Fear is not a weakness. Nor is it a childish
indulgence. Fear plays an essential role in the unfolding of our lives. Fear
keeps us from touching fire, swallowing razor blades, and kissing rattlesnakes.
Fear in and of itself is not the problem. It’s the misapplication of fear that
causes all the damage.
For the ancient Greeks courage was
the most important of virtues, for without it, none of the other virtues are
possible. How can we be compassionate without the courage to love? How can we
be strong without the courage to push past the limits of our endurance? And how
can we be smart without the courage to admit ignorance and press onward into
new areas of learning and mastery?
But courage
is frightening. It asks us to risk everything.
I think we’re afraid of courage
because courage asks us to abandon the supports we have worked so hard to
construct. Courage asks us to sacrifice our safety and comfort. To be brave is
to venture out beyond the reach of our protections, into an unknown field where
none of the old rules apply and everything we know is irrelevant. To be
courageous is to be vulnerable.
Courage begins with the willingness
to let go. Courage and renunciation are two sides of one coin. Not only do we
have to let go of our old support systems, we also have to let go of the idea
that we are not enough. To be courageous we have to come to understand that
there are qualities and strengths within us that have not yet been realized.
Renouncing our old, limited, and limiting self-definition goes hand in hand
with courage.
Courage is also an affirmation of the
goodness of the universe. Fear, on the other hand, is often a misguided
overreach of the ego feebly asserting its so-called power in an attempt to
control everything. The fearful mind believes that we are not enough, and the
universe is not enough either. Courage, on the other hand, means letting go of
control and trusting that if the means are pure, the ends will take care of
themselves. We must learn to use our egos, and not let our egos use us.
This then is the metaphysical
foundation of courage – the view that all is one and that our lives are sacred
expressions of the formless ground of being beyond all thoughts and forms.
Debilitating fear is only possible when we have forgotten our original
relationship with the divine. Again and again Jesus counsels his students to “fear
not,” because anxiety and fear sever our delicate tether to the eternal. Coming
out of fearfulness and into courage opens the portals to higher consciousness.
In the world’s hero journey tales the
hero must face the monster again and again to be tested, and even more
importantly, to have everything about them that is underdeveloped and
inauthentic stripped away by the ferocity of the ordeal. While we may not
literally be fighting monsters, the underlying truth remains. There are
obstacles between us and the life we were born to live. Without cultivating the
courage to face them, we rob ourselves and the wounded world of the healing
elixir our transformation would bring both to our own lives and the lives of
innumerable others, for when we heal ourselves we take an enormous step toward
healing our families and communities. Instead of running away from fear, we
should be running toward it. As Joseph Campbell wrote, “The cave you fear to
enter holds the treasure you seek.” Without courage we will never know who we
really are. Only courage unlocks our sacred potential, latent within us and,
for now, hidden behind a fog of fear. Courage is not the absence of fear.
Courage is the willingness to act in spite of the fear – to feel the fear and
do it anyway.
[This piece first appeared in my column "A to Zen" in the March/April edition of Unity Magazine, and is reproduced here with permission.]
