Don’t expect results

(28)

This slogan is about hoping for a particular outcome. Particularly with the hope of achieving results improving your life situation or even enlightenment. This seem counter to the goal orientation and process improvement focus of our social environments of work and family. On first glance this seems counter intuitive.

But this slogan doesn’t mean that you should not have goals and work hard toward improving your work and family situations. Goals direct your attention, help keep you on track and accountable but in reality, you never know what will happen. Succeed or fail will just be what happens. You can’t control the outcome, too pretend otherwise is folly. To ride this roller-coaster of success and failure with your expectation is ripe with disappointment and disillusion on the down side and egotism and self-grasping on the up side. Getting the results you want and not getting them are just two different states of what is. Which ever is yours except that.

For meditation to be effective, the mind placed in meditation must be uncontrived. [^@Rinpoche:2009a]

Settling into the present, to what is, is the antidote. Be without the desire or thought of any specific result. Hoping for results is wishful thinking that adds a layer of distance and separation to life. It’s a sign of harboring impatience. And don’t look for results, improvement or even enlightenment. As the Heart Sutra tells you that there is no wisdom to attain, as attainment is also empty. Let go of the silly thought “I will get better as a result of my study and practice.” It is self-centered to want to get better.

Life turns out how it does and not how you hope it does. Hoping and wishing doesn’t make it so. Hoping and wishing is an acknowledgment that things are not as you want them to be. Somehow you feel our hopes and wants trump reality. ¹ The hope that Mind Training will help you deal with your life is part of what holds you back. It would be more fruitful to focus on how life and practice actually are and less on how you hope and wish life would be. What if everything was just perfect right now?

Hope for success blinds you to the living in the future. Wishful thinking robs you of the joy and connection to the present moment of experience. Hoping is a wish for something else that is not present. It holds you back from working on what wants attention. ‘Do what needs to be done now because it needs to be done now, not for the result it might bring.’ Abandon all hope of results and rewards. [[202011071727]]

“Practice disappears as a vehicle for self-improvement, and the only thing important for you now is to live your life, which means to continue your mind training.” [^@Fischer2013:aa]

You still want to act in the world, but when you act from the place of no expectations or hope for a certain outcome, everything becomes a miracle, a joyous experience of wonderment. Practice with no goal in mind. Let go of any sense of being special. Just be at peace with what the universe provides. Not rolling over and letting life just happen but to move through it joyfully being the best you can be.

Cultivate a serious attitude ……………………………..[[201903160423]] Don’t expect thanks ……………………………………..[[201904270500]] Observe, no matter what ………………………………….[[201904110510]] Don’t poison yourself ……………………………………[[201903280559]]

Alternate Titles

• Abandon hope
• Abandon any hope of fruition
• Discard all expectations of reward
• Give up all hope for results
• Abandon all hope for results
• Give up hoping for results

★ 03-27-2019 - 4:58 AM ›[[201903270458]] → #slogans

[[202011071727]]