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. Its 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 doesnt 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).