Expectation as a Tool for Transformation

One of humanity’s greatest advantages and challenges is our capacity to expect. Our ability to expect allows us to gather data and plan for events so that we can survive. For example, we use our powers of observation to gather data about weather changes. When we sense a sudden, dramatic drop in temperature, winds coming in from the North, rain clouds building in the sky, and animals behaving in tell-tale ways, we expect a strong, perhaps dangerous storm coming in that we should take shelter from.

We head indoors, batten down the windows and doors, and so on. If we are at sea, we take similar precautions by either making a run for a safe harbor or taking down the sails, battening down the hatches, and pointing our bow into the storm to meet the waves coming in. If the signs of an economic downturn are presenting themselves then we take precautions by selling off vulnerable investments and take other means to lower our risks of losing everything.

Over millennia we have learned to work with expectations to manage finances, strategize our way forward, gather resources, build defenses, stockpile food, and perhaps go lean and mean to be able to move quickly to meet adversity. Expectations have become one of the most powerful tools in our tool box to survive and thrive in a constantly changing world.

However, expectation comes at a cost and sometimes the price is steep, even disastrous. One person or company prepares for disaster but another person senses perhaps through intuition that the disaster will not manifest and instead, expecting a better outcome, they find huge opportunities instead.

Expectation, Fear, and Conditioning

Expectation can make us overly cautious or lead us into predictive behaviors that may cloud our vision or creative response to a challenge. The hurricane is coming and millions of people jam the roads to get away and perhaps they are smart to do so. Some people take the risk and stay home and perhaps they lose their lives or perhaps the hurricane changes course and hits elsewhere, right where people were escaping to with disastrous results.

When we have been traumatized early in life by abandonment, violence, sexual assault, or starvation, poverty, and the like, it can scar us for life by cementing expectations that these things will always happen to us. In this way we develop the seven deadly fear patterns of self-destructiveness, greed, self-deprecation, arrogance, martyrdom, impatience and stubbornness.

Whole cultures may develop expectations in response to impoverishment, war, invasion, colonization, and many other difficulties. This all creates enormous suffering in the world and creates an endless chain of similar events that result from negative expectations.

Why? Because most of us know that expectations breed more of the same. Science has demonstrated to us that our beliefs and the expectations based on those beliefs actually impact physical reality in ways that repeat our expectations. We can see this clearly in the placebo effect.

Of course, the positive side of this is that when we expect positive results from a pill or a medicine, we often get them and it is the same with all aspects of life. If we expect our students to do well, they will. If we expect our students will do poorly because we are holding some prejudices they perform with lower scores.

Beyond Fear and Into Awakening

Expectations often center around our fears. As a species we have been conditioned by fear for hundreds of thousands of years because it is endemic in our cultures, religions, beliefs and mind sets and hardly anyone notices how pervasive fear is and how it is totally accepted and expected.

So, are we rightfully fearful because the world is a totally scary place and horrible things happen if we are not hypervigilant? Or do horrible and scary things happen to us because we are so afraid?

The fact that we believe we are separate objects from one another and from our environment leads quite naturally to having fearful thoughts. We learn that anything we cannot control or manage could harm us. So, we try without success to control everything.

Around the world there have always been individuals and small groups who are not afraid of anything. If we question these people, we find that they do not feel separate from their environments or from animals or other people. They feel safe everywhere they go.

They identify only with universal and infinite awareness. They are one with everything. Who is it that would be afraid? What would they be afraid of?

They are mostly in the present moment. They have personalities, jobs, relationships, families, and responsibilities just like everyone else. Yet they are relaxed, content, loving, and kind.

Humanity is perched on the edge of an era. The old paradigm of being afraid all the time of everything is done-zo. Humans en masse are sick and tired of it, yet many do not know there is another way to be.

Armed or violent resistance usually strengthens the old structures. That leaves the path of awakening. Millions must decide they are no longer willing to live in fear and act accordingly.

The world’s infrastructure has not worked for a long time. Time for whole new fearless ways. What would that look like, feel like? We can and will do it.

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