If there were truly no connection between our 'outer circumstances' and our inner relationship to those circumstances, then hope for better circumstances would be perfectly reasonable.
But in reality our inner
relationship to circumstances how we meet them, how we touch them, how we think
about them cannot be separated from the circumstances themselves.
Our
relationship to circumstances *are* the circumstances themselves or all we know
of them, it informs everything we experience of them. This is what 'no
separation' means in functional terms.
Therefore, it is our
hope for the future that is precisely the same as our resistance of the
present. This hope is our relationship rejection to circumstances.
It is our
experience of circumstances.
Our hope is our suffering.
Without hope there is
no resistance.
Without resistance there isn't despair as we imagine that is
just hope overburdened by fear, but rather without hope everything that we
hoped for in a future moment reveals itself as available in the present
circumstances.
We imagine that
optimal conditions will make us happy and so we hope.
But it is actually the
end of hope that ends the resistance that ends the seeming itself that
something is missing.
Hopelessness is not
bad news.
On the contrary it is very good news because in that moment we stop
pushing what we're after farther away like chasing a carrot on a stick attached
to our head.
I am the only person on earth who can make that effort.
I'm not talking about taking action or not taking action.
I'm talking about an inner state of resistance.
What I've found is that inner
state of resistance is so stressful that it inhibits rather than facilitates
action.
What better place from which to effectively act than when you're in a
good mood already?
Not hoping doesn't mean not acting, or not changing things,
rather acting to undo an injustice, for instance from a place of ease and strength
and clear thinking, because you are not all busy and tied up freaking out
against how bad things are, way more effective action.
Hope is the mantra of
doubt.
I'm saying that the outer mirrors the inner in that what we
experience of it must pass through the filter of whether we think it should be
different.
Thinking we want, need or believe it should be different actually
changes our experience of it. So hoping for change in the future changes our
experience of the present it creates the seeming necessity that peace or
happiness be preceded by a change in circumstances.
We experience this is relatively mundane ways all the time.
When it is raining we don't usually dwell on hoping the rain will go away.
We
just respond to the situation as it is.
We might open an umbrella or we might
stay indoors or we might get wet.
But without the assumption that the rain must
be absent in order to experience peace, we don't see the rain as a problem. In
that sense we are having a totally different experience than someone for whom
rain ruins their day...
Hope in other contexts has very much the same net effect. It
changes how we experience things as they are by solidifying the belief that the
way it is a problem than is necessarily making us unhappy.
And change doesn't
come more easily in rejecting things as they are because as our attention and energy gets spent on the tantrum/upset rather than on
the action...
Sometimes water opens itself up to accept an object only to
push down upon it,
burying it forever....
Sometimes it lifts the object up,
keeping it raised to the heavens forever.
Sometimes water sits - silent and
motionless...
Sometimes it slowly, gently, and steadily drips onto an obstacle
drilling a hole in it over time....
Sometimes water crashes down destroying any
semblance that there was ever an obstacle in its path to begin with.
Sometimes
water evaporates, disappearing in front of our eyes and floating up to the
heavens.
The path of least resistance has many faces.
They are not contradictions.
They are related.
ps/smoh
