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True Humility IT is not by repeating mea culpa ad
infinitum that one can show one's true humility. In owning too much and
too often one's sins, one may be just on the wrong side of virtue. There lurks
a strain of vanity in self-maceration: the sinner in an overdose of self-pity
almost feels himself saintly. Certainly, one must stand before oneself face to
face, not hide or minimise or explain away one's errors and lapses, all one's
omissions and commissions. But one need not brood over them, merely repenting
and repining. One sees steadily, without flinching, what one actually is and
then resolutely and sincerely takes to the ways and means of changing it,
becoming what one has to be. A fall, the discovery of a new frailty should be
an occasion not to chastise and punish yourself, thus to depress yourself and
harden your nature, but to enthuse you with a fresh resolution, to rekindle
your aspiration so that you may take another step forward. And, naturally, this
you must do not with the sense that you can succeed or move forward by any
inherent capacity of yours – your failures are there always as standing
eye-openers to you. No, it is not your self but the Divine Self that will come
to your succour and lift you up – tameva eï ¡a vŗņute tanum swam – to him alone it unveils its own body. That is
the humility to be learnt. But it does not mean that you are to remain merely
passive, inert –you cannot but be that if you are only a "weeping
willow" – a dead-weight upon the force of Grace that would carry you up. Rather
you should throw your weight, whatever it is, on the side of the Divine. An
atmosphere of alacrity and happiness and goodwill goes a long way to the
redemption and regeneration of the consciousness. This is demanded of you; the
rest is the work of the Divine. It is under such conditions that the Divine's
Page-104 help becomes all the more speedy and
effective. Otherwise, mere contrition
and lamentation and self-torture mean, as I have said, a ballast, a burden upon
the force of progress and purification; as Sri Krishna says in the Gita, by
oppressing .oneself one oppresses only the Divine within. Humility, in .order
to be true and sincere, need not be sour and dour in .appearance or go about in
sack-cloth and ashes. On the .contrary, it can be smiling and buoyant: and it
is so, because it is at ease, knowing that things will be done – some things
naturally will be undone too – quietly, quickly, if necessary, .and inevitably,
provided the right consciousness, the right will within is maintained. The humble
consciousness does not, of course, take credit for what is being done for it,
nor does it .concentrate wholly or chiefly on its utter futility and smallness.
It feels small or helpless not in the sense as when one one feels weak and
miserable and almost undone, but as a child feels, naturally and innocently, in
the lap of it mother: only I perhaps it is more awake and self-conscious
than the child mentality. Humility is unreservedly humble, as it
envisages the immensity of the labour the Divine has undertaken, sees the
Grace, infinite and inscrutable, working miracles every moment: and it is full
of gratitude and thanksgiving and quiet trust and hopefulness. Certainly, it
means self-forgetfulness and selflessness, as it cannot co-exist with the
sense of personal worth and merit, with any appreciation of one's own tapasya
and achievement, even as it thrives ill upon self-abasement and
self-denigration, for if one is rajasic, the other is tamasic egoism
– egoism, in any case. Absolute nullity of the egoistic self is the condition
needed, but anything less than that, any lowering of the consciousness beyond
this zero point means reaffirming the ego in a wrong direction. True humility
has an unostentatious quietness, as it has a living and secret contact with the
divine consciousness. Page-105
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