Thanks Chris… you have really brought this hope vs. no-hope discussion to life for me with the following analogy;
My one iron-clad rule for myself is to not be in relationship with someone if I am expecting, requiring or demanding (on any level) for them to be different than they already are.Makes sense.. sure.. I have learned this too.
And this is my present relationship to the worldAh........................... now I get it.
Beautifully written Chris. One of the benefits of aging is the ability to hold two emotions at one time. I completely agree with you and yet the subject of our human existence is so complex and diverse, under certain circumstances I do not agree.
You talk about your life being your own and hope free being a place of mystery and abundance for you. That is an existence many would love to have and enjoy and I/we are happy for you. Certainly to live in abundance with hot coffee, showers and food on the agenda along with time to contemplate our state of being is a glorious place to be. Many on this site are enjoying a similar existence…at present.
In Victor Frankel’s book, Mans Search For Meaning, he points out that many of the people who died in concentration camps did so because they lost all hope. So in a case of living in misery and suffering hope can give life meaning and makes it endurable. I write this not to be disagreeable but rather I can foresee a future where many people’s existence may include misery, suffering and lack. We are an empire and world in decline and our best days are behind us. Frankl, like you Chris talks about each of us having to search for our own meaning in life. It is a topic that if explored before a major crisis can help us face the future. I think we all benefit from exploring this subject and like to get feedback from many different people.
Hope, I think can be an instinct. Take for instance searchers looking for survivors after an earthquake. Their insatiable ability to give up hope after a reasonable amount of time has passed enabled survivors who have defied the odds to be found alive. As a parent I would run into a burning building against all hope to test that sliver of a chance to save my child. When all the odds are against us as they were for many in the concentration camps hope may enable us to work just a little harder to survive and in my case, just maybe make life endurable for those I leave behind. I am actively taking steps to make that happen and it gives me hope that those who follow me will benefit from the fruits if my labor. That’s a pretty good life as well.
This subject alone could make a huge difference in many people’s lives especially when facing predicaments. And unfortunately, our modern society has not prepared people’s minds for dealing with a crisis or a catastrophe. What will we tell our children and grand-children about hope, hopelessness and living hope free after a SHTF event. It’s worth contemplating.
AK Granny
To live hope free is to take emotion out of the equation. Edward Bernays has shown us through psychological manipulation that most people are ruled by emotion. We collectively need to do a lot of work.
Chris I hope you visit this subject again.
AK Granny
Having reviewed all the submissions to this particular thread over the last two weeks and cogitating on it more than I can justify, it still strikes me that, eventually, we all face the ultimate tragedy and the consequences it bodes. If the Crash Course doesn’t confirm that, then all we are left with, as an alternative is, the comedy. From a Shakespearean perspective, that usually ends with the union of lovers, and, implicitly, a future and hope. So,: "Laugh, Kookaburra, Laugh
Kookaburra sits on the old gum tree, Merry merry king of the bush is he. Laugh, Kookaburra, laugh, Kookaburra, Gay your life must be! Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree Eating all the gumdrops he can see Stop, Kookaburra, Stop, Kookaburra Leave some there for me. Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree, Counting all the monkeys he can see Stop, Kookaburra, Stop, Kookaburra, That's no monkey, that's me.
I believe that being hope-free is one of the final states of acceptance of our dire predicament. I typically agree with EVERYTHING that Jan says, but this quote struck me as appropriate for our current cushy American lifestyles:
I am finding this thread fascinating, leading me to delve deeper into this concept to try to get my head wrapped around it. How can one live completely in the present if one is ‘hope-free’? Is hope not inextricably linked to our very existence?
Chris, a question for you regarding this paragraph from your post #28
What we can do is keep moving, to go on, and so that’s why Adam and I built this site and continue to do all the things we do each day to keep moving, to go on. Honestly, I would not be able to continue, and would not have lasted this long, if I required a promise that if I applied myself well enough that it will all be okay. I know too much to hold that view.How does keeping moving on differentiate from taking action based on (some level of) hope. Is this site itself not representative of hope - even though we all recognize that it will not all be okay. If you were completely hope-free, would this blog exist? In reading the article about the changes to the site and what can be done to increase the visibility to further spread the word about the 3Es it strikes me that this goes to hope for a better world - not fixing the world, but spreading the idea that we can all make things better through our individual daily actions. In a way, is not blogging and educating others as you do a form of hope? I ask this not to be a shit disturber, but to truly try to understand. Most of us here have gardens and try to grow as much of our own food as we can. In my mind that is hope in action, while simultaneously living/being in the present, accepting the circumstances that are in, which tell me that at some point I may not be able to buy tomatoes therefore I should grow my own. I am keeping moving, going on. When I start my tomato seeds under my grow lights this month, I see that as both acceptance and hope inter-wined, dashed with optimism that I will be successful and be able to feed myself. I am having a hard time envisioning living so fully present that I am completely hope-free. Somehow I feel like that is a cop out on the rest of humanity. So that then begs the question: is living "hope-free" selfish? I hope I can turn my brain off to sleep tonight... lol Jan
Hi Jan
This is indeed subtle and tender terrain and maybe hard to articulate. It’s not about vetoing hope, but about being able to remain present with or without evidence for hope, or even a sense of hope. Some years ago I realized that even in the theoretical complete absence of hope there are other powerful forces remaining.
