The State of Freedom
A journey of Truth into the mind’s sanctuary
with the destination of inner Freedom.
Β16. The mind gives up his expectations.
The same day, in the evening…
“I was, indeed, more quick and straightaway. With no resistance I jumped from one subject to the other”, ponders the mind, while he takes stock of his day. The trial was successful; he will continue it tonight until he goes to bed, and tomorrow again.
Many of the thoughts he consciously abandoned during the day were related to some of his most basic aspirations. It did not cost him at all to he put them aside; the smooth flow was for him more important than the fulfillment of his aspirations, because this is how he had determined it from the beginning. He was able to easily put aside his aspirations, in order to quietly accomplish whatever came about on his way. He willingly sacrificed what he had considered as pleasant and important for the sake of what he was asked to do. And so, he was able to unwittingly set better priorities, and his choices proved to be more pertinent, with no delay due to needless dubiousness and pseudo-dilemmas.
The dilemmas proved to be pseudo indeed, as at the end of the day he feels deeply satisfied with his performance, not only in regard to his external achievements but, in the main, concerning the inner satisfaction he received by the joy and the plainness he tasted during the day.
Thus, today it seemed to him easy to give up the expectation that his collaborators would adopt his own way of accomplishing the tasks, and he let them free to try their own way and trusted them convinced that they would do alone the proper corrections to the problems they would face while applying their own way of working.
“Whoever meddles with the roughage gets eaten by the chickens”, warns a Greek saying, and today the mind is happy that thanks to his new tactics of plainness and trust he avoided being transformed into roughage and become a meal for the chickens.
Furthermore, it was easy for him to give up his desire to call many customers and gladly responded to various intervening needs posed to him by his collaborators. This resulted in the fact that a more spherical benefit was achieved and with greater prospects in the long run than the mere ensuring of many sales within one day.
Overall, today the mind discovered that the eager abandonment of his expectations makes him much more flexible and efficacious, and he does not care if everything is not done in the way he had thought. After all, who is he supposed to be that his ideas are always so correct and perfect that they have to be accomplished at any cost, lest a big disaster will take place?
In other words, today he was open to other ideas which negated his own ideas and replaced them, and he was free of the old pain and dread for the probability that his own ideas would not be accomplished. Thus, he knocked them off their pedestal of deified perfectness, and instead he placed on the pedestal the peaceful and unobstructed flow of the torrent of the changes and the twists that life can bring within a day.
Now he closes the eyes to better monitor the internal process of the abandonment of his ideas, in order to deepen into it and familiarize with it. Thus, he will become more capable of reproducing this process whenever he observes that he has again identified himself with his expectations. He observes his expectations to become rich, handsome, sporty, popular and endearing to all his brothers, especially to the beautiful women. He also observes the anguish caused to him at times due to these expectations.
He allows these thoughts to flow within the head and pour through the throat into my body. The thoughts of expectation themselves vanish into the Earth, but their energy remains and activates my body to do whatever it takes to achieve the respective goals. The expectations, as well as the anguish they caused have now been forsaken. Solely the activation persists, and the creative joy, to which the expectations gave birth by means of passing through my body.
Eventually, the mind allows to the hitherto unwanted and repugnant image of the self who is bereft of the desired goods to exist and live in him. This image does not stress him anymore. He is not scared of it. He no longer tries to dispel it; he has totally reconciled himself to it. At last, he has the right to be a failure! Thus, he has found his lost peace again.
The abandonment of the expectations is for the mind a considerably redeeming denudement. He feels to be nude again, like when he came to this world, when he still did not know the world and its rules and had not been told anything about the goods promised by this world, and therefore at that time no expectation had been born in him yet. What he was only interested in was the nipple of his mother’s breast, her lap and the magic dreams of sleep. The future did not make him anxious in the least. Obviously, he had not even learned to distinguish between the present, the past and the future; these were for him inexistent notions, which he had not even thought of.
Exactly this very ignorance of the infants regarding past and future may be the evidence that past and future do not really exist and are but a fiction of the human mind; but this is a separate subject which needs much discussion.
When he was still an infant, the mind did not use to make his happiness dependent on the prospect of the fulfillment of his expectations, since he did not have any expectations at all. He did not even know what “expectation” means; he did not know that such a notion exists. After all, maybe also the notion of expectation does not really exist; it also seems to be a fiction of the human mind, like past and future are.
The mind now relives this enviable condition of denudement and rejoices while he abandons one after the other his various expectations. Redemption, redemption and again redemption. The woman and the gold may persist existing around him, but they no longer concern him, like also the anguish caused in him by these two goods no longer concerns him. If he stumbles upon them, it will be alright; if not, it does not matter at all. He takes great delight in his denudement, and this relish is sufficient for him. It is the first time that he feels to be so self-contained.
He recalls the old generalized feeling of deficiency and is moved for the new gift that was granted to him, because the sufficiency he now feels evinces to him the possibility to be from now on blissful by on his own, having nothing, expecting nothing, and not worrying about how he will fill the “unbearable lightness” [1] of his worldly being in his leisure time; like his brother Nikos Kazantzakis said: “I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free.”
[1] This wording has been borrowed from the novel of Milan Kundera “The Unbearable Lightness Of Being”, which also became a movie.