you so many times? Was it here? Last week I did the above average intelligence example. It was? Yeah. When I asked you how many people think the above average intelligence, and most of you thought you were above average intelligence, half of you were wrong. But we expect ourselves to be above average intelligence. We expect our relationship to be special. We expect our children to be specialists or expectations. And what happens is because we ask for something which life can't give, we get disappointed. We get frustrated. If we only knew that the rules of the game, what life can give and lived according to those rules, we knew what marriage was. If people told us that beforehand we had a small print, so we understood what's going to happen, then at least we know what life is all about. We can have no unrealistic expectations. We can live life as it's supposed to be lived. In other words, being with things rather than wanting things to be so, so different. So often that is our expectations of the future causes the problems. We want someone to be different. When we look at what they want to be, we're not looking at who they are now. Looking at who they are now is the opposite of expectation. Looking into the matter, into the person you live with, into the moment is the opposite of expectation, which we call inspection or inspecting. Looking inside, looking what you have. And when you look at what you have, you inspect and inspect and inspect. We call that respect. We're constantly inspecting. We're doing it again. We call it respect. And then we start to respect our children. We respect ourselves and we respect life. And there's a lot to be said for respecting life. Of course, I'm playing around with the English language here, and the English teachers will probably really harass me after this talk, but who cares? But it's actually something to that, because when we look in the mirror and we look at the person we are, we look at the way our children are right now. We look at the way our wife is, our husband is our finances are the Buddhist society is life is instead of what it should be, how it actually is. And we can respect that. We can respect life for what it is. Now, what that really means is actually looking at this life, and you find it's not as bad as you expected it to be. Instead of trying to think what your life should look like, you look as she does look like she's not that bad. In fact, there's many worse ones around here. Just take a look around and say, oh, okay. Fair enough. She's good. The same as your husband. He may not be the best, but there are many worse. So I could tell you some stories if I wasn't bound to confidentiality. Because when people say so, we could actually respect our partners. Now, you know what that word really means. When you're respected by the person you live with, how does that feel when they respect you and how they feel when they want you to be something different? You can imagine how you feel when you are respected, accepted for who you are, valued for your good qualities, not always having your thoughts pointed out. That's called respect. Now expect. I always want you to be something different, something more than you can be. How does that feel when you're always pushed to be something you're not? Or is people challenging you to do better, be different? Whatever else, it is that pressure on life to be something you're not. It's the main cause of the stress of life, and after a while it is the expectations put on as it is too great and after a while we just crack up. We've had enough. We get angry. We get depressed. Now, poor Mr. Gallup, too many expectations. What do you expect of politicians? My goodness, you know, if you try to do that job, you know you'd go crazy. You'd never be able to do as good as some of these people have done. It's such a hard job to do. Now, you do work really hard. You try and do your very best. You have to make a decision. You know, sometimes the decision doesn't turn out right. My goodness. Even on a Buddhist society committee, it's just so hard making the right decisions, being an average, hard making the right decisions. Sometimes you stuff up and make a wrong decision. But. That's life. I got into big trouble last week when I went to a ceremony, and I saw, there's no one of the people I know very, very well who was sitting next to this other woman. I said, oh, you brought your mother. He said, no, I'm his sister. Have you got a suicidal tendency at your birth? Oh, really? Go to big trouble for that one. You know, you see someone, you've got to make a quick decision. Say hello, be friendly. And I thought it was his mother, not his sister. And that was very, very sensitive. So, anyway, you know, make mistakes sometimes. But I can do that. I can laugh at it. But if you do that as a politician, that's it. You're in the newspapers and you're you're hammered for weeks and weeks afterwards. He said, what do you expect? And sometimes our expectations put so much pressure on other people. And we can feel that pressure when people have those expectations on us. And that sort of pressure is a negative force, which actually stops us performing well. I always think always being judged or people asking of things. Life is just so tough. We always have to do things and be something we're not, and it's just so difficult. And many people after a while give up. And by giving up, I mean I just get depressed or get into alcohol or drugs or anything to escape. And you know what that feels like. No, it's the same with me sometimes that people look at a man and they expect me to be able to levitate, be able to read their minds. So all of their problems without charging