Courage

Its a beautiful word. Yes it is. Here are a few lines over it:-
Courage means fearlessness. Society will try in every way to force you according to its ideas. It is better to suffer than to compromise, because through suffering your soul will be born. Trhrough compromise you may save your skin but your soul will be lost.
Courage means to be an individual; not to be a sheep but to be a lion. Courage means the capacity to assert:"I am myself, and my life is my life, and I am going to live it in my way. I am not here to live acccording to others, and I wont allow anybody to dictate to me how I should live, what I should do. I will live according to my light whatsoever the cost, even If I go astray." It is better to go to hell by your own decision rather than to go to heaven by somebody else's order, because then heaven will be a slavery.
Courage means the courage to be free. Courage means freedom. If you reduce it to the essential core it is dying to the past. If yu die to the religion you are born in, you die to the society you are born in, you die to the whole past, you die to history and time. You are born anew- a new human being who belongs to no race, to no country, to no religion, but who belongs to existence - a religious person but not a Christian, not a Hindu, not a Mohammedan.

A meditator needs a totally different kind of courage. The courage to drop the past. To drop the past you will have to become a child everyday, and your ego wants to be a n adult not a child. Your ego wants to pile up the past and wants to sit on it so that it looks higher than others. Without the past you will always remain a child with no knowledge, but full of wonder, of awe. Therefore, the only courage is to drop the known and to move in unknown. And it has not to be done only once, it has to be done every moment. It is not a question that once done it is done forever. You have to do it every moment, every day, till the very last moment of your life when you are dying on your bed. Then too you have to continue the process of dying to the past so that you can live each moment with pristine clarity, with no dust on your mirror. When you can reflect the present as it is , you know what god is. God is another name for that which is.

Courage means courage to drop knowledge, courage to be innocent again, courage to function from a state of not-knowing. I dont know any other courage.

(Excerpted from Walking in the Zen, Sitting in the Zen, Osho)

The experience of joy that unknown brings, the great ecstasy that starts happening with the unknown, makes you strong enough, gives you a certain integrity, makes your intelligence sharp. For the first time you start feeling that life is not just boredom but adventure. Slowly, slowly fears disappear.

Basically courage is risking the known for the unknown, the familiar for the unfamiliar, the comfortable for the uncomfortable arduous pilgrimage to some unknown destination. One never knows whether one will be able to make it or not. It is gambling, but only gamblers know what life is.

(Excerpted from Come, Come, Yet Again Come, Osho)