Greetings, Luminous One!
For those in the USA, I hope you're doing something relaxing and/or fun this weekend to celebrate our country's independence day.
For those outside the US, it's usually a time of informal gatherings of friends and family for grilling, swimming and general outdoor enjoyment, often culminating with fireworks.
It's timely to be talking about freedom because when people come together these days, even longtime relationships can become strained due to the proliferation of freely-expressed opinions on a myriad of societal topics.
One reason for this month's focus on Humility is to relieve the strain from potentially alienating conversations, as you'll see below.
But before we go there, I have a caveat: the tricky thing about Humility is when you start talking about it, you can quickly end up not demonstrating it!
True humility does not know that it is humble. If it did, it would be proud from the contemplation of so fine a virtue. -Martin Luther
But we'll try anyway because everywhere you look these days, Humility seems to be in short supply. It's rarely modeled and seems to me to have become devalued as a virtue.
The three most important virtues are humility, humility, and humility. -Bernard of Clairvaux
When many of us were growing up, I think you'd agree that there was more of a common thread woven through our communities. Speaking from my own experience, every adult I encountered as a child expected the same behavior from me as my parents did. The rules of society were clear, and firmly in place largely due to shared doctrines about how to act with one another.
As we all know, those walls of conformity (for lack of a better word), started crashing down in the 60's and have continued to erode ever since.
Freedom to be an individual with personal perspectives, perhaps differing from mainstream society, has been surging for the last 6 decades with no sign of slowing. In fact, I would say that the pace has rapidly picked up, which is kinda cool.
I sometimes marvel that if it's true that the Creator is seeking to know Itself through the magnitude of iterations of Itself in ever-expanding intricate fractals of expression, then It must be having quite an exciting time of it!
All this freedom is fantastic, but what about our capacity for harmony? What happens when there are so many points of view on personal rights and freedoms that we can't avoid conflicting ideas?
AND...
What if Creator set this up for us as a way to grow?
Evolution would not push us backwards into a homogenous society but rather urge us to stretch into a new way of existing.
What if this is an opportunity for us to practice the 5th dimensional, non-dual attitude of "Yes, and..." even more fully? (See below for a Hathor meditation on detaching from old beliefs.)
One thing's for sure: we need to find our way back to loving each other, regardless of our beliefs.
Put simply, Humility helps us to listen with curiosity and kindness. It moves us out of judgment and into empathy.
Humility is a disposition, a relationship with life that understands that we’re living in a mystery every single second, and in that mystery, we’re not in control.
Anything can happen at any moment to set us on a new trajectory.
An eternal truth is that if we forget about this orientation, life has a way of eventually setting us a course correction to regain a Humble outlook. (Mythology is FULL of examples.)
Life is a long lesson in humility. -James M. Barrie
I humbly offer up these musings in hopes that they resonate with you, and am deeply grateful that we can dig into sometimes sensitive topics, fully realizing that I'm often "preaching to the choir."
I figure it's ok because we're all in this topsy-turvy peduncle together, trying to make sense of it all.
I am satisfied with the mystery of life's eternity and with a knowledge, a sense, of the marvelous structure of existence - as well as the humble attempt to understand even a tiny portion of the Reason that manifests itself in nature. -Albert Einstein
Much love and infinite blessings,
-Hope
Comments