In Buddhism they often talk about the ignorant part in our mind being called Mara. We have ignorance on one side of our mind, we have wisdom on the other side. Buddhism talks about Mara as the personification of our ignorant side of our brain. According to the Buddhist theory of rebirth, Mara has been in control for thousands of births, thousands of eons, whatever it's been. Mara has been in control. Mara wants us to suffer. Mara's whole purpose is to make us suffer.
Once we acknowledge, "Ok, Mara is behind lots of our desires, Mara's behind our aversions, Mara's behind of our jealousies.", we have to start identifying and then working with this. We start letting it go by bringing up wisdom to combat it. We're going to need a lot of courage because when you think of Mara, you've got to think of Mara in every way possible. Mara is a monster coming to attack you in the middle of the night. Mara is a whole army, a thousand armies of rockets and everything else, and you've to fight them one at a time.
Mara is your best friend who says, "Come on" when they want you to do something unskillful. Mara is the most handsome man who can wink, Mara is the most beautiful woman who can wink, and so on. You've got to understand Mara. Mara is in every one of these different aspects, because you're going to need courage to fight these Maras.
With the issue of fighting enemies, we automatically think we need courage to fight the enemy. Well, you need courage to say "No" when your friend says, "Hey, let's go and have a beer". Some of you might still go for the beer. We're encouraging you not to. You need courage to stop doing lots of other things. You need courage to stand up against normal society that says go this way when you are trying to go this way. You need courage. You have to think of courage in this way because of your enemy.
The more you think of how powerful your enemy is, the more you realize you've got to get tough. A lot of you have participated in sports. In order to be a great sportsman you need courage. You really do. Some people are natural, but that's very rare. Most great sports people need a lot of courage. Because you've got to work, you've got to work really hard. Now a lot of people don't define courage in some of the ways I'm using it here. But I'm expanding this to mean a powerful strength against an enemy, against something we want to defeat. It's a strength we have to develop, that ability to say, "I'm going to go for it, I'm going to go against these odds!" So this type of courage is very much needed in this practice and can be stimulated if you consider what you're up against.