Finding Strength 'Within'

Although it is common for people to talk of finding strength 'within' in Western culture today, previously in centuries before, people would look 'outward' to find the strength required for certain things.

For example: courage is an accessible virtue, however excessive nervous energy can thwart the courage you might otherwise experience. If we invoke the consoling powers from without to bear down upon the excess energy and curtail their disruption, we are then free to experience the courage that comes most naturally to us.

Asking the powers without can be a way to define the powers within. Ancient cultures looked to the vapors, to the smoke and fire, to the elements of nature and supernature, to 'normalize' the great powers within.

Our being, our own nature within, holds the same essence, power and velocity of the purest and fiercest forces universally known. There are not many different lesser varieties, but rather each bearing that of the same - same forces also that drive the world as well.

-B.Hive  

Courage must be developed. I have told you that courage is all around us. Air is an illusion; it is courage that is everywhere around us. If we are really to live in the world in which we breathe, we need courage. If we are timid or cowardly, if we do not live together with the world but exclude ourselves from it, we breathe only in semblance. What is above all things for medicine is courage, the courage to heal. It is indeed so: if you confront an illness with the courage to heal, this is the right orientation which in ninety percent of cases leads you right. These moral qualities are most intimately connected with the process of healing.

-- Rudolf Steiner, Course for Young Doctors, LECTURE VII, Dornach, January 8, 1924