How many times during the day do we feel pain because our pride is hurt? Or we try too hard to "look good" for others and we fail and we get hurt? Well, Martheiu Ricard, a Buddhist monk has this to say:"Pride, the exacerbation of self-importance consists of being infatuated with the few qualities we posses and, often, of imagining ourselves to possess those we lack. It hinders all personal progress, because in order to learn we must first believe that we do not know.
Humility is a forgotten value today’s world. Our obsession with the image we have to project of ourselves is so strong that we have stopped questioning the validity of appearances and endlessly seek better ways to appear.
What image should we project? Politicians and movie stars have ’’media advisers’’ whose job it is to create a favorable image for their client with the general public, sometimes even teaching them how to smile. Newspapers are devoting more and more space to their “people page,” with grabby headlines on “people in the news,” their ratings of who’s “in” and who’s “out”. In all of this, what place is there for humility, a value so rare that it might almost be consigned to the museum of obsolete virtues?
Humility as an attitude is essentially focused on other and their well-being. Studies in social psychology have found that people who overvalue themselves present a higher than average tendency toward aggression. People who consider themselves superior judge the faults of others more harshly and consider them to be less forgivable.
Humility is a quality invariable found in the sage, who is compared to a tree whose branches, heavy with fruit, bow to the ground,. As for the conceited man, he is more like a bare tree whose branches rear up pridefully."
Selected excerpts from Happiness, Chapter 18.
