Hi Tee

I took TS Eliot’s words as a method of creating the space for beginner’s mind. To let go of what you think you know and how you feel things ought to be and instead – self-empty.

The first time I came across the passage I wondered what he could mean to hope for the wrong thing. Isn’t hope a good thing?

In hindsight on my experience hope I think I can say that more often than not hope for the wrong thing as it only amplified what it was that I wished to avoid.

Then Eliot makes the statement that hope is in the waiting or is waiting which I take as trusting, not knowing, the beginners mind) – a different kind of hope that isn’t hope for a outcome.

The poet Vaclav Havel noted “Hope is a dimension of the soul, an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart. It transcends the world that is immediately experienced and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizon. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out.” Hope that acknowledges Life as it is, is, good – transcends duality.

I was latter surprised to learn that there is a Buddhist practice of ‘Hopelessness’. (release of fear)

Pema Chodron spoke of Letting go of Hope. She noted the relationship of hope to fear. The opposite of hope is not hopelessness but fear. Where this is hope there is also fear, that in a world of hope and fear we are always looking for a way out of something that has started to feel uncomfortable.

“Hope and fear come from feeling that we lack something; they come from a sense of poverty. We can’t simply relax with ourselves. We hold on to hope, and hope robs us of the present.”

Anytime we hope for a certain outcome, and work hard to make it happen we also introduce fear. The fear of failing, fear of loss…. Hopelessness on the other hand is free of fear and thus can be liberating. We no longer associate Hopelessness with despair and instead as a process of waiting – emptying –  Tao – the stillness (silence) from which all things arise and return  – Aum

Thomas Merton also talked of the journey into hopelessness. “Do not depend on the hope of results. You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. You gradually struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything.” – In the space created in such hopelessness the self observes the Self, the relationship with all – one might say the 8 C’s emerge:  compassion, confidence, calmness, creativity, clarity, curiosity, courage,  and connectedness.