Selected Correspondence Peter

Humility

humility,

Gods and God-men, shamans and priests have forever demanded that their followers humble themselves in the face of some mythical Higher Power. As I well know from my spiritual years, there are none so proud of their humility than spiritual seekers, for the more one humbles oneself, the more one debases and humiliates oneself and the more faithful and loyal one is, the more one’s personal self will be diminished and the more one’s Divine Self will be strengthened and enhanced.

Humbling oneself to a Higher Power, trying to become God, or cunningly becoming ‘one with Him’ – a sort of a ‘God and I are best mates’ scenario – taps into a deep pathological dependency that has been cunningly utilized by the Gurus to wield power over others and to wage horrendous wars on rival Gurus, shamans, priests and God-men for centuries.

surrender,

Gods and God-men, shamans and priests have forever demanded that their followers surrender their will and blindly and unquestionly follow. To surrender is but to give in. One surrenders to the tried and true belief in God and thus accepts that nothing will ever change. I for one would not, and could not, stop until I found something better than old time, or New Dark Age, religions. Of course, the first step was when I realized, right in the middle of one of those sublime moments of surrender to a Master, that I was but a sheep and far, far from being a free human being.

I am awake, but I am not perfect in the eyes of some, perhaps most. So what? Most people have such a misunderstanding of what it means to be enlightened. Enlightened people are just people who have seen the fact of our being one with all life. I just live my life not harming any one or any thing. That is simple, we can all do that, awake or not.

Well, that’s a bit of a come down for the exalted and much prized state of Enlightenment. This seems to none other than the ‘we are all enlightened, we only have to realize it’ psittacism that is floating around the spiritual world. So now, I assume your teaching is simplified even further to – if everyone sees ‘the fact of our being one with all life’ and ‘just lives (their) life not harming any one or any thing’ then there will be peace on earth.

Why not? I am awake, I harm nothing or no one. If everyone just lived that simply were would the wars and killing come from? It is true that the mind of the unenlightened is the same mind as the enlightened, except for the enlightened have awakened to a clear direct seeing the fact before our eyes.

Okay, let’s look at the facts before our eyes. The Dalai Lama is an avowed Buddhist who would claim that he would harm nothing and no one. He is a pacifist, which meant when someone invaded his country he fled. Now if everyone in the country you lived in was a pacifist it is like hanging out a sign – pleas invade – we won’t stop you. The Dalai Lama, now safe behind the protection of the Indian army is busily trying to get someone else to free his country. Pacifism is an unliveable ideal in the world as-it-is with people as-they-are. Do you not rely on the guns of the police and army for the privilege of feeling a pacifist? Would not it be more sensible to tackle the root cause of malice and sorrow – the instinctual animal passions in humans – rather than striding the moral high ground sprouting unliveable ethics that completely ignore the facts before our eyes.

The Enlightened not only cop-out from acknowledging any malice in themselves but they also cop-out from acknowledging sorrow in themselves. As you yourself stated Enlightenment means that one no longer identifies with one’s personal suffering but that one feels universal sorrow or compassion for others. This is easily seen in action whereby they continually rile against the unenlightened as the cause of wars and suffering. The excuse for this malevolence is that they feel compassion towards those who have yet to realize that the wars and killing is all a dream – created by their ego – from which they haven’t yet awakened.

There has been no one in my life who I let believe I was some high and mighty being because I was awake. I have had a problem with people who have tried to put me on a pedestal for just being awake. If I let them it would just be ego playing another game.

Why should people want to put you on a pedestal in the first place? Just what Guru-energy are you radiating? Is it you or your seductive message of dissociation from the symptoms of the animal instinctual passions in operation in humans? Do you find you have to be humble to put them off? Again your actions of putting yourself above Father Dionysus, Otto Kernberg and and Ammachi on the list does seem to weaken your case for being an ordinary man. It must be a tricky business getting these balances just right.

As soon as someone manifests some form of Divine Inspiration there are a host of people just waiting to credit that person. As if the person created something.

The Gurus and shaman have created an illusion of their own Divinity in a Greater Reality out of the illusion of Evil in a grim reality. If someone becomes completely deluded such that they are absolutely convinced they are Divine, then they are compelled to spread the message. Being a Saviour of Mankind is part and parcel of the grand delusion – not an optional extra.

It takes a very balanced person to insist that there is no ownership of Divine Inspiration, it is available to us all and the only real value a teaching has is whether or not other people find something that helps them on their path.

I guess what you are alluding to is true humility. I always find it kind of cute that someone who says they are God-realized, a Chosen One, Divinely Inspired or whatever, also somehow have the gall to claim to be humble while exacting humility out of their followers.

That is what a teaching is, a gift to us all, not a bargaining chip of authority.

