Cultivating Courage

Matthew Flickstein

(This piece will appear in Living Through the Eyes of Truth, a book Matthew Flickstein is currently writing. He will lead a residential retreat for New York Insight September 11-14, 2003.)

Working with our afflictive emotions takes enormous courage. When we begin to face unpleasant emotions such as fear, anger and jealousy, it may feel like we will die in the process since the pain that comes from the presence of those emotions may be so intense.

Courage does not mean being fear-less. It means learning not to be stopped by the fear. In this context, we can describe courage as dying into each emotional experience, surrendering to the experience, becoming intimate with the experience, penetrating the experience, and so on. It means staying present with the experience through the fear of losing our sense of self, our sense of security, and our belief in the reality of our mental images and concepts to which we are so attached.

It is also the courage to accept our shadow side. Almost everyone in life is dedicated to being perfect. We may want to be the perfect student, employee, employer, partner, meditator, or even to become a saint — the “perfect person.”

Most of our definitions of a perfect person include being consistent, calm, loving, compassionate, wise and so forth — in other words, to have a perfect mind. However, there is no such thing as a perfect mind.

Inherent to creation is the existence of opposites. Everything exists in contrast: there can be no good without evil, no right without wrong, no pleasure without pain, no security without insecurity, no happiness without unhappiness, no teacher without a student, no parent without a child, no enlightenment without delusion, and so forth. Life moves in cycles going from one extreme to the other.

There is a perfection, but we realize it by embracing the duality and ultimately recognizing that we exist beyond it. When we do not recognize that duality is the defining characteristic of our relative existence, we deny half our mind which creates an internal conflict. We separate qualities of mind that we want to project to the world from those qualities that we feel that our minds should not possess (i.e., our shadow side).

In actuality, we possess all qualities of mind; everyone does. In truth, when we are looking at what we believe to be “our mind,” we are looking at the mind of all humanity. It does not mean that we act based upon any of the unskillful qualities we may find. It is just important to have the courage to acknowledge that they are there. There is a biblical injunction, “Resist not Evil.” The meaning is that we must not repress our shadow or the non-acknowledged aspects of our being.

Freedom comes from accepting our humanity, not from denying or hating it. The more we deny one side, the more reactive we are to the other (e.g., the more we hold to pleasure, the more we fear pain; the more we pursue goodness, the more obsessed we are with evil; the more we try to be calm, the more irritated we feel; the more we seek happiness, the more we fear sadness; the more we cling to life, the more terrified we are with death, and so on).

Ultimate reality, the goal of our spiritual search, is a unity of opposites; in ultimate truth there are no boundaries anywhere. To experience this wholeness, we must reclaim those aspects of our mind that we have denied, pushed away, judged, kept hidden and suppressed. This does not mean that we need to go into therapy to delve into our past — it is not about uncovering our unconscious memories. It just means having the courage to be so open with our mental processes, that we can recognize what is truly occurring from moment to moment, thereby noticing its true characteristics.