|
Please note that some text below was written by the feeling-being ‘Peter’ while ‘he’ lived in a pragmatic
(methodological), still-in-control/same-way-of-being Virtual Freedom before becoming actually free. |
Hope
Hope: Expectation of something desired, desire
accompanied by expectation; confidence in a future event; a person or thing that expectations are centred in. Oxford Dictionary
Peter: It is surely time we abandoned the archaic concept of hope entirely.
Humanity has been hoping that peace will come to the planet, hoping for an end to suffering while at the same time anticipating and
prophesizing a doomsday end to civilization. Human beings hope that things will get better, be better in the future, while at the same time
expecting that this is only possible after death, either in ‘the next lifetime’ or some ‘other-worldly’ realm. To hope or expect a
future event, person or thing to bring happiness is to forever postpone the sensible action required to free oneself from instinctual fear,
aggression, sorrow and malice and to ensure that one remains entrapped in the Human Condition.
We are, in fact, inducted into believing the imaginary world being primary and
real, and subsequently to regard the physical, actual world as secondary and illusionary. This primary imaginary world includes both a
‘real’ world-view and its associated ‘spiritual’ world-view, neither of which are actual. This obsession with imagination, belief,
trust, faith and hope offers a continuing haven of denial of the facts of the Human Condition and prevents us from getting up off our bums, or
up from our lotus position, and taking the necessary action that will lead to the eventual elimination of malice and sorrow from this fair
planet.
Above the door of the Actual Freedom Trust offices (if there ever is such a thing)
will be a sign that reads ‘Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here’.
Richard: To enable one to live in virtual freedom one
can, among other things, renounce resentment. For the commitment to achieving peace-on-earth to become total, for it to become a complete
devotion to effecting perfection, for it to become a dedication of oneself to the consummation of the freedom-of-the-moment, one gladly
forsakes humankind’s ‘wisdom of old’. That ‘wisdom’ is a wishy-washy, part-time, lip-serving, casual approach to the ultimate goal.
It is called ‘Hope’. All peoples are constantly exhorted to: ‘do not lose Hope’. But, as Hope is an impoverished proxy for the actual,
the resentment remains. Only by firmly renouncing resentment, by abandoning one’s commitment to proving that life on earth is a ‘vale of
tears’, can one’s commitment be staunch only to the ultimate goal. One is then no longer able to agree with others that ‘life on earth is
a grim business’. One will easily cease saying things like ‘I didn’t ask to be born’, or ‘sorrow is part and parcel of life’, or
‘learn to accept suffering and grow by worshipping its beauty’. All of these desperate coping-mechanisms become humbug and are never
validated again. With each experience of the fact that perfection is already here, the connection becomes stronger. One is laying down a path,
as it were, with each cobblestone being the reminder of the purity of the atmosphere which lies at one’s ultimate destination.
Renouncing resentment obviates the need to apply the commonly accepted antidote:
gratitude. Gratitude is one of the many ploys designed, by those who expound on the merits of self-imposed suffering, to keep one in servile
ignominy and creeping despair. As strange as it may initially seem, gratitude has the same deleterious effect upon one’s well-being as the
resentment it seeks to reform. When gratitude is realised as being the panacea that it is, one will gladly renounce it along with the
resentment it promises to replace. To successfully dispense with the despised resentment, its companion emotion, the extolled gratitude, must
also go. It is a popular misconception that one can do away with a ‘bad’ emotion whilst hanging on to the ‘good’ one. In actualism the
third alternative always applies. Good and Bad, Right and Wrong, Virtue and Sin, Hope and Despair, Gratitude and Resentment, and so on, all
disappear in the perfection of purity.
For thousands of years humankind has been struggling along, fumbling around in the dark for some
miserable ray of light to act as a beacon to guide one’s way to perfection and peace. All of the philosophies and psychologies and all of the
ideologies and theologies have not been able to deliver the goods. Peoples everywhere were forced to live on hope – and hope is a poor
substitute for the exquisite purity of the actual. It is the complete eradication of sorrow and malice that is the essential pre-requisite for
peace and harmony to prevail. One is then happy and harmless … and well equipped to face the now inaptly named ‘rigours of life’. One is
able to make one’s way in the world with joy and delight, marvelling in wonder at the magnificence of being alive on this verdant planet.
|
