On Humility
Most humility that we know as humility is a pretense. It is designed by us to dupe people into thinking that they don’t need to beat us over the head for us to get what they say or to think well of us, blah blah blah. That humility we know is an outside job. Real humility is an inside job. And very very very selfish! (Did I tell you to prepare to be surprised?)
Real humility (I should be an expert on this, after all this is my soul correction!) is very different.
Humility is a great hearing aid for helping us become open to guidance (from Source, from Soul, from other people). But sometimes we don’t hear because we have a process to go through. And sometimes it’s the process that creates the humility to hear.
Most people need to be broken in order for the messages to enter.
Why would being broken work? The ego that wants you to stay the same, that wants to perpetuate the status quo, good or bad, useless or useful, has to wake up to the new reality: you are beaten, you are broken, it needs to allow change.
Does it always work? No. Unless there is support from your conscious mind, your subconscious mind, your soul, it is going to become an “oscillating structure” where you are going to go back and forth… improvement, back where you started.
The ego is going to create a Sisyphus “syndrome” read the footnotes for story… ((Sisyphus’ story is part of Greek Mythology. The myth is that this dude, Sisyphus, was condemned to attempt to roll a huge boulder to the top of the mountain each day, only for it to roll back to the bottom at the end of the day. Others say that Sisyphus is a symbol of the sun that rises every morning, and sets every night… But the popular interpretation, what I am really referring to here is ‘starting and starting and starting and never accomplishing anything…’ nasty stuff.))
So what can you do instead, so you can grow, so you can become all you can be?
In one of the trainings on training I had 25 years ago, we were taught that you need to declare yourself incompetent in order to be trained.
First off: am I saying you are incompetent? No, I am saying something totally different. You need to create yourself an empty vessel, and empty cup, so you can be filled. You can sort through the new stuff once the training is done.
Is that humility? Yes, that is humility of the highest degree!
You disengage your know-it-all, your 3-year old: have you noticed that you can’t explain anything to a 3-year old: they already know everything. The next know-it-all stage comes when they become a teenager… then, for most of us, it stays. Even the best of us can’t hear anything the way it’s said, the best we can do is try to
agree/disagree,
like/not like,
true/false judge the new information, and if it passes our muster, if it is compatible with what we already know, then we’ll fit it into the brick wall of what we already know.
What is the problem with this picture?
Several!
One: we are not listening. We are not hearing. We are busy thinking. That is the definition of arrogance: thinking that YOUR MUSTER, your opinion, your knowledge is definitive.
This is why most people never learn, consciously, anything new. Unconsciously, of course, you learn all kinds of useless garbage. That is going to form the basis of your judgment to accept or reject the new knowledge.
Which means something really BIG for the readers of this site: You will never