It doesn’t matter how much we think we know or what we say we believe. What matters is whether or not are we living our deepest beliefs with integrity.
We talk about peace, love, and compassion but so few of us live these principles. Our compassion extends only to the people who think like we do, not to the person who abused us. Our peace extends only to the people who believe in what what we believe, not to the non-believer. Our love is only for those who please and validate us, not for the person who disagrees with us.
Pride. We used to talk about pride, now we talk about ego. Most of us don’t really understand what the ego is, there are so many different ways of defining it, but pride we understand. Pride and unconsciousness, (“Father forgive them they know not what they do”), is what keeps us from living in joy. Pride. It’s pride that keeps us from apologizing to our spouse or our children when we’ve been too harsh with them. It’s pride that keeps us from telling them that we love them. It’s pride that keeps us on the edges of our relationships–never to experience the fullness and richness of the other person’s company.
Humility. Humility is pride’s opposite. True humility is an act of courage because it is often misconstrued and misunderstood as weakness. To be humble is to stand in a place of power, to recognize the shortcomings of our pridefulness and then let go. It takes humility plus courage to live the deepest and fullest expression of Life.
Action. To speak of humility, to speak of compassion, to speak of love, is not the same as being humility, as being compassion, and being love. This is true spirituality.
Photo Credit: Arno Smit