Life, Death And Love
Don’t move ahead of yourself into the future because that is not possible to do. The future remains unknown; that is its beauty, that is its grandeur, glory. If it becomes known, it will be useless because then the whole excitement and the whole surprise will be lost.
Don’t expect anything in the future. Don’t corrupt it, because then all your expectations, if fulfilled, will make you miserable. You will not be happy about it because it is your expectation and it is fulfilled. Happiness is possible only through surprise, happiness is possible only when something happens which you had never expected, when something takes you completely unawares.
If your expectations are fulfilled a hundred percent, you will be living as if you are in the past, not in the future. You come home and you expected your wife to say something and she does and you expected your child to behave in a certain way and the child does. Just think, you will be constantly in boredom. Nothing will happen, everything will be just a repetition, as if you are seeing something which you have seen before, hearing something which you have heard before. You will continuously see that it is a repetition of something, and repetition can never be satisfying. The new, the novel, the original, is needed.
So if your expectations are fulfilled you will remain completely unfulfilled. And if your expectations are not fulfilled then you feel frustrated. Then you feel constantly as if you propose and God goes on disposing, you feel that God is the enemy, you feel as if everybody is against you and everybody is working against you. Your expectations are never fulfilled, you feel frustrated.
Just meditate upon your expectations: if they are fulfilled you will feel bored, if they are not fulfilled you will feel cheated, as if a conspiracy is going on against you, as if the whole existence is conspiring against you. You will feel exploited, you will feel rejected, you will not be able to feel at home. And the whole problem arises because you expect.
Don’t go ahead into the future. Drop expectations.
Once you drop expectations you have learned how to live. Then everything that happens fulfills you – whatsoever it is. For one thing, you never feel frustrated because in the first place you never expected, so frustration is impossible. Frustration is a shadow of expectation. With expectation dropped, frustration drops on its own accord.
You cannot frustrate me, because I never expect anything. Whatsoever you do, I will say “Good.” I always say “Good,” except for only a few times when I say “Very good!”
Once expectations are not there you are free – to move into the unknown and accept the unknown, whatsoever it brings, and to accept it with deep gratitude. Complaints disappear, grumbling disappears. Whatsoever the situation, you always feel accepted, at home. Nobody is against you; existence is not a conspiracy against you. It is your home.
Excerpted From Ancient Music In The Pines CH: 8