any money, are they just so many expectations of a monk these days? In the end, it's what drives you. You've got to be like a manager, a meditation teacher, a counselor, have psychic powers, be able to tell them that the lottery numbers people actually do that. They come up to say, come on, that I'm Brahms. I'm really poor this week. I know you can do it. Please. Come on, tell me. So whatever it is, we've got all these expectations of you. And sometimes if a person, uh, gets oppressed by other people's expectations, they're never going to survive in life as a monk. I got rid of those expectations of myself a long time ago. Just enjoy myself. Just relax. Now, what you see is what you get. If you don't like it, fine. A long time ago, I had this beautiful way of no expectations. If I succeed, that's fine. I can spread the teachings, make people happy. If I don't succeed, I'm a terrible teacher. People get really bored with me. Then I can stay in my heart and be a meditator. Be a hermit. They'll be even better. So that way when both outcomes were acceptable, it was a win win situation. I never had any expectations or force on me to be something other than I am. Now, when you actually understand what it's like when people have those expectations of you and it always usually comes down to this word should you should be like this, you know, you should be more sensitive. You know, you should be more caring. You should be a better cook. You should clean up more. You should do this. You should do that or those should shouldn't. That's like a like a red alarm, a red light sometimes now, which is putting pressure on us to be something we're not meeting. If someone told us, you know, you should be exactly like you are. And I expect you to be as you are, whatever that happens to be. No expectations, no shoulds, no force to be this or that in the future, how would you feel? You feel this amazing sense of freedom, lack of stress that someone actually respects you, loves you for who you are. It's a sense of peace and freedom when those expectations are taken away from us. And with that sense of freedom and that stress taken away, that's when actually we can perform to a much higher level now, because we're doing it out of fun, not because we're forced to this pressure on us, which is expressing ourselves in freedom. And we do actually achieve much more with the least expectations. So imagine if you have children, you have all these expectations on them. And a lot of people these days, they want their children to be lawyers or doctors or or business people. How many of you really expect your son to be a monk, your your daughter to be a nun? Wouldn't that be a wonderful aspiration? I said this actually, and, uh, because this is Chinese New Year in the Chinese community in Malaysia and Singapore, parents are very, very inspired and happy when somebody else's son becomes a monk. Whereas their own son. No no no no no no no. Then what is expectations of what your child is going to turn out as? Now, my mother never, ever expected that I would end up like this. But she's very happy. The point is that all the expectations. They put our future in a sort of this corral, in this prison, which, you know, stultifying us and kills us. And we don't have any freedom to actually to grow. So it's wonderful not to have so many expectations of your children, of your wife, of your husband, not even of your monk or your nun. When you don't have any expectations, you give the other person freedom. And in that freedom is more time for growth. And when it's more time for growth, the bad things don't tend to happen. One of the reasons why people do get into drugs, or do get into alcohol, or do get into dysfunctional behavior because they're just fed up, that is so stressed out, people demanding they'd be like this and like that, and they just sometimes they just had enough of the pressure of life. And of course, you know what I'm talking about, because each one of us has experienced that to a certain extent. And when people say, you know, you shouldn't be doing this, you know, even being a monk, I remember going the first time I went to a doctor in here in Australia, went to see the local GP. I've been here for about 8 or 9 years in perfect health. I was feeling a bit sickly. I went to see the local GP and as soon as I went in there, one of the prison officers from Karnak, I was teaching at Karnak prison from every week he came in. He had a bad back. He looked at me, said, I didn't expect to see you in here. That's all. Now I felt as if I'd been in a brothel or a pub or something. What's wrong? Because monks are supposed to be sick. You meditate, you're supposed to be healthy. And I feel really guilty for being sick. I took his expectations on board, and I really suffered for that. If I don't care what people say, I'm sick when you expect it should happen or shouldn't happen, it's happening. So when the wonderful things of learning and this wonderful Buddhism is not to have so many expectations of yourself, not having so many expectations of others, you don't expect things. It's not you not disappointed. It's not the the absence of the negative is actually is that by itself, it's a positive thing to give other people freedom. So this respects this love, accepting of who they are and just allowing life to unfold. You never know what's going to happen next in life. Now these amazing, strange things happen. And when you're open to all possibilities, you've got this huge resources of adaptability. Whatever happens, you can you can always works out. Now. These days I do have a lot of responsibilities, but it's amazing just how many responsibilities I can take because