Question: What is hope? Is hope good or bad? Why is the mind always full of hope?
Speaker: Hope is a movement away from what you think the present condition is. This is simple. You hope to be different. Whenever there is a hope, there is an expectation attached to it. Hope is always about the future and you want something to happen in the future. This is called hope. So, there is a present condition, there is a present image that you think exists. You want to go away from it and that you call as hope. ‘I am not good right now, I want to be good’; this is called hope. ‘I am not an achiever right now, I want to achieve’; this is hope. ‘I don’t have all these things, I want to get them’; hope. ‘I have these things, I don’t want to lose them’; hope. An image of the future; hope. And hope wants a change.
Now, hope can be of two types. Understand this clearly. First type of hope says, ‘I am not sufficient. There is something wrong with me. I am inadequate. There is something missing and I want to get something which will make me complete. I am missing a person in my life, I hope to get that person. I am not complete till I have a good job. I hope to get that job’. This is the first kind of hope. This type of hope says, ‘I want to gather more. I want to achieve. I want to accumulate’. This hope says,’ I want to get more’. Now, this getting will make you more dependent upon external forces. It will make you more dependent upon the world.
We said that the first type of hope first asks for a change. It has an expectation from the future and a moment away from what you think exists. First type of hope wants a change and in this change it says that I don’t have, I want more. This is the change it wants. ‘I don’t have security, I want security. I don’t have money. I want to be well-moneyed.’ This hope is about gathering and hence this hope will make you dependent because the gathering will necessarily happen from the outside. When you take something, it is prone to be taken back as well. And because your want is dependent on the world, so it is not certain that you will get it and then, there will be fear. Fear that the hope will not materialize.
