Freedom from Expectation & Law

-Expectation is the root of suffering, and often violent infliction

-People’s violent attitudes towards defending imagined spatial constructs and laws

-The draining and abusive expectation of compassion when you turn it to yourself first and they miss it

What is law, and what is freedom? What is the structure to which every being, no matter their culture, race, age, gender, religions and interests - should adhere? This has been the age old battle of humankind for millennia. We have seen, erupt from this, a multiplicity of violent external acts, where people forcefully attempt to submit others into their law, their way of being. It is why we have religious wars worldwide, why we have cultural and sexual wars. Why we put up borders between ourselves and something other - create something other; something separate.

But nothing is separate. Somehow, everything forms balance in this chaotic mess of one moving cosmic energy that is the known universe through consciousness. Expectation needs to be disabled in order for people to function harmoniously - or at least deeply understood and acted upon with compassionate awareness. In expectation, we create a void and an area of activity which is out of our control. By having an expectation on someone, some system or some thing, we open up space for disappointment, for external control which infringes upon our internal freedom, for victimisation and blame. That is a conscious decision that we make when we have expectation.

Expectation on another beings, is a disrespect to their natural existence, an act which does not have acceptance for their natural way. We don’t accept the way they are and wish to change them, because we fear it could be us - we fear our own freedom of existence and what others may think of it.

We cannot control this. People will sometimes love you and sometimes hate you but your only mission is to go on loving yourself. The rest will happen naturally.

When someone does not behave according to our personal expectations, which are personal projections of an inner attitude which we expect to see compliance with in the outer world - we more often than not, choose to allow this to produce feelings of upset. This is crazy. We need to understand, that our ideas of the world at large and how everything works, are completely based on our personal energies, beliefs and experiences. We create personal associations to physical things in the external world, based on our conditioning and emotional impulses. For example - someone who has witnessed a violent stabbing, may always (consciously or consciously ) associate a knife with the feeling of threat, because their personal experience allowed them to form a violent association with that object based on their experience. A chef, on the other hand, may feel excited by associating the knife with his creative work and passion - if that is how he feels about his work.

On an even more abstract scale, a chair is only a chair because you think it is a chair. Actually, its just a creative assemblage of materials in a certain shape, that we project is useful if handled in a particular way. It is just a bunch of fucking atoms. So when some one else says - ‘Oh, a it’s a table’, they are as right and as wrong as you are - they are simply expressing their own personal projection based on their own experience and conditioning. Let them be. If you feel the need to be authoritative, then probably you are feeling insecure in your internal beliefs, so are trying to grapple on something external to hold onto your law. Don’t be afraid.

And so we go on, projecting our personal laws and structures onto the objects and people around as. That is why, for example, in India, the roads function in a completely different way to say the inner city of London. In India, we have a number of people who have grown up seeing roads function in this way for their whole life, so this is normal to them. Each person has the same projection onto the object which is the road, so they collaborate in their projection, dancing with one another under the law of this is how the road works, harmoniously. A British outsider, who may have never seen the object of a road being handled in such a way, could experience emotions of shock or fear or frustration - seeing that his personal association and projection of what a road is and how it is used, is not the same as some one his.

So he has a number of options in deciding how to act upon experiencing this new law. He could respond impulsively on the first emotion which arises - but this is not the way of awareness. If he did not like it, and immediately expressed his distaste, he would be putting out a negative energy - one lacking in compassion and understanding and acceptance for other ways of being, and one which assumes a hierarchy in which he believes his law to be superior to the point that he has the right to externally expect others to abide to his personal projection. So he would essentially be disrespecting that other way of being, working against flow and harmony by creating a resistance which is based in fear.

If he felt the feeling of distaste, but took the time to cultivate compassionate awareness, in which he is able to acknowledge that his dissatisfaction with this law is simply based in a fear and unfamiliarity, he could then make the conscious decision to still act harmoniously, despite his own cultural background, and surrender to experiencing the new way with a positive attitude. He could choose to not externally express his resistance, but instead attempt to flow and dance with this new way, and experience a variety in projective associations.

This would be the much more beneficial approach, as a person who is open to newness, variety and understanding, is a person who is expanding their intellect, their ability to harmonise and share. They are essentially expanding their ability to find the positive and joy in any new situation, enabling them to use their experiences to expand their happiness and fluidity into more areas of life. Now, not only can he be happy by understanding the function of roads by collective conscious projection in Britain and experience harmony when submerged in that space, but by not resisting the variety of collective projection found in India, he can now enjoy and experience that system in that context too. No problems.

He is free from suffering by releasing the expectation of others to conform to his idea of the law. By accepting and understanding that there are many ways, and as long as people choose to harmonise, it will work. This is not to say that we should surrender to absolutely everything, as it is still important to have an idea of the self as separate to everything else in order to maintain our health - but it is just that. The ego never truly dies, it is never truly something we can be rid of, so it is not something we should externalise and run away from - but rather something that we have to keep nurturing to be healthy. A healthy ego is important for expressing self-care. Self-care and self-compassion, is the first and foremost love.

