In every spiritual tradition, the quality of humility is important for the student’s progress. Paul explores the question of “What is humility?” and how Paul Brunton embodies it in contrast to our egoic variations of it.
It baffled me at first.
Then, as I thought about it, it baffled me more.
How could I “work for it?”
About other things, I likely would have asked PB to say more. But asking him how to “work for” another hit or for more of that peace felt inappropriate at the time. It had emerged completely unexpectedly, so naturally and freely as a blessed, time-suspending moment. Now seemingly passed, but unforgettable. And I at 32 was with the 81-year-old PB, so I thought, to try to make his daily/routine life easier—not to be needy or greedy or burdensome for him.
What did feel appropriate, as I recall, was to help as I could with what he let me see or expressed a need for, and to be silent—inwardly and outwardly—about whatever That was that had happened. Not silent only in the simple sense of not talking, or trying to talk, about it, or about the mystery of it abiding still, but also in a deeper sense. Silent in the sense of making room deep within for layers of something unfathomable to gather and accrue.
Each layer had many nuanced aspects. Each aspect seemed to be an infinity in its own right. They all seemed to echo both within and distantly to one another as a mass of inward presences. All without physical sound of course. Each nuance was a profound silence becoming more profound through its presence with and permeability to the others. Whatever was going on, it insisted on being kept deliberately secret, not to be spoken or spoken of. Staying with it was more like keeping and tending silence than trying to just be quiet.
Also, I wanted to internalize and squarely face PB’s simple question: “What’s so special about you that you should have it . . .?”
Did I believe I deserved more of that blessing presence that, as he said, many want and so few have? Was there anything special about me that would justify my feeling depressed or deprived or despondent about its having gone? Maybe I just couldn’t appreciate how rare it is and how, instead, to feel blessed and grateful/joyful to even know about it? To know for certain that it is, to feel how desirable it is, and to be willing to give up everything else for it? (Well, almost everything else.) Maybe he means how dare I be depressed? How dare I feel deprived?
Still, the remark felt like a deep stab. Was it a challenge? A put-down? Or just a realistic perspective on how things are, and the rules of this new situation?
It may have been just a casual remark, of course. In that case a response could be “Nothing. Nothing makes me special in that way. Nothing entitles me to know about that at all, let alone to enjoy more of it—especially not before or instead of anyone more deserving.” If that response were a healthy self-assessment, a simple and realistic perspective on how things really work in this area, going with it might even help some much-needed humility come in. (Much more needed than I had any real sense of at the time.)
If it were not a healthy one, though, taking that perspective might snatch the wind from my sails for the rest of my life. Did I really want to let myself feel, “You’re right, I don’t deserve it,” and pretend that could be okay—either for the present moment or for long? Can you even aspire for something you feel that you don’t deserve?
And what could having it when others who’ve worked harder for it than you don’t possibly mean in this case? Could it mean “instead of”? How could that possibly apply? Why/how is this not something available to all people at all times and under all conditions infinitely, endlessly, timelessly? How is it not more than enough for zillions of us to be one with at the same time? And I being one of us, why not me again and/or forever as well as anyone?
PB hadn’t struck me so far as being a person to make casual/careless remarks, though. What he chose to speak seemed well measured to fit the situation he was part of. Maybe he was poking something I needed to see and acknowledge and attend to? I wanted to find out.
Looking back now from years later, I wouldn’t be surprised to find that seemingly simple or casual things he asked people in the natural course of conversation—especially about themselves—had similar triggers in them. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that his question(s) pointed to exactly the next thing that person needed to look into and deal with. In my case, it did turn out that feeling my way into this one was an opening move toward what I most wanted to know, the start of learning how to “work for it.”
It led to seeing a sharp contrast between what ordinarily passes for humility and the humility that I saw in PB. There were many remarkable qualities about him that I hadn’t seen before meeting him and haven’t seen in a similar degree since. Each of them deserves a chapter. But for me, over several months of working for and with him, the one that left the most lasting impression, and remains the most mysterious through the years since, has been the humility. He wasn’t the first and hasn’t been the only person with a modicum of humility that I’ve seen, but for me he set the standard for what the real thing looks and acts like.
