In my last post: “The De-glamoured View,” I said that at a certain point in our journey to enlightenment most of us need to undergo a gigantic ”humbling” - although, to be honest, we usually experience lesser humblings prior to this, as if to soften us up for the big, painful one! In today’s post, I thought I would elaborate on this very important aspect of our spiritual/soul journey, which can be, if we allow it to be, a major turning point in how we live our life.
The Purpose of Our “Humblings.”
All humbling experiences are intended to strip us of our arrogance, and one of our greatest arrogances is our tendency to believe we have the ability to manage our life successfully, and often the lives of other people, as well. To believe we have this power to control most of what happens in our own and other people’s lives, is both an illusion and an arrogance, and our “humblings,” are attempts by our soul to cure us of this hubristic attitude.
Quite simply, our soul attracts a humbling experience to us so that the size of our ego can be reduced. In plain language: so that we can be firmly put in our place and shown that we are most certainly not the captain of our own ship - our own life. Neither are we capable of being the captain of other people’s ships, or lives. This is a very important lesson we all have to learn in life and we discount it to our cost. Incidentally, I’m using the term “ego” in this sense, to mean our sense of individual self, IE. the little “me” or “I,” that we perceive ourselves to be.
One of the most common mistakes people make when they embark on a path of spiritual progress is to believe that they have embarked on a journey of self-improvement. The reason for the misunderstanding, in my experience, is that in most of us, there seems to be a deeply held, though often unconscious conviction, that who we are now, right at this minute, is a defective, inferior version of who we ought to be, or should be. In fact, many people on the spiritual path seem to think their task is to become saintly or “perfect.”
In other words, there’s a belief that if they aren’t completely unselfish, self-sacrificing, and caring all of the time, aren’t always wise, patient, peaceful, compassionate and understanding (to mention but a few of the virtues many people imagine an enlightened being possesses) then enlightenment will forever elude them. This insistence on becoming perfect, however, is one of the biggest hurdles we need to overcome if we are ever to attain spiritual maturity.
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