The next step in The Direct Way is an exploration of courage. Courage is not one of those words you hear that often anymore, but even in our modern world, courage is essential because life can be challenging—not only the life around you but also the life within you. Courage is an awakened quality.
When the great twentieth-century Hindu sage Ramana Maharshi was asked to describe the characteristics of an enlightened person—a guru or Master—he answered, “Steady abidance in the Self, looking at all with an equal eye, unshakable courage at all times, in all places and circumstances.”1 He explained enlightenment in many ways, most of them different from this definition, so I paid attention when he equated enlightenment with unshakable courage. What he meant is it takes courage to live an enlightened life, to live an embodied, awake, vital life.
There are many ways we can shrink away from being courageous. Sometimes it takes courage to be truthful, sometimes it takes courage to be peaceful, sometimes it takes courage to love. Courage is the atmosphere within which all the practices in this final section—Enlightened Relativity and the Paradox of Being: Integrating Insight into Daily Life—exist. They all require an element of courage and can be challenging because they aim to loosen up certain forms of egocentric fixation. Just because you wake up from identifying yourself with your ego doesn’t mean your ego disappears. A lifetime of dysfunction doesn’t magically fall right out of the ego; some of it does, and for some people a lot of it does, but there’s always something we need to attend to.
This practice is simple and pointed, but it’s powerful as well. It takes courage for your insight to be humanized and allowed to move through you as an embodied way of being in the world. Remember, each time you notice a fixation, each time you notice a sticking point, each time you notice a place where you’re holding on or overly insistent or pulling back too far, it will take courage to meet those places. It takes courage to be honest, it takes courage to love, it takes courage to understand another person, it takes courage to choose love over fear, and it takes courage to pivot toward peace.
•Throughout the day, pay attention to moments when courage is called for. As with all the practices in this section, this can be applied to moments when you are dealing with your own experience of being, a life situation, or interaction with others. This courage is an undercurrent of the awakened way of being.
•Ask yourself: Where in my life is a bit more courage called for? Where am I holding back because I have not yet been willing to embody courage?
•Pay attention to places that invite or require courage, whether it’s the way you relate to some part of your own experience, the way you relate to somebody else, or a crisis or life situation. When you notice an area where it may take a little more courage to embody your own truth or embody your own love, step into that courage.
•Often we get hung up on thinking we have to wait until our fear goes away or that we must engage in some process to remove our fear, but if you wait for the absence of fear, you’ll wait forever, because you never know when a moment of fear or hesitation is going to arise. What happens when you stop waiting and begin to exercise courage, not in a cavalier or indulgent way, but in a conscious way?
•When you shift your orientation, you’ll encounter moments when you ask, “What might it mean for me to be a little more courageous right now?” It’s a question that can open up the pathways through which insight and your own deepest values in life can flow and be embodied. Notice where you might be withholding courage and examine what it might mean in a practical way for you to embody a bit more courage.
•Courageously clearing these pathways for insight means confronting hesitation, doubt, confusion, and fear. That’s how it’s done. You can’t avoid them—you must face them. It takes courage to do this kind of inquiry and confront your own conditioning.