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life. Others only vegetate, they don't live.
Courage can be of two types. The first type is the most prevalent one. The first type is cultivated. You repress your fear and you go on repressing your fear, so much so that it disappears from your consciousness and becomes part of your unconscious. You are no more aware of it and you start thinking that there is no fear in you.
In ordinary situations it will work, but in any extraordinary situation in which real courage is needed you will have a breakdown. The fear will surface again. It was only on the surface that you were courageous. It had not become your soul.
The second type, the second category of courage is spontaneous, natural, uncultivated. It does not come by repressing fear. It comes by understanding fear, by seeing deeply into your fear. And the moment you start looking into fear, the fear starts evaporating because suddenly you become aware that you are not it. It is just an idea in the mind and you are the witness of it. One thing becomes absolutely certain, that you are beyond it, that it does not constitute you or your being. In that very moment courage springs up, wells up. And that is a totally different thing. In no situation will it leave you. Even death cannot destroy it.
I teach the second type of courage. The first type is needed by all kinds of soldiers all around the world. The second type is needed by the sannyasin. The sannyasin has to live an uncultivated life, natural, spontaneous, alert, aware, but absolutely non-repressive. Neither fear has to be repressed nor greed, nor sex -- nothing has to be repressed. Everything has to be understood. And the miracle is that through understanding comes transcendence, through understanding comes transformation.
Sannyas is a death and a birth: the death of the old, of the past, of all that you have been up to now, and the beginning of something absolutely new. Sannyas means that you are becoming discontinuous from your own past, you are dropping the old identity, you are entering into an uncharted territory with no map.
The master can only give you hints. Maps are not possible because the territory is constantly
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