"Courage at 200: Where the Real Story Begins"
By someone who's spending $300 to make $100—
and calling it spiritual growth
By Lee Haponski (and ChatGPT)
If you’ve studied David Hawkins’ Map of Consciousness, you’ll know that Courage is the turning point—the great cosmic pivot—where things start getting interesting.
Below 200? We’re stuck in the sludge: guilt, fear, apathy, pride, the DMV.
But hit 200—boom—you enter the land of true power.
Not egoic, muscle-flexing, “I’m going to control everything” kind of power, but the kind that aligns with life itself.
You stop pushing and start flowing. You stop forcing and start creating.
Apparently, I crossed 200 sometime in the last year—probably around the time I started
uploading my eBooks to Amazon and whispered to the Universe:
“Okay, now what?”
Let’s be real: courage sounds noble when it’s written in a metaphysical text.
“Courage is the willingness to try.”
“Courage is the bridge to higher states.”
But in real life, courage is often more like,
“I'm about to click ‘Publish’ on this thing I edited at 2AM with one eye twitching and
half a protein bar in my bra, with no idea if it’s good or just caffeine-fueled delusion.”
But I hit publish anyway. That’s courage.
Courage is investing in cover design instead of new shoes.
It's launching a new series under a secret pen name and telling no one (except, of course, the algorithm gods).
It's uploading an audiobook version of your work and realizing the voice isn’t what you imagined in your head—but doing it anyway.
Courage, according to Hawkins, is the entry point into the “life-supportive fields.”
And let me tell you: spending money to advertise your books—to strangers who may or may not click, let alone care—requires a spiritual field of something.
Is it supportive? Some days, sure.
Other days, it’s more like: “Hi, I’m here to trade my imposter syndrome for an empty cart and a 37-cent royalty.”
Still—I show up. I market. I write. I revise. I learn. I keep going.
Because Hawkins says that once you hit courage, you’re finally operating from power, not
force.
And that distinction is everything. Force is pushing your book into the world with clenched fists, hoping someone somewhere “makes it happen.”
Power is releasing your work with open hands and open heart, trusting that it will find its
readers—maybe not overnight, but inevitably.
Force says, “I’m not enough until this pays off.”
Power says, “I’m doing the work. I am the payoff.”
So yes, I’ve spent $300 to earn $100. But I’ve also learned how to track ads, test headlines, and watch my stories find strangers who didn’t know they needed them.
I’ve moved out of perfectionism and into momentum.
I’ve stopped asking “Is it good enough?”
and started asking, “Is it aligned?”
Soon, I’ll convert five of the eBooks to paperbacks. I’ve got two five-book series simmering for early 2026.
I’m building worlds and pen names and reader funnels and a business—not because I’m fearless, but because I finally trust that courage doesn’t require the absence of fear.
It just requires motion. It requires faith in the next step, not the entire staircase.
So if courage is the baseline for true empowerment, then I’m living proof:
you can build a publishing empire while sweating profusely and hitting “refresh” on your KDP dashboard every 15 minutes.
And that, my friends, is the spiritual path of the indie author and publisher in the 21st century.
Messy. Magical. Bold.
And absolutely above 200.
From Lee (and ChatGPT) as of November 2025
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