Question: I am not sure that I know how to feel humble.

Sri Chinmoy: It is very easy. I have asked you and your husband to open up a Divine Enterprise, a flower store. That is your field. You will be an expert in taking care of flowers and plants with a delicate, subtle and soulful touch. You are happy and you are proud that you have the capacity. Now immediately think of Kanan. If you are sincere, then you will acknowledge the fact that Kanan definitely knows more than you do with regard to plants, because he has been in that line for so many years. I am not discouraging you; I am not saying that you are not good at all. You are good, very good, in your field. But if you look around at other florists, will you be able to say that you are by far the best? No. Kanan will surpass you and there will be many thousands of florists who will far surpass Kanan. So in any field on the earth-plane if you do well and pride enters into you and you find it difficult to be humble, just look around to see if there is anybody who does far better than you. You will immediately find that there are many, many, many who surpass you. Then your pride will go away.

Again, you can think of your capacity a few years ago, before you joined our path. Five years ago you were not as spiritual as you are now. Think of your present spiritual progress and then think of your ordinary life of five or six years ago. In you are both the lower self, or let us say the desire-life, and the higher self, which is the aspiration-life. Now you are consciously in the aspiration-life, but at that time you were in the desire-life. Just think of your own desire-life of five years ago. How many desires you had! Countless ordinary human desires you had. Now you are in the aspiration-world, which is infinitely higher than the desire-world. Try to imagine or identify yourself for a fleeting second with what you were and what you have become. If you become identified with what you were, then immediately you become humble because of what you have become. If you become one with your old desire-life, then the desire-life surrenders to the aspiration-life and feels humble because the aspiration-life is far superior to the desire-life.

Now you are in the aspiration-world, but your goal is realisation. You don’t want to stay only with aspiration. From aspiration you have to go forward. Realisation is a far cry right now. You know that it will take time. Your goal is far, very far, but you have the intense cry to reach the goal. If you can imagine that the goal is at the top of the mountain and you are sitting at the foot of the mountain, then automatically you become humble, because you have to go so far to reach your goal. Again, you can take humility as a sincere feeling of oneness with anything that you are going to become in the future. You won’t be proud, but you will try to become one with the goal itself before you reach the goal. Before you reach the top of the mountain, try to feel that the top of the mountain is welcoming you. Your soul is already there, your heart is already there; only your body is not there, your vital is not there, your mind is not there. In that way you will not be discouraged.

Sometimes we become very haughty and proud; we are assailed by ego. Again, sometimes we think very ill of ourselves. We go from one extreme to another. This moment we feel that we can break and build the world with our ego-power, and the next moment we feel that we don’t have the energy even to budge an inch. We feel that we are hopeless, we are absolutely the most useless person on earth. Then frustration kills us. This moment ego takes us very high, like a balloon, but the next moment it bursts. The frustration-dragon comes and immediately devours us. We don’t want to be carried by the ego-balloon, which will burst, and we don’t want to allow ourselves to be devoured by the frustration-dragon. So what shall we do? We shall increase our oneness, our inner confidence and assurance. These are the things that will help us to reach our goal.