The humility challenge in self-inquiry

The quietude of Lakshmi by Barbie Robinson

“How do you know that your life will not be better upside down?”

-quote from the Sufi mystic Shams-i-Tabrizi from “The Gift” (Netflix series)

Humility is a worthless quality in a competition dominated world. Where life is interpreted as a competition for resources, humility is tantamount to death. Survival of the fittest philosophy celebrates a muscular aspiration to dominate and control. Success is recognition and renown. Today even monks must make themselves known and market their services.

Some of us justify these actions as our purpose to be of service to others through our teaching. Or that we want to make the world a better place. The thing is that all these reasons assume we know better than the so called “others”. That we are somehow the chosen ones.

I am as guilty of all these rationales as anyone else.

When I transitioned from a professional dancer to offering dance as self-inquiry, I found myself in the vast spiritual self-help milieu. This world has an entirely different reality than a professional art world. One is an artist because one is talented, or one is passionate about the art. There is an artform that is one’s expressive manifestation in the world. Often that expression is a unique, original, and intimate revelation. One shares one’s soul with the world.

I experienced vulnerability as an artist. Especially because I did not always create from an established dance idiom in my experimental and contemporary choreographic works. As an original language, I felt I was offering a voyeuristic invitation for people to look into my soul. I have heard other experimental and contemporary creators speak of their work in similar ways.

Vulnerability mostly keeps the Hubris and ego in check. At least it did for me.

Spirituality is a deeply seductive cosmos. It dazzles us with the promise of a better self, or even better, an enlightened self. I often ask the people in my programs what they mean by enlightenment. They speak of connecting with the Divine. I ask, how do you know when that connection happens? Will we be like the so-called spiritual masters who have thousands of followers? Is it about knowing a lot of philosophy and texts?

Few people these days aspire for peace. Yet, is that not what we most desire? Has peace become old-fashioned?

In the Rasa philosophy of dance, peace begins with humility. Humility here is the experience of one’s smallness in the context of the vastness of Reality. It is the deep sighing the emerges from this smallness when we relinquish the bluster of Hubris. It is uneasy because it connects us with the river of tears of our vulnerability. Not the personal vulnerability based on our psychological stories, however relevant and true they are. This is the primordial vulnerability of each material manifestation in the vastness of Reality. There is a scent of Death here, and in equal measure a relief at the divesting of larger-than-life size costumes of mastery and control.

Humility is not the same as humiliation. We are not shamed or belittled in any way in this invocation. Indeed, when we dance this Rasa, it returns us to the depths of our own Consciousness, to our own abode. It is of the nature of an autopoiesis experience of sorts—we realise that we are materially and in terms of our Consciousness, a self-sustaining intelligence.

Humility is bandied about a lot, especially in India which is the culture into which I was born. I grew up around humility as an obsequious expression. People would fall at the feet of elders and teachers as a sign of their respect and humility. I did my fair share of feet-falling as well. Of course, this is a sacred and beautiful act in its intention and origin and many people do this with truth. However, humility itself can become competitive.

I saw firsthand how in Guru-disciple situations, people competed to show they were more humble and more devoted than the next person. This kind of obsequious subservience is not benign and has led to much soul-searching in recent times about the dynamic of Guru paradigms and the dangers they pose.

When people approach me about undertaking my Individual Program where they invoke an archetypal deity for six months, I notice how the paradigms of competition and mastery drive them. I say this without judgement because I am not immune to those very paradigms myself. That is why I can recognise them. They wish to choose the most difficult archetype.

For example, people ignore Goddess Lakshmi because they assume She is “easy”. The popular versions of Lakshmi have Her dispensing gold coins from Her hands and promising wealth and prosperity. This is somehow not congruent with our notions of self-inquiry or spiritual inquiry.

Self-inquiry we think must be difficult and have something other-worldly about it. Who wants a Goddess who promises domestic bliss and money? Rather the Goddess who is terrifying like Kali or Chamunda. Then there is a sense of real challenge. It is like Alpine climbing where the challenge of mountaineering is ramped up by using minimal equipment and supports.

There is something rather hypocritical about this in the spiritual realm. Because in truth we do crave domestic bliss and money. However we feel that we ought to be squeamish about the ordinary world in spiritual inquiry. We want to be in the cemetery and the shopping mall at the same time.

In truth Lakshmi is one of the most challenging of archetypal inquiries. When we set aside Her modern interpretations and consider Her ancestry and Her archetypal constellation, She invites inquiry into the everyday world of our lives. It is exactly the banal and everyday that we wish to escape. Often spirituality is that escape or respite. Lakshmi proposes that our bodies, homes, and workplaces are where we attend to the immanence of the Divine.

That attention can have radical implications for our everyday reality.

The question then is are we prepared for our lives to be overturned at that intimate level? Because this kind of overturning does not come with fanfare. It may not be rewarded with martyrdom or celebration of our dark-night-of-the-soul suffering. Are we prepared for making space for attending to Body in our busy lives? Are we prepared to encounter what that might mean in terms of how we use our time for other things? Are we prepared for letting our Body-led intuition shape our lives? Are we prepared for our lives turning upside down in ways that we cannot imagine?

We assume that the radical comes with much theatre. However, the most radical aspect of the radical is its quiet humility. This is why the most ancient Goddess was The Outcast—transformation held quietly in the wilderness of the margins.

Humility is the essence of radical inquiry. It is also the essence of freedom. Because it frees us from the weight of our Hubris and its bombastic and unrealistic story of Reality.