Lectures & Talks
Humility
By Bulent Rauf, written for the intensive six-month course at the Beshara School
The necessity for patience and humility is the condition of human life and life in immanence.
…How, then, does this realization of the essential Oneness finally filter into one’s being and how is one made to realize something which the intellect seems to have accepted a long time ago? It is that any knowledge is a realization which comes much later than when the lesson is learnt; but this process, as we have said, requires constant, or as humanly near constant, awareness to be the factor of this realization. Humanly near constancy of awareness is naturally open to many weaknesses of falling back, time and time again, into lapses. It is through this process and sequence of several or innumerable number of these lapses and returns to the requisite humility that one finally acquires a constancy. This process or sequence of lapses and returns to reality is what is known as patience. Hence, with patience, the recurrent self-imposition of humility all the while one is in a lapse, i.e. in immanence, one finally arrives at transcendence. The necessity for patience and humility is the condition of human life and life in immanence.
…But how can one practice humility? Humility is in its broadest terms poverty of spirit; not poverty by lack,, but by esteem of individuality; it is the acceptance of one’s limitations; in other words a realistic estimation of one’s self without aggrandizement of one’s egocentrically fabricated self-illusions…