Pride and Progress
Saturday, September 13th, 2008Anandamayi Ma was asked:
“What does God eat?”
Sri Ma’s answer: “God eats your pride.”
Pride is the hallmark of those in the human realm.
To be proud does not mean to be happy about some personal characteristic or achievement.
It means to be defensive of one’s place in the world.
Real happiness opens the gates to experiencing our continuity with others. We want everyone to share in happiness when we really discover it.
Pride makes us jealous and afraid. We want to keep our supposedly limited supply of happiness to ourselves and our small circle.
Pride is a certain kind of insecurity that makes a fortress of the small self.
When we are proud, we cannot tolerate self-doubt. We cannot tolerate failure. We cannot listen to, or digest, honest reflection from friends, family or our teachers.
When we suffer from the limitation of pride, we cling to the activities, self-concepts and friends that bolster our self-image and aggressively reject anything that threatens it.
Pride makes us highly discriminating and sharp-minded. We are always on the look-out for threats and insults. Pride is paranoid.
We become sensitive to the slightest rebuke, imagined or real, and gravitate compulsively toward that which keeps us supplied with honors and praise.
We also cannot bear to be around those who openly display their insecurity and uncertainty. We do not want to see ourselves in that mirror.
God (Guru) eats our pride by making us painfully aware of the gap between how we really feel about ourselves and the image we project to the world.
God (Guru) helps us to become un-addicted to the extreme effort we have been putting into maintaining our winning self-image by showing us how contrived, futile and exhausting that effort is.
God (Guru) slowly wins us over by helping us to discover our indestructible desire to know ourselves without contrivance and our true Vajra pride, or exuberant appreciation of life just as it is.
What gets in our way, especially in the West, is that we want to move quickly from false pride to Vajra pride. We want to skip over the pain of self-doubt and uncertainty that comes between these.
We are not so willing to feel the pain as our old self-concepts give way and the unerring, cutting-through gaze of Guru becomes the vehicle through which we see ourselves without deception.
And feeling closer to Guru, just as we are seeing our limitations more clearly, provokes even more painful self-questioning.
We also don’t want to feel the full force of our longing for realization and our love of the life process we call Guru. We are afraid that that fierceness will sweep all other longings and loves.
Which is absolutely true. But what we don’t realize is that having been swept away, we return and embrace all of life.
No one can realize this until they let God (Guru) eat their pride.
For many years, my Guru asked for permission to strip me of all pride. Yes, we have to give permission for this. Without bargaining or hedging.
It’s not so easy to give permission. Pride is a strong fixation, and it has us in its grip. When you really try to let go of it, you will find you are a slave to pride.
My pride couldn’t accept some of the things she asked of me.
But she arranged things slowly, slowly so that I had no choice but to follow her. She took away my satisfaction in anything but following her, and she is still busy destroying all of the paths of ambition and attachment that lead in other directions.
She said:
Remember this everyday. Like a flower stripped of all petals, only the shining central channel with its golden head will remain, and from that again arises the whole world.
In Ma’s love,
Shambhavi
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