What Do You Hope For?
It seems to me that there are at least these four things that people hope for religiously or spiritually:
1. Their individual lives and the lives of loved ones
2. Our species
3. Our planet, as in “Maybe some other species will come along and do a better job with life on earth if we don’t last long.”
4. Reality or being itself – hope for the entire universe and whatever full or complete context may hold it.
1. Hope for the individual – Most westerners find this presented by their religious traditions as hope for personal immortality.
On the one hand, you hate to think of yourself and those you love being annihilated in the end. On the other, you can reach a point in life where you sincerely don’t want to be immortal. The idea of being yourself forever can seem way too long as you realize your inherent limitations.
2. Hope for our species - This might be the most widely shared item on the human hope list. Most of us want to see our species survive and thrive long term. It would appear though, that this is a universe in which all species go extinct sooner or later.
3. Hope for the planet – It’s easy to imagine a scenario where humans go extinct through human or natural causes (or some combination of the two) and some other life form takes our place to “live long and prosper” (Mr. Spock). On the one hand, this has a hopeful ring to it, kind of. On the other, humans are all dead.
4. Hope for reality or being itself – It’s hard to imagine just what this means. Language can’t do more than allude to such a possibility. I think, for example, of a phrase from the Christmas carol, “Joy to the World” that goes “and heaven and nature sing.” Or Tennyson’s reference to “that one far-off divine event to which creation moves.”
You Don’t Need Hope If You Have Certainty…
One commenter on the previous thread seemed to suggest that hope may be unnecessary or irrelevant. I’d have to guess that this commenter, like quite a lot of people, feel that they know things turn out well and that such knowledge makes hope unnecessary.
###
What do you see as the biggest threats to our species in the long run? How hopeful or hopeless do you feel about overcoming them?
If you consider yourself to know something about life that leaves you with no need for hope, then what is it that you know and how do you know it?
If you lack this kind of certainty, what kind of hope is most important to you?
1. Their individual lives and the lives of loved ones
2. Our species
3. Our planet, as in “Maybe some other species will come along and do a better job with life on earth if we don’t last long.”
4. Reality or being itself – hope for the entire universe and whatever full or complete context may hold it.
1. Hope for the individual – Most westerners find this presented by their religious traditions as hope for personal immortality.
On the one hand, you hate to think of yourself and those you love being annihilated in the end. On the other, you can reach a point in life where you sincerely don’t want to be immortal. The idea of being yourself forever can seem way too long as you realize your inherent limitations.
2. Hope for our species - This might be the most widely shared item on the human hope list. Most of us want to see our species survive and thrive long term. It would appear though, that this is a universe in which all species go extinct sooner or later.
3. Hope for the planet – It’s easy to imagine a scenario where humans go extinct through human or natural causes (or some combination of the two) and some other life form takes our place to “live long and prosper” (Mr. Spock). On the one hand, this has a hopeful ring to it, kind of. On the other, humans are all dead.
4. Hope for reality or being itself – It’s hard to imagine just what this means. Language can’t do more than allude to such a possibility. I think, for example, of a phrase from the Christmas carol, “Joy to the World” that goes “and heaven and nature sing.” Or Tennyson’s reference to “that one far-off divine event to which creation moves.”
You Don’t Need Hope If You Have Certainty…
One commenter on the previous thread seemed to suggest that hope may be unnecessary or irrelevant. I’d have to guess that this commenter, like quite a lot of people, feel that they know things turn out well and that such knowledge makes hope unnecessary.
###
What do you see as the biggest threats to our species in the long run? How hopeful or hopeless do you feel about overcoming them?
If you consider yourself to know something about life that leaves you with no need for hope, then what is it that you know and how do you know it?
If you lack this kind of certainty, what kind of hope is most important to you?
Posted by Paul at 1:39 PM Permalink
21 Comments:
Here's my shot at it.
Challenge 1:
Biggest threat to our species? We are. We are our own biggest threat, and that's the irony and the sadness. For all of our fine talk about caring about our own species, I see little evidence that many people carry that into action in even the most limited ways. Take recycling. It's minor. How many bother? Turning off a light? Perhaps they feel hopeless or too small. War? (ie, deliberately killing our own species) Lets not even go there. When we ARE the problem, no effort is too small.
challenge 2: Hope or knowledge?
