Misplaced courage

June 28th, 2023

We are entwined in a web, a very comfortable web of ignorance of our true core of individuality. It keeps us buoyed and eases our attempts for deep breaths. It is driven and supported by our need for self-forgetfulness and ignorant of the true energy of our centered self. This web is a lie we ourselves have fashioned and spun so tight that we have no choice but to believe in it, so we can live our lives comfortably and securely and serenely and even ostensibly happily — with a false pretension of courage that we think we have.

We can (and do) strut around and boast and yell about and point to and reference our courage, which is our defining character trait as members of the human race. And we expect that courage to come easily and handily when we actually need to reach for it when faced with real situations. Alas, the courage to be is not something that forms our personality — it comes from the outside of our beings. It comes from god, popularity in the eyes of others, a celebrity, a flag, or our tribe (be it an elite or proletariat), or an unchecked fetish for money and power.

Those are the defenses that form our character and support the grand illusion of what really drives us to do and achieve things we do or expect to happen to us because of our actions and our character. In reality — we are driven away from ourselves, from self-knowledge, and from self-reflection. We are driven to use automatic outside symbolic reflections of our true being. And paradoxically –what we are driven toward is what brings us anxiety. Worrying about wealth, social standing, nationalism, and religion, belonging make us anxious, and yet at the same time, those anxieties lure us to test ourselves by defying them. And that is not courage, that is only a reactionary action to keep us safely deluded about our true selves and our true possibilities.