Humility Doesn’t Take Away Our Self Respect, it Helps us Respect The Self (Gita Daily)

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Published on Jan 31, 2014
Based on Bhagavad Gita Chapter 13, Text 08
By H.G. Chaitanya Charan Das
 
Some people feel that humility is demeaning, that it takes away their self-respect. This feeling stems from their misunderstanding that humility means to let oneself be trampled on by the world.
 
But actual humility is not about being disrespected by the world; it is about freeing oneself from dependence on the world's approval. Such dependence characterizes the arrogant — they struggle feverishly for acquiring those things that will bring the world's praise. They thus unwittingly tie their sense of self-worth on things that are external to their true self — positions and possessions.
 
However, such externals are not always in human control. And they certainly don't last forever. The futile struggle to hold on to those things causes the arrogant enormous anxiety and drains their mental energy. They spend their whole lives trying to preserve and parade their assets. By living for such peripheral and ephemeral things, they end up disrespecting their true self and its glory as an eternal blissful being, part of the all-attractive Supreme Being, Krishna.
 
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