Expectation contour

I have been thinking about the psychological causes behind our Raag and Dwesh. In one of my earlier posts after having discussion with Dhanendra ( Link to post ), I have written the following:

"Question: If someone is acting unfair to me. Should I have bad feeling for him.

Answer: No. because he is unfair because of his upbrining. And hence the real cause if his parents. And why his parents taught him wrong things - because they were taught badly by their experiences and their own teaching. So now the real cause is something else. It seems there is a big chain of cause and effect relations- so we can not just blame the person who is acting unfair to me."

I have been always wondering why knowing above truth decreases our bad feelings about someone who is acting fair to us. The reason seems to be that after above reasoning we realize the truth, and it diffuses our expectations of him being fair to me.

I realize that we usually have a contour of expectations. We have a perception of right and wrong. And from our experiences, while interacting with others, we build a set of expectations with others. As an example: If we know 100 people in our life, we associate some kind of 'goodness' and 'badness' with them. And according to this association and our "wisdom" of rightness/wrongness, we build expectations from the people. These expectation are not bounded only to these 100 people, but in fact to the whole world. We have general expectations from a stranger, a political, a humanitarian, a scientist, a businessman etc. I am calling these set of expectations, which is associated with various people, as 'Expectation Contour'.

Now let see when we get bad or good feelings.

• We have bad feelings when something happens which is against the expectation contour.
• And we have good feelings when things happen according to expectations or they surpass expectations.
• We have mixed feelings when part of things happen according to expectations and part do not.

Dynamics of Expectation contour: Our expectation contour keeps changing as our understanding about other persons change. And accordingly our good feelings/bad feelings change.

• Example: If we meet a rude person we have a bad feeling. Later when we know that he is orphan and could not inculcate love within him because he did not get love from his parents. Our bad feelings turn into compassion for him.

Expectations of a knowledgeable person:
A knowledgeable person would not have any bad/good feelings. Let us see what a knowledgeable person would have:

1. Either he will know know what is going to happen. In this case there is no reason for good/bad feelings. This happens in omniscience state.
2. He would not know what is going to happen. And therefore all happenings will be acceptable to him.
3. He would have some kind of estimates or guesses. After he has the outcome, he would not blame others for what happened. But he would know that his estimate/guess was wrong.

In either of above cases there is no room of good or bad feelings for a knowledgeable person.

Difference in the knowledgeable and un-knowledgeable person: There is a big difference in the expectation contour of un-knowledgeable and knowledgeable person. An un-knowledgeable person would want to see the world according to his expectation/estimate contour, while a knowledgeable person would want to see his expectation/estimate contour according to the reality.