Is it Prideful to Own Our Accomplishments?

Is it spiritually hindering to have pride in others and in oneself? Is being glad of one's accomplishments pride? Is it spiritually hindering to have pride in others and yourself? Well, if you have pride in others, of course it usually means you have some kind of ego link with them. They may be your children or somebody close to you, family members. There's a difference between feeling a sense of goodness about something that you have done and the sense of pride. Pride usually is based on the misperception that I did it, I did that, and not the deeper universal I, of which I am a temporary expression, but the limited sense of I as me. The ego. I did that, look at me. Now, when children do that, we have to allow them to do that. When the little boy or the little girl says, look at me, what I can do, or the little girl, a boy says to another little girl, you can't do what I can. Look, I can jump much higher than you. And of course that's the beginning of ego. But it would be futile to tell a child, this is your ego. Stop it. Ego is something that is really can be and should be like a childhood disease, like measles. And measles is something that children often contract. It's something that you have to go through. And ego really, as humans evolve, perhaps will be like that. It's something that manifests as a childish, childlike state of consciousness while they're growing up. And as a human being reaches maturity, they outgrow the ego. That is where we are going. It's not yet the case. This is not yet the case with most humans. They don't outgrow the ego. It gets even bigger. So it's fine for the child to say, look what I can do. And for the parent to be proud and say, oh, isn't that wonderful that you can do that. But then of course, if the 30 year old still says, look at me, look what I've done, look at my car, look at my house, or look at what I know, or look how I look. Do you like the way I look? Whatever it is that one identifies with as oneself most strongly. And usually the ego chooses the thing that the most obvious thing in your life you have, the good looks but not much knowledge. Then of course you focus on the good looks and anything else unimportant, or you have bad looks, then perhaps you can acquire a lot of knowledge and hit others over the head with your knowledge. Or you can acquire possessions and then you have, you have more than of powers, worldly power. Look at me. Sometimes it's very kind of rudimentary ego you can immediately wreck. It's almost a physical ego moving about across the room. So pride, then usually is something to do with I did that. And often, usually really implies other people didn't achieve what I achieved. Pride, I would say, usually implies a comparison with myself, with others. And I come out on top when there's pride and I compare myself with others I must have or can do or know more than the other. That brings up pride. So it's ego, but there is something else that is a sense of satisfaction with something that happened through you rather than something that you did. And I get that. For example, when people come up to me and say, you or your book or your book changed my life. That feels good. But I know that I didn't write this. Not this entity wrote the book. The book consciousness wrote the book. Obviously the one consciousness wrote the book and it did. So it changed people's lives. I don't get the sense of, Oh, a bigger sense of identity. Suddenly it's something. When I travel the most unlikely places, people say I was going through the airline, going, boarding a plane. I sold my. The passport and the ticket to board to go onto the plane. And the man who took the ticket and passports, he looked at me and said, you changed my life. And that's. I don't feel pride about that because I didn't do it. Not the little I. Only the little I can feel pride. But it felt good. There's a feeling of rightness and goodness, that there's an awakening and it happened through that. So really, it's not. If you have a sense of a separate doer, that is the illusion. If you don't, if you don't recognize your connectedness with the totality, and it is the totality, the consciousness acting through you. If you don't recognize that, then you're in the illusion of separateness. And when the illusion of separateness is there, pride can come in. And the opposite of pride, a dejection that you haven't achieved what you wanted to achieve, or the world isn't recognizing your achievements, then the opposite, this dejection comes in and you feel unworthy because something in this world or form hasn't happened to give you a sense of worthiness. So you have pride. And the opposite of pride, when there's the illusion of separateness, the separate doer, me, that's the iceberg who doesn't know, who only knows itself as the tip that's above water. So, yes, Feeling good about it, about the something that happened through you, that's not very different from pride. And that's fine. So it could be anything when people may love to come to you. Let's say you have a business, let's say you. People come to you for haircuts or whatever and they feel, and they love being there. And you know, they love not only because you're a good hairdresser, they love being in your presence because you acknowledge their being. That's. You don't feel pride anymore. You feel a goodness about that, the totality of what's happening, but not. You don't take yourself out of the totality and saying me, I did that. That also takes power away from you. The more you get trapped in the illusion of separateness, the less power, the less consciousness can flow through you into this world. And again, similar pride in. You can have pride in your child because that's the developing stage of consciousness. But my mother had a, like her generation, perhaps even more than now, had a very highly developed ego. And she was very, she had great pride in me. Well, only after I published the Power of Now, but I could see how much it was her ego. And she talked about. She never read the whole book, but she talked, I loved her dearly so that I completely accepted that it wasn't. She couldn't understand it, but what she did understand was that there was worldly success. And so she kept telling people, my son, the famous author, of course that's complete ego and that's pride. But that's fine. I didn't tell her, you shouldn't do that. I just, there was an acceptance of that, her evolutionary stage. And that's what she does. It's fine. And so you can have Pride in your 6 year old who can do something that's fine, but it's not really pride. It's your. You completely recognize that there's a developing ego and you have to allow that ego to develop. But when your child becomes an adult child, it's a different matter. If you then have, you feel, oh, you keep talking about my son, my daughter, what he can do, what he has, what he has achieved to their friends and others, then you haven't outgrown the ego. So it's just a secondary ego. Many, many parents have that. So some people even have. I have observed in a few cases, you can have an ego ego identification with a family member at one moment and an ego competing ego with the same family member another moment. For example, a mother, when talking to her friends can talk with pride about her daughter's position or achievements or possessions, implying, of course, that my daughter has more than your daughter or is better than your daughter. But when the mother meets the daughter, she resents her success. So suddenly the ego identification is dropped and the ego is fighting somebody. So the ego can shift from one moment it identifies with when it's convenient, and the next moment it's competing. And they're all states of unconsciousness, of course. So ego is always identification with form, mental idea of who I am or who somebody close to me is, so close that it becomes part of my ego. And that's how it is. You allow people their ego identifications, and you can see it when you see it. It's just there may be a little inner smile when they do it. Although I must admit some egos can be pretty obnoxious. But that's just how it is. Sa.