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UNITY WAY

August 29, 2004

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Secrets of Faith: Courage

by Andrei Yashurin

It has been sad that "the one who can see the invisible, 
can do the impossible". Somebody else noticed that the glory 
of life lies in doing the things that cannot be done. 
I do not know authors of those quotes, but they evidently 
were faith-thinkers. They realized that faith implies 
reaching to things which seem to be impossible to ordinary 
men and women. 

The truth is, our vision is so conditioned by our present 
and past experiences that we can never know which is possible, 
and which is not. I wonder if anyone who lived several 
hundreds years ago could imagine that we will fly across 
oceans within hours. I seriously doubt that even the most 
enlightened thinkers of that time thought of sending 
spacecrafts to the moon and to other planets. As I've read, 
none of authors of science fiction novels who lived 50 
years ago could predict such things as mobile phones and 
the Internet. Even casual glance at the history of our 
civilization leads us to a conclusion that we do not know 
our limits. This applies to human family in general, 
and to our individual lives as well.

Being the creative power, faith is the power to do seemingly 
impossible things.

As we stand at entrance into the realm of the unknown and 
the impossible, we need courage to enter in. It is critically 
important to overcome our fear. Often we find out through 
personal experiences that the greater is our challenge, 
the greater is our fear. 

Let us use the image from a fairy tale to illustrate this 
point. There is a beautiful princess locked in a high tower, 
guarded by a dragon. A hansom prince should kill this dragon 
to rescue his true love. This story is being told through 
ages with different variations. 

We cannot dismiss fairy tales as nice and entertaining 
lies for kids. Their meaning is deeply symbolic - especially 
if they survived many generations. They are parables, 
deserving spiritual interpretation.

The parable of a princess and a dragon teaches us that 
there is an enemy which needs to be conquered before we will 
accept our desired good. This enemy, or dragon, is fear.

Perhaps, it is not absolutely correct to speak about 
"killing a dragon" of fear. We are peaceful warriors. 
Spiritual perception reveals us that the best way to deal 
with fear is to let it die from malnutrition. Let us not 
feed our fear by thoughts and emotions, but turn our attention 
to another direction. Let us stay focused on God, the Source 
of courage within. 

In his small booklet, "The Golden Key", Emmet Fox writes:

"Stop thinking about the difficulty, whatever it is, and 
think about God instead. This is the complete rule, and 
if only you will do this, the trouble, whatever it is, 
will disappear... Your object is to drive the thought of 
the difficulty out of your consciousness, for a few moments 
at least, substituting it the thought of God. This is the 
crux of the whole thing. If you can become so absorbed 
in this consideration of the spiritual world that you forget 
for a while about the difficulty, you will find that you 
are safely and comfortably out of your difficulty". 

This teaching might sound simplistic, but it is not different 
from what the Bible tells. It is the old story of Peter 
walking on water in its essential meaning. Remember, when 
Peter looked on Jesus, he could walk across the sea. But 
as soon as he shifted attention to the raging wind, he became 
afraid and started to sink. 

Mental concentration of God will help us to remain 
peaceful in the midst of all life's storms. But even if 
we cannot overcome all of our fear completely, let it not 
stop our actions.

Courage does not necessarily imply the absence of fear. 
A courageous person moves forward in spite of his/her fear. 
As we take steps toward the fulfillment of our creative 
plans, we find out that they become easier. New confidence 
arise within ourselves. Gradually, we are being prepared 
for greater demonstrations of the power of faith.

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Andrei Yashurin: pczine@yandex.ru

http://pcjournal.ru/talks Talks on Truth

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All messages (c) 2004 by Andrei Yashurin

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