HOPE and Success!

Absent faith and love, hope is fundamental to starting one’s movement along the path to personal success; it affirms the possibility that things can make sense in spite of how they seem to be working out. Hope encourages us to remember that life has meaning, value, and purpose. In relationship to the other six attitudes, hope can sustain their life preserving and nurturing properties through the challenges that life inevitably offers.

Consider what we might call hope’s “mechanism of action”. How and why does it work? It is all about projections, intentions, and success . Hope projects into the future and finds fear there, sitting on a pedestal of control over the present. Indeed, J. Krishnamurti described fear as “a product of time and thought.” Well, so is hope, which has the power to knock fear off its pedestal. So let us intend to replace fear with hope on the pedestal of tomorrow. Thus, it encourages and nurtures meaningful life in what J. Krishnamurti called the “now-moment”--also a product of thought, but this time without time--where we realize our worthy ideals.

How did fear become so powerful? Memory projected backwards in time, finding guilt and pain, and now it wants to try to protect a person from hurtful and hateful things that happened back then by making the future look like the past and taking defensive action to protect against an imagined danger. This is illusory thinking because it projects forward and backward to times that do not yet or any longer exist. When one projects in time, one is not home, but in a non-existent time where one loses power!

This universal power of hope to bring us back to the present facilitates removing projection from anger! Consider this: anger is all about attack, whether it is a thought or a hydrogen bomb. It is the consequence of fearful thinking. It is a compensatory reaction in the present moment. When you project anger, you are not home--you are in another space where you lose power by being there!

You can stop projecting, come home, and be you, a God-given presence in the world! Be here now!

Think about coming home. Consider adopting a personal centering practice based on the integration and balance of the four elements of the person: body, mind, soul, and spirit. Look at the notion that taking care of yourself in this way may have a direct beneficial effect on those with whom you have a significant relationship. (And the law of returns says that this effect will come back to you as well!)

In other words, if you would do unto others as you would have them do unto you, it might just be a good idea to know what you are doing by practicing it on yourself. It might include:

• Prayer and meditation
• Exercise and work
• Balanced nutrition
• Pleasure and fun
• Spontaneous acts of beauty and universal kindness.
• Mindfulness of every thought and action

What might happen if we were to begin to look at every human life as a gift of the Universe, given at the instant of conception and promised for the whole of that life? What if we were to take the idea that there is a never-duplicated set of coordinates in space and time that define each life as if it were a plot of land to till? What if we were to see that plot of land as the container of the gift we have for the Universe? What would the consequences be for all of us if we could begin to get the idea that we live because the Universe lives; we think because the Universe thinks; we have bodies because the Universe has a body; and we love because the Universe loves. What would life be like if we were to give ourselves permission to know that the entire Universe knows every one of us in person, and it waits with patience, love, and wonder to see what we are to do with this plot of land?

Hope knows that the mystics throughout the ages have spoken of this possibility, and now science has information to support it!

To live as if time and space do not exist is to live free of attachments. To live free of attachments is to end suffering. This is the essence of success, of which there are four aspects:

1.  A guiding principle:

“Our rewards in life are always in exact proportion to the level and degree of our service.”

2. A rule to enrich that service:

“Beginning today, treat everyone you meet as if he or she were going to be dead by midnight. Extend to them all the care, kindness and understanding you can muster, and do it with no thought of any reward. Your life will never be the same again.”

3. Creative qualities, such as:

Loving, kind, and peaceful;
Decisive, assertive and intentional;
Concerned, committed, and persistent;
Clear, Centered and Grounded;
Serene, Happy, and Joyful.

4. Feedback that shows us how we are doing: the law of returns:

What goes ‘round, comes ‘round.
What you sow you reap.
What you give, you get.

HOPE and Success!

Absent faith and love, hope is fundamental to starting one’s movement along the path to personal success; it affirms the possibility that things can make sense in spite of how they seem to be working out. Hope encourages us to remember that life has meaning, value, and purpose. In relationship to the other six attitudes, hope can sustain their life preserving and nurturing properties through the challenges that life inevitably offers.

Consider what we might call hope’s “mechanism of action”. How and why does it work? It is all about projections, intentions, and success . Hope projects into the future and finds fear there, sitting on a pedestal of control over the present. Indeed, J. Krishnamurti described fear as “a product of time and thought.” Well, so is hope, which has the power to knock fear off its pedestal. So let us intend to replace fear with hope on the pedestal of tomorrow. Thus, it encourages and nurtures meaningful life in what J. Krishnamurti called the “now-moment”--also a product of thought, but this time without time--where we realize our worthy ideals.

How did fear become so powerful? Memory projected backwards in time, finding guilt and pain, and now it wants to try to protect a person from hurtful and hateful things that happened back then by making the future look like the past and taking defensive action to protect against an imagined danger. This is illusory thinking because it projects forward and backward to times that do not yet or any longer exist. When one projects in time, one is not home, but in a non-existent time where one loses power!

This universal power of hope to bring us back to the present facilitates removing projection from anger! Consider this: anger is all about attack, whether it is a thought or a hydrogen bomb. It is the consequence of fearful thinking. It is a compensatory reaction in the present moment. When you project anger, you are not home--you are in another space where you lose power by being there!

You can stop projecting, come home, and be you, a God-given presence in the world! Be here now!

Think about coming home. Consider adopting a personal centering practice based on the integration and balance of the four elements of the person: body, mind, soul, and spirit. Look at the notion that taking care of yourself in this way may have a direct beneficial effect on those with whom you have a significant relationship. (And the law of returns says that this effect will come back to you as well!)

In other words, if you would do unto others as you would have them do unto you, it might just be a good idea to know what you are doing by practicing it on yourself. It might include:

• Prayer and meditation
• Exercise and work
• Balanced nutrition
• Pleasure and fun
• Spontaneous acts of beauty and universal kindness.
• Mindfulness of every thought and action

What might happen if we were to begin to look at every human life as a gift of the Universe, given at the instant of conception and promised for the whole of that life? What if we were to take the idea that there is a never-duplicated set of coordinates in space and time that define each life as if it were a plot of land to till? What if we were to see that plot of land as the container of the gift we have for the Universe? What would the consequences be for all of us if we could begin to get the idea that we live because the Universe lives; we think because the Universe thinks; we have bodies because the Universe has a body; and we love because the Universe loves. What would life be like if we were to give ourselves permission to know that the entire Universe knows every one of us in person, and it waits with patience, love, and wonder to see what we are to do with this plot of land?

Hope knows that the mystics throughout the ages have spoken of this possibility, and now science has information to support it!

To live as if time and space do not exist is to live free of attachments. To live free of attachments is to end suffering. This is the essence of success, of which there are four aspects:

1.  A guiding principle:

“Our rewards in life are always in exact proportion to the level and degree of our service.”

2. A rule to enrich that service:

“Beginning today, treat everyone you meet as if he or she were going to be dead by midnight. Extend to them all the care, kindness and understanding you can muster, and do it with no thought of any reward. Your life will never be the same again.”

3. Creative qualities, such as:

Loving, kind, and peaceful;
Decisive, assertive and intentional;
Concerned, committed, and persistent;
Clear, Centered and Grounded;
Serene, Happy, and Joyful.

4. Feedback that shows us how we are doing: the law of returns:

What goes ‘round, comes ‘round.
What you sow you reap.
What you give, you get.