The word Courage's etymological roots come from the Roman word 'Cor' and span history persisting in modern-day Spanish in the word for Heart, or Corazon. Which just so happen to be in the title of 8 out of 10 famous latino songs. But rather than focus on the emotive side of the Heart, lets focus on its deeper function. The etymological thread hints at the strong connection between the Heart and Courage.
True courage means aligning our actions with the voice and direction of the Heart. While there is an emerging field of study that researches the ‘intelligence of the heart’, conducted by institutes such as Heart Math, Cardiologist such as Dr. Paul Pearshal, and others, many of us still scoff at the ‘wisdom of the heart’, prematurely dismissing it as a type of new-age euphemism for acting selfishly and following our desires.
On a closer look, we realize that there are countless examples meriting the elusive 'wisdom of the heart' and soon find that it would behoove us all to turn our ears towards its all too salient guidance. Courage has a few modes of being defined, and we’ll dive into the most simplistic form first and move into deeper layers and its unique connection to the Heart from there.
Courage is typically understood and defined as the willingness to act in the face of fear, uncertainty, and doubt. The core skills of courage are the willingness to act and the ability to manage fear and anxiety in order to act. Courage involves acting for something we feel has deep value; action that will provide more richness to our lives than the route of avoidance. Courage takes us out of our shells and thrusts us from the consoling comfort of passivity into the friction of action for something we deem to be greater and worthy of the danger. Courage is risky, terrifying, and a voluntary choice.
Why, though, is courage such an esteemed virtue? Courage is lauded because it is innovative. Courage is creative. If passivity is receiving the world around us, absorbing and analyzing and contemplating, courage is acting and initiating our inner intelligence and wisdom in the realm of emissive action. We universally recognize the paralyzing power fear plays in all of our lives and know intuitively how difficult it is to break beyond the boundaries of fear. When we see it done in others, we recognize a quality of something we want to emulate within our own lives.
We know that all great acts in the world were born from courage. Everything we use in our daily lives, from technology to basic necessities were created by someone who broke through fear and created courageously.
Courage is innovative because it emerges our of fear that thrives in maintaining the status qou. In a world of fear that invisibly dictates norms and limitations, Courage pierces through the inhibiting paradigm and boldly creates an illuminating new path forged by an intuition of the soul. Fear builds psychological structures that are reflected into social structures and then reflected back into our own psyches, creating invisible buildings and borders that limit us from seeing clearly. We often don’t realize it, but the walls of the fear of past generations keep us in a limited spectrum of consciousness.
Every great author or religious leader, visionary, or imminent scientist, saw a limitation in the status quo and had an intuition there was more to the picture. In the realm of the spirit, visionaries ranging from Socrates to Martin Luther King Jr., cultivated a courageous Heart whose vison bore through the fear based structures of their age. Socrates shifted the way people thought and spoke regarding truth, creating a gaping schism from the foundation of ancient culture. Jesus broke the law of the land, challenged cultural mores, ridiculed the economic elite, and defied the use of violence. Religous reformist Martin Luther broke the chain of 1000 years of the Catholic church’s monopoly on salvation and opened the doors to a more felt connection to the divine that superseded any orthrodox structure. And more recently, Martin Luther King Jr. fearlessly spoke his truth to the myopic and oppressive cultural norms of the time; they all rebelliously challenged the status quo and sought to innovate what was considered normal and acceptable at the time with little more than the Courage of their hearts.
They saw through the robotic nature of limited understanding and intuited there was a better, more universal, and integrated truth than what prevailed at the time. They all lived during uncertain times and knew the backlash their actions would invite, yet acted anyway, knowing they were sowing the seeds for future generations to experience more freedom. Martin Luther summed it up beautifully:
“Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.”
I want to iterate that Courage not be such a historical act, but presents itself in small but everyday choices in our lives. Courage could just as well be the courage to finish our paper or override our procrastination and create something that a fear of failure is otherwise preventing. Fear and Courage have a million expressions, but it all revovles stepping into the fear with the wisdom of the heart anc acting despite our minds doubting voice.
Surfing a 20-foot massive wave might be terrifying for a seasoned public speaker, but as veteran, big wave surfer Mark Matthews will readily attest, for him, public speaking is far more nerve-racking. Either way, it is clear that fear keeps us bound in the safe harbor of the ‘known’. Whether it is keeping us bound to job trajectory because ‘the pension looks good’ or choosing a college based on vocational security or not telling our parents something because we’re afraid of how they’ll respond, or writing the book we’ve always dreamed of, the same energy of playing it safe prevails when scripted by fear. Courage is the force of the Heart that propels us into the unknown despite those feelings.
"You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore." — William Faulkner
Courage is the deep knowledge in the heart that our fears are baseless and the countless thoughts swirling around them are like crows swirling around the garbage of a landfill. Fear, ultimately, is born of the belief in illusion, and Courage is born of a conviction of the Truth. Courage has an innate conviction of our deathless nature and despite the cries of the rational mind that calculates and plans based on the ‘safest route’, Courage is the voice that straightens its back and broadens its shoulders, proclaiming the victory in the Heart before the battle is fought. The Zen archer first shoots his arrow and then aims. An arrow fired from a pure Heart is sure to reach its intended target.
