By Jach

A Grouping of Questions with Jach’s Replies from the Online Conferences

During the Evenings with Jach and the ‘Twenty Questions’ Conferences as well, so many have commented about Jach’s wisdom and insight. He connects current events to Lazaris’ teachings in a way that helps bring new and refreshing outlooks to so many issues in our world. Because of the overwhelming feedback we have received, we have grouped together some of Jach’s answers by topic. Enjoy!

Hope

Q: Can you provide your thoughts on the Tucson event this past weekend? It has multiple meanings and metaphors, but I’d like your reflections.

JACH:

Well, at first I was shocked and appalled, and then I turned to understanding, or to working with understanding, and I have come around to once again being appalled. At first my shock had to do with such an act of violence happening at a shopping center in a place such as Tucson. (I have been there … once [s].) Then I wondered if this were political. I wondered if this guy, with mental problems and all, had hooked into the segment of the Tea Party that advocates ‘take them down’ or having someone ‘in our targets.’ I now am hoping that this guy had no knowledge of that kind of stuff and that he was just part of some obscure lunatic fringe. I am hoping that this was not at all political, not at all. Even so, I am still appalled: This is America. These sorts of things don’t happen in America.

The polarization that Lazaris has mentioned stands out here. The lack of imagination and the lack of dreaming leads to instant polarization, Lazaris pointed out in November. We are seeing that now. I do not speak of this with any political bias (and personally, I surely do have a lot of political bias [s]), but I leave that aside now). The issue of an imagination that is lacking and perhaps even dying, and of a lack of dreams, crosses all political terrain. And I think it has a strong connection with a growing sense that can be called a lack of future. I think so many people just do not have a sense that there is a future or the future they see is abysmal. Some tie that to politics: The left says the right is leading us into devastation and the right says the left is leading us off a cliff into oblivion, but such rhetoric is symptomatic of a larger issue, it seems to me. People, left, right, or in any other direction, seem to lack a sense of the future or of a positive future. And I think this is connected to the Tucson shooting. This guy having no sense of the future tried to what? Kill the future of a governmental official? A judge? Innocent people? Why? He had no future. Perhaps he was showing them that they have no future. He created that for 6 people and he significantly altered his future and the future of all who attended (to varying degrees).

We need hope. We need the expectations and anticipations; we need the presence of soul and spirit that are hope. And out of that sense of hope, new dreams can be born. And out of that sense of hope, new futures can form. Initiation is not enough. We need to fuel what we set in motion with hope. I think back to 2000, the Year of Dominion, and to 2001, the Year of Mystery. The terrain of dominion is made fertile by the insemination of mystery. The womb of dominion needs the insemination of mystery to give birth to creation and manifestation. Well, this decade began with 2010: The Year of Initiation. But setting things in motion, causing them to be, is not enough. We need to fuel the initiations with hope so that which is set in motion, rich with hope, can emerge as enchantment. I see a pattern here. And I see Tucson calling us to that pattern. Yesterday Gabby (I think it’s beautiful that people are calling her Gabby) opened her eyes. In the midst of this horror: hope. What a gift she gives us all.

Then there are President Obama’s comments. Oh man, can we come together? Perhaps we magicians can. He spoke of the tendency to blame and point fingers. He spoke of how we want to know why. We want reasons for the unreasonable. He spoke of how we have choice in how we react and how we respond. I doubt that some such as Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck will quiet their rhetoric, but they are entertainers: They have an audience to please and they are putting on a show. But for us who are magicians, for us who are mapmakers, I think we can come together. Not in form — I am not talking about coming together in form. But we can come together in function. I am appalled that it happened, and I am determined to find the hope and to augment and embellish the hope in this tragedy.

Q: When Lazaris talks to us about emptying ourselves of all Hope that has been, he also says ‘not hopeless, but devoid of Hope. I get it when I am in meditation and can do it, but wonder how you would cognitively describe it?

JACH:

Lazaris talks of the Paradox of Hope. Actually, he talked of it years and years ago in the 1990s, I believe, when he first talked of hope. [s] The paradox, as you point out is that you need to let go of all hope, all of it, in order to receive hope. That is, you need to release it all in order to receive its bounty … Ah, the bounty of hope and then the magic of hope. In a sense, we have to make room for it by discarding all the hope we have. Lazaris also points out: Not hopeless, but devoid of hope. I love the next part.

You say you get it in meditation, but outside of meditation, how do you describe it? I am not sure you can cognitively describe it in the conscious state. It is a paradox: to have it you have to discard it. You have to be willing to be without hope, not hopeless but without hope. And hope is a transcendent energy. We cannot fully describe or fully comprehend hope, and I suspect we cannot cognitively describe it, either.

So with that as a backdrop, an analogy: I can take off my shoes and be shoeless. But there are those who have lost their shoes or who never had them. So maybe when I discard my shoes, I am devoid of shoes, but not shoeless. I will get my shoes back shortly, but for those who truly lost their shoes? Okay, okay, it’s not a perfect analogy. Not perfect? Hey, it’s not even a good analogy, but maybe it works.

A hopeless person has no hope, but they do not or cannot take responsibility for its absence. To relinquish hope, to be without hope but not hopeless, means that I can hope, and I can have it again. I am responsible for relinquishing it.

One step more: To be without hope, but not hopeless, is possible because ‘hopeless’ is not a quantity, it is a state of mind and a state of being. It is a quality. When I relinquish my hope, I still maintain a hopeful state of mind and state of being. I just don’t hold on to any hope at the moment.
I hope [s] that answers your question in some way.

Q: It is interesting to me that Hope and Trust are linked at that 4th position of the upper Tier of Emotions. Can you please speak to how you see those two energies working together.

