Expectation Is Brought, Not Chosen

The first edition of this book said something about Expectation that I now believe was wrong, and since this chapter is where it said it, this chapter is where I should correct it.

I wrote that if you wanted to change your reality, you had to work on your expectation. That sentence sounds reasonable. It is the premise of a thousand self-help books. And it gets the mechanics backwards. You cannot work on your expectation. Not directly. Not by any means. That turns out to be one of the most important facts in this entire book, and once you see why, a great deal of needless struggle falls away.

Already there

Expectation is what the unconscious comparison machine brings to the moment. It is prior, not posterior. It is already there when Actual arrives. By the time something happens to you, the denominator it will be divided by has already been set.

Think of it this way. Suppose you are going to a wedding this weekend. You have not thought about it much. Ask yourself whether you have an expectation of it anyway.

Of course you do. You already expect how the day will unfold, roughly how long the ceremony will take, how the food will be, how you will feel seeing certain people, whether your feet will hurt by the end. You did not decide any of this. Nobody asked you. It assembled itself somewhere beneath awareness, out of everything you have lived and everything that has ever been put in front of you, and it will be sitting there in the denominator when you walk through the door.

That is what I mean when I say Expectation is brought, not chosen. You do not set it. You inherit it. The conscious mind does not write the denominator; it finds the denominator already written.

Never zero

There is no Reality without Expectation. The denominator is never zero.

People sometimes imagine a state of pure openness, a mind with no expectations at all, meeting the world fresh. It is a lovely thought, and it does not exist. You can be relaxed about outcomes. You can be humble about predictions. But the comparison machine never stops running. It is always bringing something. To be alive and aware is to have a denominator.

What changes, from person to person and moment to moment, is not whether Expectation is present but what it is made of.

A complex number

And what it is made of is the most interesting thing about it.

Expectation is what mathematicians call a complex number. I do not mean complicated, though it is that too. I mean the technical sense: a number with two parts, a real part and an imaginary part, which point in directions perpendicular to each other and do not control each other.

I write it like this:

E = P + iI

P is the real part. It stands for Prediction: what habit and history expect, the forecast your subconscious makes about what happens next.

I is the imaginary part. It stands for the Ideal: the lean of ideas: the standing conditions you are turned toward, each one exactly itself, and so each one a lean. You are not their origin. You are where they could happen.

The small i in front of it is the mathematician's mark for the imaginary direction. It is not a moral judgment. Imaginary does not mean fake. It means perpendicular. It means a second axis, at right angles to the first, that adds a whole dimension of possibility.

Both parts of your Expectation are given to you. Prediction is given by everything that has trained your subconscious. Your orientation toward ideas is given by something stranger, which we will come to: the long sum of everything you have ever committed to and abandoned. Neither is a lever in your hand.

The rule

So here is the rule, and I want to state it as firmly as I can, because I broke it in the first edition and I have watched people hurt themselves by breaking it.

No one can touch either term of the fraction.

Not the numerator, because the numerator is the finished past and nothing touches the past. Not the denominator, because the denominator is brought to you, unasked, from beneath awareness. There is no lever. There is no technique. No amount of cleverness, money, discipline or authority creates one. You cannot affirm your way into a new denominator. You cannot visualize your way there. You cannot simply decide to expect differently.

What you can do is act. That is the one place where you are free. Reality arrives, the quotient lands, and in that moment more than one action is available to you. You can only ever act on Reality, on whatever the number happens to be.

The only road

And yet Expectation does change. Your subconscious learns. Your predictions shift. Things that used to devastate you stop devastating you. So how, if nothing can touch it?

The answer is that there is a road, and it runs in one direction, and it is slow.

You act. Your actions leave things behind: words spoken, things built, places gone, habits performed. Those things become part of what has happened. What has happened is history, and history is Actual. And Actual, arriving again and again, is the only thing that teaches Prediction anything. Over time, the denominator adjusts to what keeps arriving.

The road to the denominator runs through the numerator.

That is the whole of it. You do not change your expectation. You make history, and history, in its own time, retrains what you expect. The first edition gestured at this in its chapters on habit, which I have kept and expanded. What it failed to say clearly is that this road is not a shortcut to the denominator. It is the only road there is.

Why this is good news

At first this can sound like a loss. If I cannot change my expectations, am I simply stuck with them?

No. You are freed from an impossible job. Consider how much effort people spend trying to think differently, feel differently, expect differently, by force of will, and how often they fail and blame themselves for failing. They were trying to reach into a part of themselves that conscious effort cannot reach. It is like trying to change the weather by shouting at it.

Once you know where your freedom actually lives, you can spend your effort there. Not on the denominator. On the next action. On the next thing you add to the record. Your expectations will catch up, slowly, behind what you actually do.

We will walk that road carefully in Book Four. First we need to understand what the denominator is made of.