Here’s a very important point about hopelessness: When we come to accept that life is hopeless we are not responding to life itself — we are responding to thinking. The fact of the matter is life never — never — affects us emotionally until we label life with our thinking. This situation is bad, this situation is good. It is this label, that we ourselves create, that triggers a response.
Depression, anxiety, despair, optimism, etc. All created by a mental label.
Most people believe that hopelessness is an outside in phenomenon: something happens “out there” and we respond by feeling hopeless. That’s not the way it works. Hopelessness is actually inside in: internal mind activity, thinking, creates an internal emotional response.
If you find the notion that hopelessness is created by thinking, and nothing more, hard to believe ask yourself this: Does an unconscious person experience hopelessness? What do you think the answer to this question is? An unconscious person does not experience hopelessness — nor do they experience depression, anxiety, optimism, or whatever else — because they are not tuned in to thought streams.
No thinking, no emotional response. Period. No thinking, no hopelessness. Period.
Hopelessness is not some hard and firm thing that appears in response to a hard and firm external reality. Hopelessness is a thought stream. How “serious” is a thought stream?
This is not to say that life is always easy. Life does, absolutely, operate in ways that are not always to the liking of our ego. But a mental interpretation that circumstances are hopeless is not absolute proof that circumstances are hopeless. My believing that life is hopeless is not the same thing as life really being hopeless.
Not the same thing…
If you feel hopeless about life you do not need to work on life — you need to work on yourself. Specifically, you need to work on your thinking. And do you know that there is a longstanding spiritual belief that external circumstances match internal states of being? So when you are no longer stuck in pessimistic and toxic thought streams such as ‘life is hopeless’ then the external circumstances of your life improve. As within, so without.
The fundamental question becomes how do we affect our thinking? There are two methods, separate but even more effective combined, that I recommend: conscious awareness or presence, and energy therapy (along the lines of EFT).