Peace, for all its wondrousness, is easier to describe. There are stories about how Ramana Maharshi inwardly transmitted/extended his own Peace to PB at Arunachala and helped him learn not to lose it. And likewise with other spiritual states we can tune in to through proximity with (or grace of) more advanced humans whose “specialty” they are. Compassion, for example, with the 14th Dalai Lama, who is said to be a literal embodiment of compassion. You can get a real contact high of a specific spiritual quality by hanging out with such people, if you have a sensitivity for the quality their lives are rooted in. You can even walk around with it inside you for a while, thinking it’s your own accomplishment and aren’t you something.
Not so, in my experience so far, with humility. Which calls for recounting some of my limited experience of it . . . so far.
Where I grew up, thinking or feeling oneself “special” was not a good thing to be accused of. Two threads in my background concerning that seemed at odds.
One was the “all created equal, no one’s entitled to . . . [fill in the blank]” theme. That part said it was essential, absolutely mandatory, to understand that I, like everyone else, am not inherently better or worse than anyone. Not entitled to preferential treatment because of my family’s good or bad fortune—living or not living in a nice house, for example, in a “good” or “bad” neighborhood, having or not having a nice car or any car at all, my parents’ successes and prestige or failures in the world, wearing stylish new or shabby hand-me-down clothes, having a little pocket money or not, etc. Being what people called smarter than someone else didn’t make you better than that person. Being better at something didn’t make you better than someone. Likewise with being slower at learning or disadvantaged in some other way—that didn’t make you less. We all make up the same team or family or tribe or nation and enjoy the successes and failures we make together.
Many of us had parents who came to this perspective through working/serving/fighting alongside people from all parts of their country and many parts of the world in World War II. Your life might at any moment be in, or at least partly in, that other person’s hands or theirs in yours. (Maybe at some level it always is.) Each life should be of equal value when it comes to joint enterprises or saving, in light of a deep ideal shared in their hearts. And we kids were to carry into the future this felt value that they did their best to pass along.
The other theme that was also always present as I grew up didn’t fully dawn on me until many years later, in a Walmart aisle.
There always were people in the mix of relatives and friends and teachers who told me that I was better than others. Sometimes it was for accomplishments—winning a spelling bee, for example, or coming through as a teammate in a clutch. Sometimes it was for something given by birth, like a good IQ or not being allergic to poison ivy. Isn’t it natural to take some of the positive input to heart? And have some of it go to your head as well?
Yes, part of me would come to think/feel/believe I was special. And at the same time another part would learn to conceal that opinion well—to camouflage it with something that might pass for humility to some but wasn’t anything of the sort.
I grew up in a culture that (despite many of our parents’ ideals) taught you early to “stick up for yourself” if you don’t want others to put you down and/or take advantage of you. Odd maybe, given what our parents wanted for us; and yet it was so.
Some of us had good coaches or teachers who lived to bring out potential they saw in you. Their mantra was often on the lines of “Show me you want it.” In areas that I did want what the “it” was, they helped me find and own the inner place I wanted it from. So things came about to be rightly proud of.
Not so much the pride that goes before a fall, as the pride of earned accomplishment, of doing something that didn’t come easily. Pride that stays intact when people who don’t know the facts try to shame you. Pride that recognizes that many things out of your control, and some beyond your awareness, had to break your way for things to turn out as well as they did. Pride that can live in the same house with humility. And benefit from being friends with it.
What got through to me in those years about “humility” was not to get too full of yourself, or put on airs, or brag. Especially not to brag. Don’t claim too much credit for yourself for anything. Take a healthy share of the blame for shortcomings or failures and give others a good share of the credit for successes. Don’t exaggerate how good, or how bad, or how important or unimportant you are. Humility like this was a quality that paired well with confidence, and necessarily paired with confidence.
