Word Gems: Hope: Three Cardinal Virtues

One of the more jarring perceptions on my way to “discovering the truth” was that hope, faith, and love – in their traditional presentations – are not what they seem to be.

Allow me to outline the issue. For brevity's sake, I’ll need to make reference to earlier writings.

Some of this I’ve gradually come to see in recent years. For example, the apostle Paul’s adamant “we know” such-and-such. But how did he know? No mention of hope and faith, just certainty.

Part of our misperception is that the ego believes God is unfair. “This should not be happening to me!” Why can’t we have the good things we want and need right now?

In what we view as delay, we admonish ourselves to exercise “patience.” This is another one of those purported virtues. But, do we really need patience? - or something else?

And concerning ‘delay,’ August Goforth offered the insightful comment that Source never delays any good thing. ‘Delay’ is the wrong way of looking at what’s happening. This is the ego's distorted view. Source always desires to give us any good thing we want, as soon as possible. The ‘delay’ occurs on our side of the equation: we’re not ready.

Instead of ‘delay,’ we should think in terms of prep time, that’s what’s really going on. We’re given time to prepare to receive, allowing Source to give us what we want. Good things are never delayed in the kingdom of God.

And – also from August Goforth – we don’t need ‘patience’, either. Patience is a strait-jacket worn by the ego to control itself. Patience is internal conflict -- the root word itself means suffering and pain (this is why a doctor's clients are called 'patients'). Patience means we want something but can’t have it, and then grit our teeth to behave ourselves.

But once we see the hand of Source in our lives, and perceive that we need a time of preparation, patience is not required; then we willingly agree, with ourselves, that it’s not a bad thing to wait for what we want, lest we create suffering in our lives by ill-timed receipt of blessing.

The truth of the matter is, Source always grants us what we want in the shortest time possible, given all factors in play. In physics there is the principle of ‘least action.’ Nature itself is arranged to take the shortest path to achieve its purpose. And ‘least action’ also governs the flow of spiritual blessings to us.

I said that, eventually, we ‘agree with ourselves.’ We stop resisting life as it was meant to be for us. We surrender to the whispering guidance of Spirit in our lives. We finally accept the will of God, designed to offer us maximum happiness.

Notice what he did not say. He did not say, “what you need is more hope, faith, and love; you need to try harder to be more religious, try harder to think the way you ought to think.”

Instead, he told her that a day is coming when you’ll put away traditional religious views. All that she really needed was to become aware of the inner riches, the “artesian spring” of God’s own life within.

This “living water” will naturally and effortlessly bubble up to the surface of personality. No trying very hard to think the right way.

While not discouraging the element called ‘hope,’ we won’t speak of it as something to acquire and keep for very long. This goes quite against many earthly traditions that promote it as something to cling to. Hope contains doubt and so must not be allowed to linger for long, because hope is meant to be changed into the faith that transforms into the knowing; doubt keeps this from happening. From [an afterlife] perspective, hope is perceived as something held up against a background of fear—“Maybe it will happen or maybe it won’t, but I hope it will.”

This doubt is the reluctance to assert one’s Divine Authority to speak positive words of faith. Hope chooses unknowing, while faith chooses knowing. And then knowing simply chooses anything correctly.

Hope cannot have the illusion of reality unless it is projected onto a background of fear, from which it then draws its sustenance. Just like misfocused attention upon the past, hope is another defense of the frightened ego-mind. Hope is projected onto a screen of the future—never the present, which hope obscures.

The present cannot contain hope, and hope cannot contain the present. If one is hoping, one is not present, having been taken out of it by the desire for something that is not in the present. Without a sense of time-generated fear, grief has no lasting reality and no permanent significance.

Some will say, of course hope contains doubt; life is uncertain, but we try to do our best.

But who is saying this? It is the dysfunctional ego which knows nothing of certainty as engendered by the mind linked to Source.

Faith is often promoted to very high religious status. This unwarranted elevation has occurred because despotic Big Religion has been dominated by egos with little perception of the God-life within - which comes to us attended by a sense of certainty.

It’s aggrandized endlessly, for thousands of years, by poets, clergy, and philosophers.

Well, there are worse sins, but, the truth of the matter is, love is not the highest virtue. There’s something better and more wondrous.

Love implies subject and object, lover and beloved. There is an intervening distance, the two are not one. And in that distance, the ego has room to create perceptions of fear, doubt, and sense of loss.

This is a very large, very important, subject discussed in several WG articles, but one might begin HERE.

This world has been constructed by dark egos. Almost no one is led by the inner life, the “bubbling artesian spring.”

As such, egos have created definitions and explanations of the world to satisfy a materialistic metaparadigm.