Courage and Truth are intimately connected. Courage is a prerequisite to Truth. It keeps you on the right path and steers you away from a false and treacherous comfort zone.
While the ultimate Truth may be an abstract understanding of the manifest and the unmanifest, it is reached through a concrete journey. A journey that compels us to look deep and if necessary, course-correct. Retiring to a monastery is not required, but a paradigm shift in perception is. The path to Truth (or enlightenment) forces you to take a candid look at your beliefs, and notions about various things. The rearrangement of the inner furniture—even junking some—requires courage.
This is not to say that the proverbial beaten track leads to blind alleys. However, if that track is chosen for fear of the wild, then that fear will block the light of Truth. Gathering sufficient courage will lead to an inner revolution. Truth is not for the weak; it requires the ability to leap into the unknown. If you compromise and ignore your inner voice, you miss out on the opportunity to live life and unearth its treasures.
However, it is dangerous to confuse the inner voice of consciousness with the guileful voice of insatiable desires and drives. A callous covetousness may make someone ‘courageous’ enough to satisfy his whims without caring for others. So, a child may want to eat all the possible flavours of ice-cream available, while the adults may want cars, houses, awards, sex partners…Courage involves a lofty kind of ‘selfishness’. The person of courage always pays the price. The object is not to hurt the other, or to gain unfairly, but live a true and meaningful life; if someone is hurt, so be it. Like Lord Krishna’s advice to Arjuna in the Mahabharata war, the object is not to kill or grab unethically, but given the circumstances there was no choice for Arjuna but to fight. To renounce it all at that point would have been a cop-out. A painful choice for Arjuna, but true--and yes, the price was dearly paid.
-Harvinder Kaur
(www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?NewsID=1014159&CatID=19 - 49k; Tuesday, February 21, 2006 )
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