Liberation From Fear

RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR





Hope carries us even through the worst moments of crisis: it wells up, as though from some deep reservoir, at times when an unbearable world robs us of every motivation to go on living. Hope is also an active principle, in that it sustains belief. By offering us the dreams and visions that will guide us through the present, hope gives us the power to project alternative realities; that the world can be transformed, that it can be conceived differently....It is the triumph of constructive imagination over existential anxieties, over the “machinations of fear,“ as Ernst Bloch says in The Principle of Hope. Hope is not an escape, but a mandate for us to look “in the world itself for what can help the world,“ Bloch continues: “Nobody has ever lived without daydreams, but it is a question of knowing them deeper and deeper and in this way keeping them trained on what is right.“Bloch advises us to nurture our daydreams, since we would then enrich the sober gaze of our everyday lives.Hope is not a simple emotion confined to the individual self -it becomes meaningful only when it expresses a long-range goal that encompasses the fortunes of all beings. Hope characterises the will to live, love, and, most importantly , thrive.In short, it is a refusal to give up on the best in people, a refusal to deny the possibility of one's own evolution and others. Hope allows us to explore the relationship between the envisioned and the possible; it allows us to project ourselves creatively into the world.