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Brian J. Weller answers the following question

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Question

What does courage mean now? Sarah Francis


Answer

Brian J. Weller: This is a great question – courage; from the French coeur, the heart. A very, very huge question this one. I guess, really, courage now is about speaking one’s truth without any compromise despite the risk of harm, injury, censor loss. That’s the real courage. I think courage now really – this is probably one of the most important questions we’re facing today in the Table of Free Voices. It’s really, really important, I think, to really step into the heart. I guess that’s really what this question is talking about and that’s what courage is. I think the greatest courage, actually, maybe the greatest act of courage today is to feel the pain and to feel the suffering of the people who are in conflict. That takes a lot of courage. You know, in a sense it’s easy just to shut that out, but to really feel what is going on, that takes courage. I think the flipside of that is having the courage to truly forgive ourselves and particularly when we feel we’ve been aggrieved. I think that’s a really deep, personal question. You know, can we really forgive our own past? Can we forgive our guilt? I think if we don’t do that, if we can’t do that, then humanity doesn’t have much of a future. I think this is, again, a deep question. You know, do we have the courage to complete and heal the past, so that we can create the future? That’s a huge act of courage right there. Creating the future means stepping into the possibility of what we truly want together. It’s so easy to completely reason it, continually repeating the past, and I think that’s in a sense one of the real difficulties we’ve got together as human beings. So yeah, the courage to be truly happy, the courage to forgive ourselves, maybe the courage to stand up and say what we truly feel.