Bravery does not mean being fearless. It means to be full of fear but still not being dominated by it.
Fear comes from the mind, love comes from your heart; listen to the heart.
The greatest discovery in life, the most precious treasure, is of awareness. Without it you are bound to be in darkness, full of fears. And you will go on creating new fears - there is no end to it. You will live in fear, you will die in fear, and you will never be able to taste something of freedom. And it was all the time your potential; any moment you could have claimed it, but you never claimed it.
Wherever you are afraid, try to explore, and you will find death hiding somewhere behind. All fear is of death. Death is the only fear source.
What kind of living can be out of fear? Once the armor is dropped you can live out of love, you can live in a mature way. The fully matured man has no fear, no defense; he is psychologically completely open and vulnerable.
A mature person should disconnect himself from anything that is connected with fear. That`s how maturity comes. Just watch all your acts, all your beliefs, and find out whether they are based in reality, in experience, or based in fear. And anything based in fear has to be dropped immediately, without a second thought. It is your armor. I cannot melt it. I can simply show you how you can drop it.
Don`t allow the fear to overpower you, allow love to overpower you. Love comes from the center, fear always comes from the periphery; don`t allow this periphery to be dominant. And what have you got to lose? Even if there is no rebirth - there is rebirth - but I say even if there is no rebirth and you simply die, what have you got to lose? What will be lost?
The fear that things may change tomorrow... Somebody may die, you may go bankrupt, your job may be taken away. There are a thousand and one things which may change. You are burdened with fears and fears, and none of them are valid - because yesterday also you were full of all these fears, unnecessarily. Things may have changed, but you are still alive. And man has an immense capacity to adjust himself in any situation.
Love dispels fear just as light dispels darkness. If even for a moment you have been in love with someone, fear disappears and thinking stops. With fear thinking continues. The more you are afraid, the more you have to think.
So just look into your acts, into your thoughts, into your feelings: you will find the armor everywhere. Wherever you see fear, you have created it. It was needed at one time - now it is no longer needed. A simple understanding that it is no longer needed... now it is a barrier, a hindrance, a burden. If you find something truthful, it will have its own validity. But in the armor you will not find anything that has any connection with truth. The whole armor is made of fear - layers and layers of fear.
The moment you start seeing life as non-serious, a playfulness, all the burden on your heart disappears. All the fear of death, of life, of love - everything disappears.