The Courage to Face What We're Avoiding
We all have places inside ourselves that we'd rather not look at. Maybe it's a relationship that's changing in ways we don't want to acknowledge. Maybe it's a limitation we don't want to admit. Or perhaps it's a position we've been defending for years without really understanding why we're so invested in it.
The Red Latifa — the essence of courage and discriminating clarity — gives us something remarkable: the strength to turn toward exactly what we're avoiding. While our personality structure wants to tiptoe around difficult truths, this essential quality says, "Wait a second. Why am I avoiding to look here? What am I afraid of?"
Think about how we usually operate when someone challenges our positions. The ego immediately gets defensive. "It's not true. I'm not doing it. It's the first time I'm doing it." We deny, we defend, we create elaborate justifications. But the Red Latifa does something different — it challenges our own philosophies from the inside.
When Avoidance Becomes More Powerful Than What We're Avoiding
Here's what I've discovered in my own experience: when we don't look at something, our avoidance of that looking affects us far more than the thing itself ever could. We start behaving differently. We avoid certain people because we don't want to face a particular issue. We create complex maneuvers to sidestep what feels threatening.
"The Red Latifa says, 'Okay, first of all, it's a position. Why do I have it? Why am I scared of letting go, of looking into it? What is here?'"
The avoidance becomes a big maneuver that actually makes everything more complicated. We still feel whatever deficiency or limitation we're trying to avoid, but now we're also carrying the weight of not looking at it directly. It's like trying to navigate with our eyes closed — we bump into everything we're trying to avoid.
The Red Latifa offers us a different possibility. It's like going for a hike in the mountains — there's something a little bit dangerous, but we're curious and we feel like going a little bit further, taking a risk. This essential quality brings the courage to take psychological risks, to see what we're actually doing.
The Diamond Body's Discriminating Clarity
What makes this work particularly powerful is that the Red Latifa doesn't just give us courage — it brings discriminating clarity. It's like a sword, separating all the elements of our experience. "This is my super-ego talking. This is my ego defense. This is what the other person actually said. This is my identification with their opinion."
We usually see this challenging quality in interpersonal situations — challenging somebody else's position, bringing across our point. But here it's challenging our own philosophies. The Red Latifa is saying, "We usually see the Red Latifa in interpersonal, for example, challenging somebody else's position... But here is challenging our own philosophies."
This isn't the mind that already knows everything about us, recycling the same familiar stories. This is the Diamond Body mind — like a scientist taking notes of an experiment unfolding. It stays one step behind the experience, looking and discriminating, waiting to see what happens rather than projecting what should happen.
"We naturally as human beings, we love the truth. We love love. We love to show up in the truth... Sometimes we're really freed by the truth, even if it's a painful truth."
The Paradox of Painful Liberation
There's something beautiful and paradoxical about truth. I've seen this many times — sometimes in a relationship we want to know, "Is it finished? Is the relationship over?" Maybe the other person is tiptoeing around it, and then they finally say, "Yes." And we feel heartbroken and relieved and happy that we know the truth all at the same time.
The truth is liberating, whatever form it takes. When we finally look directly at what we've been avoiding — that limitation, that change, that ending — we can actually move on. We can stand alone and say, "Okay, I will be with whatever happens, with whatever is the next chapter."
The Red Latifa works through both heart and mind together. The heart loves the truth, loves the adventure of finding out who we are. The mind provides the capacity to see all the elements clearly. This isn't inquiry as a mental process — the heart leads and the mind articulates what's unfolding.
What position have you been defending without really understanding why you're so invested in it? What would it be like to let the Red Latifa ask: "Why am I scared of letting go, of looking into this? What is actually here?"