One of the tricky things about hope—a word so pretty it also functions as a pretty name—is its complicated relationship to time. As many wise Eastern spiritual traditions hold, only the present moment actually even exists. Hope, however, seems to posit a preferable potential set of future circumstances relative to what’s happening now. From a mundane point of view, this just seems healthy and normal: “I hope my cat gets well.” “I hope the political tides turn.” “I hope the tornado doesn’t cause damage.” From our usual perspective as vulnerable mortals, hope may well be a necessary part of our psychological survival strategy. But if we are really committed to being firmly rooted in the present, should hope ultimately be discarded as a naive, and perhaps even harmful, delusion? Is there a way to reconcile our desire to be here now with the inclination to hopefully project ourselves into a “better” future?
Reflecting on hope’s apparent dissonance with acceptance—which also plants us squarely in the now—helps me grapple with hope. It goes something like this: If only the present moment truly exists, then isn’t it misguided to evaluate this moment as better or worse than some remembered past or potential future moment? I can, of course, mentally compare what I project might happen in the future based on my memories of the past—and such mental comparison is obviously an important human skill—but humans have no direct, unmediated access to either the future or past. Here in the present, we are able merely to shuffle and assess mental constructs—memories, fantasies and other projections—that we may then use to judge what’s happening now as acceptable or not. In the actual present moment, then, it’s not so much that everything is acceptable but that judgments of acceptability no longer quite make sense. It’s not about there being some moral rule that one “should” accept what is, then, but that, in the absence of abstract, temporal mentalized comparisons, i.e., thoughts, there is no other authentic, reality-based possibility. If we truly and deeply accept what is, and that includes the intrinsic uncertainty the concept of future includes, is there any room left for hope?
That I hesitated to write that last sentence reminds me of how taboo it feels to question the validity and viability of hope, even provisionally. Again, many of us quite naturally rely on it as a coping mechanism, and it has basically been enshrined in certain religious, spiritual, and literary circles. So when I refer to hope as the Santa Claus of spiritual self-help concepts, I don’t mean to deny its relative legitimacy and efficacy. For that matter, Santa Claus too has his own role to play in our unfolding human drama. At the same time, a danger of leaning too heavily on hope (or Santa Claus) is that, rather than prepare ourselves to more directly face the reality that IS, we may, instead, become lost in a fantasy we have constructed and dangled before ourselves. In its most perverse, naughty-or-nice version, we may even feel we can, or should, work to earn this positive future outcome by staying hopeful. Some hope-based positive thinking indoctrination is so transactional that we may worry that lapses of optimism can create the punishing future reality we are so desperate to avoid: “Did my cancer return because I lost hope?” “Will fascism win if I indulge in thoughts of the resistance failing?” Such self-blame is, of course, the flip-side of the human fantasy of control. We may be willing to accept such self-blame if it permits us to avoid the conclusion that, in our world, things sometimes happen regardless of what we want or how we behave.
That hope can still feel so very necessary suggests that, despite the fact that many of us profess to believe in the power and sheer rightness of staying fully in the present moment, we may not really buy it. “Being here now” sounds nice while we’re sitting on the meditation cushion, but once we’re back in our workaday lives, how many of us are habitually flipping between mental projections of a regretful past and a dreadful future, desperate to control what happens next? And how many of us worry that, without hope, and without the notion of future it assumes, we would lack motivation to work for desirable outcomes for ourselves, others, and the planet? Do we cling to the life raft of hope because we do not trust ourselves (or others) to take prudent, compassionate, or skillful action without the dangled carrot of improved future circumstances? And how much of our attachment to the concept of time itself is a function of our addiction to thinking and the control cognition seems to promise—despite (perhaps) our professed belief that our true identity is rooted in a formless transcendent awareness beyond thought?
I’m surely not suggesting that hope is wrong or even that it’s a problem. I’ve got no inclination to talk anyone out of hope—including myself—mainly because, in normal life—and particularly during apparent catastrophes—it can feel like the only alternative to hope is hopelessness. But that helpless, doom-n-gloom attitude—let’s call it negative hope—is merely the flip-side of the same coin, for “hopelessness” too is future-oriented, a negative fantasy, one of pessimism and impotence rather than optimism and overweening (perhaps) self-efficacy. In short, neither hope nor hopelessness is rooted in the trustworthy, authentic realism that the here and now actually demands and deserves. When we imagine our only option to be either hope (or its opposite) we reveal our identification with time-based mental projections—memories and fantasies. Unfortunately, even as this relatively superficial version of hope may work as a short-term coping mechanism, it will also create a view of possibilities limited by the same cognizing mechanism that makes such hope possible. This seems inevitable since, from the seat of our thinking self, we can never witness the present moment as it actually is, but only through a distorting filter of past memories and future fantasies shaped by our conditioning and preferences.
Still, rather than imagining we should (or could) give up on hope altogether, perhaps we might simply notice that we’re especially inclined to lean on it when we’re attached to some perhaps hidden, unexamined negative thought about reality. Maybe we’re assuming, for instance, that reality is basically unfriendly, and that, without our constant, scrutinizing, thought-based vigilance, things will go to hell in a handbasket. And when we are, even unconsciously, identified with such doomsy thoughts, maybe it’s an act of self-love to use hope to ward off the anticipated evil and misfortune. If and when we are able to fall back into the direct experience of unconditioned awareness, though—behind and beyond thoughts, and always already rooted in the now—craving for stories of a happier, predictable, controllable future naturally fall away. Of course, as human creatures, we have preferences and desires about future outcomes. But embracing this simple fact, and diligently working toward outcomes we’re invested in, is different from leaning on hope as a positive thinking manipulation tactic. Happily, new possibilities for creative action tend to organically emerge when we stop abandoning our current reality as unworthy, when we stop compulsively projecting ourselves into a fantasy future that our mind has persuaded us would be better.
If you’d like to be notified by email of new posts, hit the menu button above to find the link to subscribe.
OtherWise Philosophy 