Hello and welcome to another episode of the secular Buddhism podcast.

This is episode number 78.

I am your host Noah Rochetta and today I'm talking about hope and fear and specifically

how these two things correlate with mindfulness.

Keep in mind the Talai Lama's advice do not use what you learn from Buddhism to be a Buddhist,

use it to be a better whatever you already are.

I like to emphasize that at the beginning of every episode because it's very important

to understand that the Buddhism isn't something that's meant to be preached.

So I'm going to emphasize that every time, every podcast, except for the ones where I forget,

which I know there have been several.

But this idea of no hope, no fear, what does that mean?

Well, we know that suffering arises when we want things to be other than they are.

Where there is hope, there is fear, and where there is fear, there is hope.

They're like two sides of the same coin.

When we feel uneasy, when we get restless, when we want something to change, something

to be different about ourselves or about others, we hope that things could be another way.

With that in mind, this concept of having no hope, it's that having no hope can be a radical

affirmation of acceptance. It's like when you truly accept things as they are, you don't hope

for them to be any different than how they are. That's kind of the mental game that's going on

with this expression of no hope, no fear.

Now, in past episodes, I've talked about the concept of having a koan.

A zen koan is like a riddle, an expression, it could be a sentence.

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