Hope is Not the Antidote to Hopelessness: Consciousness is

"Success is as dangerous as failure. Hope is as hollow as fear.”

~Lao Tzu

Have you noticed how almost everyone is talking about “hope?” For several decades, I have put off writing about “hope” simply because I have met tremendous resistance from others whenever I say, “I don’t do hope.” Years ago, my friend and I attended Unity Church in Sedona, Arizona; the sermon was on “Hope.” Honestly, she hoped I would be persuaded to believe in hope. I’ve decided to share my experience because it might help you understand how hope can be blinding (what is blinding is that people are addicted to it).

She believed, as a trained social worker, in the insanity of the hope trap. People’s aversions are so strong that many can’t even listen; they immediately go into judgment (which is a lack of trust in oneself): “You are just depressed…That’s crazy. How can you say that!… You have to hope, otherwise life is meaningless.” Before they heard my viewpoint, they quoted the experts to prove their point. Even though you may experience a great deal of cognitive dissonance considering hope from a different perspective, it feels important for me to share my perceptions about hope, which are based on the understanding that “Enlightenment is one’s natural state, where reality is experienced as it is.”

My experience is that hope is not conscious.

Hope keeps people dependent on others instead of living from their souls—divinity; therefore, hope keeps you a prisoner in the stupor of misery. Miserable people need religious leaders, philosophers, politicians, psychologists, and all kinds of frauds telling them what to do. Why? Because they are so miserable, they are ready to accept the deceptions of hope and who and whatever gives them hope. From my experience, hope is like a narcotic: you forget your misery, you live someone else’s dream, but not your own. If you think about it, hope is one of the greatest businesses in the world. For eons, miserable people have been exploited by those who are proffering hope. And so few are asking, “What about now?”

The miserable person is ready to believe in anything; this belief is a consolation but not consciousness.

If you look deeply into it, hope is often joined by its companion: addiction. This is one reason masters tell you that the man who is ready to suffer can easily be enslaved: Addiction is enslavement. Think about a time when you realized that you were addicted to something or someone, and it doesn’t matter whether it is money, caffeine, sex, or suffering. The thing about hope is that it moves forward with frustration, then more hope and more frustration: this is the cycle of hope. And when you become more frustrated, you hope more because that is the only consolation. You go on moving in the future because in the present, you always have frustration, and all the while, the frustration is coming because of your past. Then you will hope again. Then, more frustration, more hope, and with more hope, still more frustration.

Hope and frustration become a vicious cycle of addiction.

So much of humanity is addicted to suffering. The man who is ready to sacrifice today for an unknown tomorrow has already declared his proclivity to enslavement—if not his own, then that of his children or grandchildren. The future becomes hope’s bondage. For eons, man has lived only in hope, illusions, dreams, and anything but reality.

And there is no life than the life of reality; life exists in this moment, this breath.

It is our need for commiseration that is being exploited by offering us this narcotic, this “hope.” Friedrich Nietzsche is right. He says that people's lies and illusions keep on giving them hope. Today, it can be looking forward to not wearing a mask, not being separated from those that you love, and being able to vacation and travel; these can all be causes to subsume to fear. So you take an experimental shot (not even a vaccine) so your life can get back to ‘normal.’

You have been lied to about the pandemic and herded like docile sheep. You lost your intelligence and common sense because you couldn’t access resolve and courage. The frauds keep telling you lies with absolutely no science to back them up, “If you do this…if you do that…then everything will go back to normal.”

The questions begging to be asked are, “How will we know when we can return to normal? What is normal? … Do we want to go back to the tranny that landed us where we are?” You have no idea what you are doing through it all because you are full of hope. This hope keeps you from exercising your intelligence and doing your research, not to mention exercising common sense.

So, the masses are living for tomorrow, which is not now. They live in their ambitions, which are never fulfilled, but whether fulfilled or not, through those ambitions, desires, illusions, and hopes, they go to their graves miserable. What will happen if you destroy their illusions? There will likely be no point in living, no hope, only desperation (hopelessness). Will the masses wake up, start to care, take responsibility, and have compassion? These are all attributes of freedom, not fear.

