Hope
Hope
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Hope
Evolutionarily, hope allows someone to navigate difficulties or suffering. It can keep us working and moving forward. It can help us survive. However, there comes a time when we need to discern whether the hope is based on reality or based on naivety, shaky ground or even delusion. This applies to individual and to collective life. When it is fragile or false, hope can be a way of avoiding truth. Hope can delay or avoid the needed changes. This has been called hopium, a reference to the drug opium, which brings pain relief and euphoria, as well as being highly addictive. But hope need not be rational. Our unconscious may be vaguely or intensely aware of amazing or unexpected things that will unfold. The most helpful understanding of hope is that we are spiritual beings. We are not our bodies, our feelings, our thoughts, our social identities. We are spiritual beings having a physical experience. If you can realise this, there is nothing that will destroy you. Not even the extinction of the human species, whether by nuclear war or climate and ecological emergency. You will live on as a being of Light. That is true hope.  Quotes Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul and sings the tune without the words and never stops at all. (Emily Dickinson) There are two flames burning in the human heart all the time. The flame of anger against injustice, and the flame of hope you can build a better world. (Tony Benn) Hope is not a vague wish for an easier and pleasanter life. It is a wisdom which knows how to use the past and the present in order to project itself into the future and influence it. Hope is the ability to live a magnificent reality that does not yet exist. So it could be said that hope is a foretaste of a perfect life. Yes, thanks to hope, you eat, drink and nourish yourself with a happiness that you do not yet have, but which is the true reality. For true reality exists not on the physical plane but in the divine world. That you are heirs to heaven and earth is the true reality. Because you are still too young and inexperienced, you cannot yet take possession of your inheritance, but it is there waiting for you. That is what hope is. (O.M. Aïvanhov) Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. (Václav Havel) Hope doesn’t come from words. Hope only comes from actions. (Greta Thunberg) The one thing we need more than hope is action. Once we start to act, hope is everywhere. So instead of looking for hope, look for action. Then, and only then, hope will come. (Greta Thunberg)  Keeping faith alive through faith and love When people are dissatisfied with their fate or disappointed with events, they tend to look to the future, telling themselves that life will be better soon. . . in a few days or months. Hope is perhaps what they hold on to until the very end. But in the meantime, they need to discover what they can count on. First of all, they must have faith, knowing that the universe is governed by laws - one of these being that every seed will one day bear fruit. They must also nourish the life within them, gaining new energy thanks to their love. Otherwise, hope is only an escape from reality, and it too will one day abandon them. Faith and love are what enable us to remain hopeful. (O.M. Aïvanhov, Sparks of Light on Our Path, p.10) The problem with hope, of course, is it's a way of covering up what's actually going on. (Roger Hallam, YouTube, 55m24s, posted 28 April 2021, accessed 18 Aigust 2021) The government’s promises are not made to be kept. They are made to assure us, to distract us, to persuade us to put away our banners and go home quietly like good citizens, because the situation is under control. Hope is the fire extinguisher governments use to douse public anger. But public anger is the only effective defence of the living world. Keep the flame burning. (George Monbiot, The Guardian, posted and accessed 30 September 2020) On what must you base your hope? On the certainty that the future can always be better. Even if the present is not particularly great, the powers of life and the powers of good are such that they can always triumph over evil, once you decide to ally yourself to them. Someone will say, ‘But what hope is there for me? Everything I take on fails. I have no future!’ That depends of course on what you call your future. If you see your future only as material, social success or as a love story worthy of a fairytale, then maybe your horizons really are blocked. But your true future, your future as the son or daughter of God, lies wide open before you. Every day is different. You may not have seen the sun today, but tomorrow it will shine again. For those who know what to base their hope on, nothing remains closed forever. (O.M. Aïvanhov) We must accept finite disappointment but never lose infinite hope. (Martin Luther King Jr.) Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness. (Archbishop Desmond Tutu)  Resources
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This is part of a series on Emotion Also see:- Emotion Emotion Index Placebo Effect |
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