I've learned the art of of responsible irresponsibility. So responsible irresponsibility means how you do a little bit of work. We just allow things to unfold and you always able to adapt to whatever happens. Now, when the plane gets delayed, there's always something you can do. There's always someone can work out what happens whenever sort of things go wrong. There's always something you can do. Sometimes when things go wrong, you go to great opportunities. Now, if we're doing something else. Every time I make a mistake and do something really stupid, like I said. And according to someone's sister, their mother, it's always great material for my next time I talk. So. So whenever things go wrong, whenever I make a mistake, it's a wonderful thing. Because when you make a mistake, it makes people laugh. And when they laugh, I laugh as well. That's actually when somebody asked me about the my experiences with AG and my teacher and my goodness, what I think I found there, that he was never critical. Whenever you made a mistake, he'd always laugh. And because the Western monks made so many mistakes, we kept him amused for years. You could tell that these Westerners were so faddy and so crazy. You know that if you ever been to to the, um, the toilets in Asia, you know, they don't use toilet paper. You know, you use your your bottom. I always made a mistake there. You wipe your bottom with with your hand, with water. And they've got one of these little things that you seen in the toilets. You can squeeze the handle and some water comes out to wash your bottom. I thought that was for your teeth. So that made me laugh that. You know, just high pressure washing your teeth. For whatever. Or whatever happens. I sort of actually know that she was. You should try it. Let's see what you don't expect. Anything. You can be more adaptable. The point is here that sometimes when we anticipate, expect, we plan, we put ourselves in a straitjacket. It has to work out this way. When it doesn't work out that way, you get frustrated, you get angry, spoils your whole day. It's like when you go to work in the morning, you expect the traffic to be this way. You're expected to be that way. How many of you get really angry when there's a traffic jam or there's, you know, some work going on on the freeways? It shouldn't be this way. What do you expect if they've got the main roads department they're supposed to know close the road to fix it up. This is what they do. What do you expect? What do you expect? A red traffic lights. There can't always be green. So, you know, welcome to life. And where we know life as it really is and we're true to the experience of life, we don't expect it to be anything different. You find you have less anger, less complaints and more happiness in life. You have more freedom. So you can expect to be late every now and again. You can expect other people to be late. You can expect things to go wrong. You can expect the computer to crash. This is what computers do. That's their nature. You can expect your children to be naughty. Sometimes you can expect your wife to get upset. You can expect you, your husband, to be insensitive because that's what they like. So when we come to real life, then we don't get so much suffering, too much expectations for the cause, for too much suffering. And sometimes we think, why is life so hard? It's because we want it to be something. It's not the way Arjan Cha put it in a very wonderful way. He said it's like a person searching for a tortoise with a mustache. It's a beautiful simile. You can imagine searching for a tortoise with a mustache. That's like searching for the perfect wife, or the perfect husband, or the perfect child, or the perfect monk or nun, or the perfect monastery, or the perfect whatever. Life is not like this. Tortoises do not have mustaches. However, now I've mentioned that some sort of scientific geek is going to genetically modify a tortoise to have a mustache just to prove against you and me wrong. So we have to live within the limits of life to understand what it truly is, and to expect nothing more than life can give. So the true expectations. What can you expect of life? We can expect of life is you're going to get old, you're going to get sick and you're going to get die. That's what you can expect. That's what life gives us. But it's what we do in the meantime which is most important. And so in the meantime, we can adapt to life as it changes. We actually train ourselves to have few expectations. This is what meditation does because we're meditating. We're in the present moment. We're just allowing the moment to unfold. You don't know when that dog's going to start. Uh, going to start next door. You don't know when somebody's mobile phone is going to be go off, even though you're all very good, you try and turn it off. You can expect out of so many people that someone is going to forget. So instead of getting upset and angry, we can just allow it to be. I tell this story very often when I teach meditation because when people meditation, they really try hard to get silent places. And when once when there was a big noise outside our monastery, the people were holding a party just outside. And in those parties in Asia, they just go for broke. They went to about 2:00 in the morning, which was okay if after 2:00 you could get some sleep, but they went to sleep at 2:00, our monastery bell went at 3 a.m.. So by the time they finished, you had about half an hour to get to sleep. And then the monastery bell when you wake up and had to do your chanting. So we're only getting about half an hour sleep and not at night. And these parties would go on for days. So what did we do? We