Part One

During the summer of 2017 I paid a visit to the Mediterranean island of Ibiza. From Scotland it's not so simple as from London, where you take a deep breath, squeeze into a high-altitude cattle truck provided by Ryanair, and two hours later thankfully disgorge into the sun-and-sand of the Mediterranean. For me, it required a five-hour stopover in Barcelona airport. Like all other airports, it's an unremarkable place, but one which provided the material for a piece that I wrote later.

I recently had a look back at the article in question. I was amazed. I barely recognised it as me. The writing style, the observations, the reflections, the personal commentary. Much can happen in five years, it seems, more than I realised....

Having said that, my attention was drawn to two main things during the Barcelona stopover. Firstly, how attached most travellers were to their phones, their constant companion, like a dog without a tail. Secondly, the disconnect which manifested between the official narrative - that air travel is bad, destroying the planet, and should be curtailed immediately - and the reality on the ground - that vast numbers of people travel vast distances with great ease, treating it with the same sense of occasion that I might a trip into town on the local bus. 

I didn't expand on the feeling - I didn't understand it very well - but all of this was accompanied by the distinct sense that this could not continue. What exactly 'this' was I did not know, so I could not elaborate; but it had something to do with the kind of reality bubble that so many people appeared to inhabit, shaped by trivia, instant this and instant that, an information soup based around superficialities.

Ironically, I was not alone in believing that 'this' could not continue. A little further down the line, it became increasingly clear that a whole bunch of unelected and unaccountable self-appointed overlords of planet Earth held this point of view. Or more precisely, they concurred that air travel and all manner of human activity was to be curtailed. In contrast to my own instinct, however, they deem the digital world to be the best of worlds, and aim for it, in time, to be the only world.  

At this point the events of the day in Barcelona became too much for me. They provoked a reaction which I went on to write about: I gave up hope. What's more, I found that giving up hope wasn't such a bad thing; it felt OK. Maybe, I speculated, 'hope' was just one more piece of emotional baggage that we carry around without benefit. We can drop it into the rubbish bin and continue life perfectly well.

This notion of giving up hope sparked some debate and discussion among various readers of my writing at the time. They didn't go along with this idea of giving up hope at all. As it happened, I gave up hope, and they eventually gave up reading my writing.....

When I put all this down in 2017 I was swimming around in vague intimations, barely-conscious intuitions. I propose that I know now rather better what I was trying to get at.

There were two things which I didn't realise. Firstly, that these few readers who shook their heads at relinquishing hope were either overtly Christian or strongly shaped in the Christian mindset. Within Christianity, 'hope' is a big thing. You see it on church billboards - hope in Jesus - and it's prominent this midwinter time of year, often accompanied by a star associated with a little baby. One thing that Christianity is bigger on than hope is suffering - so it follows that, in a world defined as suffering, you look out and pray for a saviour, a symbol of hope, somebody who will make things better. 

The other wee insight is that these lovers of hope could only see 'giving up hope' as adopting an attitude of hopelessness. Maybe perceiving it as an atheistic, and nihilistic, stance. This is the duality; hope or hopelessness. But what I was pointing to was not hope's opposite (which boils down to being the same thing), but an attitude which transcends the polarity altogether. 

Part Two

Fast forward four years, to the summer of 2021. I was invited for lunch in a restaurant in town. After eighteen months of convid restrictions, going for lunch was something of a novelty. It was a lunch with about six other 'awake-to-convid' folk, and I looked forward to it.

At one point the conversation veered towards the future. How did we feel about it? Were we optimistic, or what?

My fellow diners all agreed that yes, they were optimistic about the future. They had hope. It came to my turn, and I conceded that I was not optimistic. Neither was I pessimistic. I simply took things as they came.

My point of view was clearly not approved of; the atmosphere turned a little quiet. I tried to explain how these attitudes, of optimism and pessimism, are not needed; they are only glosses on the fabric of reality, and they veil us from direct experience. My fellow diners didn't seem to quite understand.

As if to make the point, one of the attendees later invited us not to worry: "I think you will find that things begin to improve in about two weeks' time" he declared with unwavering certainty. I felt like punching him on the nose. So-called awake people making such ludicrous and unfounded statements serve only to discredit, I began to realise. I haven't seen him since - he was noticeably absent from the group of us who went out in the cold, wind, and rain the following winter with yellow boards to highlight the madness which continued - but if I do bump into him, I'll point out that I'm still waiting; it's been a long fortnight.... 

