Krista Tippett: Welcome back to the next session of Hope Is a Muscle.

My definition of spiritual life at its best, my most succinct definition, is that it is about befriending reality. And there are lots of ways to explain that, and I won’t do that here, but I will say that one of my great companions in that understanding is the Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön, and particularly her book When Things Fall Apart. It’s true, actually, all the time, that something is falling apart. But we certainly have had periods recently where it feels like a global reality. So I found myself turning back to that book, and in fact, I’m just gonna read a little passage for you, which will give you the flavor, if you haven’t found this book for yourself.

“Things falling apart is a kind of testing, and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together, and they fall apart. Then they come together again, and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen — room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.”

So in the middle of the pandemic I invited Devendra Banhart to come on the show. He is an incredible Venezuelan-American musician and a deep soul. And we had seen that somewhere he had spoken about When Things Fall Apart as a book that’s important to him, and Pema Chödrön as a teacher to him. And he has described his copy of When Things Fall Apart as a literary version of an “in case of emergency, break glass box.” So I got into my recording cave that had been created in my basement in lockdown, and he spoke to me from his home studio in East Los Angeles, and we read some favorite passages to each other and reflected on what it is to be alive and looking for meaning right now. And that search continues beyond the pandemic.

So he took me to a part of When Things Fall Apart, which actually has the title “Hopelessness and Death.” And it has statements like this in it: “If we’re willing to give up hope that insecurity and pain can be exterminated, then we can have the courage to relax with the groundlessness of our situation.” She talked about the “beginning of the beginning” being giving up hope. She says, “Without giving up hope — that there’s somewhere better to be, that there’s someone better to be — we will never relax with where we are or who we are.” So I wanted to talk to Devendra about that.

Tippett: You know, I use the word “hope” a lot, and I always use it and I always say, hope is muscular. Hope is a muscle. Hope is a choice. And hope isn’t like optimism, which is like wishful thinking. So it challenges me when Pema Chödrön uses this language of hopelessness, so then I was looking farther in the chapter after you sent your passages. And — do you remember this? I think it’s on the next page. She says that the word in Tibetan for hope is “rewa.” The word for fear is “dokpa.” And there’s a word that is used which combines hope and fear. And she says, “Hope and fear is a feeling with two sides. As long as there’s one, there’s always the other. … In the world of hope and fear, we always have to change the channel, change the temperature, change the music, because something is getting uneasy, something is getting restless, something is beginning to hurt … we keep looking for alternatives.” This is the place she says, “You could even put ‘Abandon hope’ on your refrigerator door instead of more conventional aspirations like ‘Every day in every way I’m getting better and better.’” [laughs]

Banhart: Ugh, I love that. I love that. You know, I have a tattoo gun, and I think I just found my next tattoo: “Abandon hope.” It’s great. It’s freeing, because it’s — ugh, I love that. I love that.

Tippett: Right. But just explain why it’s freeing, because every time I start explaining it to myself here, I feel like it doesn’t make sense.

Banhart: Well, I will explain it by reading another passage from, actually, the previous page. “To think that we can finally get it all together is unrealistic. To seek for some lasting security is futile. … One has to give up hope that this way of thinking will bring us satisfaction. Suffering begins to dissolve when we can question the belief or the hope that there’s anywhere to hide.”

Tippett: That does it.

Banhart: Yeah, that does it. [laughs] I really, though, think that there’s something very cool about what you said — that hope is a muscle, though. We should clarify that we’re not saying that hope is bad and that we’re anti-hope. We’re not anti-hope. [laughs]

Tippett: [laughs] No.

Banhart: No, but it’s more the reality of effacing this delusional hope that’s based on escaping suffering or just making everything good or running from something that feels bad, as opposed to — that line, “Suffering begins to dissolve when we can question the belief or the hope that there’s anywhere to hide” — I mean, that’s the thing. We’re stuck together. We’re in this together. There’s nowhere to hide. There’s a billion distractions, and so much of our entire life is spent in those distractions, but the hope that suffering will go away if I don’t look at it, that’s the wrong kind of hope. That’s the hope we’re not so into. [laughs]

Tippett: Right. Well, she also talks about that hope we get addicted to.

Banhart: Oh, sure, right — like “someday” and “if only” — those words that are like, the worst words in the world. [laughs] Like you said, though, it’s not a wishing thing. It’s like, I have hope that I can deal with this badness that is definitely here, [laughs] with patience, with kindness, and find something to be grateful for from it. I have no faith — I have zero, zilch, zero faith in today being a good day. Today will not be a good day.

Tippett: [laughs] That’s right.

Banhart: But I can try to do good today.

[music]

Tippett: So as Devendra said, this piece of wisdom, this teaching, is not anti-hope. Actually, what comes to me is an analogy from deep Christian theology. The German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer talked about something that he called “cheap grace,” a flimsy version of what the muscular notion of grace really means. And so what this conversation with Devendra makes me think about is that — it’s a good way to think about, also, that there’s kind of a “cheap hope” going around, hope that’s not this muscle that we’re talking about.

And if you listen to part three, you’re gonna hear Devendra speak about a practice he does, called tonglen, which is a Buddhist ritual of breathing in, of being present to what we feel we can hardly bear in the world, and also using our breath to send into the world what we wish for the world. So that sounds like a private spiritual practice, but I want to think of it as a way of orienting towards this meaningful hope that also is going to shift the way we walk through the world and we bear witness, in very concrete ways.

And in part two, we will actually try on that practice.

I’ll see you next time, when you’re ready to begin again.