complained to the headman of the village saying, look, please, you know you're making it so loud. We don't mind maybe going to midnight or something, but give us a three hours of sleep, please. And of course, no way would they listen to us. We were just small monks at the time, so we thought, okay, let's go to the boss, Ajinkya, and ask him, because the villagers would always respect someone as famous as Agencia. And also he had supposedly psychic powers that probably scare the hell out of them if they didn't do the right thing. And so we went to Atlanta. Can you please tell those villagers to not tone it down so we can get some sleep? We're supposed to be meditating. Imagine Charles said his wonderful thing, which comes up with his expectations. He said it's not the sound that disturbed you. It's you who disturbed the sound. And it's one of those sayings of this great master which was so profound it sort of applied not just to that event of being disturbed by a noisy party in a meditation monastery. It applied to everything else of your life because it wasn't. The sound of the dogs disturbed you earlier is you disturb the sound of the dogs. What does that mean? That's what dogs do. They're called dogs. Sometimes we call them powwows because that's what they do. They bow and they. Wow. You might say that Buddhists are half a dog because you bow, but you don't go well. That's how I really scraped the bar. But you can't do this. This is what you can expect from me now because you've seen me many, many years. This is just. But the point is, how often is it that as dog barks and we get angry at the dog because we somehow got this amazing, strange expectations, will you expect the dogs next door to understand that seven to or 730 to 8 every Friday night is meditation time, and they should know better by now. They've been in that house next door for, I don't know how many years. Maybe we can get our president to go and tell them now. Dogs. Seven 730 8:00. Right. I don't think it's actually ridiculous when you put it this way, but how often do we do that? When I say our wife barks at us and we get disturbed? It's never your wife disturbs you. You disturb your wife. It's never your husband's fault is you disturb a person's nature. This is what people are like. So hot dogs are like this. What node governments are like, what life is like. We have unrealistic expectations what children are like, should we not? We say boys will be boys, girls will be girls. Bucks will be monks. So when you don't have unrealistic expectations of life, we become more accepting and we become more accepting. There's more freedom. When there's more freedom, there's more growth. Even in, like, meditation retreats or my monastery, I'm not sort of like a tyrant monk. This, you know, this I don't think I am. If any of those monks says I am, I'm going to sort them out later on. I don't tell them what to say, do I? Now, the point is that I felt like as a as a leader, that the more kind you are, the more accepting you are, the more freedom you give the people who are trading underneath you, the more that they will aspire themselves to really become good people. You don't need to force them. You don't need to have all these expectations. We're supposed to get up at 4 a.m. every morning in my monastery. Four years ago, we started ringing a bell. But we don't do that these days. What is instead of expecting people to get up? I just trust that they will. So I don't have these, uh, CCTV cameras in all the the corners of the huts with a big monitor in my hut so I could find out who's doing what or when and how. We don't need to do that. Because when you have respect, people tend to live up to that respect. When you have a partner and you respect them for who they are, they live up to that respect and become a much kinder, nicer, more beautiful person to live with. When you have a child who you give respect for, you don't expect them to come top of the class every year. Only one child can come top of the class. There's so many parents here. They can't all come top of the class. So I sometimes people, they ask me sort of, you know, can you do some charging for good luck? Let's say for a child, for your good luck, that means that someone else can't win the lottery. So say, just chat for me, please. This week, don't shine for anybody else. I said, that's really unfair. So now everybody can be a winner. Not everybody sort of can now be top of the class. Now everybody can be the best and they don't need to be where we don't have such unrealistic expectations. We can accept life as it is, be more at peace with life, and we grow much more. We become better people. When you don't expect things to happen, then the unexpected what does turn out actually becomes better than anything could ever expect. Again, we train like this in our meditation. One of the great meditation techniques is no expectation. So you're in this present moment. You don't know what's going to happen next, which means you stay in the present, which means you're peaceful. You don't know what's going to happen next because you don't expect anything. You have this wonderful mantra which we've been using for many years. This is good enough, this is good enough, this is good enough. It's a great mantra to do with your meditation. A mantra is like a word which you say along with your your breathing. Say. You repeat it to yourself again and again. This is good enough, this is good enough, this is good enough, this is good enough. And it's not an exercise which creates mediocrity. When you have this no expectation, this is good enough, you accept things as they really are in this moment. It doesn't mean that