Without a proper dose of confidence to balance it, that kind of humility could bring you too far down. You could become too self-deprecating and spiral into low self-esteem, lack of self-worth, self-doubt, self-loathing, self-hatred, and a whole spectrum of unhealthy states of mind that would make you self-defeating, keep you from even aspiring to be or do anything worthwhile. You could fester in jealousy or envy or shame, become obsequious to or resentful of people who were more successfully self-assertive or self-appointing, attract and submit to people who are not good for you, maybe even harm yourself.
Confidence involves different problems. A right amount seems to please the gods and brighten the day. Too much offends and sets them (and key people) against you. You need to be brought down a notch or two. On the way to that point, you easily become overbearing. Unrealistic about what to expect of yourself or others. You can have too little respect for the difficulty or complexity of something you want to do, too little or no awareness of the psychology of other people involved. You can be in the dark about your inability to correctly assess a situation or your lack of skills or other resources for dealing it. You easily find yourself and/or others chronically disappointed or frustrated about outcomes that “should” have been better.
Conventional (secular) humility helps you heed the warning signs of these traps ahead before it’s too late to change course. A healthy dose of it is a good part of one’s ego development. It’s a good thing to present as part of a well-rounded personality package.
At that level, life provides many opportunities to see our limitations and be aware of places where we fall short of our own or others’ hopes for us. Seeing and working with them in a healthy way does make room for some genuine humility to operate in our better moments. But it doesn’t usually awaken us to the constant presence of something else, compared to which we are as nothing at all. PB seemed to be constantly aware of that something else.
In conventional collective life, humility and confidence together help shape the face you turn to the world, how you face the world and society. They contribute much to how you present who you are and what place in the world or society you want, and deserve, and will do all you can to convince others you are suited for.
Finding your best mix of these two qualities calls for frequent adjustments. It can be a constant shuffle between bolstering yourself (and/or others) up or toning down your expectations and standards for yourself or others. This balancing act is a lot of work, and it often sustains a pretense. There’s something you want others to affirm and reward, something that you yourself might want to fully believe in but find hard to sustain. Sometimes the pretense feels phony or becomes desperate. Even when you think you have the balance right for a moment, part of you hopes to prove itself and get approval, something else needs defending or hiding, dodging the never-absent possibility of exposure and/or shame. Shame for what? Shame for being uncertain enough of its own worthwhileness or survival? So that survival, slipping safely away from facing something, or successfully confronting and one-upping it, becomes the primary measure of success? You have to pump yourself up on a regular basis because you’re constantly losing air.
What I saw in PB I was nothing of the kind. With him there was no pretense. None whatsoever. It was antithetical to pretense. Whatever it was seemed to expose the pretense in you as well, which many people found unsettling. Something not entirely unlike, but much more profound than what I had thought of as humility always pervaded him. Instead of pairing with confidence, though, it seemed to be paired with reverence. There was no fluctuation, no alternating between the humility and the reverence. Both were constantly present, as if conjoined. Like two sides of a single coin with no thickness. Something allowed them to be distinct, but not separate.
The humility didn’t seem to be just part of his check-the-boxes personality package, like it is for so many who can pull off the act now and then if needed. It wasn’t just an acquired mannerism to observe in his behavior (though it did also shine through there), but something more fundamental. Not a good addition to or feature of his ego. More like an antidote to ego altogether. Something that kept egotism out of the picture entirely. Some sort of force field that just dissolved it.
What was going on there?
It had nothing to do with keeping face in or toward the world. It had everything to do with aligning to laws deeper than I-me-mine. Inescapable laws of intuitively guided life, maybe. He seemed always one with or at least in harmony with some feature of the nuanced infinity I had briefly been mingled with. I could feel its presence in his tone of voice and body language. It came through most strongly when he turned his attention inward and aligned with a deep joy for which he seemed immensely grateful.
