Hi Peter,

Not quite in the way you speculate: My comment on expanding on Bruce Lee quote was me talking to myself wondering how better to communicate what I see as a major stumbling block for integrating the teaching of the various wisdom traditions. Mistaking for action what is really passivity and vice versa.

Oh I see. The notion of activity vs. passivity is something that occupies you, and you believe that sometimes what is seen as action is actually passivity (Mistaking for action what is really passivity and vice versa). Would you expand on that? Can you give an example of an action which is actually passivity?

Erick Fromm suggested that unskillful hope is a attempt to flee from choice, from responsibility, from the anxiety of being, and in our flight, we embrace submission, conformity, and destructiveness.

Unfortunately, I’m not familiar with Fromm’s writings and his notion of hope… Do you mean that people often hope that someone outside of them would change their lives for the better – an external savior (even a political figure)? Whereas true change lies within us. True change comes from within, not from without. Is that what you had in mind?

Hi Peter,

I’ve often wondered why wisdom traditions, for all their depth and beauty, don’t seem to catalyze the kind of societal transformation they point toward. I’ve witnessed individual awakening, but once form becomes institution, something seems to stall. The flow slows. The tenderness hardens.

Ah, societal change is a big and complex topic. Something that occupies me, and saddens me, is that in the 21st century, we’re at the brink of WW3, or at least a war on the European continent.

We could speculate about the reasons, but I don’t think it’s for the lack of personal development and self-awareness in the Western world, but for other reasons. Perhaps being naive, appeasing the bully rather than holding them accountable, and becoming even more dependent on the bully economically, rather than seeking to reduce dependence. Perhaps that’s all a consequence of wishful thinking and fear (on behalf of European leaders), rather than thinking straight and being aligned with one’s true self-interest. Perhaps it reflects a certain passivity, both in thought (internal) and action (external).

Anyway, that’s just something that occupies and worries me, which I think is related to societal progress. But there are many more issues, which you’ve touched upon, where indeed the question could be asked why it sometimes seems that we go backwards, while we should be going forward and advancing as a society, as a civilization.

We live in a culture that celebrates transformation, makeovers, breakthroughs, revolutions… a world that privileges what can be seen, counted, and proven. Action, in this frame, means movement.

Inner work, by contrast, is subjective. It happens in silence, in solitude, in the messy terrain of thought and feeling. It lacks the markers of “doing something” that our culture recognizes: speed, noise, output. So we label it passive. We call reflection “navel-gazing,” restraint “weakness,” and emotional labor “soft.”

The way I see it, a part of the problem is that those who are loud and aggressive are the center of attention (which is largely exacerbated by social media), while those who are silent and contemplative, those who self-reflect and do the inner work, do not get the necessary attention.

People like entertainment, they like drama, they like individuals who stir strong emotions in them (or who give them excuse to vent their strong emotions such as anger onto others without being called out for it). Someone who is contemplative and self-reflective isn’t necessarily a good entertainer.

But more importantly, many people still don’t want to self-reflect, but would rather blame others for their problems. So the silent, contemplative, “navel-gazing” person may have audience (if they start a youtube channel haha 🙂 ), but it will be probably much less than some not so self-aware (but emotions-stirring and captivating) influencer.

We live in a culture that celebrates transformation, makeovers, breakthroughs, revolutions… a world that privileges what can be seen, counted, and proven. Action, in this frame, means movement.

If transformation is real and has come from within – and then it manifests in external action or outer success – it’s not a bad thing. There’s a funny meme that goes something like “Overnight success is a real thing. It just takes 5-10 years of hard work.” 🙂 But in all seriousness, I welcome that type of “overnight” success – behind which are years of hard work.

But there’s another type of action too, which is not aligned with our true self, but is let’s say to accomplish a goal that someone else wants for us, to meet someone else’s expectations. Thomas Merton said: “We may spend our whole life climbing the ladder of success, only to find when we get to the top that our ladder is leaning against the wrong wall.”

If our action is driven exclusively by ego desires, e.g. fame or riches or some other “earthly” goals, it won’t be beneficial either to us or those around us in the long-run.

My thought is that to truly understand action and passivity, we must integrate both objective and subjective perspectives. We must learn to see the invisible, to recognize that stillness can be strength and motion can be avoidance.

Definitely. Motion/action can be an attempt to alleviate the pain that can only be alleviated by self-reflection and inner work. If we don’t want to face that pain, we might engage in actions that numb it (all kinds of addictions and distractions), or we might punish and attack those who trigger that pain and bring it to surface.

I believe that actions that stem from avoiding pain – when that pain would need to be addressed instead – are not balanced, beneficial actions.

In doing so, we confront our biases about what counts as passive and what counts as active. And perhaps then, we begin to discern how those biases have shaped the way we hope, what we expect from change, and where we place our trust.

Can you elaborate on how you see our biases regarding action and passivity affect the way we hope and trust?

