Who Wants To Be A Coward?

No one wants to be a coward, so if we know what it takes to be a coward, perhaps we can avoid becoming one!

When we read books or articles on how we can improve, or self-help books that tell us how we can help ourselves, we are in a twilight zone of assumptions and speculation. To get real, all we need to do is look at ourselves - what we are doing now and how we were acting yesterday - this is where we learn. When we look away from what we really are, it is because admitting what we really are is too painful. Instead, we lose ourselves in books and imaginations of what we should be, then, instead of seeing and facing our cowardice, we imagine ourselves as heroes. The problem with this is that until we see and acknowledge our cowardice, it will not change. So the first step in avoiding cowardice is seeing it.

How we conduct ourselves in relationship with others indicates our state of mind. If we come from a controlling place where everything has to be our way, we are displaying our cowardice because while cowards hide behind their concepts and hypothesis, heroes have their eyes wide open at all times for new possibilities. When we hide behind beliefs and theories at the expense of seeing what is happening at this very moment, or what is real, we display our fears. If our beliefs foster guilt, repression, fear, hatred, separation, sectarianism, and judgementalism rather than creating love, compassion, forgiveness, and true generosity, and if this is what we are teaching our children by our actions; then we will lose our children, as well as our own souls.

We remain hostage to fear when we hide from anything, especially our deep psychological tendencies that we have cultivated over a lifetime. In order to become free from these tendencies and become what all of these self-help books suggest, we must find a general freedom; this is the bottom line. To become free, however, involves facing our tendencies head on, and this means acknowledging them. If we can't admit them or if we actually enjoy our subtle, controlling, manipulative ways, no self-help book in the world will help, and even worse; if we are the type that feels we need no help at all, well . . . then we are probably beyond help. In that case, we must learn the hard lessons on our own; the lesons that our karma will chu
out

Authentic freedom is never freedom from; it is always just . . . freedom. Freedom is a state of mind - boundless and uninhibited - the mind of a hero. The mind of a coward is suspicious and fearful all the time; fearful of new ideas, different thoughts and anything that disturbs its delusions.

Authentic freedom, on the other hand, is a release from all of this. Authentic freedom is the opposite of attempting to keep things from changing, because things do in fact change regardless of our most committed attempts to keep things the same. Conservatism, if looked at closely, is filled with fear - the fear of change. For a moment, think about what it is that we are fearful of. Why do we constantly pick up one self-help book after another, and they never help for long? It's because we never get to the root of our problems.

If we study ourselves in depth, which is a form of meditation, we would quickly discover what it is that we are fearful of; which is simply not being happy. But instead of exploring our unhappiness and fear, we attempt to become free from fear . . . and embrace happiness. This doesn't work. Only in the " seeing" of our fear and our unhappiness, followed by the acceptance of our fear and unhappiness, offers the possibility of transcending both.

For it's only when we stop trying to cultivate bravery and reject cowardice, and instead accept what we are in every moment, fully and unabashedly, does the possibility exist of changing ourselves fundamentally.

And therein lies the possibility of freedom. nnn-----------------------------------------------------------------nnn