I imagined that it would be only natural for one’s sense of self to go, or be brought, to its knees in continuous awareness of that Presence. To in turn be saturated/pervaded/displaced at times with an intangible holiness more sacred than one’s opinions and gripes and personal loves at the very least, and than even one’s own life while it is there. And I imagined that recognition to be the beginning of true reverence.
Somehow PB seemed to move about within a deep version of that kind of reverence always. As if reverence was a primary act of recognition for him of where he actually lived, inwardly . . . and he could do it in the same room, or the same train or bus or car as the rest of us, without busy neighbors or preoccupied fellow travelers even noticing. It seemed to me that what allowed this to happen was a fathomless something that I felt prompted to call humility.
Whatever it was, I could see that I didn’t have it. And I could see that my lack of it would be a big problem for going forward. I knew a little now of the state of grace PB lived in or with or as, but nothing about how to live it myself. The difference between knowing how to act humble (me, sort of, to folks who didn’t know any better) and to actually be humble as a state of being, as a foundation for, or root expression of, the ongoing awareness I longed for, became increasingly clear.
Could anything from the earlier stages of my life be of use in this new situation with PB, I wondered? Was there a need to show him (or show someone or prove to some being) that I “wanted it” enough to make a difference? Not likely, is what I felt.
Self-assertion didn’t seem to have a place in this new mix of possibilities and improbabilities. Letting that unlikelihood sink in to the depth I could at the time wasn’t easy. Just acknowledging that it had to happen was humiliating. And seeing how hard it was even to acknowledge, was more humiliating. I’d like to say humbling, but not so. Just humiliating. An opportunity for humbling maybe, but also for resentment, anger, despair, dissociation, backlash of all sorts. How to opt for humbling, instead of finding some way to run away or hide or attack?
Seeing no viable escape from facing this need was a coming-around, a ripening of sorts, of an insider tip PB offered when I first met him in New York State a few years earlier. I had asked him back then how to know if you’re getting guidance from your higher/deeper nature, how to distinguish that from just acting on a momentary impulse or selfish interest or ingrained habit or fear or desire. He said first you must make yourself utterly humble. If you can’t do that, he continued, then it’s a moot point: There will be no guidance.
It didn’t take me long back then to realize that I couldn’t meet that fundamental requirement. I couldn’t be utterly humble. I couldn’t even really imagine what that would be like to do. Now, some four years later with him again, was the moment coming around to start some learning along that line? I wish I could say I hoped so. But more honestly, I hoped not.
As I wondered inwardly about this, PB kept me busier by the day with various kinds of tasks. He didn’t, as I recall, ever say (with regard to those wonderings) Try this or Try that or Have you considered or You might want to . . . He just kept giving me more and more varied things to do. Often they were things I had no idea how to do, and had to just figure it out.
Most days PB and I had lunch together in his apartment. Then he would retire to his bedroom for whatever purpose for an hour or so. One day, after he came out of the bedroom, there was something for me to do or get in there, I don’t really remember what. What I do remember was momentous for me.
On the bed where he had been resting was a slip of white paper with his handwriting on it. The note said, “When he has had enough mystical experience to know the goal is real, and has caused enough unnecessary pain to himself and others to see that he must relate to his ego as to an enemy, he may be given an opportunity to enter the spiritual quest.” Well, I think now (as I write this) that the note probably said, “he.” In my mind I tended then and in memory now tend to switch things like that away from the masculine gender bias asap and take it as, “When you have had enough mystical experience to know the goal is real, and have caused enough unnecessary pain to yourself and others to see that you must relate to your ego as to an enemy, you may be given an opportunity to enter the spiritual quest.”
I don’t recall if I put the note back on his bed or moved it to his nightstand. Either way, I never saw it again.
PB had told me weeks earlier that usually when he took up a pen to write on whatever was handy, it was in response to an intuition that was beginning to form. He often didn’t know what he was going to write until it was completely written out. Sometimes as he finished it, he would have an image of the person the intuition was for. And sometimes, to his surprise, he would see that what he had just written was for him!
