Verse 1
In the first of his Teachings for the mind, Śrīla Raghunātha Dāsa Gosvāmī instructs us to give up our pride.
Giving up our pride is a special kind of surrender. In the West we are taught the importance of pride. We are taught that in order to be successful in life we must take pleasure in ourselves, be satisfied with our selves. Those who succeed, we are raised to understand, are those who have esteem for themselves, those who value themselves, who find satisfaction in themselves, those who are able to care for themselves and, ultimately, love themselves.
Self-pleasure, self-satisfaction, self-care, self-love: these are all precious qualities. Why then do the the saint admonish us to surrender them?
The realisation is not that there is something wrong in satisfaction, pleasure, care or love. Indeed these are forms of goodness. It lies in understanding that we are not the origin of these things.
Particularly in the West we are raised to believe—quite paradoxically—that we are both the creators and the enjoyers of this experience of self-esteem, that we cause it, then take pleasure in it. We are told to believe that we are like tiny atoms of self-love, caring for ourselves, pleasuring and satisfying ourselves.
This makes as little sense as a dog chasing its tail.
We need only think of a blood-red sunrise or catch a glimpse of a shooting star, to be reminded of the simple question: from whence does our ability to create the self-care or self-love come from, this care or love that we direct to ourselves when we experience pride? Where does our capacity for self-care or self-love come from? It comes, of course, from the Divine.
It is the Divine that plants in us the love that we in turn address to ourselves in our moments of pride.
We humans are materially finite, closed, limited. Everything that we give or take in the material world, for ourselves or for others, remains enclosed in the closed circuit of matter and material energy. What we give to others in material form is subtracted from our material selves in a kind of physical arithmetic.
As spiritual beings, however, we are unlimited. Open to the spiritual energy of the world, of others, and of the Divine, we are inexhaustible. In our spiritual being there is no closed economy of material energy. When we are hungry in the material world, we must find food and eat. But when we are hungry in the spiritual world we have only to open our souls to the Divine and we are replenished.
The self is the cornerstone of material life. The self is the idea that were are a thing distinguished from other things by a certain number of qualities that we have. In material life, the answer to the question ‘who am I?’ Is a list of things: a female, caucasian, height and weight, nationality, schooling, work, etc. This material self is the reference we use in order to navigate the material world.
In the spiritual world this self made of things dissolves. It is reduced to its core function: to love. It melds into the flow of Divine love. It needs no nourishment for it already has everything it needs. Or rather it already is everything it needs.
The great saints and spiritual teachers are those who see no difference between the material world and the spiritual world. To them, there is only the world.
So the error of pride—and the reason that Śrīla Raghunātha Dāsa Gosvāmī’s first instruction to the mind is to surrender pride—is not because the satisfaction of the self, the pleasure of the self, the care or love of the self is somehow wrong.
Rather, the error is to believe that we are the source of it.
To surrender pride is to surrender to the idea that we are both the giver and receiver of love. It is to understand that our self-love is the shadow of Divine love.