So April is being cruel to me to the point, and I know this is stupid, but I’ve got a lot in my life that is up in the air. The one thing I feel like I can rely on is the circle of the sun, of the earth around the sun and the way it spins on its axis and that at least daylight will get predictably longer going into summer, wherever we are. And winter will get predictably, predictably shorter days and that will affect the plants and that is something I can rely on. This is how desperate I am to absolutely be certain of something in the future, which I know is ridiculous.

Every day I go into a state where I don’t have to be waiting for anything because presence is all there ever is and I know that’s where I’m safe and I know that’s where good things happen and I know to go back to it. But here’s the thing, hoping that the leaves turn green, hoping that something good happens for you, hoping that you’ll have the love you want or the money you need or the safety you long for, hoping for bigger things for yourself—these are not folly. This is part of the uniquely human capacity to imagine and it’s made us such a destructive species. But, here’s the thing, when you’re hoping and there’s no proof that what you hope for will ever come, there is a temptation to do a spiritual bypass where you just say, “Well, I’m in the present moment. I don’t care what comes.” We were designed to care about what comes. 

There is no human group in the world—I believe, I do not have evidence of this—but I firmly believe that there’s not a human group in the world where people don’t hope for wonderful things to happen. And this I think is part of the act of creating a different future. Hope is not just an idle longing for more. It’s not greed, it’s not a lack of wisdom, it’s not foolishness. It’s something in us feeling into the probabilities that have not yet become physical and choosing what we contribute to with our energy.

So if you have absolute presence with no hope of anything different, I believe—if that’s your path, fine—but I believe that most of us are not meant to live in that way, that it would be squandering the capability that we have to be human. And physical consciousness that has taken physical form and is living in the line of time, which to consciousness itself is not the same as it is for us. There’s not that sense of something is inevitably going to happen and different things could come to pass, and I really want certain things. We have to be in a physical being, in a line of time, to have the capacity to hope. And if we stop ourselves from hoping, we cut ourselves off from the creativity that is meant to build what comes next.

Now it’s tricky because what is meant to come next has never happened before. And at no time in history has it ever been changing this fast. I was just talking to Ro, one of my partners, earlier today saying when she came here from Australia and she’s a brilliant poet and writer and I had these dreams of her being in groups of authors in New York City who are in the publishing industry, who have these sort of the classic New York literati sort of feel, the sparkly artistic feel of that. And I really hoped for that for her. And actually now, things are so different in the world. The way society works is so different. The internet itself has shifted the way people work with the written word. I did not know 10 years ago, has it been 10 years since Ro and I got together since I first met her. I didn’t realize that the New York I remembered from the 1990s was never going to be that way again.

I did not know that human thought would take off in such strange ways through our communication technologies, and I didn’t know how that would shape our society. I didn’t know that the political disruption that I think is grounded in those shifts in technology would take the form it has. If I had been given exactly what I hoped for, I think it would all be crushed and ineffective. It would be the wrong thing for the wrong time. It would be as if I were a nomad from some fabulous ancient culture that valued only horses, and I was suddenly switched into the 2020s and I said, “Oh, I can have what I want? I hope I have a thousand horses.” And then a thousand horses came and I had no place to put them and no way to feed them. And I was not on the steppes where they could graze and roam free, and I would have a thousand horses on my hands and not know what to do with it.

That’s why I think sometimes the things we hope for don’t come to pass in the way that we have imagined them. But, but, but: the frequency of hope—hope without proof—is something different. It’s part of the creative arts. It is: “I may not have a thousand horses, but what is the feeling of having a thousand horses in a long-ago culture? Now can I turn my hope, can I shape my hope to that feeling, to that love instead of to the object of a thousand horses?” You know what I mean? What is coming for you feels the way the thing you hope for would feel, the way you imagine it would feel—but better. 

So I have been doing this a long time now, and here is what I have come to believe: that when we hope with our hearts, from our souls, when we let ourselves be wide-open hearts, it almost hurts to be so raw and so vulnerable and so sensitive. And when we hope from that place, we are sending out a signal that knows, it knows what will serve us best. And the answer to those hopes, to those requests from the universe is one of two things: “Yes, here’s what you ask for, what you hope for,” or “Here’s something better, sweetheart.”

And it doesn’t always look better. When I prayed and prayed and prayed to have my second child not have Down syndrome and I hoped and hoped and hoped for a life where my experience as a mother would be what they told me it should be when I was growing up in the 1960s and 70s, I didn’t get what I hoped for. I got something much, much, much better. I got a shattering of my old illusions and an introduction to the world that we’re using right now, the world of love and connection that travels in ways that I would not have believed possible at that time.

