Humility and Pride

 Look in any spiritual textbook and it will tell you about humility and self-abnegation, particularly if it is a Christian one. Humility is an important virtue that shows one is not dominated by the ego or separate self which is a materialised expression/distortion of the soul. Self-abnegation likewise indicates that the disciple has overcome the ego. But are things really as simple as that? Is humility the only quality the spiritual self should possess?

There are two aspects to the soul which are to do with expansion and contraction, and both must be realised if the soul is to be complete. What, after all, is the point of the soul? What is its purpose? You may say that the soul just is as an individualised expression of divine being which is true enough, but that just refers to its raw state and there must be more or else there would be no need for the soul to descend to the phenomenal world, the subject/object world of duality in which the keywords are experience, expression and experiment. This relates to the self-actualisation of the soul which means its development from a more or less blank cipher to a glorious star being of many colours.

Humility relates to the awareness of the oneness of life and the supreme reality of God, the knowledge that all that you are comes from God. It is not yours. It is his gift to you. But the soul is also called to become great. The soul is not a servant or slave, and any religion that teaches this is not worthy of your spiritual allegiance. The soul has the potential to be a king or queen, and this is the path it must follow. The more you have, the more you can give. The soul should strive to have everything and to be everything. This is its destiny, and this is where pride comes into the the equation.

The spiritual person is proud. He seeks the exaltation of the self. He strives to express the majesty of God in his person. This is right and proper and what we are called to do. We are kings of the universe if only we knew it. We can wield powers that could destroy planets. We can master and direct the pure force of spiritual will.

At the same time, the spiritual person is humble. He knows that everything comes from God. He knows that all he has, others can have too. He is bound to the rest of life with bonds of love. He lives in a permanent state of gratitude to his Creator.

Humility and pride relate to love and will, and the two are not mutually exclusive but part of the whole. Christianity has focussed, to excess some might say, on humility, while the old pagan religions, especially those of the Indo-Europeans, sought the path of the hero. There is no contradiction between these two if one understands that they relate to different aspects of the spiritual path, the push forward of the undeveloped self to mastery and its subsequent return to the inner knowledge of God. The problem has been the expression of humility and pride in the wrong spheres. The spiritual self should have pride and the worldly self humility. Some Christians have made the mistake of transferring humility to the soul and some pagans in the past made the opposite error, but if you understand the nature of the inner and outer aspects to your being you will see that both humility and pride (of the right sort) have their place in the spiritual life.