What is courage? To me, when you feel a very real fear, and you take action in spite of it, as you do something in spite of the fear.

That fear is like a wall that prevents you from taking action. Sometimes that wall serves us, it’s why we know better than to jump off the Golden Gate bridge or a tall building, and why there is a universal fear of heights.

So a one year old that doesn’t know better, might see a crocodile on Riverbank, and be curious enough to walk up to him. That isn’t courage, that is a lack of knowledge of what can actually have a fairly negative physical effect on you.

But there are other things in life, that people looking at it from their paradigm would assume that you’re an incredibly courageous person, when in fact courage ceases to take part in an action.

Let me give you an example. For most men, approaching a woman that they are attracted to in public is cause for great trepidation. Most men, no matter how successful or attractive they might be, will still refuse to do this without some social greasing of the interaction such as being introduced to each other by a mutual friend.

The sense of self fears rejection, that we’re not good enough, attractive enough successful enough, whatever it might be. As the pursuers, we are putting ourselves at risk that the woman is going to tell us that our genes are nowhere good enough to propagate to the next generation, she’ll be looking elsewhere.

For most of my life, it was no different for me. However, unlike all my other buddies, I would always attempt to climb the wall of fear, and other to get to the other side. While I always successfully climbed the wall, my foray onto the other side most of the time I wasn’t.

Then as I became completely comfortable with myself, and the ego started to dissolve, not that I still don’t have one, but it is far less strong than it was growing up, something just clicked.

The wall of fear just completely crumbled, and if fear did manifest in the form of a stone obstacle, it was more of a pebble that I quickly kicked aside.

My goal, is to have a pleasant interaction, make someone feel good about themselves.

So it’s not about me. I’m just there, trying to create a positive interaction, and if they don’t want to be with me, or they were dating someone, well, then that’s fine. I’m no longer at risk. Therefore there is no fear. But if you look at it from somebody else’s paradigm, they’d consider me a courageous person.

So when you see that wall of fear between you and your goal, whatever that might be, one needs to ask themselves whether the fears justified and serves us as protecting us from getting into a physical fight with Chuck Liddell, or whether it’s a manifestation of the ego, a perceived sense of self, that feels threatened.
If it’s the latter, then the first thing to do is be aware of that, and then remind ourselves that we are a microscopic speck of dust on this earth, and expand that out into the universe, and realize how small we really are, so that we are freed by a relative size, and this is in a go at construct of course, but that will allow us to be free of the fear immediately in front of us and able to dispel this wall into the ether from which it came.