I'm one of the nutcases that believes in direct revelation, and believes that it's available to those who truly seek it. There are many gateways. I pursue it through shamanic practice - I talk to spirits, angelic beings, the whole cast of incredible but real characters, any that I can find that will talk with me. And they are kind, and often willing. Perhaps better, I pursue with fixed attention but marginal/sporadic results my True Self. A friend recently told me that finally fully meeting/merging with one's True Self blows the lid off of all one's previous thinking, because by understanding the plan and the "trap" one sets for oneself, one understands everything. I seek my TS as a guide, to help me down the path I set as learning. And Paul - if you ever meet your TS - there are no "limitations." Or so I'm told and believe. That's faith, based on a combination of logic and evidence.
For the final dose of "this woman is really a wack-job": I recently was joined by a new power animal that is, to my shocked delight, a member of species that went extinct about 11,000 years ago. When I journeyed to him to ask why he had appeared and what learning he had to share with me, he said (in part) - NOT just the infamous, Momento Mori, which is supposed to make you live more fully by remembering that you must die, but instead: "Remember, your species too will become extinct. It's part of the cycle."
My response (beyond unfathomable joy at the communication?) -DANCE HARDER! Being born is an AMAZING experience.
your friendly (and generally harmless) spirit chaser,
Hayden
the biggest brain on earth, highest intelligence, dooms themselves with creations that destroy the earth.
i am a hopeful little gal, springing along. oh wait, fifty years have gone by. the steps are no longer springy and i suddenly realized i have not many years left to my existence.
do i hope for anything?
i just want to die a peaceful death, swift, because i'm quite a coward.
and if there is a heaven, i sure hope i'll land there, and be able to reunite with all my loved ones. even those coming after me. bwahahaha.
always enjoys her take.
her oiii sure grabs my attention.
The other ones: our species, our children, our planet, seem important, but also seem to be largely out of my hands. The trajectory of Everything, though ... I don't know, maybe it's fuzzy enough that I feel like I can participate in it today.
I think our greed, arrogance, and lack of compassion will do us in eventually. I'm not hopeful about us overcoming these traits as a species, though some individuals can do it. We're doomed :)
If you consider yourself to know something about life that leaves you with no need for hope, then what is it that you know and how do you know it?
I don't feel I know much at all.
If you lack this kind of certainty, what kind of hope is most important to you?
1) I do hope my loved oes are saved and made happy and whole and that I can be with them again.
2 + 3) I don't have an investment in the human species surviving. I do feel bad about the devastation of other species because of the damage we've caused. But eventually the sun will die and so will the planet.
4) I hope that God exists, that he is good, and that he loves all of what he has created, not just people, that he will preserve it all somehow so that nothing will be lost and so that every bit of damage will be redeemed.
(Addressed to no one in particular...)
And above all, undying Faith in God,
wishes,
devika
But I would draw your attention to the laughable typo in 6th paragraph where you have "immorality" (something we don't need to hope for, it's a readily-available option) instead of immortality.
Those four hopes are all totally interlinked, and if we could put them together and hope for universal humanity and spread the love in our own small ways the future will come in its own way, but perhaps we influence that future and those who come after us.
Life is great – hope is great too – it gives us positives to move forward towards .. thank you great post ... Hilary
“A man’s attachment to life exceeds all the miseries life can throw at him. The body’s decision outbids the mind’s, and the body recoils from annihilation. In each of us, the habit of staying alive precedes learning how to think. In this race which daily takes us a little closer to death, the body maintains its invincible lead. At bottom lies an evasion, because it is both less and more than diversion, in Pascal’s sense of the word. The deadly evasion which forms the third theme of this essay is hope. To hope for another life earned by merit in this one, or the self-deception of those who live not for life itself, but some great overarching idea which purifies, gives meaning to life but ultimately betrays it.” (my translation)
The reference above to Pascal’s sense of the word diversion is explained by this extract from his Pensées:
“Man finds nothing so intolerable as to be in a state of complete rest, without passions, without occupation, without diversion, without effort. Then he faces his nullity, loneliness, inadequacy, dependence, helplessness, emptiness. And at once there wells up from the depths of his soul boredom, gloom, depression, chagrin, resentment, despair.”
