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In Spirit of Hope
What do you do in a hopeless situation? How can hope come to your aid once again? The way of peace has to answer these questions.
Hope is emotionally necessary in a crisis. It’s one of the chief ways our minds protect us. Yet hope has a hard time being felt when every disaster is instantly communicated around the world. And hope is rarely pure. It is always mixed in the angled hierarchy with other emotions, including those opposed to hope, such as despair, fear, anger, and vengeance.
Because of this tangle, hope has often been a cloak for violence. How many times have we heard politicians, on the eve of war, seize the microphone to express how fervently they hope for peace? One must pay lip service to hope even when an enemy is being driven into hopelessness and crushed without mercy. Violence especially needs to be treated with hope because at bottom a violent person is hopeless.
When hope serves as a means to reach deeper into yourself than anyone could predict, or than anyone believes possible, it is a spiritual force.
There are certain hallmarks of remarkable recoveries: The person is without fear; there is belief in an extraordinary outcome; the search for a cure doesn’t depend on outside opinions; often there is an unshakable certainty that a cure will be found. These same qualities apply to any situation that is considered hopeless by the majority of observers. To rekindle hope, one must find a path to the extraordinary.
The trick is not to despair, and yet since we despair so quickly in our current condition, avoiding despair can only happen by going deeper into the spiritual value of hope. This requires a shift in oneself.
Adapted from: Peace Is the Way, by Deepak Chopra (Harmony Books, 2005).
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9 comments
add your comment »Hope does not exist in a vacuum, but must rely on someone. Only Jesus understands our predicament and moves or changes circumstances to make hope realised.
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Thanks Hope...I love what you say! Opening our thought to new views and possibilities! That's what it's all about!
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I recently heard a lecture in which the speaker explained that the word hope evolved from the indo-european root word keu which essentially means 'change of direction' and/or 'looking in another direction than we have been looking'. Sometimes when we are in the midst of hopelessness it is exacerbated because we continue to look to the past or try to make use of worn out solutions, ideas or techniques to resolve cyclical crises. What we may need most is a new perspective, a lifting from the routine ways we have habitually approached the desire for shift and change in our lives. Certainly 'hope' is open for interpretation. I see hope as a bridge that can lead us in a fresh direction, a new space of possibility that perhaps we have never been open to before.
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Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.
Hebrews 11:1 KJV
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When you hope for, you have to have faith in the hope.
Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.
Hebrews 11:1 King James Version
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Hope is not based on reality. Whether you see the glass as half-full or half-empty depends on your attitude. If a glass is mostly empty you might say that is enough reason to not have hope, but I say even an empty glass can be filled again. Hope is a choice.
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What if there is no hope and there is no pope???
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An interesting article...thanks! A favourite author of mine, Mary Baker Eddy wrote "Knowledge that we can accomplish the good we hope for, stimulates the system to act in the direction which Mind points out." I've found that as I become more conscious of my spirituality I can experience that promise of good which relies on Mind: Mind who knows all and loves His creation.
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Hope is the signal between the immortal self and its' fragment , our currant consciousness of self, that we are in agreement on the mutual benefits of a pleasant outcome to any change. Uma
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