Question: What is the gait/qualities of true humbleness in a devotee? I am told to be careful not to be pretending to be humble, but be truly humble. (I am told) not to act until then but to be myself. I struggle with this because unless I start being humble in my mind and action how can I really achieve true humbleness?
Is my behavior/attempt to learn to be humble a pretension? How would one cultivate the true nature of being humble at heart?
Answer by Romapada Swami:
To practice the consciousness or behavior of a humble person is not pretension. Indeed it is welcome and recommended. Every child begins by crawling and attempting to walk, however awkwardly and unsteadily, before being able to actually walk. So, you can begin with practicing simple words / actions of humility. For example one can begin by offering obeisances to devotees, rendering menial services, seeking input from others, humbly admitting one’s mistakes without being defensive, not being hurt when corrected by other devotees etc. These are ways one can practice being humble, even though one may not necessarily always “feel” deeply humble while offering obeisances or mopping the temple floor. But by practicing these principles of Vaishnava achar, with a sincere desire to be humble, we gradually develop a humble mood.
However what we do need to be careful of is trying to ‘imitate’ the words, actions or consciousness of an exalted soul. For example, one may be very inspired to hear about the humility of Sanatana Goswami or that of Krsnadasa Kaviraja Goswami who considered himself to be lower than the worm in the stool, or of Prabhupada’s humility in washing the pots after his disciples left. But if a new devotee repeats the same phrase or action without actually realizing the depth of the realization and consciousness of these exalted devotees, that would be pretension. It may not necessarily be that one is intending to artificially put on a show of humility and impress others. But a far more serious danger is that of self-deception i.e. one may begin to think that simply by adopting the behavior/speech of a humble person, now one has actually become humble, although internally the false-ego may be flourishing without even one’s recognizing it. Therefore it is very important to make constant effort to cultivate the internal mood of humility and honest self-assessment, along with adopting the external practices. One should regularly hear, glorify, reflect and meditate deeply upon the greatness of the Supreme Lord and of the members of the parampara, as well as our own utter insignificance and thus we can begin to develop true humility.
One simple way to evaluate if we are actually cultivating humility is to see how much enthusiasm / resistance we feel for understanding and following the instructions of the spiritual master. To follow the orders of spiritual master as one’s life and soul *is* real humility, in fact. By sincere execution of our prescribed devotional service viz. our regular hearing, chanting and other specific instructions of the spiritual master, gradual purification of heart and realization are attained. This is more important than extraneously trying to practice more advanced symptoms of humility.
To illustrate with an example, at one point there was a faction amongst devotees where some disciples of Prabhupada did not like the book-distribution methods used by other devotees. This faction felt that devotees were using “aggressive” tactics to distribute books and were not being very humble in their preaching efforts, and therefore they gradually gave up the service of book-distribution and even moved away from living with other devotees. Srila Prabhupada however corrected this misconception by pointing out that those devotees who were continuing with his orders to distribute books were actually being humble, simply because they were following his instruction. Whatever faults there might have been in their execution of that instruction will eventually be corrected, because they were on the right path. Whereas those who gave up their service out of a sense of “mundane morality” were actually not being humble, because of their lacking submission to the order of guru, although they tried to be polite and considerate towards people and so on. In other words, they had a faulty, mundane understanding of what it means to be meek and humble.
In short, if one sincerely tries to please the spiritual master and execute the orders of the spiritual master, one automatically advances in humility even if externally their actions might apparently seem not so humble. The service attitude towards Guru and Krishna is the deciding criterion. I hope this clarifies your doubt.