you're not achieving things, but actually you achieve much more in that good enough meditation because you are cutting down the craving and the will and desire and the negativity that might become so peaceful. It becomes so beautiful. It gives you all the peace and the happiness and bliss which expectation was supposed to give you but never did. It that expectation promises you everything but delivers nothing. When you give up expectation, you allow things to be the everything which expectation was supposed to bring you. You find you already have. When you don't expect your life to be something different, you really appreciate what she really is. And it's much better than you ever thought. When you don't expect much of your children, but you respect them for who they are, they become children you really proud of when you don't expect so much of yourself. But you're at peace with yourself. Being at peace with yourself grows and grows and becomes fully enlightened. Isn't that what enlightenment is? Peace to come to a sense of inner peace. Peace with yourself. Do you have to change yourself first of all, before you can become enlightened? If you have is a hopeless task, isn't it? How many years you've been trying to change yourself? And you can't. But you certainly can be at peace with yourself. How many years you've been trying to change your husband? How many years you've been trying to change your wife? How many years you've been trying to change your children? How many years you've been trying to change the Buddhist society? If you're in the committee. But in the end, all of that stops us from appreciating what we have. Expectation looks over into the future, and it stops us appreciating what we have. That's my opposite of expectation inspecting and with repeated inspecting respect. And this is not only the path to deep meditation, it's also the path to a happy life together and getting the best from your children, and the best from your family and the best from anything. And it's also, it means you're just open just to life as it happens. You don't know what's going to happen next. So you're always adaptable, willing to change, willing to accept this moment as it is. I remember once getting caught in a traffic jam on the way here on the freeway, where everyone else was complaining. I thought, isn't this wonderful? Because on that freeway had this beautiful view over the. There were the Swan and the Canning River's come together and so lovely. I was actually quite disappointed when the traffic started to move again. Isn't it wonderful to have these moments of being stuck when you can't do anything, when you can actually be peace and you can meditate and you can just relax? But when we expect things, we think we have to get here at a certain time. We have to do this. We expect other people to be here on time as well. And when you do things like that, you're creating suffering for yourself and suffering for other people. What's the meaning of life? Life is what goes wrong when we expect things and life is what goes very smoothly. The fewer expectations we have, it doesn't mean we don't participate in the flow of life and guide it this way and that way, but we guide it this way and that way, just not expecting anything back in return. We just give with no expectations. It's like a person who gives a donation. Yes, they give a donation and they want tax receipts, their names up in lights. They want to sort of have recognition and say, no, Mr. So-and-so, he gave $0.50 for the nuns monastery. I've told you that's actually why that people usually put coins in the box on the way out, because you can hear coins being put in, but you can't hear sort of notes. But sometimes people expect recognition. And that's. Is that real giving or is that just more business? I give a donation as long as I get to heaven afterwards, I am going to be kind to you. As long as you give something back to me. That's not real giving, real giving. It's always giving, expecting nothing back in return. So when you give kindness to someone. If it's real giving you give with no expectation at all. I'm just doing this because it needs to be done for the sake of doing it. Will I get a thank you or a smile or appreciation that's just extra, but that's not part of the deal of giving. So real giving, expecting nothing back in return. When you see that happens, there's some people who are just so selfless. They don't ask for any acknowledgement. They don't want their names printed in the newsletter. They don't want anything at all. They just want the opportunity to give with kindness, with joy. So every time you give and you expect something back, you expect people to thank you or you expect something in return. I sent no birthday card to you. You never send one to me. That's not really giving. That's. You've done that expecting something back. That's called business. And too often in life we don't give ourselves to life. We do business with life. We expect something back in return. When we marry someone, we expect something back. Now, when we are kind to someone, we expect something back. When we have kids, we expect something back. Isn't it wonderful to be able to give with no expectations back? To this wonderful sharing. Expressing our love. Just forgiving with no expectation. That's why I teach my monks how to meditate. When you meditate, you'll give your bottom to the meditation cushion, expecting nothing back in return. You just watch the breath, expecting nothing back in return. And sometimes monks say, I've been watching the breath for years. I'm still not enlightened. Exactly. Because you've been doing it to get enlightened. You're expecting something that's