Why are people so vulnerable to this exploitation of hope?

The masses are vulnerable because the nature of the mind lives in hope. It goes on thinking that something new and different is going to happen. When you depend on hope, you must constantly be reminded of what you are dreaming of; it doesn’t matter what it is; it can be becoming excessively wealthy, famous, or whatever you imagine based on what you are told you should desire. Your hope is all about your dream, and your misery is all about your dream, too.

Consciousness observes what you are, while hope goes on looking for what you would like to be there. Hope is the secret of the mind; the mind nourishes itself on hope, creating chaos and conflict. Once you stop hoping and you just let hope disappear, you are suddenly awakened to the truth of your being, the truth of the One.

Reality is in the present moment, accepting ‘what is.’

You must know that hope is of the dualistic mind. It is hope that is not allowing you to live. So often, hope will be the root of your constantly postponing going with the flow and making a decision that will enliven you at your core. However, when you are caught in the lure of hope, you will remain the same (making the same decisions), but tomorrow, you will hope for a new future. Sadly, this illusion and addiction to hope can infinitely go on while life continuously passes you in a dark cloud of fear.

Hence, the wisdom behind the master’s teaching is to “Stop postponing.” If you want to be a belly dancer, then sign up for a belly dancing class. If you hate your job, then find one you love.” You don’t know what the future is going to reveal to you. None of us knows what opportunities will come our way when we live in the present moment. You can be here today and gone tomorrow. You can have a job today and be unemployed tomorrow; that happened to me once. I arrived at work, and the door sign read, “Gone out of business.” You could be a pauper today and a billionaire tomorrow. Life is a field of infinite possibilities.

No one can predict what will happen, but it is guaranteed that nothing new will happen if you don’t make a different decision.

Man lives just in hope, and this living is a dream (a nightmare is still a dream). The truth is that unless you live here and now, in this moment, you are not living; you are simply existing. I just wanted to let you know that fulfilling all of your hopes for tomorrow will never come. But death will most certainly come, and now you cannot postpone it because there is no tomorrow. Then you will feel disillusioned, but no one has cheated you; you are sovereign. This is why the master lives in the present moment, cherishing freedom, not hope.

It makes no difference what the nature of the hopes. They may be religious, political …, or psychological; the master says, “I don’t do hope.” And if a master feels a subtle hopelessness, she embraces it. Don't run from hopelessness; disappear into it and fully experience it. If life is hopeless, be hopeless. Accept it, but don't cling to any future dream; then suddenly, automatically, there will be a transformation. Once you remain in the present moment, dreams cannot emerge because the source has been withdrawn. When you cooperate with and nurture dreams, they will betray you. So, if you stop cooperating with hope, it too will pass. It’s like when a negative thought enters your mind; you can’t control that thought from coming to your mind, but you can control what you do with the negative thought.

Many people believe that hope is the antidote to hopelessness.

When hope fails, you are lost in hopelessness; when this happens, know that a deep imbalance exists inside you. If you know this, then you can do inner work to restore balance. Buddha said, “My path is the middle path. The middle path is the path of transcendence.” He meant that on opposite ends of the continuum, precisely between the two, is transcendence. When you have lived with hope, and the hope fails, now you are living in hopelessness. You see, hope is the root of hopelessness, not the antidote. So you see that you must be in this present moment, let hopelessness disintegrate: drop hope and hopelessness. What you will transcend is your frame of mind; you will give up the dream to live in the future and live in the present.

Living in hope is living in the future, which is postponing life.

Hope is the way of suicide, not living. There is no need for any hope, and there is no need to feel hopeless. Live in the present moment. Life is tremendously joyful; it is here, and you are looking somewhere else. An example of this is when facilitating a spiritual process, I asked each person to enter the sacred chamber. Missing the altar set up for people in the sacred chamber was impossible. However, one person came out exclaiming, “The whole time I was supposed to be praying to my divine, I was looking in the wrong direction. I didn’t realize it until I turned around to leave the sacred chamber.” Then he remorsefully exclaimed, “That is how I have been looking in the wrong direction my entire life.”

