April/May 2011
On Understanding Expectations…
How much life do you really experience when your mind is set upon expectations and anticipating what will happen? Are you likely to get what you expect? How often do you miss the whole picture when you are looking for something you think you’ll see? Does it detract from your enjoyment when something does not meet your expectations?
What are expectations? The dictionary defines them as strong beliefs that something will happen in the future. Let us focus then on the key concept of belief. We hold on tightly to our beliefs, but do they really help us? Beliefs are ideas that the ego uses to reinforce its sense-of-self. When we have expectations, the ego gets a sense-of-self by keeping you fixated on a the future event. This future is where the mind can be in control – this is where the mind reigns. It believes it will see what it expects while your ego gets its sense-of-self from being right or wrong.
Okay, so now we understand the concept of belief and how it strengthens the ego whether the belief is right or wrong. We have also learned that the mind uses expectations to keep us anchored in the future where it has the most control. The mind has us always seeing with the eyes of the ego, instead of seeing with the eyes of God.
Let us suppose that we are viewing a mountain top, expecting to see a sugar coated mountain top. The egoic mind asks your eyes to glance to the top of the mountain, never really glancing anywhere else. The gifts that lay on either side of it or off in the distance lie unseen. But what if you focused on more than simply what you expected to see?
Around this mountaintop birds are flying and trees are growing. And underneath this sugar coated mountaintop, life is beginning as it readies for spring. Below what’s seen on the surface lies the evidence of God and all his blessings. Deep beneath the mountaintops, the life that God creates in lush beauty. But one who looks just for the mountain top sees only the mountain top and is unaware from a place of consciousness what lies beneath or around its sugar coated surface. The beauty or experience of it, is ignored.
The explanation is simple. Your mind is task-oriented focusing only on the outside, looking for what the ego expects to see – never venturing deeper under the sugar coating where the genius of God shows His true colors as life.
Try to envision a mountaintop the way you always see it, and then with a close up view, float down underneath the sugar coating into the world of the life beneath it with open eyes and no expectations. Wonder at the experience of seeing what unfolds for the very first time! Do this through not your ego’s eyes but with the intentionality of shared eyes, Gods eyes, shared by you.
An easy way to remember to change your focus is the simple knowing that what you focus on, expands. Redefine your focus. When you catch yourself with an expectation, look beyond it and around it envisioning a greater reality. Ask God to point your eyes. This greater reality is seeing through God's eyes.
Stephen Hawking once said, “When one's expectations are reduced to zero, one really appreciates everything one does have." Reduce your expectations to zero. Let God point your eyes to what He wishes you to see, and view the world from a new place. Once you do you will come to avoid all expectations, knowing them as limiting. You will begin to see more beauty and peace than any expectation could ever give you!
-Frannie Rose