Without sufficient self care, we are unable to give that authentically to others. But we can still try understand and accept peoples attempts to show love. When love ourselves well, we know better whether the love we are receiving is well suited to us or not. For example, when I discovered that sugar is in fact one of the most toxic substances to the body, I realised that it was an addiction that I ought to break if I wanted to treat my body with love, care and respect. Why would I consume something poisonous if I loved and cared for my body? So, it is hard, and sometimes I still often cave when I see a fresh croissant, but I managed to work myself out of eating sugar in as many ways as possible. This brought a number of unexpected things to my awareness.

Firstly, the number of food products which we buy from the store that have sugar in them, is absolutely incredible. The last things you would expect - bread, tinned food, pasta contain this poison. Why? Why do these products contain sugar? It would seem that due to the highly addictive quality of sugar, many production companies insert sugar as an ingredient into their products to create a consumer dependency. That is not love! These products seek to enslave us.

Secondly, after informing my direct family and friends that I was to avoid the consumption of sugar, I was surprised to experience massive resistance. Instead of sharing joy in my liberation from poison and advancement in self-love and self-care, I received violent lashes and nasty comments which put me as an outsider. “Ugh, fucking vegans”. Different comment but same vibe. People still often buy or offered me sugar containing foods.

So it would seem, that many people are afraid to break routinely habits of consumption, as they are afraid of being different, of becoming an outsider, or excluded from the communal routines of poise consumption. Their violent comments, are an external expression of their will for me to conform, a disciplinary chastising for breaking the communal law. I am doing the thing they’re afraid of, and they don’t want to see me excluded so they try force me back in. And I understand this, because I understand that people are afraid to feel excluded as we need community to feel included and maintain mental health. I also understand that these offers for me to join in on the consumption again and again, are in fact unconscious attempts at expressing love - but it is a love that is unaware and conditioned. They are conditioned into expressing love through the ways in which they have been told and shown is love, from their whole cultural upbringings and experiences. So the intention is good, but the ability to harmonise with variety, and act out of a more aware love and understanding is limited until a person is ready to change some habits, break some routines and try a different way of being. For this is the only way in which we can discover new and better things, grow, evolve and expand our joy into more areas of life.

So I have no expectation for these people to remember I don’t eat sugar, or go out and buy me a special sugar-free vegan snack, or even get me anything at all. Then I am free from disappointment. I also have no expectation for them to understand why I choose this way, as I understand that until they themselves have attempted a sugar-free diet - they would not not be aware of the benefits it has and so it would not even occur to them as an option for a way of being. But by them expecting me to conform, they would experience dissatisfaction when I do not, and even more when I continue to resist. In this case, my ego is important, because if I just surrender to consuming the poison, I am committing a dishonour to myself, to my own self-care, in order to please externally before internally.

I know that when I eat that sugar, it creates an uncontrollable appetite for more, it produces toxins in my body which cause gut disfunction, it roughens my skin and creates pimples and dots on my face, it feeds cancerous cells, it inhibits my natural energy production - I know that consuming sugar is an act of violence upon my own physical form. Cultivating this awareness, enabled me to move closer to true love of self, to health and to happiness and vitality. And that is the way in which I can share my love, by standing true in my own healthy ego, understanding that those who are ready to be open to the idea I present to them - may also try and be benefited and grow, but also cultivating peace in understanding that not everyone will, and accepting their ways of being while continuing on my own.

Any desire to be authoritative on another body takes away their ability to generate self-power through truth and understanding. It is a natural instinct that we contain though - when a mother sees her child about to eat a dog poop she will stop the child, knowing this child is simply unaware and this is the guidance she can provide in that moment. It is a further and deeper expression of unconditional love in which the mother instinctively steps beyond her barrier of self-containment, of allowing others to learn by themselves, acting out of fear for the child’s health/life, the desire to preserve and nurture, an egoic act. It is egoic because she acts on a personal projection of a social law, that she believes she is responsible for this child and so the law is that she should intervene and control its movements until it has developed enough personal wisdom and awareness to start navigating for itself. But that law is instinctual, it is a subconscious feeling which she has inherited in her instinctive DNA from all those mothers in her ancestral lineage, even those that were not human. It is not set in stone. This may be a poor example but stick with the dharma. Awareness separates you from this, because had she not responded, and allowed the child to consume the poop, others would violently chastise her, for they project their law onto her behaviour and have the expectation of her to behave, which she does have on herself too.

And so, we essentially understand that even when it doesn’t seem a harmony, doesn’t seem right to accept or to resist - essentially all are important and nourishing ways of existing, somewhere rooted in love or fear, but essentially in love. And so we needn’t banish one way of being or the other, but accept and understand all with a detached awareness - if we wish to cultivate harmony. If some external circumstance triggers an intense emotion - of fear or distrust for example, it is because of our own personal experience and perception that the instinctive emotion arises. The emotion gives us insight into the root of our association with that experience.

The knife triggers fear because we associate it with stabbing and not the slicing open of a delicious fresh watermelon - that violent association is a personal experience. It is also changeable. By cultivating the awareness and the detachment - the awareness of the source of the emotion, but the detachment to choose to act differently despite the instinctive emotional response, is the higher way of living we can all move to in order to experience more peaceful and love-filled lives.