Part Three         

Anyone setting out their stall by 'hope' is playing a dangerous game. Hope is an emotional response to an unsatisfactory, most likely painful and stressful, situation. It is a cry from the heart, and is easily misplaced. Commensurate with this is its vulnerability to being deceived, used, manipulated, by those whose intentions are impure. It easily gives rise to a saviour mentality.

The prominence of hope within Christianity is a clear example. Your life is crap, but put your faith in Jesus, show hope, and all will be well. It's a recipe for standing by and doing nothing while the forces of darkness get on with what they get on with unhindered. In this case hope breeds inaction.

In the case of my kind-of awake dining comrades, the Jesus mentality remained alive and kicking. The attitude of hope was transferred onto organisations (?) or entities (?) such as Q/Qanon as the 'alternative world' deliverers of salvation.

Q/Qanon came to the fore in the 'alternative/awake community' during the first year of the plandemic. Who or what Q is or was precisely is a bit of a mystery. But Q had a great following during 2020 going into 2021. The basic message of Q was that, yes, godawful things were happening. But alongside the horror was a parallel movement of goodness, spearheaded by the 'white hats'. They were in the process of destroying the cabal, and the chaos of the convid time provided cover for their activities. Tortured children were being released in their thousands; DUMBs (deep underground military bases) were being blown up, as evidenced in earthquake activity. Liberation was at hand.

I did come across evidence that the stories about children and DUMBs had some basis in reality. However, as time passed, the Q narrative became increasingly unlikely, and I began to view those who persisted in believing its stories as deluded, or at least suffering a serious blind spot.

The crunch came with the U.S. presidential elections. Q was strongly aligned with Trump, who was seen to various degrees as the modern-day saviour of mankind. The results were in, Biden won, but there was plenty of evidence that the whole thing was a fraud, a set-up job. Consider for a moment how simple it is to falsify statistics once much of it goes through the internet....

As inauguration day approached, excitement mounted. It was destined to be the great moment, when truth and goodness would prevail. Just before Biden took on the mantle, Trump and his people would jump in, declare the falsehood, and all would be well.

As we know, the day came, and .......nothing. Trump was silent, had done a runner. Q and Q-types' credibility took a nosedive, and has never properly recovered, though there are still many people who strangely continue with the 'it will be short and sharp, and the cabal will fall' narrative.

Placing hope in Trump - or in Putin, for that matter - is a gesture of blindness. Both of them had their chance to bring the whole shithouse tumbling down with the subject of the not-vackscenes. They could have brought the cabal to its grubby knees in next-to-no time. But they didn't. They allowed the programme to continue rolling out. Exposing evil was not part of their own game plan.

So, give up on hope. Abandon its twin opposite, too, hopelessness and despair. Forget the search for a saviour. Instead, just get up in the morning, look out the window, and decide what to do today. It's as simple and as scary as that.... 

A Footnote on Tarot

The Tarot card most commonly associated with hope is the Star. Rummaging around the various books and booklets on Tarot scattered around my house, I found quite a bit of material about hope and the Star that was derivative, unstimulating, uninspiring. The best by far came from a book that I don't always go a bundle on: 'Secrets of the Waite-Smith Tarot' by Tali Goodwin and Marcus Katz (the Rider-Waite, or Waite-Smith, Tarot is the best known deck, the cards which many people will be familiar with as 'the Tarot'). Here are a few words from the chapter on the Star:

A.E. Waite, the creator of the deck, referred to the explanation of the Star as hope as 'tawdry'. Spot on. And the authors of the book go on to write:

"The card is vision - the vision that can never be reached, but sets a point for our navigation. We must always hold one star in sight and recognise that it is ultimately our self. We are what we do and we become what we have done." 

"Whilst the Star is a generally positive card, it can be empty and even dangerous if not accompanied by more active and dynamic cards. Otherwise it is like having a compass in prison." 

So our wishes, our goals, the Star, require action for their fulfilment. If we want a better future, as one friend wrote to me recently, it will not arrive by just waiting and hoping. Change doesn't happen out of nowhere. It is up to us: the future is ours, should we only have the courage to grasp it....      

Images: Ben Hope, mountain in northern Scotland; The Star, Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot; Hopeman Bay, north-east Scotland; Bob Hope; The Star, Gilded Tarot