Hope

We live in times that seem hopeless. 

I hear from people every day who report that they increasingly feel they're encountering a bleak world. Values, we seem to believe, are eroding. The civility of society (if there ever was any) is deteriorating. The planet is being trashed. Technology is overtaking our humanity. 

A dark cloud of pessimism hangs over the human enterprise.

Yet this simply isn’t true. There's hope everywhere—we live in a veritable sea of it. Life itself would cease to exist if there were no hope; it suffuses all Being. Every single object, event, circumstance, and condition contains not just the seeds of hope in it, but even the flowers themselves.

The issue isn’t that there’s no hope; the issue is that we aren’t in touch with it. 

Hope lies just beyond us in a territory of awareness. That awareness is a feeling-awareness. If we can awaken that awareness, hope is ever-present and self-evident. It’s only when we presume hope is invested in our selfish expectations and their compromise—or material things—that we see it as missing. Hope taken as the act of living itself, which is a service instead of a pleasure-tour, is always here. It's a level of vibration that penetrates all of reality.

Living through sensation and feeling-perception brings us to the threshold of a hope that emanates from Being itself: what Gurdjieff called hope of consciousness. 

This isn’t, as one might perhaps think, a hope that we might become conscious; it’s a hope born of consciousness. 

Hope born of consciousness is indelible. Even a tiny bit of it is invested with the power of all creation.

—Lee