PRIDE AND GLORY

Pride – An excessive belief in one's own abilities, that interferes with one’s understanding of the true laws of nature. It has been called the sin from which all others arise. Pride is also known as Vanity.

The laws of nature are many, and they define the reality in which we all live. If everyone and everything that you know abides by these rules, then it is pretty safe to say it is a law of nature. Some simple ones are:

1.) Everything ages.
2.) All that is born dies.
3.) To live we must breathe air, drink water and consume food.

There are many other natural laws, and as hard as we might try, it is not in our power to change them. To be humble is to understand the existence of these laws, along with the knowledge that we have no power over them. Still, we see pride pushing us to fight these laws as if we had any control over them. Billions are spent on battling the aging process with things like creams, miracle cures, and surgery. This is pride and arrogance for these laws cannot be changed by man.

So, how does pride work exactly? Pride stems from man’s false understanding of his own role as a creative force. Parents often feel they created their children when in reality none of us have a true understanding of the process that takes place in creating a human being. Once again, we see this process being battled on a daily basis. Fertility doctors create drugs and processes whereby people who could not otherwise conceive are having litters of babies. Eventually, time will tell what defying these laws will bring.

Likewise, a farmer who delivers a large crop is often proud of his harvest. In such a situation, pride may lead the farmer to mistakenly believe that it is he who caused the crops to grow. In reality, he had no control over whether the sun shined, or the rain fell, or even that the soil was fertile. The humble farmer knows his role was but a small part in the chain of events necessary for the crop to come to fruition.

Life, and its rules existed long before any of us were here and the humble man knows that there is nothing that we as humans have invented. We have only uncovered how to manipulate the elements that were given to us to create new forms. In short, we have learned the “recipes” for making things, but in truth, we have invented nothing. Still, we have given ourselves credit for creating things like metals, glass and concrete. Columbus took credit for discovering America even though entire civilizations were already there. This is the most unfortunate thing about pride. It often leads us to deny the reality in which we live. When we are proud, we are saying we do not accept our role and what we have been given, in essence becoming delusional about the world in which we live. True humility will come through our simple acceptance of reality and the laws of nature that make up that reality.