The Humble and the Proud: Life is the ultimate feedback mechanism. It provides us with the natural, consistent, and predictable consequences of our choices. Over even a short span of life we have plenty of information to correlate our outputs with the outcomes they create. We can then learn to change our outputs and the outcomes we experience can change as well. This process allows us to refine or degrade. It depends on whether we are humble or proud.
The proud are essentially lazy and frightened by life which ends up in a general unwillingness to change. Life provides them negative feedback and they attempt to rationalize it away so that they feel they do not have to change. This eventually leads to the development of the victim mentality as a defensive mechanism where they conclude and rationalize that life is not fair. Victim mentality continues on in this downward spiral to create an attacker mentality towards forces within the control of the person. Tell the proud about a mistake they are making, and they will surely attack or disregard your feedback just as a defensive mechanism.
The humble consider life’s feedback and are willing to change their outputs to change the outcomes. They come to trust and appreciate the consistency of life’s feedback. This eventually leads to the development of an empowered and happy mentality where they realize that life is consistent and fundamentally fair in this sense. They learn to work to create the outcomes they want by consistently refining their current outputs and also by consistently developing new outputs (i.e. learning/growth). They eventually discover that one of the exceptions to life’s consistency is when they are in a situation heavily under the influence of a prideful downward spiraling person.
The prideful person will inevitably create a situation that proves their belief conclusion that life is not fair. They will thrust that upon the humble person and the humble person will either be corrupted and assimilated to the downward spiraler point of view or they will learn to effectively fight back and maintain their positive relationship with life.
The humble person will learn to recognize when they are dealing inside a prideful person’s sphere of influence. They will learn to avoid such positions and they will learn to appropriately counter as needed against the prideful person and their influence. The humble person learns that this is an anomaly of life that is not part of the overall natural feedback of life, but which exists only in and around the prideful person’s control. The real challenge however is that each individual may vacillate between being a humble and prideful person many times in their lives and may vary their behavior patterns depending on different settings and situations in their life. I.E. they may be a masterful teacher and beloved at their school where they apply humility but still be terrible at applying this at home for some reason, or vice versa. Over time however, the divided performance ceases as the person gravitates towards congruency so either the pride cycle or the humility cycle will prevail in the end. We all choose for ourselves which way this goes. Gong Fu philosophy teaches a martial artist to pay careful attention to this so that the humility cycle will prevail in your life.
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