The Only Hope is Hopelessness | Mark Whitwell
Mark Whitwell | Yoga Teacher at Heart of Yoga
In Yoga studios around the world innocent people are doing all kinds of exaggerated asana on themselves in the effort to get somewhere, because we’ve been told we’re not already somewhere.
In retreat centres and meditation halls, people are trying to transform themselves, because we’ve been told the body-mind isn’t the pure wonder of existence as it is.
And in the world of work, money, politics and sport, people are burning out, because we’ve been convinced that happiness is absent, and that peace lies on the other side of success.
Whether it is framed in the religious language of ‘enlightenment’ or ‘God-realisation,’ or in the secular mode of self-improvement, the denial of the inherent perfection of life is making us miserable.
“The only hope is hopelessness,” my teacher and friend UG Krishnamurti used to say. What UG was getting at is that the only hope is for us to see the absolute futility of struggling within civilization’s hopeful paths towards a future happiness. To become hopeless, to come to that place of despair with the methods of the world can be very fruitful. We can now give up and become available to Reality Itself — to live in and as Reality, as the great power that we are.
In the intertwined political and religious systems of the world the ideas of separation and hierarchy are the principle messages and means of control. You “think” you are separate from the Absolute — that there is something essential missing from your life. You “think” that you are less and have to become more. You “think” that you are second to a higher power or person, or conversely you “think” that you are superior to “others” — first you fool yourself, then you fool the people. The more charming the knowledge authorities are (whether guru or politician) the more they delude you in this insidious system of thought.
None of it is real. In Reality, the idea of Separation is just an idea, an intellectual mistake that has developed momentum in human society. Indeed, Western civilization was built upon religious power structure, organisations which for thousands of years sowed into the public mind the shadowy idea of God as “Other,” and the various methods of working away on yourself in order to get to this presumed absent Perfection — meditation, celibacy, hard work, sacrifice. Whether we are presently religious or not, these ideas are in us because they are the fabric of the world-mind. Despite the glitz and glamour of modern consumer culture and science, an archaic mind of presumed separation and hopeful seeking operates as the uninspected motor of human activity and culture.
Humanity is coming to that turning point now where the hoax of patriarchy has become visible. Clearly religion, consumerism, meditation, and gymnastic yoga do not work. All method has been turned in an aberated instrument of thought. Like never before we are witnessing the utter failure of patriarchy’s institutions to look after the people and the planet.
Why don’t the methods of attaining a future perfection work? UG spent his life pointing out that the body, as it is right now, actually IS the great power of the cosmos; that the body, as it is right now, and all that is experienced is the Absolute Condition, whereas the ‘absolute’ that culture proposes is only conjecture moving attention away from reality. The body is a continuity of the absolute. Therefore, there really is nothing to change and nothing to be liberated from. The thought-created imaginary state of future perfection is only the active denial of the inherent perfection that is currently arising as you and me and every thing else; the active denial of the connection that is here right now. “Man’s idea of heaven has created a hell out of this abundant paradise.”
Everywhere on Mother Earth the pendulum is swinging back, bringing us back to ourselves — taking away the distractions that humanity has been preoccupied with. This new civilization is emerging as the old world of patriarchy and it is based upon the simple recognition that every person and every thing is the beauty of the natural world; that each person is the power of the cosmos. Mothers and fathers are telling their children words that previous generations did not have the opportunity to hear: words such as “you belong here,” and that “you exist in a profound and inherent harmony with air and light and water and green and the male-female, yin-yang union, just by being alive.”
As part of this historic shift, real Yoga is enabling us to directly perceive the wonder of our worlds for all people. Authentic yoga begins as Life’s means of restoring itself. This happens when the mind folds up from the habits of seeking for what we are not, which is a denial of Life. It is one part of a process of unlearning, like breaking away the layer upon layer of culture and history that have obstructed our free enjoyment of life. A new world is being born.
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