Practice the Art of Audacity

“Hesitation puts obstacles in your path, boldness eliminates them. Once you understand this, you will find it essential to overcome your natural timidity and practice the art of audacity.” ~Robert Greene

Don’t hesitate. Whatever it is you dream of doing, whatever it is you love to do, whatever it is that makes you come alive, do precisely that. Life is too short. Be bold. Be daring. Be audacious.

You are your only obstacle. You are a knotted mess of blind beliefs, political blindness, cultural conditioning, and outdated reasoning. And that’s okay. But now it’s time to get out of your own way. It’s time to outflank your beliefs, think outside the box of your political bent, and recondition your cultural conditioning.

Here are five audacious ways to do that…

1.) Dare to be uncomfortable:

“Be an ascendant not a descendant. Break the cycle.” ~Doug Dahlen

Your comfort zone is a fluffy noose. It’s the illusion of safety and security. The longer you remain there, the tighter it will get. Escape before it throttles your dreams. Stretch your soul before your Ego cramps your style. Untie the anxious knot of yourself and dare yourself to be uncomfortable.

Better yet, learn how to be comfortable with being uncomfortable. When you are too comfortable, you become complacent, absent minded, and soft. There’s a tendency to take things for granted and to harbor unreasonable expectations. But when you learn how to be comfortable with being uncomfortable, you open yourself up to possibility. You flip the script on the illusion of invulnerability and usher in absolute vulnerability. You get in touch with the underlying essence.

There is discomfort in working out a muscle. There is discomfort in challenging an entrenched idea. There is discomfort in questioning a cherished belief. But it is all worth it when the muscle, the mind, and the soul become stronger despite.

2.) Dare to unknow:

“Belief is the death of intelligence.” ~Robert Anton Wilson

Don’t allow belief to be the death of your intelligence. Unlearn what you have learned. Flip the script on the script makers. Question yourself—balls to bones, ovaries to marrow. Wield “I don’t know” like a sword while slaying false truths and decapitating false gods.

If, as Epictetus said, “it's impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows,” then force yourself into questioning everything you think you know while systematically destroying what people think they know.

Master the art of recycled mastery. Maintain the balance between thesis and antithesis so that synthesis and Meta-synthesis can manifest. Cultivate Beginner’s Mind. Never allow the Master’s Complex to dig its claws in. Honor your inner Phoenix by practicing the life-death-rebirth process inside you. Cultivate the “skyhook” of curiosity lest the “anchor” of certainty hold you down.

As Bruce Lee powerfully stated, “Learn the Form, Master the Form, forget the Form.” Then move on smartly with curiosity as your failsafe.

3.) Dare to be humorous:

“The only intelligent tactical response to life’s horror is to laugh defiantly at it.” ~Attributed to Søren Kierkegaard

Cultivate high humor. Practice Dionysian disobedience despite Apollonian obsequiousness. Get high above the seriousness of it all and see how utterly laughable it all is, how thick the smoke and mirrors are, and how ingenuine the song and dance is.

Do this by tapping one of the most powerful archetypes there are: the trickster. Trickster is the ultimate boundary-crosser. No manmade rules or laws can contain it. No gods can outflank it. Trickster laughs defiantly at all stuck-in-the-mud self-serving constructs.

Trickster cracks open your ego like an egg. What’s revealed is your inner darkness, your festering repression, the tangled knot of your unconscious. But rather than balk, the trickster laughs. Rather than fret, the trickster has a little dance. Rather than flinch, the trickster integrates the darkness and makes the unconscious conscious.

But it is precisely from the dancing, the kicking up of dust and ash, where a brave new ego might emerge. When the ashes and dust settle, the bed of the Phoenix is made manifest, and the Self is finally allowed to go through the painful iterations of Self-actualization.

4.) Dare to be nonattached:

“Every addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or idealism.” ~Jung

The two worst addictions known to mankind are belief and comfort. When you transcend these addictions, you get above it all. You’re able to elevate yourself above the battlefield of life. You rise above the cultural morass to see how everything is connected to everything else.

Once you’re able to see how everything is connected to everything else, then you gain the ultimate power of healthy nonattachment.

If, as the Buddha says, “the root of suffering is attachment,” then it stands to reason that the root of attachment is belief and comfort. Suspend belief and comfort. When you suspend belief and comfort, you suspend your religious-political-scientific sycophancy long enough to see the big picture. You get power over the power that your comfortable beliefs have over you.

In short: you get ahead of the curve. You get out of your own way long enough to realize that the propaganda machine of your brain and the religio-political claptrap clapping back and forth is nothing more than a culturally conditioned song and dance.

When you suspend belief and comfort, you transcend attachment. You attain a fearless state of nonattachment, and you free yourself to remain open to further freedom.

Stop clinging to belief and comfort. Let go of the need to hold on. Be audacious. Burn the effigy of the self. Let the Phoenix of nonattachment rise out of the ashes.

5.) Dare to redefine God:

“Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt.” ~Sun Tzu

Count coup on the gods. Unite summit with abyss. Transform halos into yokes and crowns into mortal coils. Drag heaven into hell. Lift hell into heaven. Sow a little strategic disorder to reap a higher order. Plant spiritual minefields in your religious mind field. Drop thought bombs in the fortified ramparts of your parochial worldview.

As Rumi said, “Stop acting so small. You are the universe in ecstatic motion.”

Upset your settled mind. Reimagine imagination. Dare to square the circle. Redefine God as the infinite interconnectedness of all things. Then revel in the fact that you are an integral aspect of this interconnectedness. You were always God in hiding. You were always God playing peek-a-boo with itself. You were always the finite integration of an infinite expression.

As Alan Watts said, “You are something that the whole universe is doing, in the same way that a wave is something that the whole ocean is doing.” And you have a responsibility to this sacred unfolding.

Discovering the God within yourself is merely the parting of the veil. It’s the cutting away of delusion. It’s the crumbling away of untruth. It’s seeing through the facade of all the religious pretense that came before and rising up with a heart full of creative audacity and spiritual moxie that has the courage to destroy all false gods.

Image source:

Dead End by Mikael Aldo

About the Author:

Gary Z McGee, a former Navy Intelligence Specialist turned philosopher, is the author of Birthday Suit of God and The Looking Glass Man. His works are inspired by the great philosophers of the ages and his wide-awake view of the modern world.

This article (Practice the Art of Audacity) was originally created and published by Self-inflicted Philosophy and is printed here under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Gary Z McGee and self-inflictedphilosophy.com. It may be re-posted freely with proper attribution, author bio, and this statement of copyright.