Addendum to Labyrinthine

I don't understand hope and therefore I do not believe in it. Nor do I believe in hope's opposite, despair. You see you can't have one without the other. You can't have good without bad. The more you try to focus on the one, the harder the other will push to enter your perception. 

Perhaps one day someone will explain to me what hope means. I know what faith means. That is belief without understanding. I know there are things I do not understand and yet I trust in them, believe them to be necessary or worthwhile, so I know I have faith. But hope is the wish or desire that there will be a positive turn of events. It's true I don't have wishes but I do have desires. I desire that certain people will be blessed with good fortune since their lives are not particularly pleasant. 

Mostly though it is a lack of wishes that I feel permeate my being. I don't wish ill will towards anyone. Not even those that may have hurt me intentionally. I desire to be healthy but that desire must be tempered with action, conscience, will, otherwise it is merely empty hoping. Ahaah.  Is this where hope comes in? When you desire something, you wish for it, but you don't have the understanding or the ability to actually do something in order to bring it about? 

You see I don't see the point in that. Now if I try to do something about a situation, I hope I will be able to. So when there is action, an actual presentation of will in order to effect change, then there can be hope. At least for me. So hope is then a part of actually doing something, putting into action the will, as I said. That's kind of close to my definition of prayer: the (meditative) state of concentration, sometimes brought about with the assistance of particular repeated phrases, that enables a person to move from idea or desire toward action. I'm certain very few will agree with me on these things, even though I've been dealing with theosophy, religious studies and philosophy for decades as a point of vested interest, my thinking can either be wrong or simply not suited to everyone.

In any case, as long as I see hope as being a form of prayer and prayer a preamble to action I can be comfortable with using the word. The zen-state attempts to roll all of these together: intent - focus - action, preferably into one single moment, culminating in supreme awareness of one's place in creation. I wonder if Segev isn't there most of the time, since awareness is not intended as a thought but much beyond that. Something seems to me to be missing from this contemplation of Segev when I think about these things. Perhaps there is something above Segev that holds the awareness and he himself is not required to have this lucid moment. We are after all made up of much more than just our conscious minds. 

So the Zen state seems a bit overrated to me. That moment of supreme awareness may be much more than we can consciously process. Greg Lucas seeks in his own way in his son, something which may be just wishful thinking or emotional indulgence on my part, to believe that Segev and children like him, have a much higher and pure connection, uncluttered by concepts and that therein lies one of the things we can learn from them. Whe we talk about these things we break them down into elements but of course in such children there is no distinguishing the moment, the action nor the intent. Or perhaps I am merely trying to extract water from stones.