In the lead up to Barack Obama's inauguration as the 44th President of the United States, I received quite a few emails from Gurdy members telling me "Barack is going to solve everything!". There is a great air of expectation out there, carried along on Obama's slogan of "Yes, we can", an air of expectation in sharp contrast to what can only be described as the mass hysteria fostered by the "gloom and doom" merchants over the last few months.

However, let's pause for a moment to reflect on that "air of expectation" and how that "air" is at work all of the time. For example, at the outset, it's worth noting that financial markets move up or down based on sentiment and confidence - or, in other words, expectations, feelings or emotions. Anyone who has lifted a newspaper of seen a news report over the last six months knows that world markets react to each other in a planet-encircling chain reaction where Far East markets react to Wall Street, Frankfurt reacts to the Far East, London reacts to Frankfurt and, in the end, Wall Street reacts to... well, actually, itself!! All based on expectation, feeling, sentiment, call it what you will.

Expectation is self-fulfilling.

Years of psychological research has found that we only see what we expect to see and only experience what we expect to experience. Now, don't get me wrong. I am not for one moment suggesting, as some people do, that positive thinking will change things. Positive thinking is just that - thinking. It's done in the conscious mind and, as I cover in other articles, it is your subconscious mind that automatically creates your view of yourself, your view of how the world works, your behaviours, your reactions and, as a result, your life. You expect with your subconscious mind - and, as a result, you're obviously not aware of it!

You need to expect something different and something different will happen. I would suggest that this is what happened with Obama's election.

You see, expectation is contagious. Again, many years of research and practical experiment in the real world has proved that state of mind is contagious. You already know this from your everyday life - spend half an hour with a boring depressing person and you'll be depressed and bored. Spend a few minutes with a charismatic person and their presence rubs off on you - you feel uplifted. Mass hysteria - whether it's at a football match or the dreadful stampedes that take place at overcrowded places of pilgrimage - works exactly the same way. In fact, what we've seen in the global economy over the last year rates, in my view, as mass hysteria (prompted by mass greed in the first place).

Contagious expectation works positively too. An experiment carried out in Washington DC in June-July 1993 proved conclusively that a concerted effort by a large number of people to "calm down" had a predictable and measurable effect on violent crime in the greater Washington DC area. Law enforcement authorities had been told, in advance, that if 4,000 people "calmed down", through meditation, there would be a simultaneous 25% drop in homicide, rape and assault. Although the authorities laughed at the idea at the time, US Federal Crime Statistics for the area, for the eight week period show a drop in violent crime that almost directly mirrors the number of people meditating.

Let's be clear about this. This is not some kind of wishful thinking or spiritual hocus-pocus. The evidence is publicly available. Also, twenty-first century quantum physics and molecular science have both proved conclusively that energy responds to expectation, emotion and intention and that all energy is connected.

So, yes, perhaps Barack Obama will work wonders. But he will only be able to work wonders if the ordinary people who elected him - and those of us around the world who welcome an election that defied "normal" expectation - start expecting good to happen, start turning their backs on negative news, stop wallowing in the feeling of despair that many commentators just love reporting on and start focusing their minds on the task of living wholeheartedly today - in the here and now. Not looking forward to a brighter future, not wishing for economic recovery to take place, not hoping that Obama will wave magic wand and that things will get better.

We're all in this together - in terms of our collective subconscious and our singular universal energy. We all need to pour our energy into living today, appreciating today and not letting ourselves be distracted by all the bad things that might happen. Expect something new and something new will happen.

Copyright (c) 2009 Willie Horton