humility

In this episode of the attitudes series, I'm going to talk about humility. In times gone by, humility was seen as a virtue. Being humble was appreciated by other people. But in many societies nowadays, humility has for fallen out of fashion. Instead, we live in an era of celebrities. And celebrities are exactly the opposite of this humility. Celebrities, in order to be a celebrity, have to attract huge attention from millions of people. They have to be highly individual. And almost all celebrities are proud. They assert themselves. They assert that what they think is right, they assert that they have achieved great things. And they really believe it all. Everything is seen and felt as being their own personal achievement. And this leads to a very strong personality. That's what happens when we are not humble.

And so we can see why humility is important on the spiritual journey. Spirituality is about removing energy from the personal, in order to come into contact with the impersonal. And the impersonal, ultimately, is the whole of existence when it's no longer felt as being divided up into me and you and separate things. This non-separate existence also goes by the name god, and our spiritual journey is about coming back in touch with god, and ultimately melting into god. That is the total surrender of being a separate person. It's the acknowledgement that personality is not what's important.

And for all of this to happen, there can be no pride. Instead, we need humility. We have to be rather wary, though. We've become so indoctrinated into the world of personality that if we begin to become a little humble, our proud ego will latch on to that. And that is not real humility, that's then a false humility. Being proud of being humble is a total contradiction. So we need to be very careful not to fall into that trap.

And how to develop this attitude of humility? One way to encourage it is to dwell on the chance element, in everything that we feel that we have achieved. What we have become in life is very dependent on the circumstances of our birth, who our parents were. We didn't choose that. It was handed to us by chance, you could say. And from that so much follows: the education we received, the opportunities we received in life. Almost all of it is down to chance. And of course, what we achieve in life is totally dependent on those opportunities and the education we received.

So in the end, all our achievements are primarily down to chance, luck, good fortune. And it's absurd to be proud of good fortune, of good luck. Chance by definition is something that has happened not because of something we've done, but just randomly. Who can be proud of something that has happened randomly? It's absurd.

So contemplation such as this can help us to undermine pride when it occurs. And this is in turn will leave us in a state that is more humble. And with this humility, there comes a gratitude for all the bountiful gifts that life has showered us with. So humility and gratitude tend to go hand in hand. If one is not humble, then it's difficult to get any depth of gratitude. That pride gets in the way. And conversely, when we are feeling deep gratitude, it does bring a feeling of humility. So bringing a little more awareness to our gratitude can also encourage humility.