Black Dog Effect: The Burden of Expectation

The other day while working out on an isolated farm in the mountains a stray dog wandered up.  He was a large and looked like until recently he had been well cared for.  He was clearly hungry, and his protruding ribs showed it had been a while since his last meal.  Although I had no food to give him he followed me around as I worked at various tasks.  At one point I drove some way and he trotted a long behind.  I stopped, got out of the truck to load some wood into the trailer, and I saw the black dog walk behind the truck out of my view.  As I turned and looked to my left, I could see 100 yards down the road that the black dog was slowly trotting towards me.  I was momentarily disoriented, until I realized that I must not have really seen the dog walk behind the truck.  In an instant my mind righted the situation to what I thought was possible and without a thought I "realizes" that I had been mistaken.

Teacher Takes Many Forms

As I watched the dog approach me up the road, suddenly the first Dog came out from behind the truck and I realized now that there were in fact 2 almost identical black dogs. 

What amazed me about the situation was my minds quick and instinctual almost imperceptible ability to discredit what my eyes had just seen and rewrite the event in a way that "made sense".  I literally had not believed my eyes, even though they had accurately described the event that had taken place.  I could see now how far I have to go in my Yoga practice.

Yoga could be described as the practice of direct experience.  Yoga practices seek to quite the mind so that our consciousness can have the experience of what this is, not what we think it is.  The mind constantly "adjusts" the world to appear how we expect it to.  Due to subtly of these corrections, they are most often not as obvious as in the case of the Black Dogs.   How often do we discredit a situation as impossible when really that's not true of it.  "I can't do that" we say.  And with others, how often do we experienced someone not as they are, but as we think they are.  We dismiss whats really happening because the mind thinks it knows better.  How many times is our experience of the moment actually an after thought constructed by the mind based on expectations from past experience or conditioning. 

There is a mantra I sometimes repeat to dissolve the burden of my expectations.

May my subtle eyes be open to experience not what I think it is, but what it is.