Of Hope and Fear

…”And now these three remain: faith, hope and love.  But the greatest of these is love.”  This verse of the Apostle Paul from 1 Corinthians 13:13 is one of the most famous scripture passages in the entire Bible.  It is most often quoted at wedding ceremonies, and often includes the part from 1 Corinthians 13:4, in which this scripture states love is “patient and kind.” One of the most fascinating aspects of Paul, as I have mentioned before, is how he can be so truthful in one moment, and so deluded in the next.  As Paul states in 1 Corinthians 13, Love is patient and kind, not boastful nor proud.  Love does not keep a record of wrongs.  Paul is correct on all of these points.  However, where Paul is not truthful is in his statement that faith and hope is on a similar plane as love, with love being the greatest of the three. Love is the only, as faith and hope are inseparable from fear.  Fear has nothing to do with love, and has no place within the realm of Truth. 

Paul himself describes what he believes faith is in Hebrews 11:1, “Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.”  So, by this definition, we can see Paul sees faith and hope as one in the same.  Being certain of what we do not see, which I interpret as being aware of the Oneness of All, is not the same as “being sure of what we hope for.”  Hope is fear.  Why? Because we only hope for what we are afraid is not true.  We only hope for what is pleasing to our egos.  Truth has no fear because it is never separate from anything.  Only the ego can be afraid, can hope, can long, because the ego is always the illusion of separation.  The very experience of fear iself confirms the fact it is of the ego and nothing else.  Without fear, hope does not exist.  This fact in and of itself reveals that hope is of the ego, and has nothing to do with awareness of the Oneness of All. 

In the Oneness of All, there is only the present moment.  There is no hope, because there is no self nor time to “hope” for anything.  There is also no self, nor time to be afraid of anything.  Pleasure and pain, just like hope and fear, are different aspects of the same one thing – the ego, pure and simple.  Without the ego, none of these things exist.  In fact, without the illusory ego, nothing is, but the Oneness of All.  In other words, when all which is the lie, the dualistic ego is removed, all that remains is the singular One… Truth.  When one is aware of the Oneness of All, there is no “ego” persay, because there is no time.  Time is the lie in which the ego is entrapped.  It never sees the workings of the trap, the source of its pain, and has no awareness of how to transcend this pain. Time is of the ego.  Ego is of time.  Hope is time.  Fear is time.  Time… is sorrow. And ignorance is not bliss.  Ignorance comes from the word ignore. When one is ignorant, one is ignoring the Truth of the Oneness of All.  This alone is the true “sin” of the world. 

Obedience to the ego, the flesh, without awareness of the Oneness of All is the beginning and the end of all suffering and sorrow.  The flesh is not in and of itself “good” or “bad.”  Ignorance of what the flesh is, and its place as a mirror for Truth, not Truth itself, is the root cause of all suffering…

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