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 Vegetarian

Book Review Title: The Vegetarian Author: Han Kang Translator: Deborah Smith [from Korean] Publisher: Granta, London, 2018 Pages: 183 Insanity can provide infinite opportunities to a novelist. The protagonist of Nobel laureate Han Kang’s Booker-winner novel, The Vegetarian , thinks of herself as a tree. One can argue with ample logic and conviction that trees are far better than humans. “Trees are like brothers and sisters,” Yeong-hye, the protagonist, says. She identifies herself with the trees and turns vegetarian one day. Worse, she gives up all food eventually. Of course, she ends up in a mental hospital. The Vegetarian tells Yeong-hye’s tragic story on the surface. Below that surface, it raises too many questions that leave us pondering deeply. What does it mean to be human? Must humanity always entail violence? Is madness a form of truth, a more profound truth than sanity’s wisdom? In the disturbing world of this novel, trees represent peace, stillness, and nonviol...
6 comments
Read more

The RSS does not exist

An organisation that has 80,000 branches in India does not exist legally in any document. This is the cover story of The Caravan this month. By the way, The Caravan is one of the very few publications that still continues to exist in spite of being overtly critical of Narendra Modi and his Sangh Parivar. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) is not registered as an organisation under any of the usual Indian registration laws such as the Societies Registration Act or as a trust or company. It functions as an unregistered voluntary organisation, though it is arguably the largest public organisation in the country. This situation makes the organisation absolutely unaccountable to anyone, argues The Caravan . The RSS is not legally required to file annual returns to the Tax department or disclose its financial details publicly though it deals with thousands of crores of rupees every year especially after Modi became the Prime Minister of the country. The membership of the organisat...
12 comments
Read more

No Problems Only Opportunities

You’ve probably heard this joke. A young man walked into his office one morning and found a beautiful young lady sitting in his chair. He called the MD and said, “Sir, I have a problem.” The MD replied, “Don’t you know our company’s motto, young man? No Problems, Only Opportunities .” When Suchita of The Blogchatter sent me a mail with the topic of this week’s blog hop –  - the first thing that came to my mind was the above joke. I know many people – too many, in fact – who went through terrible problems. My own life was a series of problems in none of which was there the consolation of any beautiful woman. One essential lesson I learnt from life is that life is a series of problems. You solve one and then arises the next one. Now I have reached an age when problems are no more problems: they are life itself. If you ask me what was the biggest problem I ever dealt with, it was my last years in Shillong. I was a lecturer in a college drawing a fat salary stipulated by the U...
13 comments
Read more