Hope is Not the Antidote to Hopelessness: Consciousness is

“Enlightenment is one’s natural state, where reality is experienced as it is.”

~Sri Amma Bhagavan

Have you noticed how almost everyone in the world 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, Carol and I attended Unity Church in Sedona, Arizona, the sermon was on “Hope.” Honestly, she was hoping that 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. She believed that if a person doesn’t hope they are clinically depressed. Carol was a trained social worker indoctrinated into the insanity of the hope trap. Actually, peoples aversions are so strong that many can’t even listen; they immediately go into judgment (which is really a lack of trust in oneself): “You are just depressed…That’s crazy how can you say that!…You have to have hope, otherwise life is meaningless.” Before they have heard my viewpoint, they quote 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 own souls—divinity; therefore hope keeps you a prisoner in the stupor of misery. Miserable people need religious leaders, philosophers, politicians, psychologists, 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 what ever 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? I am miserable now.”

But the miserable person is ready to believe in anything; this belief is a consolation, but it is definitely not consciousness.

If you look deeply into it, hope is often joined by its companion; addiction. This is one reason master’s 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, it doesn’t matter whether it is money, caffeine, sex, 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. You are addicted to hope; suffering.

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, and if not his enslavement then that of his children or grandchildren. The future becomes hopes bondage. And for eons, man has lived only in hope, illusions, dreams, anything but reality.

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

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, being able to vacation and travel; these can all be cause 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 weren’t able to 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 go back to normal? What is normal? … Do we really want to go back to the tranny that landed us were we are?” Through it all, you have no idea what you are doing because you are full of hope. This hope keeps you from exercising your intelligence and doing your own 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? Most likely, there will be no point in living, no hope, only desperation (hopelessness).

Will the masses wake up; start to care, take responsibility, 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 for; it doesn’t matter what you are hoping for: it can be becoming excessively wealthy, or famous or what ever 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 that which you are, while hope goes on looking for that which you would like to be there. Hope is the secret of the mind; the mind nourishes itself on hope—it creates chaos and conflict. Once you stop hoping, and you just let hopes disappear, suddenly you are awakened to the truth; 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 some 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 “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 are going to 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 to work and the sign on the door 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 is really going to happen, but it is a guarantee that if you don’t make a different decision, nothing different is going to happen.

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. 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 … 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, 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 think that hope is the antidote to hopelessness.

When hope fails then you are lost in hopelessness; when this happens know that a deep imbalance exists somewhere 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.” What he meant is 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 really 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. It was impossible to miss the alter set up for people in the sacred chamber. 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 spending my entire life, looking in the wrong direction.” Life is just in front of your eyes but your eyes look at the horizon. Life is within you but you are not there. Buddha teaches us the futility of both hope and hopelessness, which are both extreme ends.**

Can we learn from the global challenges we face together?

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

It takes a big picture view to see the world as One; we are all connected.

A world-wide view is not possible if, like the person in the sacred chamber story, we are looking in the wrong direction. 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 economical systems that man has followed have contributed to this time, when important decisions must be made to overcome the global challenges. All we have to do is consider the entire world, many like my friend, are looking at the world from their own 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 is going to be hard for you to see and understand, but hope and hopelessness are causes of humanity 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 you 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, 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 is surrounding 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 in 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; you are really stopping doing everything. When you stop thinking, feeling, doing, 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 to live in this mystery is the only way to live peacefully, joyfully, consciously, compassionately; to live in this mystery is to live where every moment brings deeper and more profound blessings to you.

Not that you are entitled to blessings, but because life gives them out of its abundance, it shares with all who are receptive to grace.

 Another major strategy you can use in your life is to choose what you expose your self to with consciousness. Much of the mainstream news, social media, movies and television are not conscious. In fact, the programing is almost exclusively unconscious. You can rest assured that if you are only hearing one side of an issue, your life will be enriched if you choose avenues to gain more knowledge that is not biased. There are many wonderful sources of information that present opposing perspectives which 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 says there is the middle path of the conscious mind or suffering.

And finally follow wisdom and discernment for they will lead you on the path of enlightenment.

Together we can learn to consciously experience reality as it is.

*Cole, Dr. Shelley, Medical Director AFLDS. “Ten Medical Facts Regarding the COVID-19 Expermental 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 no qualify as vaccines, according to the vaccine criteria

**This is my experience of the teaching. Buddha does not directly teach about hope or hopelessness to my knowledge.