With or without hope, there is love. The love within humans, however buried it might be in say, feelings of hopelessness, has an unmitigated quality. Whenever I’ve been able to drop down to that level of self where the love is, it simply is not dependent on anything. It is. It is what we have for our - everything. It is a powerfully motivating state of being that we just happen to carry within us on an everyday basis.
Another place from which action can emerge that is not hope-dependent is appreciation. Whatever comes next, what we have already been gifted by this planet is beyond apprehension - at least mine. To act in ways that honor the worth of a lifetime on Earth is a motivation that does not require hope. It’s just truth-telling. It is soul-satisfying to appreciate what has been: the eons-long story of a planet developing into this exquisite age of flowers and pollinators, glaciers and waterways, fliers and burrowers, furry and scaly. It is correct for our souls to appreciate and to honor all this magic, period. We can act from hope, but also from a state of appreciation, hope optional.
I think hope is a fairly fragile state of mind - very dependent on how things are looking outside of us, how isolated we are, how much unhappy emotion we are stuck, what kind of information (or mis-) we are taking in, who we are hanging with and so on. So it may not do as a strong place to stand. I prefer love for that. Always there, bedrock.
Overall I’d say hope is nice when you can get it, but not that durable and not necessary to live well.
A note - love without the assurance of hope can be wrenching. Grieving is a practice, then, necessary to remain in contact with the love. Loving in joyful appreciation, love expressed as grief, loving in celebration, again, grieving, no resistance.
It’s late. Hope there was some sense in that anyway. It’s what I know, so far.
Susan
Some folks are born in the Shit that already hit the fan. Their life in the 3rd world is beyond tragic . They have no reasonable hopeful expectations. There are millions who can’t go on, but they go on everyday. These people amaze me and humble me. Some of them have little food, and no healthcare. They would feel blessed beyond belief to have our 1st world issues.
I must be a believer in “Hope”, because I see pathways out of many of our advanced culture problems. Maybe it should be called “Vision” instead of Hope?.. I see people gaining consciousness to reduce emissions; I see honest people in the investment world; I see organics gaining shelf space in supermarkets and young families providing clean food for their babies; I see scientists working against disease; and I see the chance for the Fed to be audited and properly constrained.
I don’t passively “hope” these things come to pass, I adopt these visions as my reality and work toward their fulfillment. Maybe it is “Hope-free”, but whatever you want to call it, it is positive and has a basis in reality.
Thanks for chiming in an articulating that which is so hard to articulate. I have other friends who also think that being in a state where one simply ‘loves’ is perhaps, if not the total answer, the direction in which we need to head. Love may not conquer all, but if one were to be able to live in a state where they simply moved through each day with nothing but love, then I would think that is about as good as it can get.
Love and appreciation go hand in hand I think. How can anyone not love this dear Earth and all that it is, to marvel at its breathtaking, almost indescribable magnificence, beauty, diversity? Perhaps those who are devoid of love are the ones who have been the active participants in the rape and pillage that has occurred in the name of creating wealth. That is the grief part - knowing this exists, and because not enough of us have loved as we should have, we are too late. Heart rending indeed.
My sister likes to say something that ties in with what Oliveoilguy said - we should all be so happy and appreciative just based on where we were born. We owe it to all of the poor souls who were and are born in some third world hell on earth, to be happy, to appreciate all that we have just by virtue of where we were born. Our first world poor are third world kings and queens, and then some, simply because we live in a society where hope is an option that has resources available to support that hope. They do not.
The one sticking point I find around the issue of whether we should have hope or not is for those who have children. Indeed, in trying to educate my brother on the 3Es and the limits to growth he came right out and said “I have to have hope for a better future, I have kids!”. With that the door was slammed on further discussion. It did not seem to matter to him that all that I do and the actions I am trying to take are because I love my nieces and nephews and I want to leave a better world for them. But he cannot see beyond the short term gratification of a materialistic lifestyle. That truly saddens me, for if he truly loved his kids, he would be doing all that he could to help manage this predicament for the benefit of his own as well as all of the other children who will inherit this mess we have made.
