[Buddha-l] Beyond Hope

[Erik Hoogcarspel]

jkirk schreef:

> http://www.oriononline.org/pages/om/06-3om/Jensen.html
>
> Excerpts:
> ".....Hope is, in fact, a curse, a bane. I say this not only because 
> of the lovely Buddhist saying "Hope and fear chase each other's 
> tails," not only because hope leads us away from the present, away 
> from who and where we are right now and toward some imaginary future 
> state. I say this because of what hope is.
>
> More or less all of us yammer on more or less endlessly about hope. 
> You wouldn't believe-or maybe you would-how many magazine editors have 
> asked me to write about the apocalypse, then enjoined me to leave 
> readers with a sense of hope. But what, precisely, is hope? At a talk 
> I gave last spring, someone asked me to define it. I turned the 
> question back on the audience, and here's the definition we all came 
> up with: hope is a longing for a future condition over which you have 
> no agency; it means you are essentially powerless......"
>
> ".............At one of my recent talks someone stood up during the Q 
> and A and announced that the only reason people ever become activists 
> is to feel better about themselves. Effectiveness really doesn't 
> matter, he said, and it's egotistical to think it does.
> I told him I disagreed.
> Doesn't activism make you feel good? he asked.
> Of course, I said, but that's not why I do it. If I only want to feel 
> good, I can just masturbate. But I want to accomplish something in the 
> real world.
> Why?
> Because I'm in love. With salmon, with trees outside my window, with 
> baby lampreys living in sandy streambottoms, with slender salamanders 
> crawling through the duff. And if you love, you act to defend your 
> beloved. Of course results matter to you, but they don't determine 
> whether or not you make the effort. You don't simply hope your beloved 
> survives and thrives. You do what it takes. If my love doesn't cause 
> me to protect those I love, it's not love.
> A WONDERFUL THING happens when you give up on hope, which is that you 
> realize you never needed it in the first place. You realize that 
> giving up on hope didn't kill you. It didn't even make you less 
> effective. In fact it made you more effective, because you ceased 
> relying on someone or something else to solve your problems-you ceased 
> hoping your problems would somehow get solved through the magical 
> assistance of God, the Great Mother, the Sierra Club, valiant 
> tree-sitters, brave salmon, or even the Earth itself-and you just 
> began doing whatever it takes to solve those problems yourself...."
>
> "...And when you quit relying on hope, and instead begin to protect 
> the people, things, and places you love, you become very dangerous 
> indeed to those in power. In case you're wondering, that's a very good 
> thing."
>
>
> What are we, as members of this list, or as humans, or as Buddhists 
> maybe, doing to solve some of these problems ourselves? Do we care? or 
> did we just give up and turn to solipsistic recourses?
> Joanna

Poetic and profound, Joanna. It reminds me of Albert Camus, who 
considered Sysiphus a wise and happy person, because he had completely 
given up hope. But Camus distinguished hope with a big H (espérance) 
from practical hope (espoir). The last one is OK, it makes sense to say 
'I hope to see you soon' or 'I hope to finish this piece before six 
o'clock'. But the hope for a heaven with 72 virgins or a promised land 
has made more vicitims then any natural disaster so far. That's whu I 
gave up the hope for sukhavati.

-- 

Erik


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