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When most people lose their expectations, which usually occurs because something they had a lot of stake in crashes, they experience this as depression.  To depressed people life is indeed an empty, meaningless wasteland with no purpose or reward.  Having lost the expectations which underpin their sense of self-worth and self-esteem, they feel they have also lost all sense of purpose, or intent.  Actually, depressed people are very, very close to enlightenment, if they only knew it.  Their problem is that usually they are demon-possessed, and their demons are blocking their vision with self-pity.   

Magicians, on the other hand, deliberately seek to crash their expectations, since they know that this is the path to freedom.  Losing your expectations is the only way to center yourself in the now moment instead of being trapped by the yearning for a future which never comes.  True self-esteem is a matter of permitting yourself to be happy now, of saying to yourself:  “What’s happening right this moment is okay by me.  I don’t have to have this, that, or the other in order to be happy; and I don’t need to prove this, that, or the other in order to be a worthwhile person.”  It’s a matter of getting off your own case and other people’s cases; and off God’s case.    

            The way expectations are normally lost is by having them crash, and crash, and crash.  If you bang your head futilely against the same wall over and over again, you finally arrive at a point of exhaustion, and you collapse on the ground in despair.  At that point, the moment of finally giving up your own will, you look around and usually you see a clear path in another direction that is open and free of obstructions.  The point is that the feeling of being blocked, or trapped on the same treadmill of frustration, is a message that – for whatever reasons – you are going about things incorrectly.  When you give up your self-will you usually are able to understand what that message is, to see quite clearly why you had been blocked previously.   

            It is necessary to lose all expectation before you can find true happiness.  For example, most single people think that what they want is a relationship, but this is baloney.  “A relationship” – in the abstract – is an expectation.  It’s not a relationship with a real, live person.  Is a relationship with the wrong person what you want?  Where you have to try to force them to fit an image you have which is not who they really are?  Wouldn’t you rather be alone than in a relationship where there’s bickering and lying and betrayal going on?  So, it must be better to wait until the right person comes along than to grab candidates off the street and try to bribe or coerce them into a relationship.  And if the right person never comes along, so be it.  Since you create your own reality, there must be some lesson or reason for your solitude.  The point is to just be happy now, alone, instead of expecting some stranger to come along and make you happy.  Unless you’re happy now, who would want to hook up with such a sourpuss?   This doesn’t mean you have to stop wanting a relationship in order to make one happen – just stop obsessing over it.  Do you remember things that you desperately wanted when you were a child that you don’t give a hoot about anymore?  It’s like that.  By not caring so much whether you’re in a relationship or not, by not making your happiness depend on it, is how to make a relationship happen.   

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