In this case, reading that note in his room, I felt this one was for me.
“Enough mystical experience to know that the goal is real . . .” check. Got that part. I knew for sure the goal was/is real. To some extent I knew that before I got here to work for PB. But definitely now, with what I’d seen both outwardly and inwardly of how PB operated, a worthy goal was clear and obviously real.
“Relate to your ego as an enemy . . .” oh no, not that. I just didn’t/couldn’t/wouldn’t/hadn’t ever been able to buy that as a real requirement. I’d heard what seemed-to-me insipid variations of that theme for years, mostly from pseudo-self-abnegating people hoping to justify or rationalize being losers. From what I could tell at the time, my ego might very well be the only friend I had. The only one I could count on to be there for me when the chips were down.
But somehow, reading that note that day in PB’s handwriting, in his space, with him nearby, the idea settled in a little. In a moment of unusual candor and honesty, I did see that I had been involved with a lot of pain. Yes, both to others and to myself. Pain that quite possibly was not really necessary. Maybe it would be good to be able to see that coming, and be able to avoid it if possible? At least sometimes?
“Opportunity to enter the spiritual quest.” Hmm. “Opportunity.” “Enter.” Oh, my . . . I wasn’t even on it yet? I’d been fooling myself all these years with the books and the meditation practices and the lip service to “spirituality”? And just an “opportunity,” not a guaranteed ticket or a welcome to or a cool admission stamp on the back of my hand, but something I actually could blow if I didn’t see it or respond to it in a proper way?
Oh, my.
But wait. It gets even better. What did PB mean by ego? Maybe it wasn’t what I thought he meant? And double Oh Oh my, what might he mean by the goal—the goal that is to be known as real? What if that weren’t what I thought it was?
As for the ego part, over the next few days I mentally revisited situations in which I had caused pain that I eventually came to regret—especially ones about which I still felt pain myself. How might the hurting have come about? When I thought of people whom I regretted causing pain to, what had happened by way of the injuring, I told myself, hadn’t been done out of any desire to harm, or intentionally at all. It wasn’t something I was doing consciously. It just sort of happened in the course of living. I didn’t know how to avoid those outcomes or how to deal with them when they arose. I was really bad at that. There was always something important to me that I didn’t see the other person or people as part of, or something or someone that became more important to me than what had been important with them up to that point. I didn’t see how the people about to get hurt fit in with where I needed to go next. And I moved on.
The constant in these situations seemed to be some momentary “importance.” Importance that overruled pausing to consider how my actions might affect someone else. Or even consider how this new impulse in me might or might not mix well with other things that were also important to me. What made this new thing, this thing that became a cause of pain and blinded me to it, seem so important? To me?
The closer I looked, the more it became clear that there was always some sense of self-importance at work. Maybe this uninterruptible sense of self-importance was a problem? Especially when it became excessive? But who’s to decide when it’s excessive? And in what situations or circumstances is it excessive?
I began to think that maybe I could take that “ego as enemy” passage of what PB wrote, at least in part, to be saying: “Whenever you’re feeling self-important, watch out!” There was much more to it, of course, but that wasn’t a bad place to start.
I also began to wonder about why he used the words “the spiritual quest”? All three of those words were restless within me, seeming to object to how I was thinking of them.
Why did PB say “the,” as if what we may be given (or not given) an opportunity to enter were somehow an objective thing, a universal archetype of some sort that’s the same for all, available to all in some one and the same way? Didn’t each of us have our own unique path, weren’t there as many paths as there are people? How can we talk about “the” spiritual quest? That requires these two qualifications to enter? Aren’t we all on our way to the holy by the natural trajectory of life?
Is the path we’ve taken, or find ourself on, not already our quest? Or does maybe our personal path intersect at some critical places or stages with opportunities to transform radically? Are there opportunities that can disrupt and redirect our momentum toward a different quality or order or dimension of life than what we’ve been doing? Opportunities that arise in certain moments and not always, that when given may be unnoticed or deliberately overlooked or declined?
