Skip to main content

Humility

 

 Photo by Sean Oulashin on Unsplash

Carl Sagan, scientist and writer, was of the opinion that science has humility in its openness to reality, in its constant readiness to correct itself. Religion, on the other hand, claims to possess absolute truths. Such a claim underscores the hubris of religions.

Humility is an awareness of our limits and limitations. That does not mean that we ignore our strengths. Humility comes from a healthy and clear self-awareness. I am this and only this. You may be sitting on the highest throne in the country. But you must be aware that you are sitting on your bottom.

In fact, humility has little to do with top or bottom. It is not about you at all, so to say. As Rick Warren put it, “True humility is not thinking less of yourself; it is thinking of yourself less.” There is no ego, in other words. There is only the clear, transparent self. And that self is aware of its oneness with the cosmic reality, with the billions of gargantuan stars and planets, with the littlest grain of sand on the seashore, with the frailty of the lily of a day. You vanish. Into the infinity of the cosmos. That is humility.

A Catholic priest who was a psychotherapist and spiritual teacher as well as author of many deeply provoking little stories, Anthony de Mello, has a story about a monk who was on his deathbed. His fellow monks gathered around his bed in his last moments and spoke about his greatness. They admired his scholarliness, austerity, self-discipline, perspicacity, and so on. But his beloved disciple noticed that he was fretting. “What happened, Father?” The disciple asked. “What worries you when they all have so many great things to say about you?” The monk replied, “But none of them mentioned my humility!”

Humility is not an easy virtue to acquire. It is an effacement of not only your ego but your self as well. True humility wipes out the distinction between you and the others. You become a mere little drop in the infinite ocean of being. A drop that is the ocean itself.

PS. Written for Indispire Edition 434: When we realise that we are all tiny little dots in an enormous cosmos of stars and giant bodies, we will experience humility. And goodness will follow. #Humility

Comments

  1. Yamini MacLeanJanuary 23, 2023 at 9:42 PM

    Hari OM
    An excellent synopsis of humility! YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
  2. JaiJanuary 24, 2023 at 8:21 AM

    An excellent explanation of what humility really is. It is actually the ability to recognize our true place in this vast macrocausm that surrounds us. Most people think of it as just being modest though it is more to do with our ability to recognize what we truly are. The point you make about Science and religion is also spot on.

    ReplyDelete
  3. ArtiJanuary 24, 2023 at 9:46 AM

    Good Morning from Doha and a Happy New Year Tomichan:)

    The monk's story cracked me up--and how often have we seen such 'humility'.

    This post read like Rumi's poetry-- so clear, so wise and so beautiful that I have to read it at least one more time before I move on.

    Thank you for writing it.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJanuary 24, 2023 at 10:39 AM

      Happy New Year, dear Arti. Thank you for joining me from Doha. Glad you liked this.

      Delete
  4. Rajeev MoothedathJanuary 26, 2023 at 10:35 PM

    Lovely take on humility!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
18 comments
Read more

The Ghost of a Banyan Tree

  Image from here Fiction Jaichander Varma could not sleep. It was past midnight and the world outside Jaichander Varma’s room was fairly quiet because he lived sufficiently far away from the city. Though that entailed a tedious journey to his work and back, Mr Varma was happy with his residence because it afforded him the luxury of peaceful and pure air. The city is good, no doubt. Especially after Mr Modi became the Prime Minister, the city was the best place with so much vikas. ‘Where’s vikas?’ Someone asked Mr Varma once. Mr Varma was offended. ‘You’re a bloody antinational mussalman who should be living in Pakistan ya kabristan,’ Mr Varma told him bluntly. Mr Varma was a proud Indian which means he was a Hindu Brahmin. He believed that all others – that is, non-Brahmins – should go to their respective countries of belonging. All Muslims should go to Pakistan and Christians to Rome (or is it Italy? Whatever. Get out of Bharat Mata, that’s all.) The lower caste Hindus co...
122 comments
Read more

Unromantic Men

Romance is a tenderness of the heart. That is disappearing even from the movies. Tenderness of heart is not a virtue anymore; it is a weakness. Who is an ideal man in today’s world? Shakespeare’s Romeo and Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Devdas would be considered as fools in today’s world in which the wealthiest individuals appear on elite lists, ‘strong’ leaders are hailed as nationalist heroes, and success is equated with anything other than traditional virtues. The protagonist of Colleen McCullough’s 1977 novel, The Thorn Birds [which sold more than 33 million copies], is torn between his idealism and his natural weaknesses as a human being. Ralph de Bricassart is a young Catholic priest who is sent on a kind of punishment-appointment to a remote rural area of Australia where the Cleary family arrives from New Zealand in 1921 to take care of the enormous estate of Mary Carson who is Paddy Cleary’s own sister. Meggy Cleary is the only daughter of Paddy and Fiona who have eight so...
39 comments
Read more

Books and Rebellions

Books become my ideal companions in times of political turmoil. Right now, as you’re reading these lines, there are dozens of active armed conflicts going on around the world. Besides, developed countries like America are asking foreign students as well as others to leave. The global economy is experiencing significant instability, characterised by weak growth projections, persistent inflation, high debt levels, and geopolitical conflicts. Even when a country like India advertises itself as becoming the third largest economy, the living conditions of the poor aren’t showing any improvement. Nay, the world isn’t becoming any better than it ever was. It's when such realisations hit you from all sides, you need the consolations of an abiding hobby. Reading is at the top of my list of such hobbies. First of all, books help us understand current events in a broader context . They can reveal patterns in history: how democracies falter, how propaganda spreads, how resistance movements...
8 comments
Read more