not real giving. It's not real. Letting go. Whenever you meditate expecting something, you're asking for trouble. That's why sometimes I was told that people come to one of our groups and they say I'm meditative for 15 minutes and I'm still not enlightened. They said that I still haven't feel any bliss yet. I haven't seen any lights. I've been meditating for six months. I still haven't levitated yet. People's expectations are so great and they meditate to try and get something out of it. We are a society which does things to get something out of it in return. That's why that story about this Polish lady, you call me just before one of the Friday meetings and there is a talk tonight. And I said, yes, I'm giving it. I said, oh, great. How much do you charge? I said, nothing. And there's a pause, but he said, you don't understand. Dollars said, how much do I have to put in a box to get in? And quite calmly I said, madam, you don't have to put any money in any box. And she paused again. At this time she shouted down the phone. Listen, you know money, dollars. How much do I have to cough up at the gate to get in? When I said, madam, you don't have to cough up anything whatsoever at all. We're not going to take your name and send you a bill afterwards. We're not going to sort of send you all these demands. We're not going to ask anything of you. You can sit by the door in case you want to slip out because you don't like it. There's nothing. And then there was this wonderful pause. And I always remember this little conversation on the phone because she's, she said, really surprised with sincerity. If you don't have to pay anything, what do you guys get out of this? She couldn't understand that you could give expecting nothing back in return, because it was just so unusual to the life which had led so far. It was great being a Buddhist, because I remember just before I was a school, when I was a schoolteacher, before I went to town and became a monk, my two major possessions was a motorbike and a little table, a dining table. I remember the dining table when the school teacher was going to take over my position at the school I was a physics teacher at. They came to the schoolhouse, which I was renting, and they looked at the table. I said, this is a table here, you know, do you want it? And there was only a young married couple and they just had their first baby. And I said, yeah, we like it, but we don't know if we can afford it because it was a very nice, expensive table like a mahogany table. And with a great, smart. I said, if you want it, you can have it for free. I was so lovely doing that. I got so much joy out of that giving, expecting nothing back in return. And they looked at each other and then the husband said, we never met anyone like you before. You okay? The same thing happened with my motorbike. It was a friend of my mother's. Sort of came to have a look at it, drive it around, lights it. So we go up to. I deliberately did not want to settle up sort of alone with this guy. So we went up in the presence of my mother and I said, do you really like it? He said, yeah, yeah. How much? How much do you want for it? And then I looked at him and said, look, I'm becoming a monk. I don't need money. I certainly don't need a motorbike. As a monk, you can have it for free. And again he looked at my mother, and this time she answered for me, said, it's okay. He's all right. He's my son. Remember she wrote to me afterwards. He'd always remembered me, because the first time in his life he'd been given something for free. With no strings attached. It meant something. And this is what like no expectations are you give. You don't expect anything back when you don't expect anything back at all. That's when you get the real happiness. If you expect to, you'll never get happiness back. If you gave expecting nothing back in return, you get this incredible joy and happiness. So that's why what we get out of teaching here, that's why what our community gets out of working so hard for everybody. Why all the people who clean or do the video? No one gets paid for doing this work. What? They do it for happiness. When you give expecting nothing back in return, you try it. It's one of the most wonderful opportunities. And so now we understand people want to give it. In tomorrow's newspaper, apparently there's going to be an article about the marks on arms round. We've been going arms round in Armadale and also serpentine on the Saturday. We don't need the food. If you ever come to our monasteries, you see these heaps of food. There's a whole banquet of food there. Now we eat so well as simple living monks. But. But while the monks are begging for more food, it's not because I need more food. Because people love to give. To give. Expecting nothing back in return is one of the joys of life. So with our expectations, where I can have huge amounts of happiness, we give expecting nothing back in return. We love expecting nothing, just loving the person for who they are. And we look at ourselves. We expect no more from ourselves than who we are, and we're happy and content with that. We have peace of mind, and that way we actually grow much further and faster to perfection. So please don't expect so much out of life and you get even more out of it. But please don't expect by practicing no expectations, you'll get more than you expect, because that's just a complicated mind we have. So this is a story that I taught tonight about no expectations, father. Very good. Thank it. Wow. I never expected applause. But see, my my favourite was right. I never expected our president to be dressed up like this. And this was I like it. So some announcements now.