Sometimes students report that they were able to meet a daunting situation with hope where before they would have responded by becoming hopeless, and of course, this is progress. Still, there is no hope involved in Field practice, the aim of which is alignment. In fact, hope, while better than hopelessness, amounts to counterintention to the extent that we desire the condition for which we are hoping. This is because hope looks off into the future for the desired fulfillment, while deliberate intending allows the desired state to be established in the past, as something already done. As long as we believe that the desired condition is not yet at hand, even if we are believing that it will happen soon, we forfeit the sense that it already has happened, and our inner gesture falls short of a deliberate claim.

To understand better how this works, imagine that there is no traffic rule establishing that “red means stop” and “green means go,” and that, lacking this rule, drivers begin hoping that the colors have these meanings, respectively. We readily recognize that red and green do not mean anything inherently, and that it is nothing more than the belief, shared by drivers, that “red means stop” and “green means go” that brings about the fact, allowing drivers to drive through intersection without worry and protected by the fulfillment of their common intention. The power to create the fact through claiming the fact before the fact—of this, hope knows nothing.

Hope is a kind of intention, one that abdicates creative authority and claims the indefinite. Thus hope fulfills itself in perpetual deferment and waiting. Alignment, on the other hand, takes us beyond hope by requiring us to take a stand in the desired state even before the facts agree.

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