A unique aspect of chöd is the nurturance of fearlessness. While all meditation practices leading toward enlightenment engender this quality as a by-product, in chöd there is a direct, frontal assault on the edifice of fear that surrounds our lives. Fear plays a pervasive role in the life of sentient beings. This is a primal, even biologicall part of our psyche. While we may have developed all kinds of neurosis e greatest motivator of the average individual’s thoughts and actions. Our fear has become deeply unconscious, engendering multiple layers of compensation and rationalization. The tip of a terrifying iceberg, the fears we recognize or admit to are only a tiny fragment of the underlying mass of unresolved fear. Chöd tears off this well-crafted mask and brings us face to face with these ultimate demons. However, it is not bravado or steely courage that allows us to vanquish fear.

We normally think of fearlessness as synonymous with bravery. While it is true, as a number of Western commentators have noted, that in chöd one must “confront their fears,” this does not happen through acquiring this kind of jacked-up courage. Courage means that the thing that we fear is still there, but we are somehow—temporarily stronger. We teeter on the edge of this precipice, using all our toughness and resolve to not succumb to panic. But real fearlessness is It is unconditional.

The experience of fearlessness is thus closely tied to the development of certainty (don dam pa). Normally “confidence” is there for us if we feel good about ourselves in the moment or over a period of time. Due to some compliment, achievement, or some other validation that has occurred, we feel we are more attractive, capable and knowledgeable than we had previously suspected. We are more worthy and valuable to our friends, our mates, or society. We are smarter, a better person, kinder, more clever at winning our intellectual, emotional or financial struggles. But this confidence is indeed precarious. It is simply the polar opposite of fear, and like all opposites, only exists because of the its polarity, like two sides of a coin. One is just the temporary absence of the other, before the pendulum swings again. It is a dumb, blind loop, deeply imbedded and fixated. And no matter how many times our falsely inflated confidence crashes to the ground and is enveloped in fear, we pick ourselves up and start all over again. Indeed, this human quality, certainly a kind of madness, is celebrated endlessly, showing the indomitable nature of the human spirit. The fact that we bounce between hope and fear is glorified and upheld.

But in its ultimate sense, the sense of chöd, fearless means there is no insecurity. How can such a state come about? Are not sickness, disrepute, poverty and even death itself, to be feared? Are they not something to inherently revolt against?......