Most of us can obviously see the upside in the concept of hope. How about diving in a little deeper?
Hope says, “Wow. Things are bad. May as well just smoke some Hopium & in the future maybe, somehow, there could be a chance of things getting better.” But you gotta keep smoking Hopium. Hope puts off facing what needs attention, investigation & action now for a future crapshoot.
“Hope, when bold, is strength. Hope, with doubt, is cowardice. #Hope, with fear, is weakness.”
~ G. I. Gurdjieff
“Hope” implies issues, but what if you saw problems as gifts? “Hope” implies a chance to fail but there’s no failure if you learn from it.
“It is attachment to the pleasant, and resistance to the unpleasant that keeps us on the roller coaster of hope and fear.”
~ Joseph Goldstein
Free yourself from “I hope this happens” & “I hope that doesn’t happen”… I’m ready once and for all to let life happen…“In spite of my ______ the will of my heart is to be open” because nothing in my reality is more powerful than love.
The Will of Your Heart by Matt Kahn
Therapeutic success (and forgiveness) means giving up all hope for a better past
“Hope is the projection that if I work hard, if I apply myself to gaining something, getting something then I’ll be happy in some kind of a lasting or meaningful way. … as nice as the things we succeeded at, that we’ve gotten have been the heart remains tight wanting more. And this is what really begins, if we let it, to break our heart open — is really seeing that our basic habit of going to hope and going to fear ends up leading to disappointment and that sense of betrayal. What is really betraying us is what we think will help turns out to not be helpful.”
~ Mark Nunberg https://overcast.fm/+OjJN-i-C8
“Tis utterly impossible
— from Path of Purification VII.36 (Nyanamoli, trans)
To reach by travel the world’s end;
But there is no escape from pain
Until the world’s end has been reached.
It is a sage, a knower of the worlds,
Who gets to the world’s end,
and it is he
Whose life divine is lived out to its term;
He is at peace who the world’s end has known
And hopes for neither this world nor the next” (S I 62).
Wait Without Hope
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
— T.S. Eliot
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
Of death and birth.
Integrating Presence 