We come full circle then to the idea of appreciation of all that we are and all that we have. Perhaps we are talking about is something that Treebeard has said time and again over hundreds of threads on this site, if I am to interpret him correctly: all there really is is love. Until everyone on this Earth sees and embraces that fully, things truly will remain hopeless.
Jan
This has been a most interesting thread, as was the podcast. What follows is dangerously close to overstepping PP’s guidelines by discussing my beliefs and antidotal experiences rather than asserting provable facts and making logical conclusions. I have been on my particular road for over forty-five years now. My view of things such as grief, hope and trust are completely tied up in that journey. I know many of you are hard and fast materialists with no sense of, or attraction to, anything beyond this present paradigm. That is fine. I am not presenting this to disrespect your views, or to convert you. For better or worse, here is my poor attempt to voice my own sense of these matters.
I understand and appreciate Jenkinson’s approach to grief. I have never adhered to the so called “stages of grief”. Nor do I look at grief as some type of road block to be out maneuvered and pushed past at all costs. The idea of “closure” after a grief creating incident, has never resonated with me. Grief is not a popular song, or book, or television show with a beginning, middle and end.
I do not see grief as an emotion. It is often accompanied by emotions: sadness, fear, regret, but in itself I do not experience it as an emotion. Likewise, I do not see grief as a mental state. It can produce depression, melancholy, even despair, but it is not one of these.
In my experience, grief is its own reality, loss so real that it produces psychological and physical pain, suffering. It is as if a foreign object lodges itself in the joints of my mind, soul, spirit (whatever you prefer). At first it produces constant pain and aggravation. Any movement reminds you it is there, like a pebble in your shoe. As time goes on you become more accustomed to the intruding particle and do not think of it all the time. Eventually your mind begins to form a coating around the pointy rock. Experiences, loves, fears, life, build up layer upon layer. Like an oyster, the mind turns the irritant and pain producer into a small, round pearl. The painful intruder has become a testimony to endurance and life. The grief never leaves but is added to the definition of who you are.
Many times, when I have encountered people older than myself, who seem wise, compassionate and thoughtful, I will eventually discover that their lives are built around a profound grief, or series of griefs. It is as if the grief has made them more human, more real.
The idea of being hope-free seems quite alien. Possibly this is due to my own definition of hope. In our consumer, society I think most people confuse hope with a type of fantasy, day-dream, wish fulfillment. i.e. “I hope I win the lottery.” Shows like America’s Got Talent, feed into this idea of “hope” being a way to fantasize into reality the virtually impossible.
My idea of hope is more akin to what Chris has labeled “trust”. I have a profound sense of the spiritual imbued in physical reality. The spiritual is what enables me to go on, when on the physical level, I can no longer go on. This has nothing, or little, to do with success or failure in the physical realm. It is a sense that spiritually, things are working to where they are supposed be. Somehow our lives, our efforts, tie into that. It is paradoxical, but it seems to be that the more present I am to the immediate tasks to be done, and to the needs of those currently with me, the more I am in harmony with the deeper reality. The cultivation of the physical opens the understanding of the spiritual.
We do not go on confident in the result of our personal efforts. We go on because our spirit has discovered that going on is a profoundly, powerfully, appropriate thing to do. Our trust, or hope, is found in attending to the present, good or bad, while accepting that the spiritual is ultimately guiding things, regardless of how they appear in the physical world.
Jan has hit upon two other important aspects of being present. To practice love, of self, significant other, family, friends, life, our world, is a major part of the equation. To practice gratitude is also important. Stop to realize the wonder of the moment, to comprehend the incredible thing it is to be alive and to be able to take in and contemplate the universe around you. The practice of love and gratitude changes you.
JT
“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.”
― Thomas Merton
Hope is a state of mind, not of the world. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good. Vaclav Havel
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/topics/topic_hope3.html
died in Copenhagen in 1927.
But what does that tell us about hope and grief?
Intellectually we need to grasp that which evolution deliberately blinds us to, that there is nothing"out there". It is all data, procedurally generated. Your mind exists, your body doesn’t.
Or you could cling to your notion of physicalism but then you are forced to abandon cause and effect. The arrow of time is an illusion. There is only the NOW. (Yes Gladys, that means that you never existed a second ago.)
As far as I understand it, when you die you rejoin the vast field of data,keeping your ego.
As an aside, the data seems to be in 3 space, which if Rhineman (sp) projected onto the surface of a sphere becomes the Holographic Universe.
And yes, my views have endured existential crises.
I’ve read the transcript and the entire comment stream. What I’m about to say may offend some, and may come close to overstepping some mark or other, but I feel that I should add to the discussion.