Erick Fromm suggested that unskillful hope is a attempt to flee from choice, from responsibility, from the anxiety of being, and in our flight, we embrace submission, conformity, and destructiveness. In Escape from Freedom, he named such hope as fear masquerading as safety, the seduction of authoritarianism…

This is a very rich thought… I wonder if you’d expand on it a little?

Jut to add – If someone told me a 10+ years ago that my hope was unskillful and passive as Fromm suggests I would have rejected the notion. Back then, hope felt active to me. Over time, I’ve learned what T.S. Eliot meant by “wait without hope, for hope would be hope of the wrong thing.”

That’s still waiting, but a least not one that pretends. Today I think I’m ready to reclaim hope, disentangling it from passive faith and restore its active essences… hope as a verb, not a feeling.

Hi Peter,

thank you!

We picture hope as active, as a something that must be good, something that will lead us to freedom, but often don’t notice due to our bias, when it becomes passive: waiting for rescue rather than engaging with reality. When hope turns into waiting, trust shifts outward where we have a tendance to place it in leaders or systems instead of our own capacity for inner work and shared responsibility.

I agree, waiting for an external savior, or for something outside of ourselves to relieve us from pain is a misguided hope.

In my own community, I’ve observed a troubling pattern. People speak of hope with conviction, often in religious or cultural terms, but their posture is one of waiting.

Yes, religious doctrine can be a cause for this false hope, e.g. the notion that all our needs and wants will be fulfilled in the afterlife, but that now, in our earthly existence, we need to suffer and accept bad things in our life. Hope for a better future in the afterlife and passivization/resignation in this life.

That alone primes the believers to accept abuse and mistreatment (including by the elites), and not do anything about it. Endure, rather than stand up for oneself and seek one’s rights.

And also, as you say, they may put their faith in some charismatic leader, who gives them a promise of solving all of their problems. Cults are an extreme example of that: followers put all their trust in the cult leader, who will ensure that a “paradise on earth” would come, or something to that effect. They only need to follow his/her instructions (and often endure his/her abuse), and they will be free from all the pain and suffering in this “heaven on earth”, which they’re awaiting.

That’s an example of completely giving up one’s own agency and putting one’s trust in someone else, someone supposedly superior and more “worthy” – someone who has a “direct connection” to God.

I guess something similar happens in other types of cults too (other than religious or spiritual): the followers have put their complete trust in one person (who might be a conman), and are willing to disregard certain abuses and red flags in their behavior, because this person is “the chosen one”, they will bring a better future, so they are forgiven everything.

Fromm warned that passive hope, especially when cloaked in faith, can become fertile ground for authoritarianism. The leader becomes the embodiment of “active hope,” even if their actions are coercive or destructive. The more people mistake waiting for hoping (pretending its action), the more they surrender their autonomy to those who claim to act on their behalf. In this way, the erosion of true hope becomes a gateway to political and psychological submission.

Yes, the more the people put their faith in leaders, while giving up (or never developing) their own agency and feeling helpless to change their lives – the more chance there is for authoritarian regimes to develop.

So I think hope and agency are related to each other: hope devoid of personal agency could probably be called passive hope, the one that leads to submission.

The antidote would be, as you say, courageous engagement with the future: trust in oneself, trust in the ability to change our life for the better, rather than feeling helpless and awaiting an external savior.

Fromm argued that genuine hope is not a passive waiting for salvation, but an active, courageous engagement with the future. It is rooted in agency, responsibility, and the moral will to shape what comes next.

Yes, definitely! Personal agency, responsibility for our own life (to change what we can change – because we can’t change everything we don’t like). And then hope that we’ll have luck in our endeavors, that as we move towards our goal, the “stars” will be on our side, that good fortune will smile on us… hope and faith in something beyond ourselves. Because sometimes we need more than just ourselves – we need luck, and that’s something we can hope for.

But we hope as we work towards our goal, as we take action… not that someone would take that action instead of us.

If someone told me a 10+ years ago that my hope was unskillful and passive as Fromm suggests I would have rejected the notion. Back then, hope felt active to me. Over time, I’ve learned what T.S. Eliot meant by “wait without hope, for hope would be hope of the wrong thing.”

Today I think I’m ready to reclaim hope, disentangling it from passive faith and restore its active essences… hope as a verb, not a feeling.

Good for you, Peter! Life without hope is a grim one, but we need the right kind of hope. It’s great that you’ve realized what true hope means and that you’re ready to live it. 🙏

If you’d like to share more about your process, or any aspect of hope vs passivity, I’d love to hear it…

Hello,

That story reminds me of the child who kept calling out for his mother. But, his mother was always praying to God for help. Calling out God’s name every time she needed something. The child called out her again. The mother turned around and said to stop calling her. The child then said, now how do you think God feels when you are constantly calling on God?

Wait, another one where a woman was calling on God to let her win the lottery. She would pray night and day to win the big money. Finally God sent a message back to her. Saying, you have got to buy a lottery ticket.

I am thinking I did not say those stories right. Save me please???