Life is just before you, but your eyes look at the horizon. Life is within you, but you are not there. Buddha teaches us the futility of hope and hopelessness, both extreme ends.**

Can we learn from the global challenges we face together?

There is a great deal of suffering on the Earth right now. Not the least is that humans are being used as guinea pigs for experimental shots.* Meanwhile, cheap, highly effective, and safe treatments work against the COVID-19 bioweapon. But because of greed and a lust for complete power wielded through “Big Pharma” and others, the Earth and all of humanity are put in danger. We can’t even fully comprehend what the dangers might be with these massive worldwide experimental shot trials because humanity has not faced anything like this before.

Seeing the world as One takes a big-picture view; we are all connected.

A worldwide view is impossible if we look in the wrong direction, like the person in the sacred chamber story. Our problems have brought us to a situation where either we will have to commit global suicide, or we will have to transform humanity. The conditioning of the educational, religious, political, philosophical, and economic systems that man has followed has contributed to this time when important decisions must be made to overcome global challenges. All we have to do is consider the entire world. Many, like my friend, are looking at the world from their point of view; they are not concerned with the whole. Worse yet, they are suppressing and censoring anyone who does not hold their viewpoint.

Is the Third Reich, the official Nazi designation for the regime in Germany from January 1933 to May 1945, coming to your mind?

How can we transform the collective consciousness viewpoint that helps us to understand and heal humanity? First, we must see that we are sick, that we are suffering, and that we are causing the Earth to suffer. The Earth is sick because we are sick. This will be hard for you to see and understand, but hope and hopelessness are the causes of humanity's missing existence.

And the root of the problem is the vicious circle: the more you miss existence, the more you hope; the more you hope, the more you miss existence. Once you look deep down into hope, how it works, how it controls you, the lie of hope drops automatically. Suddenly, you are living in the present moment and will see that you have been looking in the wrong direction; a veil of light shines in your awareness. Your world will become luminous all around you—vibrant. The trees will be greener, the sky will be bluer, and the birds’ songs will be a symphony. With hope weighing you down, your eyes are covered with mud, keeping you blind to the beauty that surrounds you from everywhere.

When you drop hope, there is no possibility of becoming hopeless because hopelessness exists only because of hope.

Once we live in the present moment, accepting reality as it is, there are different choices we make to live on the middle path. One important strategy you can implement into your daily life is to meditate every day. Meditation quiets your mind, and it will take you out of hope. Meditation reveals your existence to you. In meditation, you are not doing anything but stopping doing everything. When you stop thinking, feeling, doing, and being, then only consciousness remains because that is YOU. Once you have experienced your true self, all fear disappears, and you come to life. For the first time, you see the sacredness and the divineness not only of yourself but in all that exists. Everything becomes mysterious, and living in this mystery is the only way to live peacefully, joyfully, consciously, and compassionately; to live in this mystery is to live where every moment brings you deeper and more profound blessings.

You are not entitled to blessings; rather, because life gives them out of its abundance, it shares them with all who are receptive to grace.

 Another major strategy you can use in your life is to choose what you expose yourself to with consciousness. Much of the mainstream news, social media, movies, and television are not conscious. The programming is almost exclusively unconscious. You can rest assured that if you only hear one side of an issue, your life will be enriched if you choose avenues to gain more knowledge that is not biased. Many wonderful sources of information present opposing perspectives that invite discourse. And watch out for sources that use fear to get you into a state of not taking responsibility for living. You can do research and check facts for yourself, so do it. As Buddha reminds us, the conscious mind travels the middle path.

Finally, follow wisdom and discernment, for they will lead you on the path of enlightenment. Together, we can learn to experience reality as it is consciously. As the great Master Lao Tze said, “Hope is as hollow as fear.”

*Cole, Dr. Shelley, Medical Director AFLDS. “Ten Medical Facts Regarding the COVID-19 Experimental Vaccines.” America’s Frontline Doctors, www.americasfrontlinedoctors.org. 2021. Millions of experimental shots are being administered all around the world. For the first time, humans have been injected with manmade materials that do not qualify as vaccines, according to the vaccine criteria

**This is my experience. To my knowledge, Buddha does not directly teach about hope or hopelessness.