Humility and Transformation

[Nick_A]

Hello All

We’ve been relating on several topics and how they relate to our being. I’ve brought up how much our scattered being and our imaginations and useless fears deny the help from above we need to advance beyond a certain level. We cannot ask from the reality of ourselves so cannot receive. We lack this humility.

Yet there are these moment that cannot be denied where our need of help from above transcends our egotism and our defenses are abandoned. No more Oprah wonderfulness. It is like hitting bottom which is just reaching a state of humility that egotism cannot dominate. There is no longer anything artificial to defend. Our imagined self importance no longer matters. Such a state of humility and openness is a very powerful state and invites the experience of reality. The affects of the experience of reality are often obvious to everyone. The person is literally transformed in some way.

Take for example the powerful testimony as recorded in the following letter from Bill W to Carl Jung concerning his alcoholism. In it, the following is included: (a slightly different translation but the same)

silkworth.net/aahistory/billw_ca … 12361.html

Bill knew the doctor’s prognosis. “My depression deepened unbearably and finally it seemed to me as though I were at the bottom of the pit,” he wrote to Jung. “All at once I found myself crying out, ‘If there is a God, let Him show Himself! I am ready to do anything.’”

At that moment, Bill wrote, his hospital room seemed to flood with white light. “I was caught up into an ecstasy which there are no words to describe. It seemed to me, in the mind’s eye, that I was on a mountain and that a wind not of air but of spirit was blowing. And then it burst upon me that I was a free man.”

So what happened? Something clearly happened. You can’t fake this. He hit bottom and the intensity and purity of his need invited and enabled help from above. The acquired freedom is not imagination. No new knowledge was learned and no speeches from experts were listened to. It was something from a different quality and I believe part of the power of love to reorient our being, and a love that is far beyond us either to give or receive simply because we live life in a dream. Bill W’s need was no longer a dream but an expression of need far more real and essential than that of a new car or job etc.

I find it sad how often humility is associated with weakness and yet the courage to experience it can lead to the type of change many seek but cannot find through self esteem. Yet how many can have this courage? We are lucky if we can be brought to it by accident when we are in such need. Such is the nature of grace. But we can know for sure that something has happened and some transformation has occured to enable this freedom.

But the difficulty with normal conscious human transformation is that our dreams no longer allow us to feel the need.

It is amazing to me how much we get in our own way in the search for what the heart desires by the inability to impartially experience ourselves.