You can be angry sometimes and still have the courageous heart. You can even hate, and still the courageous heart is there. Hate does not contradict love because it can coexist with it. If you are really courageous, sometimes there will be hate, sometimes there will be anger, sometimes frustration, but these are passing reactions. They are not real. What exists, what is permanent, is the heart itself. The heart is beingness, an expression of Being. Being is indestructible. It is independent of your mind. A human being is not truly realized unless he can be the courageous heart. No matter how much you are realized, if your heart is conditional, it is dependent on the situation and frightened; it is cowardly. You are still not yet real, not complete, regardless of how you experience yourself or how you experience the other. This means that your relationships are not yet real. The real person has real relationships. The courageous heart is independent of what the other person does and what the other person thinks of you. To have a courageous heart, you need to accept a certain kind of aloneness, a certain kind of independence. With the courageous heart, you are so independent that the person can do all kinds of unpleasant things but you can still see the reality.

Pure heart is what I also call the courageous heart. The courageous heart does not eliminate love when there is hatred and does not try to choose one thing above another. The pure heart is open to the presentations of Being regardless of what they are. It is happy to be with whatever God wills, and it asserts no position. The attitude of purity is the attitude of no assertion. You don’t assert any truth. You don’t assert any knowledge, any perspective, any position. You don’t take a position; you don’t have a position; you don’t have a particular truth, opinion, belief, religion. You are absolutely poor. The attitude of purity is that you never close your mind and say that’s it. You never close the door. You are open not because you are uncertain, but because it is not possible to assert this or that about reality in some absolute way. And also there is no need or urge to assert this or that view.

The fact is that the moment you close your heart, you are the one who loses. If you give in to your heart, it does not mean that you are giving in to the other person. It does not mean you are giving in to negativity. You are giving in to your nature. You are surrendering to who you are. To be always loving does not mean that you do not defend yourself. The courageous heart perceives and acknowledges what is there—good or bad. It does not pretend that there is no negativity. It perceives the negativity and deals with it with love. So to continue to be loving does not mean that you are weak. It does not mean that you are going to be dominated by someone. In fact, to have a courageous heart means you are able to be inwardly alone and independent. There is no true autonomy without a courageous heart. And there is no courageous heart without true autonomy. To have a courageous heart means to continue loving in spite of the situation, which means your heart is really autonomous. You have achieved the aloneness of the heart. It does not mean you are weak or relinquishing anything. It does not mean you are being exploited. It does not mean you are a dupe. I am saying all this because that is how most people see it: If someone has done something bad to you, you feel that you shouldn’t love them, that you are dumb if you do. No, you are being courageous.

A person who does not have a heart cannot hate, cannot be angry, cannot be hurt, cannot be jealous. Without love there is no such thing as jealousy, hurt, fear, hatred, or anger. All of these things are reactions to the absence of love, to the blockage of it, to the non-perceiving of it. To be aware of the real relationship means that there is always awareness of love. This never goes, in any relationship. There is always the lovingness, and love has understanding in it. Love has forgiveness and acceptance in it. Love has compassion, appreciation, pleasure, happiness, strength, and gratitude. All these are elements of love, and it is there all the time; it is part of our nature. The courageous heart is the heart that is always present, regardless of what happens. If your heart is present only if good things happen, your heart is not yet free, not actualized. You are still a coward, still afraid. You have a heart, but not yet a courageous heart. So to have a true relationship, a real relationship, means to manifest the courageous heart.

Now a courageous heart is a heart willing to love regardless of the negativity. The courageous heart is the heart that will love in spite of the badness that is there. The courageous heart is not just the heart that only loves and nothing else; it is the heart that loves regardless of what happens. The courageous heart is the heart of unconditional love: whether the other is good or bad, you continue loving them. Usually, with your friend or your spouse it is easy for you to be loving if the other is loving. But if the other is frustrating or mad, angry or rejecting, right away you shift, and close your love and bring in another reaction. You are hurt, you are angry, hateful, or frustrated, and if you are angry, frustrated, or hurt, you do not let yourself feel your love, at least not at the time of your initial reaction. What splitting does, more than anything else, is close the heart. Whether you are all bad or all good, whether you are all loving or all hateful, what you are doing more than anything else is covering up your courageous heart. You are not allowing yourself to have your courageous heart, to be your courageous heart. You are not allowing your love to be unconditional. Your love becomes conditional. You respond lovingly only under certain conditions, or with certain manifestations of the other.

To manifest the courageous heart means to continue loving regardless of the situation. It does not mean seeing or not seeing the situation. The moment you make the situation all wonderful, all positive, with no negativity, no difficulty, no frustration, the courageous heart is no longer present. It is an idealized relationship. It is a mental, unreal relationship. There is ultimately no such thing as an all-good relationship. As long as we are embodied in a physical body, there will be difficulty and frustration. If you hope that one day you are going to have a relationship that is all wonderful, all satisfying, never frustrating, you are dreaming. There is no such thing here. And because there is heart and there is love, we can live, we can take in that difficulty, that frustration. We can tolerate it and continue loving and continue being happy. Love is not here just for enjoyment, for happiness. Love is also here to help you tolerate and accept and understand the difficulties. Love is here to help you continue being happy regardless of the difficulty. Love does not reject difficulty. It is not in the nature of love to reject hatred. Love loves. It does not stop loving when there is hatred or frustration or pain. So when something negative happens in a relationship, whether you feel hurt or anger or frustration, and that event makes you forget about love, then you know you are engaged in a relationship that is not real. You are involved in your mind and not in the actuality of the situation. You are not perceiving the real situation. You are not perceiving yourself in a real way. You are not perceiving the other in a real way. You are not seeing the relationship in a real way. And you are not in contact with the other person. You are only in contact with that part of your mind, but not with reality.

When there is frustration, it is natural that there will be hatred and anger. That is not bad. But it is destructive to allow that anger or hatred to eliminate everything else. The courageous heart does not allow that. The courageous heart wins all the time, by continuing to love regardless of what is happening. You do not love the other because he is good; you do not stop loving him because he is bad. You love because it is your nature to love. Your nature, part of being a human being, is to have a heart; and the heart loves and appreciates and understands and forgives and accepts. Part of that acceptance and understanding is to have room, space, for the other parts of the relationship. You realize that yes, there is frustration, there is difficulty sometimes, sometimes the other person does not like me or I do not like him. But that does not eliminate the courageous heart. It all becomes contained within and absorbed by it. If we allow that to happen, then the relationship is real. We see it as it is. We are not making it something that it is not. We are not looking at it in a purified, artificial way. We are being total, all of ourselves.