Humility... A Lost Art?

brilliant! what you point out is so true! i so often hear people referring to "the rest of them" and the "sheep" or the "living dead" and though like you said, we are all at different points along the path, i also feel it is cruel and certainly fraudulent to call anyone such names. when you care for people and help them, they are always helping you as well, even when the lesson is painful. we all help each other and as long as you ensure you do not put anything bad out there when bad things are done to you. we gotta love each other and not get caught up in the dramas our silly little lives create as we mingle and experience this infinite reality together.
it is easy indeed to feel like "I KNOW" something, though we can truly know very little, possibly nothing. with love, however, as you point out, we can feel happiness and joy despite any hardship. loving everyone means not viewing them categorically or specifically, but simply loving. treating people with love is incredibly easy once we break some silly old habits that society still encourages, and we can be thankful for that.
thanks again for your reminder to love without definitions! i love you!

~*Ibss*~

i have often met "enlightened" souls who make it their personal mission to tell others how enlightened they are. they seem to miss the truth that the more you know, the more you realize you know nothing. thank you for pointing out that referring to others as sheep or somehow lesser beings just because they don't share your point of view is as narrow-minded as not believing anything at all.

certainly being inclusive is the path to enlightenment, and living by example is much more powerful than telling people how to be. i love your idea of the "fraudulent buddhas", i often encountered this in my early college years when going to festivals and shows. the people who claimed to be so loving and "all for one" often failed to see how much they and i had in common. there were so many occasions that i was excluded because i didn't choose to conform to an alternative standard of beauty.

i always think of a movie quote (ISC Punks? Can't remember the name of the movie) where they said that rebellion isn't in your wardrobe, it comes from within. it is important to understand that being an individual and walking the enlightened path means doing what is best for yourself and others, no matter how many other people are doing it as well or how "mainstream" or "alternative" it may seem.

I'm not sure that humility is a lost art, many people show it every day of their lives in the things they do that no-one notices. It's just not been fashionable in the celebrity driven me culture to not be noticed. It is the antithesis of the fictional ego. We can never assume what others know. Everyone is a mysterious being, and if we don't recognise their potential, in all likelihood someone else will.

Speaking as someone who's occasionally guilty of preaching (though never, ever about spiritual matters ... my most passionate diatribes tend to be politically driven), thank you for writing this. It's a reminder I need, probably one a lot of us need, every once in a while.

A lot of us do tend to denigrate the 'sheeple', don't we? It can be hard not to, when we see them making the same mistakes we used to make, going through the same robotic motions whose mass cumulative effect can't help but bring our destruction. We feel scared and a bit helpless, perhaps, in the face of this faceless mass, and so we lash out the only way we can, with words. Certainly this is something I've been guilty of myself, a kind of arrogance I've carried around for a very long time ... deeper by far than any small enlightenment I might have gained. At any rate I've been trying, recently, to look at things through more compassionate eyes. Preaching, after all, only shuts the door faster, alienating those one should wish to help ... in a way you might think of it as the Truth being turned against itself, too much too soon and thus in service to the Lie. If anything such behaviour slows the awakening process, and the longer that takes....

And how can I not have compassion for those whose way of life is already forfeit, and whose life itself may follow sooner than any suspect?

...it's not that people who reach this understanding are special in any way. In fact, since it's only the understanding that things are exactly what they are, the real wonder is not that some rare few get it. The real wonder is how so many people can possibly miss something so exceedingly obvious.

KENSHSCHMENSO

Wow!... psychegram taught me how to do that...

... and by the bye... I don't have a pretentious bone in my body... Evolver is meant to be a site for the exploration and sharing of ideas... new, old, bizarre, good, bad and yes Virginia... even the ugly... push any of it away and it will just bite us in the ass one day when we're not looking... a good new friend told me the other day..."if they don't like it, they can eat me."... that's my kinda friend... or was anyway... sigh ... I was doing better behind my Rudra mask ... 'coming out' has such a funny way of getting people all worked up into tizzy fits... soo twentieth century!... sheesh !

eserudy
eserudy@gmail,com

Huge thanks for this much needed reflection. Feels like you've been listening to my mind for the past few months and given perfect shape to my fragmented thoughts and mere instincts after entering myself into a deeper spiritual search and encountering much of what you also see. Can't but feel doubly blessed and deeply inspired by your echo and feedback of ur commentators here...