The moment you drop hope, hopelessness is also dropped. You are simply without hope and without hopelessness. And that is the most beautiful moment that can happen to a man, because in that very moment one enters into the shrine of God.
OSHO
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 religion is about herenow, the present. There is nowhere else to go and there is no other space and no other time to live, only this space and this time, here and now. Life has to become very intense in this moment. A man who lives in hope dissipates life. He spreads life; it becomes too thin. And when it becomes too thin, it is never happy. Happiness means intensity, tremendous depth. If you spread your hope into the future, life will become very thin. It will lose depth.
When I say drop all hope, I mean be so intense in the moment that there is no need for the future. Then there is a turning, a transformation. The very quality of time changes for you it becomes eternal. What can you do with hope? In fact, what can you hope? You cannot hope for the new. You can only hope for the old, that which has happened before — maybe with a little modification here and there, a little more decorated. But hope is nothing but past: you have lived something, you have experienced something, and you again and again hope for it. It is a repetition; it is circular.
Hope means simply projecting the past into the future again: you loved a man yesterday, you want to love the man tomorrow also. And you know that yesterday was not a fulfillment, hence the hope. Yesterday was not enough, hence the hope. You missed something yesterday. Now that missed gap is torturing you; it is creating agony. You hope that again tomorrow that man will be available to love you, and tomorrow you will really love.
But between yesterday and tomorrow is today. If you really want to love, then why not be herenow, today? Otherwise, when today will have become yesterday you will again start projecting it. Incomplete experiences are projected. Uncompleted desires are projected. If you really love totally this moment, you will never think about this moment again. It is finished, it is complete, it is perfect. It disappears, it leaves no trace on you.
This is what Krishnamurti calls 'total act'. Total act creates no KARMA: it creates no chain, it creates no bondage. If it is total, you never remember it again; there is no point.
We remember only something which has remained incomplete. Mind tends to complete things. And you have so many incomplete experiences; they go on being projected into the future. The past is gone — now there is no way to complete them in the past; and the present is going out of your hands fast, slipping, so you don't see any point, any possibility to complete them in the present.
The future is long: you can project — this life, another life, this world, another world — you can project eternity. Then you are at ease. You say, "I am not at a loss; tomorrow is there. There will be another life." But by and by, you are getting trapped in a wrong pattern.
No, hope is not the right thing. Live in the present so deeply, so completely, that nothing is left. Then there will be no projection. You will move very smoothly into the tomorrow without carrying any load from today. And when there is no yesterday haunting you, then there is no tomorrow. When the past is not hanging around you, there is no future.
Pradeepa has understood rightly. That's what I was trying to show her: hope is an illness, a disease of the mind. It is hope that is not allowing you to live.
Hope is not the friend, remember; it is the foe. It is because of hope that you go on postponing. But you will remain the same tomorrow also, and tomorrow also you will hope for some future. And this way it can go on for eternity, and you can go on missing. Stop postponing. And who knows what the future is going to reveal to you? There is no way to know about it. It is an opening; all alternatives are open. What is really going to happen, nobody can predict. People have tried.
That's why people go to astrologers, to I CHING, and to other sorts of things. I CHING goes on fascinating people, astrologers go on influencing people. Astrology still seems to be a great force. Why? — because people are missing and they are hoping for the future. They want some clue to know what is going to happen so they can arrange it that way.
These things will persist, even if scientifically it is proved that it is all nonsense.
They will persist because it is not a question of science, it is a question of human hope. Unless hope is dropped, I CHING cannot be dropped. Unless hope is dropped, astrology cannot be dropped. It will have great power over man's mind because hope is gripping you. You would like to know little clues about the future so you can move more confidently, you can project more confidently, and you can postpone many more things.
If you know something about tomorrow, I think you will not live today. You will say, "What is the need? Tomorrow we will live." Even without knowing anything about tomorrow you are doing that. And tomorrow never comes… and when it comes, it is always today. And you don't know how to live today.
So you are in a great trap. Drop that whole structure. Hope is the bondage of man, hope is SAMSAR, hope is the world. Once you drop hope you become a SANNYASIN; then there is nowhere to go.
I have heard….
One day Mulla Nasrudin was in a very deep meditative mood. Sitting by the side of his dog he delivered a monologue:
"You are only a dog, but I wish I was you. When you go to your bed you just turn around three times and lie down. When I go to bed I have to lock up the place, and wind up the clock, and put out the cat, and undress myself, and my wife wakes up and scolds and then the baby wakes and cries and I have to walk him around the house and then maybe I get myself to bed in time to get up again.
When you get up, you just stretch yourself, stretch your neck a little, and you are up. I have to light the fire, put on the kettle, scrap some with my wife, and get myself breakfast. You be laying around all day and have plenty of fun; I have to work all day and have plenty of trouble. When you die, you are dead; when I die I have to go somewhere again."
This 'somewhere again'…call it hell, call it heaven, but somewhere; and God is here and you are always going somewhere.
God is your surround, and you are always missing Him because you are missing the present. God has only one tense — that is present. The past and future don't exist. Man exists in the past and future, not in the present; God exists in the present, not in the past and future. So how is the meeting going to happen?
We live in different dimensions. Either God starts living in the past and future — then there can be a meeting, but then He will not be a God, He will be just as ordinary a man as you are; or you start living in the present — then the meeting happens. But then too you will not be human, you will become divine. Only the divine can meet with the divine; only the same can meet the same.
Drop hope.
Hope is the cause of why you are missing God. And the problem is, the vicious circle is: the more you miss God, the more you hope; the more you hope, the more you miss. Once you look deep down into hope, its structure, its grip on you — the very vision, and the hope drops on its own accord. Suddenly you are here and now, and you will see as if a curtain had dropped from your eyes, a curtain has dropped from your senses.
You will become TREMENDOUSLY fresh and young, and you will see a totally luminous world all around you. The trees will be green but in a different way: tremendously green — and the green will be luminous. The world will immediately turn into a psychedelic world. It is — your eyes are just so covered with dust that you cannot see the psychedelic that is surrounding you from everywhere.
Drop hope.
But whenever I say to somebody to drop hope, he thinks that I am telling him to become hopeless. No, I'm not doing that. When you drop hope there is no possibility of becoming hopeless, because hopelessness exists only because of hope. You hope and it is not fulfilled; hopelessness arises. You hope, and you hope again and again in vain; hopelessness arises. Hopelessness is frustrated hope.
The moment you drop hope, hopelessness is also dropped. You are simply without hope and without hopelessness. And that is the most beautiful moment that can happen to a man, because in that very moment one enters into the shrine of God.
OSHO