Hi Everyone

I recall conversations years ago where I admitted feeling that the hope I was leaning into was making life grim and depressing. The hope I was taught was tied to unmet expectations projected onto some imagined life after death where all would be well… I wondered if it might be better not to hope at all. When I shared this, the response was nearly universal: You have to have hope, or you’ll fall into despair. – Despair on one side, despair on the other – a catch-22.

That led me to a deeper question: why, when we try to change a story we tell ourselves, do we feel such pressure, both internal and external, to replace it immediately with a new one? What are we so afraid of in the silence between narratives?

When I considered removing my story of hope, I was told the only alternative was to fill that space with a story of despair. But over time, I’ve learned this isn’t true. You can stop telling a story without replacing it. You can leave the space open, and remain whole.

This has taken years of practice. Along the way, I’ve learned to be careful with words like hope, especially because they so easily blur with belief, faith, even life and live. These words carry weight, and when we use them interchangeably, we risk confusing very different ways of being.

Take the statements: “Life without hope is a grim one.” “Live without hope.” They sound similar, but they point in opposite directions. The first assumes hope is essential for meaning. The second, echoing T.S. Eliot, invites us to let go of clinging to specific outcomes. It doesn’t suggest despair, but rather a posture of openness, of freedom from illusion.

This is where language matters. When we don’t clarify what kind of hope we mean, “living without hope” can sound like giving up. But it can also mean living without the burden of expectation. It can mean being present, receptive, and courageous in the face of uncertainty.

To avoid confusion, I’ve found it helpful to distinguish between two kinds of hope:
– Hope as expectation – which binds us to outcomes and often leads to disappointment.
– Hope as presence – which keeps us open to what unfolds, without needing to control it.

The first is a clenched fist. The second is an open hand.

From that clarity, I’ve begun to reclaim hope as an active essence rooted in courage and responsibility. Not a story I tell to avoid despair, but a way of living that embraces the unknown with grace.

Hi Peter,

I’ve just noticed something I haven’t noticed before in what you said here:

I recall conversations years ago where I admitted feeling that the hope I was leaning into was making life grim and depressing. The hope I was taught was tied to unmet expectations projected onto some imagined life after death where all would be well… I wondered if it might be better not to hope at all. When I shared this, the response was nearly universal: You have to have hope, or you’ll fall into despair. – Despair on one side, despair on the other – a catch-22.

It seems you were taught to hope in a glorious life after death, where all your sorrows would be gone. Such a religious doctrine usually makes excuses for the suffering we’re experiencing in the here and now, and even enables abuse. Instead of dealing with the abuse, and encouraging the believers to seek a better, more fulfilling life in the present, this doctrine is giving false hope of a better future while turning a blind eye on the current abuses – on the problems that could be and should be addressed.

Such doctrine is disempowering the believers, telling them to remain in suffering and to give up (or never develop) personal agency, with which they could change their lives for the better.

And then if you don’t feel like hoping in something imagined, distant and unreachable, and when you feel frustrated by the life you’re told to live in the here and now – the religious leaders and others in your surroundings tell you that you have to hope, otherwise you’ll fall into despair.

So they’re trying to keep your spirit alive by offering false hope as the only remedy against the suffering you experience in the here and now. And then perhaps even guilt-tripping you that if you don’t have that hope, you’re not a good believer.

I wonder if that’s the experience you grew up with (or encountered at some point in your life)? Because it certainly teaches a false notion of hope – basically hope that is not based in reality, but in wishful thinking. Illusion, as T.S. Eliot called it:

Take the statements: “Life without hope is a grim one.” “Live without hope.” They sound similar, but they point in opposite directions. The first assumes hope is essential for meaning. The second, echoing T.S. Eliot, invites us to let go of clinging to specific outcomes. It doesn’t suggest despair, but rather a posture of openness, of freedom from illusion.

You rejected that kind of hope. And I say: good for you! You started looking for different ways to deal with the pain you were experiencing:

That led me to a deeper question: why, when we try to change a story we tell ourselves, do we feel such pressure, both internal and external, to replace it immediately with a new one? What are we so afraid of in the silence between narratives?

When I considered removing my story of hope, I was told the only alternative was to fill that space with a story of despair. But over time, I’ve learned this isn’t true. You can stop telling a story without replacing it. You can leave the space open, and remain whole.

You rejected the false notion of hope, and you opened yourself to the unknown: to live without hope. Live without that kind of hope. The disempowering hope, which keeps one stuck in unnecessary pain and suffering.

It’s not the kind of hope that helps us deal with the suffering that we cannot escape, with life circumstances that we cannot change. Rather, it’s the false hope that discourages us from changing what we actually could change.

If I understood you well, that’s the notion of hope you rejected. And you opened yourself up to something new…

I just felt like acknowledging that, Peter. I feel I can now better understand why the notion of hope is so important to you and why you’ve been trying to clarify it to yourself and others. I’d certainly benefited from your contemplation, so thank you 🙏