JACH:

I think trust is an anchor for hope. Lazaris points out that hope can be a miraculous gift, and hope can also be cruel. I was surprised by that comment, so I thought about it more. Yes. Hope can be false hope. It can be a delusion. It can be clinging to something that isn’t or that will never be. We can hope and hope and hope and do nothing or little else, and our reality and our world can be devastated and devastating, but we just sit there hoping and hoping and hoping. …
Hope can be bitterly cruel and ugly. The abused wife or husband comes back one more time hoping things will be different this time. The broken-hearted who clings to the hope that he or she will come back … waiting for the ghostly lover, hoping. I hadn’t put that together. I had only thought of hope as this wondrous, magical thing — which it can be.

So what makes a true hope, a luminous hope, where otherwise a false or cruel hope might be? I think trust is a key. It is not the only key, I think, but I think it is an important one. And when I say that, I don’t mean that we need to trust what we are hoping for. (Maybe that’s true, too, but that’s not what I am thinking about now.) I think we need to be trustworthy. I think we need to be someone that others can trust — worthy of another’s trust. And I think we have to be one who is willing to trust others, others who have demonstrated that they are worth trusting. So I think we need to be conscious of our rapport with trust, and that we need a working relationship (a relationship that works) with trust. When we are trustworthy and we trust, I think we can release our hold on hopes that could be cruel. I think we can release false hope, delusionary hopes, and hopes that are excuses to hold on to stuff we need to let go of. So such hopes are going to be there. Our negative ego can present them. Others can encourage them. But if we are trustworthy and if we trust, I think we can sort and sift through those potentially cruel hopes.

That’s one aspect. Another aspect is that it takes strength to hope, to genuinely hope. Lazaris has pointed out that the consensus reality is distrustful of hope. Hope is seen as an emotion of last resort. When all else has failed, the only thing left is hope. That’s what’s sadly true for many people in the world. When someone says, ‘Well, we are hopeful. All we can do is hope,’ they are describing a really bad situation. To overcome the resonance of the consensus reality and to truly lean upon and rest upon hope … that takes strength, a trusting and enduring strength, it seems to me.

The word, hope, is an easy one to say. We hope a lot … We hope people are happy, we hope they are satisfied, we hope they drop dead [s], we hope for positive things and we hope for negative things for almost everyone. The word slips out of our mouths easily. But can we truly hope? Do we work with hope, really? I know I have a great deal to learn about working with hope. I say it a lot. I value hope. I appreciate it. I get inspired by it. I get goose bumps, and I get all teary-eyed when I think of its beauty and its wonder (and its power and potency). But I know very little of hope, of the real deal of the genuinely powerful, magical thing that is hope. … Primordial Hope, Luminous Hope, Human Hope … the Glamoury and the Majesty of Hope. I think trust is a part of it. AND I think that the two (trust and hope) may be two very different things, but that they share the same resonance. They function at the same frequency there in the middle or the 4th position — in that upper tier. They are the most determined, and they are essential for happiness. As alike or as different as they may be, they are key and essential for love.

Q: I am wondering, with all the energies of hope, if there is anything we can do on a daily basis to boost hope in ourselves and keep our resonance high and clear.

JACH:

Oh, there are so many things we can do. [s] I cannot remember the title of the recording, but it’s on Hope and Joy, and it was an Evening recording from a few years back. If you go to the shopping cart and do a search, the exact title will come up. [Editor’s Note: The recording is ‘The Incredible Magic of Hope and Joy.’] On that recording Lazaris suggests several techniques. One is an Elixir of Hope. It’s very nice. Another is a technique to work with Seven Days of Hope. It is stunningly amazing. For seven days, you focus on hope. You focus on listening to your Soul and Spirit. You focus on expressing your expectations and observing your anticipations. Lazaris points out that we use the words ‘expectation’ and ‘anticipation’ interchangeably, and that’s okay. But they are different. Anticipation is our actions or behaviors in advance of an event. Our expectations are our feelings and images after an event. Anticipation is masculine energy, and expectation is feminine energy.

Even though we use the words interchangeably, it is helpful to track our anticipations. What do we do and how do we behave in advance of an expected event? And it is valuable to track our expectations, the feelings and images we hold after the event. We can work to lift each. We can work to allow each to be alive with light. They can be luminous. When our anticipations and our expectations are luminous, we are alive with hope. Our hope is luminous. We can flow that light — that luminous hope — into our reality and into the world.

During one of the recent two One-Day events, we worked with Igniting the Embers of Hope. It is beautiful. It is powerful. In the other, we take those embers of hope to the Weaver Woman and together weave a Tapestry of Hope. Those two meditations are luminous. And I truly know the world is and that it can be different because of the work that we can do with luminous hope. We can also work with a Journal of Hope. Write down your hopes: desires, dreams, visions (passive hope) and your ideas, plans, and projects (active hope). Put them together as magic papers … a 3′ square, one for each hope. Fold those papers with intention and attention. Focus. [s] Then put them in a ‘Hope Chest,’ a box or a bowl, and let them incubate. You can also work with a crystal that is a Purveyor of Hope or one that has an Incubation Chamber. Or, you can work with a crystal that you choose and from which you get permission, and that crystal can be your Hope Amplifier. Work with the Hope Chest or Hope Amplifier, a box (or bowl), or a crystal. Place the slips of paper under or around the crystal. You can infuse your day with hope. And, perhaps, what is even more exciting and rewarding, you can infuse the world with hope.

But watch out! [s] Hope is the initiator. It will set things in motion and cause things to be. It is immensely powerful. Immensely. And it is beautiful in the hands of a magician. So have fun with hope. Okay? Thanks for asking. [s] You have sparked some ideas in me. I hope I have sparked some in you.