How to Know Higher Worlds – Rudolf Steiner

Such self-education in courage and fearlessness develops quite specific forces that we need for initiation into higher knowledge. 

Just as we need healthy nerves as physical beings to make use of our physical senses, so - as beings of soul – we need the strength that develops only in courageous and fearless natures. 

For as we penetrate the higher mysteries, we see things that were previously hidden from us by the illusions of the senses.  In fact, it is a blessing that our physical senses do not allow us to perceive the higher truths.

In this way they protect us from things that, if we saw them unprepared, would cause us great dismay, things we could not bear to see. 

As students.. we must train ourselves to bear these sights.

Sartor Resartus – Thomas Carlyle

… all at once, there rose a Thought in me, and I asked myself: 'What art thou afraid of ? Wherefore, like a coward, dost thou for ever pip and whimper, and go cowering and trembling? Despicable biped!

What is the sum-total of the worst that lies before thee?

Death?

Well, Death; and say the pangs of Tophet too, and all that the Devil and Man may, will or can do against thee!

Hast thou not a heart; canst thou not suffer whatso it be; and, as a Child of Freedom, though outcast, trample Tophet itself under thy feet, while it consumes thee?  Let it come, then; I will meet it and defy it!'

And as I so thought, there rushed like a stream of fire over my whole soul and I shook base Fear away from me for ever. I was strong, of unknown strength; a spirit, almost a god. Ever from that time the temper of my misery was changed: not Fear or whining sorrow was it, but Indignation and grim fire-eyed Defiance!

Thus had the Everlasting NO pealed authoritatively through all the recesses of my Being, of my ME; and then was it that my whole ME stood up, in native God created majesty, and with emphasis recorded its Protest.

Such a Protest, the most important transaction in Life, may that same Indignation and Defiance, in a psychological point of view, be fitly called.

The Everlasting No had said: 'Behold, thou art fatherless, outcast, and the Universe is mine (the Devil's): to which my whole Me now made answer:

 'I am not thine, but free and for ever hate thee!'

Rollo May – Man’s search for himself

Courage is required not only in a person’s occasional crucial decision for his own freedom but in the little hour to hour decisions which place the bricks in the structure of his building of himself into a person who acts with freedom and responsibility.

Logan Pearsall Smith - Afterthoughts

What is more mortifying than to feel that you have missed the plum for want of courage to shake the tree.