Richard: Humility is merely the antidote
to pride ... you cannot have one without the other. Where is the need to be humble unless you are first proud? Therefore, being
humble is merely pride standing on its head ... and one is proud of being virtuous.
All humility is nothing but the ego being very,
very clever ... it is but a product of a lost, lonely, frightened and very, very cunning entity called ego. One of the chief
attributes of a freedom from a ‘self’ or a ‘Self’ and from believing in a ‘God’ and a ‘Greater Reality’, is a
completeness ... an absence of the need to control a wayward ‘I’ with moralistic injunctions. Personally I have no humility
whatsoever and, of course, neither am I proud.
In order to be free of the Human Condition one
needs to see the place pride and humility plays in one’s life. ‘I’ am proud of ‘my’ major achievement – which is
maintaining ‘myself’ as an identity – and ‘I’ will do anything but relinquish ‘my’ grip on this flesh-and-blood body
... including humbling ‘myself’ before some God in order to ameliorate the pernicious effects of pride.
However, humility is merely the antidote to pride ... and they
feed of each other, continuously. For example, one cannot but feel proud of one’s accomplishment of self-abasing humility ... it
is in the nature of the entity to do so. A humbled self is still a self, nonetheless, leaving one proud of one’s performance.
When one realizes how silly all this is; when one sees that pride and humility are standing in the way of freedom from all
self-centred activity, something astounding occurs. The opposites vanish. I am simply here where I have always been ... and pride,
with its companion in arms, humility, has disappeared along with all the other feelings. I am free to be here now in the world
as-it-is. Unadorned and unencumbered, I can stand on my own two feet, owing allegiance to no-one.