The birth of that child, of my son with Down syndrome and his presence is like a battery to the spiritual, and it holds tremendous power. And I don’t care if people don’t believe it. That is fine. You don’t have to believe it, I feel it. And that’s all I really care about.

So I want to do a visualization with you. We’ll do it as part of our Space, Silence, and Stillness meditation, but we’re going to add this component of the art of hope. The art of hope that what we’ll get, even though there’s no proof that that will ever happen, is still worth refining and holding and treasuring and sustaining the way any artist sustains practice. So hope is an artistic practice and it’s a spiritual practice.

So here’s what I want you to do first. We’ve all lived long enough that some of the things we hoped for have come true. So I want you to close your eyes if you feel like it. If not, just imagine that you’re standing in a wide field, huge field, empty like on the great plains, and above you, the sky, there’s a huge, it’s not cloudy, but there’s a cloud cover of glass. It’s a clear glassy sort of cloud. And in this glassy miasma, you see the things that you have loved in your life, the things that you wanted to happen, you hoped would happen, and they did. You got taller, you found someone to love. You were able to achieve something. Someone gave you a compliment, like anything. You got a car, whatever it was that you longed for and received, it’s in this beautiful glassy like water in the air, but it’s just wind. You can see reflections in, you can feel each of these beloved things that you hoped for and you can see images as they swirl around you.

And then what I want you to do is straighten your spine and breathe in a huge breath. And as you do, all the things that you have received in your life after hoping for them, they pour into you. You may have to take several breaths, they just keep coming, and they fill you up and as they do, they dissolve the body you’re in now and it becomes part of this field of things that were longed for and then given.

So you become insubstantial, you become, the cells disappear and you are now immaterial, but you’re part of the hope field. And then still on this plain, you breathe out and all the things you hope for now shoot out into the stratosphere and they become part of a new glassy surface in which you see beautiful things happening.

You can only see it imperfectly, but it’s, it’s glowing, it’s shining, it’s filled with love, it’s filled with full, a sense of completion, with a sense of homecoming, with a sense of connection. And then you breathe that in, and that all pours into you and you dissolve and become part of it and it mingles with the things you’ve hoped for in the past.

This we’ll call the field of hope, and it’s a place to play in. It’s a place not to set yourself up to be disappointed, but to set yourself up to learn new miracles. And it’s really only by refusing to use the human capacity for hope that we can be truly defeated. So yes, it’s a little heartbreaking for me, stupidly to look out my window and there are no leaves on the trees, and they’re going to be there in two weeks, but part of me is afraid they won’t be. And then I drop back into the field of hope and I remember all the times the leaves have come and all the times that other things have come.

And now we’re going to drop away from the physical completely, even glassy miasmas, and we’re going to move into the absolute, which is the stuff we’re made of, which is not atoms, it is who we essentially are. And we’re going to start that by saying: Can I imagine the distance between my eyes?

Can I shift my attention away from the matter in my atoms to the space inside those atoms? Can I imagine the space inside the matter between my eyes? Can I imagine the space inside the volume of my upper body? Can I imagine the space inside my chest, inside my heart, inside my lungs? Can I imagine the space going down and down and down into my legs and my feet and then down into the earth beneath me through the core of the earth, through the space in which the matter that is the core of the earth occurs and all the way out to the surface to feel every other person here? Can I imagine the stillness that holds us all in this very moment?

Can I hear the silence of that space and stillness, full of love, full of eagerness, full of the absolute delight of a consciousness that knows that it is responding to the hope of human beings and that it loves us far beyond what our small imaginations can picture and what our small human hearts can hold? But we can hope. We can hope for it and it will be here and it is here.

All right, so thank you for that. That always feels amazing. And now I would like to invite any questions. I’ll have Ro send them. Here we go.

Question: “How does this interact with the tao, the ladder of hope and fear, which says the hope is this, hope is as hollow as fear—whether you go up the ladder or down your position is unsteady? Also, advice for a young gay trying to find love in college in a small city?”

I love what one of my friends in South Africa told me after she hoped and hoped for the husband she wanted. And she’d always end her little visualizations with the joke, “And make sure he’s rich.” And then her present husband, they have the most beautiful relationship, and his name is Rich. So there you go. And she told me after this, now she believes that you could be sitting on the top of Everest with a bag over your head and the person who’s meant to find and love you will find you there if you open the field. So yeah, the ladder of hope and fear, that’s a really good point because the art of hope is to hope without fear, which is actually not quite, it is not quite the human emotion of hope that is the opposite of fear. It is walking out on the stream of knowing. 

