Hopelessness

Beloved Osho, it feels so hopeless. I feel ashamed to have been a sannyasin for ten years and still be in this state. I hesitate to ask for your help, because even your words become mechanical in me after a few repetitions. Would you please comment?

Prem Indivar, it is not yet hopeless enough. Just make it a little more hopeless. There comes a point in hopelessness where you stop hoping. Hopelessness is still deep down nothing but hope. Let the hope fail completely and totally, and a dramatic experience arises out of that space when you don't have any hope -- because hope is another name of desire, another name of expectation, another name of ambition. And before you can realize yourself, all desires, all expectations, all ambitions must have failed you, must have left you alone. Hoping nothing, desiring nothing, expecting nothing -- where will you be? There is no way to go out. Hope is a way of going out, desire is a way of going away, ambition is a way to avoid going in. On the path, to be utterly hopeless, so hopeless that you stop hoping... suddenly you are in --…

Osho, I am drowning in despair; give me hope; give me support.

Evening descended from the sky, the forest turned dark. With an unfamiliar ache every corner filled. From cupped hands the fair, blooming, lovely form dripped away. Messages came from memories, the body recalled morning. Evening slipped into the room. Standing, silent, as if thinking, the corridors— on the fragrant mirror all the sun-colors were washed away, they themselves began to turn indigo-blue; the mind turned dark. Evening slipped into the room. One day or another the evening will come. The sooner it comes, the better. For all these mornings you see—the mornings of hope—are false mornings. The mornings in which you are deluded and wander are mirages. Evening has come to your life; despair has come. Evening has entered the inner chamber of your being. Don’t fear. Let those false mornings be extinguished—this is auspicious. After they go out, you will suddenly find the evening goes out too. You will…

At darshan, from the way you talked to me it seems clear my meditation is to live totally in the here and now. You made it clear I was not to live in hope. T.s. Eliot said, "I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing. Wait without love, for love would be love of the wrong thing. There is yet faith, but faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting." anything more to say Osho?

THE question is from Pradeepa. She understood perfectly what I was trying to show her. Maturity happens when you start living without hope. Hope is childish. You become mature when you don't project hope into the future. In fact, you are mature when you don't have any future; you just live in the moment -- because that is the only reality there is. In the past, religion used to talk about the hereafter. Those were the childish, immature days of religion. Now religion talks about herenow; religion has come of age. In the Vedas, in the Koran, in the Bible, hereafter is the basic goal. But now man is no longer that childish. That sort of God and that sort of religion is dead. It was a religion of hope, it was a religion of future. Now another sort of religion is asserting itself all over the world, and this…

Osho, the world has very cruelly dashed all my hopes. Even if I want to forgive the world, how can I?

Under brisk feet, groaning with pain, it lifts its face toward the young ears on both sides, then falls silent thinking only this: Had the travelers not crushed my womb by their ceaseless walking! my sons too would by now have become young men, my daughter too would have been fit to wed. Within everyone there are a thousand-and-one desires, passions; they are not fulfilled. Even if they are fulfilled, nothing is resolved. One is fulfilled, ten are born. To awaken from this futility is what sannyas is. And then, when you live without hope—Buddha has said—when you live with nirasha, only then for the first time do you live in bliss. But understand the meaning of nirasha. Buddha’s nirasha is not the same as yours. Your meaning of despair is: hope has broken. Buddha’s meaning of nirasha is: there is freedom from hope. In Buddha’s nirasha there is neither…