Humility

Cover of Take Me To Truth: Undoing the Ego

“Love, like truth and beauty, is concrete. Love is not fundamentally a sweet feeling; not, at heart, a matter of sentiment, attachment, or being “drawn toward.” Love is active, effective, a matter of making reciprocal and mutually beneficial relation with one’s friends and enemies.”

(Carter Heyward)



In the previous post I mentioned that my theme for the week was humility and balance (I know I'm totally geeking out, but love me anyway, lol). So, the book I'm currently reading has an awesome excerpt on humility that I thought I would share. I always have two books on tap, a non-fiction and a fiction, my non-fiction pick, Take Me To Truth, Undoing the Ego, by Nouk Sanchez & Tomas Vieira, is an amazing, in-depth read. Seriously, it drives so many nails on the head, it's unbelievable.

The Power of Humility

The Unified Self is an endless store of Higher Wisdom to which most of us have not yet yielded. It is a power house of Truth and knowledge beyond the finite intellectual realm because it is the direct receptor of the Source's miraculous intention. The more we undo the layers of ego-self perception, the stronger our capacity to extend and receive Love, Joy, Peace, insight, and understanding. Attack in any form is not part of the Unified Self's reality and neither is defense. Defense in itself is the belief that attack is real and therefore needs the counterattack of defense. The real and true self can never be attacked and therefore requires no defense.

The ego-self has so much invested in its image. These include ideas, beliefs, opinions, people, and things. It guards these intensely and is on the watch for any perceived threat of loss or change to any one of them, and so it uses defense as its resistance to change.

Humility contains the power of defenselessness. Only the ego-self needs to defend in order to uphold its insane thought system. Its total defense emerges when its identity is threatened by our possible discovery of the preposterous illusion that it is. Only illusion needs defending becuse if illusion of any kind were to completely withdraw defense, what would be left? If fear itself in all its guises withdrew all defenses, what would remain? Very simply, the only essence that could possibly remain once illusion is no longer protected is Love. The ego-release experienced is purely the setting down of defenses that have, until now, protected our illusions, all of them, including our ego-self image. Surrendering defenses means revealing and embracing Truth which is Love in action.

Ego-release would not be necessary if we could fully embrace true humility now. The ego-self is like an armed fortress, ready to battle against anyone of anything that threatens to de-stabilize its seat of power. We need to ask the questions, "What is our ego-self protecting?", and "What value lies in upholding such a gigantic illusion that blocks us from experiencing the ecstatic bliss of Love's presence?". If we surrendered wholeheartedly to the recognition that our most valuable asset is humility, we would become enlightened in this very instant. Both the intensity and duration of the ego-release experience would be diminished if we would only embrace humility.

We need to encourage conscious presence and extreme self-honesty to gain humility. It means eradicating the ego-self's desire to edit or justify our thought, feelings, and response in its favor, through consistent awareness. The key here is to maintain awareness while exercising discernment and not using judgment and condemnation, which foster guilt.

Our vulnerability is our strength when recognized from the Source's perspective. Not only can we afford to become more vulnerable, but we must become more vulnerable if we are to learn that ego-self defenses are meaningless and grow to trust the wisdom of Unified Will working through and around us. All the areas within us and in our life that we consciously or unconsciously defend are illusion! Our bodies, values, beliefs, and status are all illusion.

If we could only refrain from defending and hold present moment awareness with the intent of allowing Truth to unfold, we would gain insight and Peace. One more layer of illusion would be removed and we would gain yet another gigantic step forward to reclaiming our Unified Self and the blissful life for which we yearn.

(Take Me To Truth, Undoing the Ego, by Nouk Sanchez & Tomas Viera)

I love how the above excerpt explains that, vulnerability is our strength - this is something I'm chewing on at the moment, and goes directly opposite with much of what we hear today in media and political outlets (what a surprise, lol).

Vulnerability a strength, yes, I like this.