In all the above cases of courage, the Heart was the operating factor. A sense of what was right and true was never reasoned out analytically in the mind, but steeped in the knowledge of the Heart. The movements of Jesus, or Socrates, or Martin Luther, seem so obvious to us now. In the hindsight of history, we collectively and very naturally see the 'rightness' in the actions of such figures. So much so that it sets the tone for moving forward regarding equality, justice and compassionate action. However, at the time, each of these individuals had to have their own battle with the rationale of the time, and discover the wisdom of the Heart in deep solitude. It becomes clear that one of the Hearts biggest foes is the voice of reason. However, reason can neither discern the subtle nature of suppression nor counter the inner anxiety that inhibits audacious action. As the Paul Tillich, regarded as one of the most influential theologians of the 20th century, writes in his book, The Courage To Be :
"Reasoning as a limited cognitive function, detached from the personal center, never could create courage. One cannot remove anxiety by arguing it away."
The connection between the Courage and the Heart is paramount because the Heart represents the "personal center". The Heart represents the very core of the human being that is connected to the source of life. The Heart has an intuition, born before the thinking mind could bifurcate itself into the bindings of language, of its indivisible and infinite nature.
Sri Ramana Maharishi, the famous sage of South India, spoke this of the nature of the Heart:
“The Heart is not physical, it is spiritual. It is that from which thoughts arise, on which they subsist and where they are resolved. The thoughts are the content of the mind and they shape the universe. The Heart is the center of all.”
Courage knows that all of embodied life is a dire predicament, and in many cases, we face choices that leave the cognition crippled. Courage is the strength to act knowing that no matter our action, we are “damned if we do, damned if we don’t”, and doesn’t depend on the type of action, but on the state of mind with which we face the action. As Ramana mentioned, thoughts, which are the substratum of reason, are the content of the mind, and always represent the territory of the known and measurable. The Heart represents a dimension that is immeasurable and precognition, or prior to the carefully structured conclusions of the anayltical mind.
True creativity and true Courage, in the moment of action, defies the nay-saying, overly analytical warnings of the mind and makes the leap anyways in an irresistible expansion. It is that moment of trusting in something that is more real, more felt than rationed, that Courage is born. When we consistently act from this place, many actions can become easier. Science shows us that over time Courage can even be ‘learned’ and hard-wired in the brain, but the initial movement comes from the Heart.
One of the core branches of the metaphysical school of Kashimiri Shaivism, the Spanda school, referred to as 'the teaching on vibration' and considers the Spanda to be the one primordial vibration, or the creative impulse, that unifies all of creation. Spanda permeates the mundane world but is sourced in the transcendental plane, continually pulling back the sense of separation into the primeval plane of oneness which all arises from. Within the physical body, the Spanda is perceived as a vibration emanating in the depth of the heart. With a shift in awareness you can feel it, pulsating within you now. A vast opening to a world inside that is unfathomably deep and profound, unapproachable by the thinking mind.
The very movement of the universal energy is experienced as this direct feeling, or sacred tremor in the Heart, and is in a constant state of either contraction (nimesha) or expansion (unmesha). We can correlate contraction to fear and expansion to unmesha. In other words, when the energy of the universe, the energy that knows it is one with all life, is compelled to act in expansion, which is the movement of evolution on earth, it defies fear and enlarges the sense of what love is and what the true nature of the Heart is. Unfortunately, or interestingly, it is met with contraction, and the movement of love is condemned with aggression from those who haven’t been touched by the energy of expansion. The 60's are a very clear expression of the movement of expansion versus contraction. And remember, three of the four of the historical figures above above were murdered because their ‘expansion’ was threatening to the status quo.
The takeaway is that Courage is more than a mere new-age platitude, but rather a profound movement from deep within the soul that is in alignment with the very energy of God-consciousness, and paramount to overcome many of our current seemingly intractable problems. Courage stands for righteousness and the expression of purity and love in the world but is nearly always met with resistance. Moving through that resistance though, can change the course of humanity and continue to make the movement of love and unity the impulse that guides us towards a brigther future.
The more we have an authentic understanding of our own Heart and a felt conviction that it is connected to the deathless, the more we will find the strength to act from this place and bring the power of the infinite into the world.
We’ll close with a reminder from Bronnie Ware, the palliative care worker famous for her article on the 5 regrets of the dying. The first and third are, you guessed it, about courage. The first one is “I wished I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.” And the third, “I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.” The world, and the rest of our life, is waiting for us to act with courage. Actions born of courage will not only lead to our deep soul fulfillment but will allow the universe to move more uninhibited through us and help take us beyond the shores of the known and into that vast oceanic future of human potential.
We are Infinite Consciousness.
Our Heart knows this.
Let's cut through our mental fears.
Live from the Core of our being.
And lead a life of No Regret.