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Tag: humility

Humble prostrations

Here’s how my Guru began his address to the satsangis this year during Guru Purnima.

He called out a variety of different Gurus across all sorts of sects. He mentally and verbally prostrated before all the great Gurus of yesteryear and now.

He paid obeisance to all the great rishis and munis and saints of the past. He also prostrated to Swami Chinmayananda, Srila Prabhupad, Sri Sri Ravishankar, Sadhguru, Sathya Sai, Shirdi Sai and all the other divine personalities. He also said we are prostrating daily to them. Not just to them, but also to their followers!

My Guru is 80+ years of age. He need not prostrate to anyone. But a self-realized soul understands that the age of the body is irrelevant, and that at our cores, we are all divine, and that there really is no difference. I’ve seen him physically fall at the feet of those who are much younger than him as well.

His prayer on Guru Purnima day was not for himself. Rather it was that we must all understand this divine unity within us, and love each other. And that the love must begin from each one of us, and spread outward. What humility, and what a thought!

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DK boss

Look around you. At work, at the gym, in your social media feeds etc. How many people are really really successful and good at something? And how many just make a lot of noise? Okay, identifying this on social media could be hard, because everyone always puts their best foot forward. But is it really possible that everyone around us, is doing super duper amazing work, all the time?

There’s a principle called the Dunning-Kruger effect. It refers to cases where people significantly overstate their abilities, without realizing it, because they are too incompetent in the first place to even realize that they are incapable. Have you come across any such people? Many people? Maybe your boss? Your employee? Your colleagues? Most of your friends? There are so many people in the all talk and no do bucket.

A very simple mistake we can make here though is to solely evaluate others. Pointing fingers at others is too easy. But the above is meant squarely for each one of us, or definitely at least for me. I need to accept that there is much I do not know, much I am not good at – and being humble about it, I can attempt to bridge my ignorance with knowledge, and inability with practice.

Relevant here is one of Albert Einstein’s less referenced quotes. It is simple yet profound, and also a math equation!

1 / Knowledge = Ego

More the knowledge, lesser the ego, and vice versa. How cool is that?

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