Power of Hope – H is Highest Outcome

Part 1 of a series. Hope is kind of a dishwater word; it has an air of desperation about it and is only a hair away from worry. It does not sound like it is going to have a very good outcome, but there are other states of mind added to it in order to make it hope. However, as Buddhists, we want to lift our ability to hope into the power of hope, in the form of a dynamic, proactive state of creativity.

In order to remember and use the technique I have created, we can remember the word hope in a new way. H, O, P, and E in four points are: H represents highest outcome, O is for overcoming obstacles, P is perseverance, and E is for enthusiasm. These are the four important aspects to proactive, dynamic hope that will give you abilities to use hope in ways that will have profound results. H means highest outcome. There is a saying, “We hope for the best.” However, in yogic method, this is a call to arise in a directed and focused energetic that supports the best outcome instead of bland wishing.

Everything is made out of energy. Even your solid body is made of energy. Within the dense body is a flow in you that called energy if you are seeing it from the denser point of view. How you, the dense body/mind complex, use this energy, is how you express your life process toward the outer world. Meditators and also non-meditators use or abuse this natural energy during daily life. This energy is what becomes trained in yogic process in order to support states of mind and what I call high thinking. The inner yogic development will transform interior energies to another level of development under all good circumstances. This energy that you might be presently using in your everyday process can be redirected or trained through meditation and through various kinds of practices.

It is not easy for ordinary people to know what level of energies are developed or trained in others. However, definitely your outer energies have received some form of training already. Otherwise, you might be sitting and without warning or conscious decision, your arm might shoot out and accidentally punch the person next to you! So, you do have some control over your outer energies both by training and will power. You might also decide, “I am now going to sit in this chair for the next hour without fidgeting.” This is power over your outer energies.

However, inside you, there is another kind of energy body beyond will power and behavioral training, and you have probably experienced this energy body from time to time. This energy body can rush to the outer energy body in order to produce some kind of extraordinary strength result. For example, there is a story about a mother whose child fell under the wheels of a car who picked up the car by the bumper and pulled her child out.

You can feel this energy body on the more subtle inner level as something that rises up inside you when you feel, “Someone has just insulted me.” Suddenly, you feel something hot rising up, as if you could shoot firecrackers out your eyes. This is not your outer energy body. This is an inner energy body, which can be quite untrained and often it is only activated spontaneously when you are upset.

This is how yogis hope; they create the energetic support for re-creating a situation where there is a doubtful outcome, where there is a wishing outcome and this is how to make hoping come true! Like that, this energetic needs to rise up in a new way in order to support a state of mind sustaining the highest outcome based on a proactive dynamic of hope.

This energetic body is with you all of the time, and for most of you, has a position in the navel. It has a different kind of intelligence. Interestingly enough, there is recent scientific information about a second brain that resides in the navel with complete and active neural cells. However, we need to understand this better from an experiential point of view so that we can recognize when it activates automatically. Noticing it will help you be able to produce certain kinds of results in the future when it is time to learn how to do this deliberately with facilitated yogic training.

In the navel energy center, combined with mental competence, the pressure of that contained energy will create a support for your hope/wish. In that way, now try to stand up inside mentally. You are not going to stand up in your physical body. You are going to stand up in that energy body that feels somewhat like a visualization. When it stands up, there will be a tremendous energy flow. If you do not know what you are doing, it may be a bit strong for you to tolerate. On the other hand, it may be a very pleasant sensation.

While you are seated, now visualize that from your navel center, there is another kind of body. Now stand up and fill yourself throughout your chest, throughout your arms, and head. Usually people doing this are not standing straight but accustomed to standing crooked, but it is possible to stand up straight. Do not stand up physically. Now allow that to return to the navel.

That is the standing up which energetically supports the highest outcome of the hope and is the support for the mental state that you need to produce. This standing up should not be done as an exercise by itself but in the context of a practice, such as this introduction to the inner body. By the way, this is not the actual being that is your deepest development basis, this is your inner body, or we could say inner being. To be continued…