Sometimes things don’t go as we had expected. When things don’t go as expected we can react with thoughts and feelings of disappointment and anger. We can withdraw and cut off from people and situations. We can also stop and contemplate the situation looking at how our feelings of disappointment reveal our expectations. Until we feel disappointment our expectations may not be apparent. The cause of all disappointment is expectation. We have created many contexts for our expectations. Personal expectations can place conditions upon our peace of mind.
Those expectations create and sustain limitations. What exists beyond the limits of what is acceptable is what is judged to be ‘unacceptable’. What we judge to be acceptable is what makes our happiness and our peace of mind conditional. It is our expectations that exclusively create our feelings of disappointment. Our expectations can create fear, anxiety and foreboding. This is because our expectations by implication define what is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. What can go wrong is anything that does not comply with our definition of what is ‘right’.
We each create our own contexts for ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ that we use as the criteria for what is acceptable to us. If we lose our judgement and accept what is then we cannot be disappointed and peace is restored to our mind and body. If our minds are at peace our thoughts and feelings are peaceful. If we hold our feelings hostage to a specific outcome then we place conditions upon our freedom to feel what we have termed ‘happy’. This is to take the place of God. We are playing the part of God when we judge ourselves according to criterion that is founded upon concepts.
The consequence of our judgement is to give ‘absolute’ power over our thoughts and feelings to the criteria of what is acceptable and what is not. For example I may wish my favourite boxer to win his next fight. On the evening of the fight a friend tells me that he won and I am delighted, happy and start talking enthusiastically about how good a boxer he is. Then later my friend tells me that he made a mistake and that in fact my favourite boxer got knocked out and according to the commentators his career is over. My response to this news is disappointment and now I do not feel good at all.
When we feel disappointed our feelings are not responding to the experience. When we feel disappointed our feelings are responding to our expectations. We may expect things to go well. So we are comparing the truth of our experience with our own expectations. If we have expectations and our experience does not live up to our expectations we can feel varying degrees of disappointment. We can feel disappointment if our favourite sports team does not win. This is because if they do not win, then they have lost.
If we don’t get the job, meet the right person, fall in love, have friends or have enough money we can feel disappointed or what we may describe as unhappy. Why? We feel varying degrees of disappointment simply because of the expectations we have created in relation to our experiences. Our beliefs are the criteria that we use to create expectations. It is our judgement alone that creates the feeling of disappointment. We believed in concepts that we use to judge ourselves and our experiences before we had the wisdom to understand the consequences of that judgment.
The experience is the truth. What we feel is the truth but it is a contextual truth. The truth is that if we judge our self or our experiences to be good we will feel good. If we judge our self or our experiences to be bad we will feel bad. This is how powerful we are! We are our own truth! We are our absolute truth. This makes ‘us’ the truth. With very few exceptions it is our own judgement that creates how we feel about our experiences. We are the creator of our experiences. We are not the victim of our experience. The only truth about our experience is how it feels.
Until we realise and forgive all of the people and experiences that we have judged to be the cause of what we feel we will continue to be the victims of our own judgement. Forgiveness is a practical tool but it must be given unconditionally and completely. Until we forgive we cannot undo our judgement and, until we do this, our feelings remain the prisoners of our beliefs. Our beliefs are the expectations that our experiences must live up to if we are to have peace of mind. When we decide what is good and bad and right and wrong we create the criteria for our own peace of mind.
The criterion for our happiness and peace of mind has been given total control over our thoughts and feelings. Our own judgemental beliefs judge us and our results in relation to our belief’s conceptual truth. To invest our happiness in the achievement of specific outcomes is to gamble. If we say we must get the job we applied for or we will be disappointed we are saying we will use our power to deny our self our own happiness if we do not get the job. This is because our judgement only allows us to feel happy if we achieve the specific outcomes that we have judged to be acceptable.
This is to make our feelings conditional upon the outcome of an experience that is beyond our control. When this happens our thoughts and feelings are like puppets on strings. When we have expectations our thoughts and feelings do not react to the experience. When we have expectations our thoughts and feelings are reacting to how we judge the outcome of the experience. Our thoughts and feelings are like puppets because they respond exclusively to the perceived outcome of our experiences. This gives our expectations total control over what we think and feel.
Our thoughts and feelings are reacting to the criteria that we use to define our experiences. All criteria exist within various contexts of ‘good’ or ‘bad’. This is one of the causes of the delusion called ‘unhappiness’. The criterion for our happiness is ‘our beliefs’. If we lose the belief’s criteria then we remove the division that is necessary to sustain the separate concepts of ‘happiness’ and ‘unhappiness’. If there is no division then there can be no contrast. If there is no contrast then our thoughts and feelings cannot be held hostage to our expectations.
Happiness is merely an absence of its opposite. We feel happy in all of the moments that we do not judge. Our expectations must be met if our hostage is to be released. Our hostage is our peace of mind. Our expectations are the cause of our disappointment. We have expectations because of what we believe we will gain if we experience a specific result. This is because our beliefs say that if we do or achieve this or that we will be and feel better. Better than what? When we worship those beliefs as ‘our’ truth, we give them total power over what we think and feel.
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