Hope
“Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart.” So wrote Vaclav Havel, who fought to restore democracy in Cold War-era Czechoslovakia and then went on to become Czech president. I first read this quote in a collection of essays called The Impossible will Take a little While, put together in 2004 by Paul Rogat Loeb when people’s helplessness and despair at the current global situation was probably at its peak. The basic thread running through the entire book: no matter how insignificant we view our actions to be, we have no idea of how they will come to affect the future.
I picked this book up a year later, on a visit to New York see my meditation teacher, Sri Chinmoy, and its message was really what I needed to hear at that particular time. The book is largely aimed towards those who work for change on social and political levels; granted, none of the things I do may be social activism per se - giving free classes of meditation to the general public, helping with putting on concerts of meditative music, and working to create havens of inspiration the Internet (like this one - eventually!) - but I definitely feel these activities are a parallel approach towards a more harmonious world. By inspiring people to be more peaceful and content in themselves, we reduce the greed and insecurities that are at the root of so many of the worlds problems; by expanding people’s horizons one at a time, the whole world gradually awakens to what is possible. Plus - and this is the main thing, I suppose - when I do these things I get a deep feeling of satisfaction inside my heart, a feeling that I’m doing what I’m here on earth to do.
But at this particular time of my life, some part of me was quite despondent about how much my efforts really changed things. Sure, thirty or forty people might come to each meditation class, but does that really change things in a country of four million, let alone a world of six billion? What is the point of one finger in a dam with a million cracks?
But the first thing I got from this book was that all the truly inspiring people of our era - the Nelson Mandelas and the Rosa Parks of this world - were first and foremost good people. Good people who were ready when the time came. And goodness is a fruit that takes time to ripen. The distinction between greatness and goodness is one that Sri Chinmoy often makes in his writing: “Greatness is not illumination, but goodness is“, as one of his meditative aphorisms goes. True greatness, the kind which inspires others, can only be founded on a bedrock of goodness, and goodness takes time. We are so used to everything happening instantly nowadays, that we become frustrated when change does not happen in the same way - we want McChange, with fries.
But the most striking thing I took from the book was the numerous examples of how actions that the people who did them thought were insignificant ended up having huge consequences unknown to them - how the sight of a small group of mothers huddled in the rain protesting against Vietnam convinced some extremely influential personalities to throw their weight behind the campaign, how a small and unsuccessful campaign to shut down an unsafe nuclear station in America sparked off a successful campaign in far-away Kazakhstan, how an edited compilation of Buddhist texts (which the editor thought to be a worthy but minor task at the time) provided critical spiritual support for jailed opposition leader and Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi in Myanmar.
However, another main theme running through these texts is that the best attitude to take is not to do the right thing in expectation of results, but to do it because from within you know it is the right thing to do. These texts are drawn from people of both spiritual and atheist backgrounds, but some of the writing contained with in is very reminiscent of the karma yoga espoused in Indian spiritual tradition: “Thou hast the right to action, but not to the fruits thereof” , so goes the Bhagavad Gita, India’s most famous spiritual text. For those of us who are trying to work for a better world, the only way is to just ‘plant ourselves at the gates of hope‘ (as one account in the book puts it) and keep on working from the heart regardless of the ups or downs we may face.
You can read more about this book on its website…..
