11.04: Pride demands and blames, humility begs and waits

“Why am I not advancing fast enough?” This question sometimes troubles the hearts of us spiritual seekers and makes us feel dissatisfied with our spiritual lives.

This dissatisfaction can lead us to unwittingly playing the blame game where we try to find a scapegoat for our slow spiritual advancement. Generally this mental blame game finds one or more of the following three targets:

1.       Krishna: “He is not compassionate enough or not helpful enough.”  

2.       Bhakti: “This process doesn’t work or it’s not strong enough.”

3.       Ourselves: “I am too fallen; I will never make spiritual advancement.”

However, this blame game never works, because it is played out on a platform of error. None of the above three charges leveled by the mind are true. Krishna is super-eager for us to return back to him; bhakti is the supremely potent of all processes for spiritual advancement and we are never so fallen as to be spiritually irreformable. The platform of error in the blame game is our wrong presumption: we presume that we deserve spiritual advancement and our blame game is an indirect demand for that advancement. But demands proceed from the platform of pride, whereas bhakti is founded on the platform of humility, of accepting that we don’t deserve spiritual advancement. 

When we are humble, we beg for the divine grace that rewards even the undeserving and are ready to wait for that grace to be bestowed according to Krishna’s sweet will. Such a humble attitude is poignantly exemplified by Arjuna in the Bhagavad-gita (11.4) while seeking a special favor from Krishna, “If you feel i am qualified, kindly bestow your grace on me.”