This is the source of humility, that one should feel grateful to some Big Daddy, God, Existence, the Teacher by proxy, or whatever other name, for the Gift of feeling Divine and Immortal. The chance for peace on earth is readily sacrificed for the chance of ‘me’ receiving this sacred Gift.

So, I could go on but I have written much of my experiences as a grateful follower of Rajneesh. In the end I had to admit I had been ‘sucked in’ by his poetic idealism of a New Man and the utterly selfish attraction of me being one of those ‘specially chosen’ for the role. It proved a mortal blow to both my pride and humility, for I could no longer deny the facts of Rajneesh’s failure and my own desperate need to believe in fairy stories. The dream failed in Oregon, fizzled to a whimper by the time he died and is hardly even mentioned now.

But it is not something that one person convinces another of – it is for each to make their own discoveries, make their own decisions as to what they want to do with their lives. It takes a bold decision to admit to failing to find peace and happiness, to admit that one is not being the best one can be, to admit that one is neither happy nor harmless. And then to decide to set out in completely the opposite direction to what everyone else is doing, one needs to be both desperate and daring.

So, here are some iconoclastic answers, with not a hint of humility.

Humility is such a phoney concept and only covers the pride and arrogance lurking beneath. It is well practiced in the East to the point of absurdity. And there is non so self-righteous as he/she who thinks they are at one with God, God’s messenger, or has the power of God in there hearts or hands... or some similar scenario.

Some-one said to me recently that what I am talking is Wisdom. He missed the point as he was simply trying to fit the facts as I was conveying them and fitting them into his tradition. Buddhism was his thing, but when I pointed out there were serious doubts as to whether Mr. Buddha was an actual flesh and blood human, as there is a similar lack of factual evidence for there ever having been a Mr. Jesus, the conversation died in the bum. Too close to his personal beliefs! So much for Wisdom...

As for your comment that ‘the greatest challenge is ... to remain humble’, we need to be clear about spiritual humbleness. Humbleness is just pride stood on its head. There are none so proud of their humbleness as the spiritual seekers. Humbleness is highly valued and prized as a virtue in all spiritual traditions for the follower is proud of being a humble follower and the God-man is humbled before his or her God. The Dalai Lama continuously claims to be a humble monk and is revered and admired for saying it. If he is sincere, why doesn’t he get down off his throne, throw of his Kingly and Godly mantles and be a humble monk. When I became aware of how proud I was to be a chosen one, how special it made me feel, how being humble was but a front for rampant pride, it was extraordinary revealing. What I was able to clearly see was that it was my pride that ensnared me in the spiritual world and this awareness made getting out so much easier.

This seems to me to be a completely disrespectful and flippant dig at His Holiness the Dalai Lama and it really does nothing to serve your point.

Well, if you could get beyond your moral indignation and continually crying ‘unfair’ you might be able to see that the Dalai Lama’s hypocrisy in not being what he says he is, well illustrates my point. Show me an ex-God-man who got off his throne or podium, has forsaken his Holiness and happily settled down with his wife and kids in suburbia – then you would be making a valid point. I don’t have to bow down to God-men in humble respect for the whole idea of Gods and Goddesses is a myth.

Being an atheist and an actualist is wonderfully extraordinarily freeing.

But more troubling still is your argument that humility can be equated with pride. That the individual often corrupts that which is revealed in spiritual experience by making it their own is a valid point, one that you might discover is given tremendous focus by all the world’s traditions. I also appreciate your discovery of this movement within yourself as I have seen the same movement in my own experience. It is one of the biggest traps for the seeker. But that in absolutely no way means that it is forgone conclusion that pride is the true face of humility. To argue this is simply illogical and deeply cynical. It basically says humility is not possible. Where’s the common sense in this?

Of course feeling humble is possible. Billions of people on the planet practice and feel deep humility as they pray to or prostrate themselves before their imaginary Gods. Are not all seekers, followers and believers, encouraged, coerced and extolled to be more humble, more surrendered, more devoted? The more humble and the more surrendered the better, and the more proud one is of one’s humility – which is exactly my point. Given that feeling humble means

1 Having or showing a low estimate of one’s own importance; (of an action, thought, etc.) offered with or affected by such an estimate; lacking assertion, deferential. 2 Of lowly rank or condition; modest,

I eventually came to see it as a silly feeling to indulge in.

It eventually became beneath my dignity* as an autonomous human being to feign humbleness by belittling myself to a mythical God or to a fellow human being who humbly declared he or she was God-realized or God-intoxicated.

*Dignity – The quality of being worthy ... true worth, excellence.

God’s demand that we humans be humble is a trick to ensure He/She/It retains supreme control over us.

Peter’s Text © The Actual Freedom Trust