There’s a beautiful moment, I think it’s in The Color Purple, where a woman who has been enslaved, she lives through the Emancipation Proclamation, and one day she wakes up and she’s older, but she’s no longer a slave. She still doesn’t have anything, and she goes to the door of her cabin and she looks out and she says, “I get to decide for myself what to do with the day, and I’m going to walk out on the word of God.” She doesn’t have anything, she doesn’t know anything, but she has absolute faith. Hope without fear is faith, and that is not hollow because it’s walking out on the word of a consciousness that is somehow part of yourself. So the feeling is slightly different, and very good discernment there, thank you. And you will find love and love will find you, wherever you are, I promise.

Question: “What is the difference between hope and desire and how does surrender come into the picture?”

I think desire is like, “Ooh, I see something, I really want it.” And there’s a plaintiveness to hope that says, “Oh, and now something has switched. Not only would I be happy if I got that, but if I don’t get it, I’ll be sad. I will feel I have a sense of loss.” So hope entails the vulnerability to loss, and that’s where surrender comes in to say, “I will allow myself to hope and in doing so, I will open myself to grief, loss, the grief of waiting while it hasn’t come, the grief of maybe it not coming in the form I’m expecting, the grief of thinking it will never come or has never come.” But that tenderness, that surrender, that’s actually a sign that we are in the art, we are in the creative process. There’s something very visceral and plaintive and sweet about that that is uniquely human. And if you go to see a movie where the actors and the writers were being glib or silly, it can be fun. But when there’s that total, bare-to-the-bone openness, someone is absolutely putting every bit into the story, into the acting, it touches something in us that is very, very deep. And I think you have to surrender to the openness to grief in order to touch that place. And that is art. And that is the art of hope without proof.

Question: “How do we dare hope again when life has been a bit of a shit sandwich over the last year?”

Yes, it’s escalated hoping time, folks. It helps to have been through a few rough patches in the past, things that did not work out maybe, to have eaten some shit sandwiches and I had to get up and keep making lunch. So we all know in the end, we get off this bus, right? None of us is immortal. We’re all going to head on to the next version of reality within the next, as Eckhart Tolle says “Five years, 50 years, whatever. It’s still a very short time.” And in the meantime it’s going to be, as Winston Churchill described history, “one damn thing after another.” We are living in a shit sandwich factory, and it doesn’t matter where we are in the world and what’s happening in the country we’re living in or to the globe in general. Here’s the thing, though, the reason they call it a shit sandwich is that the middle part is poopy, but the bread is okay.

So here’s the thing, Nisargadatta Maharaj says, “What you call pleasure is just the space between two pains.” So life is going to go up, down, up, down, up, down. And there will always be, you can sort of look at the up periods and say, “Oh, that’s delicious bread.” Or you can look at the down periods and say, “It’s always this crap every time.” But it’s a little bit like standing aside from the ladder of hope and fear onto the steadiness of hope and love, hope and belief, hope and that inhale when you first inhaled the image of everything you hoped for that came true. If you had the feeling of warmth, if you had that, all of that came surrounded by a lot of failed hopes and a lot of pain and a lot of grief and a lot of loss. But when you focus on what you created, it doesn’t matter how many times you played a piece badly to get to the place where you once played it perfectly. The art of hope is to bring things into realization, into real-ization.

The fact that you can do that is a miracle. And no artist ever does a perfect piece of art without messing up first, without making lots of things that did not go right. So yeah, it’s really intensely crappy for many of us, much of the time, and it does seem to be getting even worse for a lot of us. And that is a goad to our hope. It says, “Do you dare become an artist of hope? Will you go into bitter resignation and shut down your capacity to dream? Or will you say an artist works more brilliantly because of the impasse?”

If you want to read my last book, I do a whole thing on how the creative brain needs an impasse to make a leap forward. So you could say that what we’re being given is something that tastes bad enough in terms of what’s actually happening in the world for us to go in and crank up our magic and say we will take what looks like an impasse and we will turn our art upon it and we will turn it into a leap forward—for ourselves, for our loved ones, for the world, for other species, for all sentient beings. Yeah, that’s the game. That is the game.

Question: “How can we get in touch with what we truly hope for?”

