
Strength and courage
I was meditating this evening and the ego, to distract me from stillpoint, threw up some memories of my time studying karate. Those were days when I felt my strength.
And the thought crossed my mind: Can a person feel strong aside from the trappings of things like karate?
Did Tank Man step in front of the tanks in Tieanenmien Square because he was strong and courageous or was that strength and courage called out by the situation? What about Iesha Evans?
In the process of looking, I distinguished out the essential feeling of strength, stripped of all associations with anything – patriotism, prowess, armament, situation, etc.

Iesha Evans protests Baton Rouge police action in July 2016
Strength doesn’t come from something we do or own or know. It comes from something much bigger than ourselves – or at least ourselves as we know ourselves.
I felt strength at that moment for no reason. Just because it was in me.
And I realized that strength, like peace, bliss, love, etc., is a state of consciousness. All three were states of a more refined experience than what we’re in ordinarily. Doorways in to a higher dimension?
I’ll bet I’d find courage to be the same if I looked.
I think we think we’ll enter the higher dimensions through stargates and portals. I think it’ll be through the portals that states of consciousness like peace, love, and strength are.
We can feel the essence of these feelings without needing to study something or lift weights. They’re available in and of themselves. I fully expect to find, when I look, that they emanate from the heart.
That’s all I wanted to say. I want now to return to my meditation and experience my native strength. And, next, courage.
***
In my meditation, I examined strength, courage, and intelligence to see if all three were states of consciousness. I found that intelligence was not.
One aspect of a state of consciousness is that it’s digital, not analog. (1) You’re either in it or you’re not. You’re either feeling strong or courageous or you’re not.
Intelligence, it seems to me, is an analog concept. It isn’t on or off. One may be judged as more or less intelligent than someone else. It’s a standard of relative measurement, of measurement of degrees.
Footnotes
(1) You’re either in transformative love or you’re not.