|
Humility
The Master views the parts with compassion, because she understands the whole. Her constant practice is humility.
The voice within is what I honor. It’s what I’m married to. This life doesn’t belong to me. The voice says, “Do the dishes”—okay. I don’t know what it’s for, I just do it. If I don’t follow the order, that’s all right too. But this is a game about where life will take me when I do follow. There’s nothing more exciting than to say yes to such a wild thing. I don’t have anything to lose. I can afford to be a fool.
What fun is it to be God if I can’t get a glimpse of myself in the mirror? And whether I like it or not, that’s what I am. I’m vanity—total vanity. So when people are attached to their looks and their health, it’s coming from an honest source; it’s just misdirected. It’s pure innocence.
The ego—mind projected as a body, as a you—is nothing more than a mirror image thinking that it’s God and misinterpreting the world. It’s the mirror image thinking that it’s the source, misinterpreting It as itself, rather than itself as just a reflection of It. It’s under the painful illusion that it’s separate. But the truth is that the ego goes where God goes. God—reality—is all of it. The ego has no options. It can protest all it wants, but if God moves, it moves.
When someone says that the world is a terrible place, he becomes the champion of suffering, projecting that there’s something wrong here, something less than beautiful. It’s the mirror image without a clue that it’s just a mirror image. You are the is, the reflection, the storyless movement. As soon as you realize that, the source is merged with; the reflection moves, without argument, as the source. And that is simple awareness, the joy of what people call the world and what I refer to as the image of God itself dancing.
Humility is what happens when you’re caught and exposed to yourself, and you realize that you’re no one and you’ve been trying to be someone. You just die and die into the truth of that. You die into what you have done and who you have been, and it’s a very sweet thing; there’s no guilt or shame in it. You become totally vulnerable, like a little child. Defense and justification keep falling away, and you die into the brilliance of what is real.
As I noticed the falling-away of the self and saw that its construct was absolutely invalid, what remained was humbled through the recognition. Everything dissolved—all that I had imagined myself to be. I realized that I was none of it, that everything I’d stood for was insubstantial and ridiculous. And what remained from that fell away, too, until finally there was nothing left to be humble about, no one left to be humble. If I was anything, I was gratitude. As the circle comes to a close in this way, it’s difficult to tell whether the feeling is humility or gratitude. Names no longer fit.
Gratitude, you could say, is what remains of the experience of humility. That’s my favorite position. It’s a sense of kissing the ground, licking the ground for its pure deliciousness, kissing the feet of the master that is everything without exception. There is such a sense of thankfulness for no longer being the person who thinks she knows and who has to live life out of that limited, claustrophobic mind. And of course I am that person as well. I remember when I believed those thoughts, so I have a reference, I understand how others see it. I watch their confusion with nothing but love, because they’re innocent children who feel that something’s askew, yet keep moving toward the polarity that never works, where they want to win, to do it right, to do more, to have more, to plan, to defend, to protect, to be loved, to be admired, and to undergo the shame of settling for less than their heart’s desire.
This is an excerpt from the best selling book; “A Thousand Names For Joy: Living In Harmony with the Way Things Are”, by Byron Katie with Stephen Mitchell
|
