I'm wary of the word "humility" because it usually has connotations of bowing down to other people's deluded values and abandoning one's own values in the process. It can quickly degenerate into an unhealthy expression of submission.I think you must know that I take issue with your assumption that you possess and can define 'spiritual truth'. You or anyone can offer opinions, if they are couched in a certain humility, but when one examines some of the almost outrageous statements made by some on this forum, one gathers the impression that there is not a great deal of humility.
And besides, you do need a certain amount of arrogance to make a bid for truth. There is no question of that. You need to have enough self-belief in your own mind to go against the grain and abandon everything that humanity has ever said and taught, including the reputed wise teachers, and uncover directly what is ultimately true in life.
It is the height of arrogance, really. But it is also a form of humility towards truth. You are bowing down to the truth alone, and nothing and no one is ever going to come between you.
I agree that arrogance can become a problem if it involves close-mindedness, shoddy reasoning, the acceptance of half-baked ideas, emotionalism, concern for one's reputation, etc. But really, these are all forms of turning one's back on truth. In each of these instances, one is no longer bowing down to truth, but to something else.
So as long as one is genuinely humble towards truth, I don't see arrogance as being much of a problem.
Well, if you look deeply into what you are saying here, you should be able to see that you yourself are judging matters from a core, simple view-point - namely, that everything is too complex and no one can really know anything. This underlying view-point is shaping your judgments and directing you to reach the sorts of conclusions that you are reaching.The word 'spiritual' is in itself very problematic, in itself it is an allusion, but there is no solid thing that it refers to. In a conversation of this sort it is a troublesome term. Also, though for you the 'spiritual' may be the acme, the issues you are discussing are social, political, economic, sexual, and emotive. I don't think that you or anyone holds some sort of absolute ground from which to arbitrate these issues. The issues are at best very complex.
I point this out simply to show how a fundamental understanding, which is always very simple in nature, can intimately relate to all the various complexities of society and human psychology. If another person has a different fundamental understanding, then his views, in all matters, will be shaped differently. He will have an entirely different take on things.
So I consider it to be the most important thing in life to encourage people to reason beyond the complexities of society and human psychology and arrive at a fundamental understanding which perfectly accords with reality. If people can manage to develop a clear understanding of reality and adopt it as their core mental framework, then it will have innumerable consequences for the rest of their lives and will impact on all aspects of society.
I've written about how to arrive at such an understanding in an ebook called Wisdom of the Infinite. So along with the Woman work that Dan recommended, I would urge you to read that. They are both short and to the point, and will give you a much better idea of where I am coming from.
That's part of it. But it isn't enough to simply renounce women in the flesh and reject emotional or sexual relationships with them. More importantly, one also has to abandon dwelling in the feminine inside oneself. By "feminine", I mean the flowy, dimly conscious, emotional, childlike part of ourselves which loves nothing better than lose itself in immediacy, in forgetfulness, in the authority of another individual, in the "now".Allow me to say this: I have a long-standing interest in and qualified respect for the Vaishnava religion, that is to say the worship of Vishnu. (In addition to my own tradition, which is basic). The 'spiritual' object of Vaishnavism is to liberate one from the 'pathological' attachment (addiction) to women, as a source of pleasure, as a source of carnal pleasure, and to refocus one's energies in service of the divine. We are engrossed in 'material consciouness' to such a degree that our language, our psychology, our mythology, our culture, our systems of education, our television, only mires us more and more in this 'material entanglement'. And the very core of this entanglement is sexual attraction. To begin to become free, we have to have another object of fixation, an entirely different (spiritual) movement within ourselves.
Though I can't be completely sure, I have a strong feeling this is what you want to communicate, in basic terms. You point out, insofar as I think I read you correctly, that men get mired in 'materialism' (matter, mater) in a similar way that we get mired in woman. You could extend that and make a bold reference to 'maya' in an almost strictly Hindu sense, am I right?
Most men try to spend as much as time as possible in that dreamy world - indeed, it is one of the core reasons why they find women so attractive, it enables them to escape more easily into it. But even worse, they soon become very attached to it, become protective of it, and begin to change their values, beliefs and outlook to accommodate it - all of which undermines their prospects of one day piercing maya and living in reality.
What is it that you like about the Vaishnava religion?
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