Humility Is At Least Half-King

Humility Is At Least Half-King
By Bill Cottringer

There is one critical virtue I can’t get enough of these days and I don’t think we ever appreciate its ultimate importance and value until the lack of it comes back to bite us in our butts. I think humility should be right up there with math, science and writing skills in the school curriculum and dominant parenting practices. Personally I am of the mind that lack of humility is the root cause of most problems, conflicts and destructiveness we see today. My main problem with trying to communicate the value of humility is to tone down my own passion and be more humble about humility; otherwise I am just contributing to the over-all problem of our over-egocentric, un-humble world.

Today, everyone seems to be an expert at their egocentric, un-humble half-truths, and that includes us humble proponents too. If you believe this to be right, good and true, then the other person or group who believes that to be the case, must be wrong, bad and false. Of course they feel the same way about you. Who is right and who is wrong, becomes the wrong question. The bigger picture which contains both these contradictions teaches the wisdom that both sides are both a little right and a little wrong.

I think that humility is the only viable answer to today’s personal and political conflicts—developing the openness to the need for us all to go from a half truth perspective of ‘I win and you lose,’ to a whole perspective of asking the valid question, ‘how can we all win something important and not lose too much of anything of value? That seems to me to be the answer of the age old paradox of wanting to have your cake and eat it too.

The only way to be open to finding answers to the many divergent, seemingly unsolvable problems that are becoming so loud, damaging and annoying today, is to consider the truth of ‘what you think you know, not always being so.’ Most of us are lucky enough to have two eyes to see the world, but even with that blessing, we can really only see 180-degrees in our 3-dimensional worlds. And if we want to see the other 180-degrees to get a whole picture, we have to turn around.

And then of course, our viewpoints about anything are highly influenced by time, our viewpoint itself and other possible dimensions. So why in the world would we ever be sure that we have anything but an incomplete and incorrect viewpoint, which is just tentatively evolving? Why are we so sure about what we think we know and so resistive to questioning our own minds?

Being open to the possibility that we only have one small piece of the treasure map is probably a reverse function of intelligence and lack of firsthand, reflective experience with the nature of nature. The cooperative inter-relations of things in nature is in direct opposition to our competing egos, and the more successful we are in using our intelligence to bully and conquer the perceived opposition, the more we believe we have truly found the way. But sooner or later there comes a brick wall that knows the whole truth.

We all get the opportunity to deal with our own brick walls to teach us the lesson of humility—some are actual physical structures like prisons, some are made up of financial or materialistic obstacles, some involve relationships, some are physical disabilities or existential dilemmas, and some are pain, addictions or other mental or social maladjustments.

The brick walls can involve groups too—wars between countries based on the battle to be right with political, economic and religious half-truths. The bleeding, broken, bones, bruises, death and destruction from this egomaniac approach to dealing with brick walls, just makes the conflicts that much more impervious to positive resolution. There is no winning with this approach, but it may be a lesson unlearned for some. And that harsh reality may be the hardest humble pie to swallow, humbly.

I would like to propose that we go back to our humble beginnings and re-interpret the Garden of Eden original sin story in the Christian Bible, without the assumption anyone has it right or what the “truth” really is. Let’s take a more tentative, ‘what-if’ approach to exploring possibilities that we can all benefit from.

What if we were to remove the over-controlling and ultimately-damning moral good vs. evil spin on this original choice Adam and Eve were confronted with? Maybe the choice was to accept the bliss of just being in a perfect whole world of union and non-judgment vs. doing something that would risk dividing and fragmenting this blissful oneness dualistically into the many pairs of opposites, out of natural curiosity?

Or, what if this fundamental choice was the only way to develop the full gift and curse-like nature of self-consciousness, which is the only way to fully experience life and all the things that make us feel alive? Take the moral spin of good vs. evil out of this story, and the humble realization is that all we are all trying to do is to experience life—without pre-judgments that over-flavor the experiences, in the journey to find out what works or doesn’t work to help us or impede us to getting to the finish line? Oddly, they say good judgment is based on experience and experience is based on bad judgment. Isn’t this the humble lesson we are being challenged to finally learn?

My hope is that if we can all be open to the benefits of being more humble with our own individual pieces of the treasure map—of which we are most un-humble about in knowing for sure—we can create a more complete collective consciousness to deal with our conflicts with more win-win cooperation than win-lose competition. If we can’t give up our egocentric competitive drives, then maybe we can turn them in on ourselves to do more individually to become more humble. Of course, I have to remain humble, that I have just uncovered half the truth to restore a better balance to the whole truth.

The key to making progress in this needed paradigm shift, is in our communication. When we try to convey our individual half-truths with words that insinuate things like over-certainty, over-control, divisive judgments, superiority, insensitivity, dishonesty or manipulation, we are just reinforcing our own egocentric minds, and not being humble in listening to and learning the whole truth that is going on around us. It may take a powerful emotional experience with a brick wall to remind us of the value of remaining humble in our journeys. I hope I never forget mine as it is the only security blanket that has ever been dependable in learning the wisdom of insecurity.