If life goes on after death we will be forced to face whatever it brings. If death is annihilation then we won't know anything after it and so should not worry over it.
Hope is a subjective thing. It's a feeling that propels us forward and keeps us going in the face of adversity, but the specifics of what we hope for is personal, coming from our perspective and our judgment.
According to the Toba Catastrophe Theory that was proposed in 1998, a supervolcanic eruption took place about 70,000 years ago in Indonesia that nearly wiped out the earth's human population. It may have been the largest volcanic eruption in the past 25 million years. At the time the earth was already experiencing an ice age. The gigantic eruption made it even colder. As a result the population of human beings on this planet was reduced to a mere 10,000 or so. It is possible only 1000 pairs of humans were left to reproduce. Imagine what life would have been like for these humans back then under those circumstances. Yet, our species was not wiped out. If this theory is true, it gives me great hope that our species is capable of surviving a variety of catastrophes and cataclysmic events.
Eventually our sun is going to die of natural causes. So too our planet. Who knows...maybe before that happens humans will have moved on to another solar system somewhere and colonized a planet there. Maybe we will have taken other life forms with us too. Maybe we will be like Noah's Ark.
"On the other, you can reach a point in life where you sincerely don’t want to be immortal. The idea of being yourself forever can seem way too long as you realize your inherent limitations."
I believe I would like to have the chance to find out for myself whether forever seems too long.
And yet that sounds very lazy as I type it.
I guess the hope I hold most often for others and myself is this: Let love fill our minds, bodies and souls, and let love guide us always.
DIVINE KNOWLEDGE: “I know I had a vision of God, Jesus Christ, Mohammed, an angel, a white light at the end of a tunnel where my grandmother was waiting...” etc. etc. Such statements are entirely credible. They assert nothing beyond what the person experienced.
“I know/believe that my vision was a perception of something beyond my own mind.” Statements of this kind raise the question of how the person interpreted his or her experience.
HEAVEN: About that traditional idea of heaven as a reunion of friends and family… while I’m not convinced that this would represent the fulfillment of life or that it’s even all that we aspire to ourselves, I can’t take it lightly. Being with loved ones is as good as it gets so far as we know.
MORTALITY: At the point in my life when mortality was a central meaning-of-life issue for me, it wouldn’t have worked to tell myself it wasn’t really a problem because after you and everyone/everything that you care about dies, nobody feels anything anymore. For me the problem was that I didn’t want life to work that way – to destroy everyone and everything I saw as priceless, including a natural world that seemed to me to hint of promise and wonder beyond anything I knew.
HOPE FOR LIFE OR BEING ITSELF: To me, hope for life or being itself is one aspect of a larger orientation toward being itself that’s only fuzzy because of how hard it is to put into words.
BODY - AND CONSCIOUSNESS TOO: The body resists death all right, but we’re not just bodies. We're also the consciousness that comes with having a cerebral cortex. That resists death too.
At our best, we go on living and doing what we can with what abilities we have because we love life and want to see it realized more fully. We don’t want merely not to die, but to live further. Wanting life is a positive; resisting death is secondary to that.
As to the body, it wants to reproduce. As to human consciousness, I like this phrase I ran across from Hinduism: that our real wants are “infinite joy, infinite knowledge and infinite being.”
I believe we often (not always) choose to believe what we believe for that very reason - we don't like the alternatives. But believing in a thing does not necessarily make it so, nor does the contrary. Sometimes a thing is true for us whether we want to believe in it or not. Our thoughts, and those of others, including this one, are subjective. We think what we think and believe what we believe for an enormous variety of reasons, some of them so true to us we can't imagine why everyone doesn't believe what we do.
I read (oh, to be able to recall where) a theory that proposed what we call death here is really stepping into a new life, that we "died" to get this life, and that we just keep "dying" and being "reborn," experiencing different planes of existence ad infinitum. Now that's an interesting thought.
Embracing uncertainty and doing the best--that's much better than nebulous hope.
Experiences can be nebulous in the sense of difficult to put into words yet still be important, passionately felt, and sometimes life changing – for example, love or our responses to nature.
It’s possible to be at a place in your life where hope for life or being itself and even for your own life in "life as we know it" are no longer where you spend much of your life and time. Personally, that's where I am now, but hope for life or being itself remains a background part of my awareness.
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