Yes, Mr Jenkinson’s thesis is useful and does offer some help to a people coping with grief. The world is in such a parlous state that often all we can do is grieve over the direction in which it’s heading.
But at bottom all he’s saying is to eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die.
Whether we live in hope or out of it, in gratitude or not for being alive, being profoundly thankful or not for having been born into an affluent part of the world, whether we devote our lives to good works or to vile, the set of assumptions upon which all of this reasoning is based leads to only one conclusion: everything we do ends in death.
I’m a bit out of touch with cosmology but about 10 years ago a common prognostication was that the universe would undergo a heat death. It would expand forever, all matter in it decay into its constituent energy, and we’d end up with an ever-larger black void containing diffuse, dilute, useless energy with no light, no heat, no way for any work to be done. The universe in effect ends in death too.
Now, if I accept these premises then I find it very hard to develop any objective codes of morality and ethics. Sure, we all have our subjective codes but how readily can and do they devolve into merely living in a manner to maximise personal comfort — which includes making people near us comfortable also so that we, personally, are not made uncomfortable? If thousands or tens of thousands perish miserably in some geographically or temporally remote catastrophe, then to what extent are my ethics tested by that?
I must deal with the proposition that I can be an Albert Schweizer or a Mother Teresa, an Oskar Schindler or a Mahatma Gandhi, an Adolf Hitler or a Genghis Khan, and in the long run, what difference does it make? If all I am faced with ultimately is my personal, permanent extinction, why should it matter that I lived as a great saint or a murderous psychopath? How can it possibly matter that I or any of us ever existed?
Dostoyevsky put it succinctly in The Brothers Karamazov: if God does not exist, then everything is permitted. After decades of study and experience, I am convinced that not only does a god of some description exist, but also that this god can be described: basically nice, caring for us at a personal level, not intrusive into our personal lives, leaving us largely at our own request up to our own devices (doing great good and perpetrating monstrous evils) for a finite period of time, and having plans for a permanent future for us.
Do I deceive myself? Make me a better offer. I have hope.
Dr. Tom Campbell tackles the physics of Values head on, as does Persig.
Physicist Tom Campbell says that as entropy winds down the Real world of Consciousness winds up due to an evolutionary process towards what can best be described as Love.
The evolutionary process is just as ruthless as the one we are familiar with. If your consciousness is not towards lower entropy, you will be extinguished.
Christ put it this way
" Bring forth that which is within you.If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you DO NOT HAVE that which is within you, what you do not have will destroy you." The Gospel of Thomas.
Do not be concerned though, The only Consciousness, the Universal Consciousness of which all sentience is a part Wills your success, for your success is Our success.
Persig identified for us the independent existence of Quality. Which of cause is what Tom Campbell describes.
The content of your character speaks for itself.When you comment,I pay attention…Between your practice and taking care of your family I see you JT Walsh…Well done…
Rhetorical questions but am compelled to comment.
If thousands or tens of thousands perish miserably in some geographically or temporally remote catastrophe, then to what extent are my ethics tested by that?
Your ethics are not tested your heart and compassion are.
How can it possibly matter that I or any of us ever existed?
Because it does.
Do I deceive myself? Make me a better offer. I have hope.
No you don’t deceive yourself and I agree, well said!. And I still think hope is instinctual. After the 1964 Earthquake the phones were down and many roads were impassable. We didn’t have news about my father for over two weeks. Hope, - maybe today is the day he will come home, the phones will work, the roads will open, he will walk in the door. It was not something a child is taught it was and is as natural as breathing. Happily I spent many years with my curmudgeonly father. How do military families endure separation and deployments if not for hope? I get the concept of living in the here and now and the value of “hope free” but I suspect few can accomplish that state if being.
Great thread love the diverse input and peoples individual thoughts!
AK GrannyWGrit
Arthur:
While I don’t pretend to fully understand it, the little I know of quantum mechanics has always intrigued me. Part of the theory seems to say that the very act of observation changes the observed. Perhaps our existence is to observe the universe, and by our observations change it in ways that could not occur if there had been no observation.
I have have often wondered if our thoughts and consciousness actually operate on a quantum level connected to realities beyond what we experience as our physical selves. I have no problem with the idea that what we perceive as physical is no more than combinations of waves and particles, or information, held together for a time in a pattern, but ultimately dissolving to be reformed into something different. I do not see this negating the idea of physical vs. spiritual. The “physical” is such, just from the point of our observation. It could be a construct, an interpretation of our mind, and seem just as “real” as something that is supposedly “objectively material”.
While I believe we come at the world from very different directions, I have to say, you always make me think and make me stretch from my often sedentary thought processes. It is good for me and it is quite enjoyable.
JT