Humility and Humiliation, True Spiritual Clarity

Why is humility the true gateway to spiritual life? Through a reflection on the humanity of awakened masters and the need to empty ourselves of our concepts, this text questions our relationship to the ego, to spiritual vanity, and to inner clarity.

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Why is humility the true gateway to spiritual life? Through a reflection on the humanity of awakened masters and the need to empty ourselves of our concepts, this text questions our relationship to the ego, to spiritual vanity, and to inner clarity.

Life is not existence. Existence is the time between birth and death. Life is what makes our heart beat. Within existence, we have duties, among them meeting our fundamental needs — shelter, food, drink, safety, and so on. Once fundamental needs are met, endless desires arise.

We have a duty to care for those who depend on us. All of this belongs to existence. There is life, and life begins before existence and continues after it. Spiritual life is existence lived with awareness of life. This life we call the Holy Name, or "vital breath." Some call it "Shabda-Brahman," others "the virtue of the Tao."

A spiritual person is a person like any other: they need to eat, to shelter themselves, they may or may not like cars, bicycles, fine clothes, and people.

Man has instincts, and spirituality does not erase instincts. We are not ethereal beings. In a person genuinely engaged on a spiritual path, discernment increases, as does balance and humility — apart from that, they are like everyone else.

The Awakened Ones

The awakened ones (buddhas), such as Gautama Siddhartha of the Sakya clan, or Lao-Tzu, and another awakened one nicknamed "the dark one" because of the color of his skin (krishna), and Jesus, also suffer from stomach upsets, fevers, fatigue. They even get angry, no doubt justifiably.

We are also this body, and as long as we are incarnate we cannot escape its constraints or its weaknesses. Neither Jesus, nor Gautama Siddhartha, nor any other escaped this reality.

Hormones are more powerful than willpower. Those who suffer from hormonal disorders, thyroid conditions for instance, know what I mean. There is no magic, except the magic of the life that animates us.

We are our body, and its instincts, which drive us toward meeting our needs. The body is the temple of God — He designed it, with its weaknesses and its strength. We are our mind, our personality, the duration of this incarnation, and we are the incarnate soul, bound to the ego.

It is the ego that keeps the soul incarnate and gives it self-awareness. It is a gift from God, not an enemy. What you mistake for an enemy is, in fact, the false-ego. I know this word is barely known, but if you read the Bhagavad-Gîtâ and the Bhaktimàrga, you will find it there.

Like a diver who weights himself down to stay underwater, the ego weighs us down so that we remain alive, incarnate. It allows us to say "I." It allows us to have a choice, to say "yes" or "no."

To become aware of this life, the Spiritual Path has a "method," a sadhana — a structured path of practice — resting on four pillars. Among them is deep meditation and its techniques, taught during the Revelation, the initiatory teaching passed from the guide to whoever asks for it.

The Revelation is given to whoever asks for it. The Path has a guide. What is a guide, who is a guide? A guide is someone who teaches and accompanies practitioners. He is himself a practitioner, and he too once had a guide.

All Masters Were Men

Spiritual masters, awakened ones, are often depicted as extraterrestrials or gods. Human vanity is so strong that it believes only an extraterrestrial and/or a god is worthy of taking care of it — why? Because she's worth it!

In truth, all masters were Men, born of a woman through the work of another man. Biology is stubborn. Their authority did not come from superpowers, but from their teaching.

Vanity, or "false-ego," prefers to depict masters as gods, the better to reject the real ones — those who are simply Men — on the pretext that they don't resemble "true" masters.

God makes use of Men as He created them. When one follows the Spiritual Path with diligence, one cannot help but recognize that our existence and our awareness change for the better — but know that life on the Spiritual Path takes nothing away from your humanity.

Humility matters in spiritual life. Humility is neither humiliation nor modesty — it is clarity. The mind, you understand, takes part in spiritual life in order to understand what you are living, and that is the second phase. The first is to practice — to observe the sadhana.

But why would humility matter so much in spiritual life? Because to meditate deeply, we must be humble.

Emptying Oneself

I was speaking with an aspirant, and she told me she needed to find her samadhi — the state of pure inner absorption that all deep meditation aims toward — in her spiritual life. I asked her what she meant by that. She believed samadhi meant "master."

You see how important it is to speak the same language. It's the same with the word "awakened": awakening only comes after a nirvikalpa or nirbija-samadhi — a temporary, thought-free state of absorption, comparable to the ecstasy described by Saint Teresa of Ávila. It is the samadhi that suddenly brings about awakening. So perhaps people believe being awakened means "I am open to subtle things," or perhaps: "I am aware of inequalities and the suffering of minorities"… You see how important it is to agree on a shared vocabulary.

How does one follow the teaching of a genuine master? You must empty yourself of your concepts and your certainties. It is absolutely necessary to empty yourself when you set out on a spiritual path — to empty yourself of what you had gathered before.

Someone who enters a monastery to live as a Buddhist will not use Muslim or Catholic vocabulary! They will use Buddhist phraseology. If I say samadhi to you, you must understand what I mean, and if I say dhyana — deep meditation itself — it is the same thing, and so on.

So you must empty yourself of your concepts. This is the purpose of the phase that precedes the Revelation, while you are still an aspirant. How can you accept doing this without humility? You will tell yourself: "My concepts are just as good as this man's," "Why should I get rid of my concepts? Why isn't it up to him to do so?"

No one forces anyone to come to the Path, but if you wish to come, then you must leave your concepts at the door — at first, so as to better hear those of the Path, and then, in a second step, decide whether you keep these new concepts or return to your old ones.

To learn, you must accept not knowing. This too calls for humility. It is a rare virtue, and this is why everyone knits together their own personal spirituality, taking as teachers angels, archangels, inner masters, God Himself, or masters disembodied for millennia.

So there is no need to empty oneself or to be humble when one does not wish to follow a master of flesh, but only dead masters or ethereal entities, real or supposed. Humility is not humiliation, but objectivity, clarity, and intellectual honesty. Ask yourself: "Do I know, or do I not know?"

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