Thursday, August 03, 2006

Expectations of Spirituality

Practicing spirituality without expectations of greater peace, prosperity, or insights is also called living detached from the outcome. The irony is that when we’re attached to the outcome, we actually put up barriers to its manifestation. The reason is because the outcome usually manifests in a way that isn’t what we had in mind and it is usually better than what we intended. So, the attachment keeps us locked in our pre-established ideas of what we think the outcome should be. The problem is that we’re “thinking” about how the outcome should look---we’re not relying on the creative power of the universe to create it for us. We’re trying to control things.

This also brings in the spiritual aspect of spirituality because to live without attachment, striving, or expectation requires faith in the universe. Without faith we’re living in fear that we won’t get what we want—that we won’t be okay. Instead we need to be trusting that we may not get what we envisioned, but we’ll get something related, though different and far better. This is what’s been happening to me lately. I had intentions for what I hoped to get out of meditation, but I didn’t obsess on those intentions. Now as I am living each day I’m having awakenings that things are remarkably different from what they were when I started meditation in April. There was no light switch that changed things from one state to another, rather it was like waking in the darkness before sun up and imperceptibly night turns to day and we wonder how the transformation was missed.

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