‘Courage’ is a form-related word, or an active-compassion related word. Courage certainly means the ability to ‘feel the fear and do it anyway’; but it also has the sense of really owning your capacity to love and care for others. We often stifle the great capacity for love that we have, through our fear of losing all sense of boundaries – as if we needed boundaries! Courage is very much linked with compassion. Compassion, at the level of our intrinsic nature, is linked with all our activities – especially our activities of personal interaction.
p243, Wearing the Body of Visions, Ngakpa Chögyam, Aro Books, 1995, ISBN 1-898185-03-4
We're all equal in the sense that we are all enlightened. Then, we're all unequal in our experience of clarity or confusion. In the ultimate sphere of existence there is no difference between people. But in the relative sphere of existence there are relative differences between people and that can function usefully in terms of active compassion.
Say that a child acts in a spiteful way towards you. You recognise that he or she has limited capacity to understand the outcome of their acts and how they're understood in the adult world. It means you can make a lot of allowances for them. It means that you can be kind. You can be tolerant. You can be forgiving.
It's all based on understanding; understanding that someone has less capacity; less intelligence; less insight; more pain; more confusion – whatever is the condition of the person. If you know that someone is in more pain than you are, you can let go of any animosity that might arise in relation to what they do.
p19-21, Wearing the Body of Visions, Ngakpa Chögyam, Aro Books, 1995, ISBN 1-898185-03-4