Well, this is so interesting, my beloved Karen, KarryKoo, has trouble identifying hope. And I think it’s because she’s very tender in her heart and is very afraid of that vulnerability. So notice where you’re afraid to let in the knowledge that you want something. And be very, very, very gentle and kind with that part of you. The only reason you don’t know what you hope for is that you’re afraid. So hold the fear and just play with the idea that even while you’re holding fear in one arm, like a mother with a baby on her hip, you can still cook up some hope with the other hand, and you can still be tender and gentle to the way your hope arises and hold it in presence as it makes itself known to you. And it’ll be very timid at first. And then just give it little, be very careful, give it lots of little attaboy, attagirl, attaperson love taps and let it get stronger. Be gentle. It is sacred.

All right, question: “I have so much hope for my future, but I feel trapped by my circumstances. How do I overcome cultural expectations when there’s a marriage, a family and young children involved? So many moving parts.”

Yeah, been there, done that, sweetheart. And I repeat: You can either shut down the hope factory and give up your birthright as a human, as an inhuman spirit having a human experience that wants to create something beautiful. You can shut down the hope, or you can say with great humility, “There is a way my hope can be realized and I will love myself, my children, and everyone else involved through this whole thing, even if we go into a storm.” And if a storm is what it takes for what we all hope for to be true—because in the end, we all hope for one another’s best outcome. We all hope for one another’s lives to be good. I don’t think you’d be listening to this or watching it if you didn’t feel that way. And sometimes that looks like a storm, but sometimes you go through the storm to get to the thing you hope for. In fact, storms are very creative. So I know where you’re coming from. I feel you, and I still think you should hope.

Question: “How do you hope and still maintain detachment? I can stay open to dance with the universe. How do you juggle between hope and attachment to your own plans?”

Well, this is where you do return to the present moment. When you’re tired and exhausted and your whole soul is sore with longing, you come back to the present moment and you say, “Well, I’m going to have this delicious cup of tea or a cookie and some milk and I’m going to laugh at a stupid show on TV and I’m going to be present and rest from the hope.” It’s hard work, the art of hope. So come back to rest in the present.

A couple more. Question: “I was on the phone with a friend who was losing her hope of finding a new job and desperately worried for her economic situation. If she’s watching this, what would you say to her to stay hopeful?”

Oh, don’t do it alone, my honey. Do it in community. Hope with the rest of us. There are so many people being upended right now, and we can do this together. And humans are meant to be cooperative. We are meant to create what we hope for in community. Please, please reach out to other people and tell them, “I’m glad you were on the phone.” Keep phoning. This is what our whole Wilder community is about, is connecting and staying hopeful at this astonishingly dreadful time.

Question: “How do we hope and stay present?”

Simple. You did that thing where you put your hopes out there in the miasma. Come back, be present in the body. There’s the hope, there’s the body. Breathe it in. They are one. You are present and you hope.

Last question: “How do you tweak your hope to adapt to changing situations as in your example of the New York publishing industry? Do you keep specific hopes vague and focus on feeling states?”

I think you just dive in. Just go straight into it with everything you’ve got. Hope for particulars, hope for specifics, hope for generalities, hope for it all. Make a list of a thousand things you hope for. Nothing is too small to be part of your art and nothing is too big to hope for. So yeah, do the whole scatter array. That’s what we have been given the ability to do, to go wild into the imagination and think of the whole universe and hope for things on that scale. And then to come right back down and just hope that the damn leaves come out on the trees in Pennsylvania in the next week, that tree, that branch, that leaf. I want that leaf out. That is, and then laugh at yourself because we are funny bunnies. But we are also magical. And our hopes create the futures we’re going to have just as they’ve helped create our pasts.

And before I go, I want to say that I hope some of you are interested in and willing to take some time and throw yourself into the Pure Wild Self retreats that Ro and I are running in Costa Rica come next winter because we need to be out of the season of the sticks and into the jungle of Costa Rica a little bit every winter, and incredibly wonderful magical things happen there. It’s just now going live so you can go sign up if you want to and it is filling up super fast. 

And I have to say, if you want a sloth like the one we had at Imiloa this last winter when we did the retreat there, you have to book a sloth very early. They are not quick. So yeah, we’ll want to get a message to your particular sloth just in case they can make it. And it worked last year. But we do need that in particular logistically, the sloths have to hear ahead of time, just saying. I am joking. But we did have a sloth and I do hope that we see one!

I hope we see another sloth in Costa Rica. I hope the trees come out green. I hope we’re all rich and happy forever. I hope that you all find the love of your lives and then another and another and another. I hope that we are transcending this human condition. I hope that there is a huge awakening that will shift the course of human society forever within the next few years. I hope a lot and I hope you don’t mind this lesson in the art of hoping. I love you all so much. I’ll see you soon.