Could PB mean something different by “spiritual” than what I meant by spiritual? Actually, come to think of it, what do I mean by spiritual? That question would deepen for me in coming weeks and months and years, as I gradually saw that PB did mean something very different by that word than I so far took it to mean. For then, it was enough to just allow for the possibility that he did.
Thinking this way wasn’t just out of the blue. PB actually had said something to me a few days earlier about how life presents each of us with certain opportunities at certain times in our lives, some of them material and some of them spiritual. I realized that I didn’t know what he meant by that. How are spiritual and material opportunities different, I wondered. How to tell them apart? How to recognize the opportunities that are spiritual?
Another few months with PB brought a variety of opportunities for this question to deepen and to marvel at this humility aspect of him. It also brought plenty of chances to see things in myself that kept me from being open to that kind of humility in any of the ways he was. Not everything got clear for me in that time, but seeds were planted. In the months and years after my time with him in person was up, working with the extensive notebooks he had reserved for posthumous publication brought some of them to life.
He wrote in one note, for example, that it takes humility even to recognize the presence of the Overself (his term for the higher/divine self within and unknown to most of us), and more humility to follow its dictates.
In another note he said that pride in our own capacity to find truth and gain enlightenment shuts out the humility needed to let the ego go and let the Overself in.
Eventually I discovered in one of those writings a “para” that immediately became my personal favorite of the many in which he writes about the kind of humility I’m trying to say something truthful about:
“The humility needed must be immensely deeper than what ordinarily passes for it. He must begin with the axiom that the ego is ceaselessly deceiving him, misleading him, ruling him. He must be prepared to find its sway just as powerful amid his spiritual interests as his worldly ones. He must realize that he has been going from illusion to illusion even when he seemed to progress.”
I’ve felt a strong need through the years to “hear” this particular para more deeply, to see more clearly and feel more intimately what PB means as this “immensely deeper” humility, and how it differs from what ordinarily passes for it . . . always with the price of trying to begin and begin again and try to begin again, with that axiom. There has been enough learning in the process so far, to expect that there is much more to learn ahead.
At one point I thought that this “immensely deeper” humility could be what Confucius spoke of as the solid foundation for all virtues, without which other virtues cannot exist. But looking more carefully into how people speak and write about his views today, it seems to me now that they (the writers) are talking about something less profound than what exuded through PB’s entire demeanor. It doesn’t sound quite the same as what PB says we need to begin and to stay on course with what he calls “the” spiritual quest.
Maybe Confucius did mean the same thing as what I saw in PB. Maybe the writers I’ve seen so far just aren’t on target. But what they say about his view makes it seem like something still primarily outward, something still about one’s face to the world and to others—not about an indispensable catalyst for one’s growing inner awareness of the sacred, not about something that quietly burns up all one’s greed for things or station.
To my mind, PB is pointing to a humility we need to even be able to turn inward. A humility that is fundamental for our awareness of the sacred to deepen and grow more intimate. Something that we must feel in order to begin to serve That rather than to go on insisting that it should serve us.
Saint Augustine’s view on this may be more like PB’s. He’s said to have held that without humility all other appearance of virtue is but a façade— that “He who practices all virtues, but with no humility, is like a man who carries dust before the wind.” Augustine does seem to honor it as an inner posture toward the Divine, rather than as any of the many skillful modes of societal deference that serve self-advancement in a given culture.
Without at least trying to cultivate this “immensely deeper” humility—learning to accept fully the moments when a drop or two of it may arise in us—we probably will not, because we can not, recognize opportunities that invite us to enter or advance “the” quest for a spiritualized life in this world. PB very likely knew this from his own experience when he early on testified to humility as “the first step on this path.” How much more profoundly might he have understood it when he could later also write, “In humility the quest is to be begun: in even greater humility it is to be fulfilled.”
