Having no hope

Today, what I want to talk about is having no hope. Sounds terrible, doesn't it? Actually, it's not terrible at all. A life lived with no hope is a peaceful, joyous, compassionate life. As long as we identify with this mind and body--and we all do--we hope for things that we think will take care of them. We hope for success. We hope for health. We hope for enlightenment. We have all sorts of things we hope for. All hope, of course, is about sizing up the past and projecting it into the future.

Anyone who sits for any length of time sees that there is no past and no future except in our minds. There is nothing but self, and self always is here, present. It's not hidden. We're racing around like mad trying to find something called self, this wonderful hidden self. Where is it hidden? We hope for something that's going to take care of this little self because we don't realize that already we are self. There's nothing around us that is not self. What are we looking for?

My life is absolute. No one can live it for me. No one can feel it for me. No one can serve it for me. My work, my suffering, my joy, are absolute. There's no way, for instance, you can feel the pain in my toe; or I can feel the pain in your toe. No way. You can't swallow for me. You can't sleep for me. And that is the paradox: in totally owning the pain, the joy, the responsibility of my life--if I see this point clearly--then I'm free. I have no hope, I have no need for anything else.

I can remember when I used to daydream literally four or five hours at a time. And now--sadly I see so many people dreaming their lives away. Sometimes a man or a woman dreams of an ideal partner; they dream and they dream. But when we live life in dreams and hopes, then what life can offer, that man or woman sitting right next to us--ordinary, unglamorous--the wonder of that life escapes us because we are hoping for something special, for some ideal.

Not only do we hope, but we really give our life to this hope, to these vain thoughts and fantasies. And when they don't "produce" for us, we're anxious, even desperate.

We spend a lot of time looking for something called the truth. And there is no such thing, except in each second, each activity of our life. But our vain hope for a resting place somewhere makes us ignorant and unappreciative of what is here right now. So in sesshin, in zazen, what does it mean to have no hope?

It means of course to really do zazen, to just sit. Nothing is wrong with dreams and fantasies. Just don't hold on to them; see their unreality and turn away. Stay with the only thing that's real: the experiencing of breath and the body and the environment.

Now none of us wants to abandon our hope. And to be honest, none of us is going to abandon it all at once. But we can have periods when for a few minutes or a few hours, there is just what is, just this flow. And we are more in touch with the only thing we'll ever have, which is our life.

So if we practice like this, what reward will we get? If we really practice like this, it takes everything we have. What will we get out of it? The answer, of course, is nothing. So let's not have hope. We won't get anything. We'll get our life, of course, but we've got that already. So let's not be like my friend, failing to appreciate our life and our practice. This life is nirvana. Where did we think it was?

-Charlotte Joko Beck, Everyday Zen: Love and Work, 1989