Modesty Is Realistic

STUDENT 1
Can you talk about the value of modesty?

SHAMBHAVI
Is there any counterargument? [laughter]

STUDENT 1
No, it's just—I can feel why it's important, but I just want to hear you talk about it.

SHAMBHAVI
Well, I think bottom line is modesty is realistic. It's actually being in our real circumstance, which is we're utterly insignificant and there's nothing to prop up. There's nothing to try to sell. There's nothing to brag about. There's nothing to defend.

This is just our real circumstance. Whatever value we have is innate and natural and can only shine out when all contrived forms of self-fashioning end. So modesty is the end of self fashioning.

Modesty isn't when someone pays you a compliment and you go, oh pshaw [makes tutting noises] [laughter] that's not modesty. Modesty is when you have no need or desire to push any version of yourself out.

When you're just being in your real circumstance, doing what you do. You don't have to announce anything about yourself. That is what modesty looks like.

So modesty means there's no brand, there's no taglines, there's no stories that you tell to manipulate other people into feeling a certain way about you. You're not taking what happens in life or anything you do as opportunities to shop yourself around. That's what modesty is.

You just stop announcing yourself. And you just do what you do. Let your innate value and your natural, unique dimension let people know who you are. Not the version of yourself that you concoct for different circumstances.

The version of yourself that you want to believe in or have confidence in, all of that is totally ephemeral. And it's usually in the human realm. And when I say the human realm, I mean all humans.

We're all human and we all to some degree have human karmic realm vision. And definitely in this realm we are very—most of us concerned about being significant and living meaningful lives.

And meaningful is just a code word for significance. From the perspective of this tradition, our natural self-expression is just to be self-expressive without it adding up to anything other than participating in the magic of this reality in a spontaneous way.

We're not going anywhere. We're not accomplishing anything. Obviously there's cycles of time and things change in those cycles of time, from a dualistic perspective. And maybe some things happen locally that seem like accomplishments or good things that we do, etc.

But we aren't doing them. God is doing everything. And yet we're so concerned to be seen as doing important, significant, and good things. And we're so concerned to see ourselves that way, too. It's not just about other people.

That's not what this tradition is about. And that's not my experience of how reality is. All of our desire to be significant, to have our lives be meaningful, to be important, to be admired, to be thought well of, all of that is an aspect of karma and is a limitation.

And this is taught in every tradition that I've studied in, not just Trika Shaivism. When we see the nature of reality, it is in and of itself dazzling. So why would we want to do anything but just let that out? And not be trying to have some really puny version of that governing our lives and making us miserable when we feel we don't measure up?

The modesty is being in that real circumstance. If you want to help somebody and you have an impulse to be generous, you don't announce you're going to do it. You don't form an identity around being helpful. You just be helpful.

No one has to hear about it. Your actions will speak for themselves. Or if you're happy that something happened in your life, you were recognized for something you did, you don't have to announce that. Just be happy.

But we're always announcing ourselves. We're always trying to work an angle on everything. To shore up this sense of individual admirability and accomplishment. And reassure ourselves. But it never works because we just keep doing it, over and over again. [laughs]

And the fact of our lives is that we already have indestructible value, indestructible beauty, indestructible creativity, indestructible generosity, and kindness. And that's what we're trying to discover. And all this other stuff we're doing, to promote ourselves to ourselves and other people is just 100% in the way. 100% in the way.

STUDENT 1
In the way of discovering?

SHAMBHAVI
Yeah. In the way of discovering our real nature. So modesty is just a way of saying we're just being who we are without announcing ourselves and making a self out of it. Making a small self out of that announcement.

We're not comparing ourselves to other people. We're not measuring. We're just doing what we do. Going about our lives in a simple way, doing what we do.

Because if we're trying always to be admired and think well of ourselves and accomplish things, that means (a) we have a measure, we have bars that we're trying to meet. And we have failure. So failure and success go hand in hand.

This is an origin of suffering. Deep, deep suffering. The fact of the matter is, you can't fail, nor can you succeed. You're already enlightened essence nature. This is what we're trying to discover.

We have more modesty when we realize more about the nature of the self. Or maybe when we just realize how much immodesty is in our way. We have to really recognize what we're doing. When we feel happy when someone admires us, that's an aspect of suffering that is not good. [laughs]

Because then when someone doesn't admire us, even if they're only neutral, then we have a pain. And the pain and the pleasure are inseparable. This is why in the Buddhist traditions that teach very much what I'm telling you, they say nirvana and samsara are the same.

If you're attached to nirvana, that's samsara. [laughs] They come together. You can't have one without the other. The only solution is to step out of that whole binary way of being in the world and recognize that livingness. And just be in that.

STUDENT 2
Shambhavi, would you talk about practical optimism? It's on your list of—

SHAMBHAVI
[laughs] My skills? [laughter] I posted something on Facebook today, from my LinkedIn page. I always find LinkedIn a bit mystifying. Like, what do people do on there? I don't even get what it is, really. [laughs]

So people kept sending me these invitations. So I went on there and I made an account. And under my skill list I had a bunch of funny skills, including keen sense of smell, and stuff like that. [laughter] But the first skill is practical optimism.

Practical optimism means that you have a sense of beneficence and the wisdom of everything. I wrote something else. This is a little note to myself that has to do with this.

As I grow old, I've been forced to reckon with the fact that human beings at this time are more limited than I thought they were. But I've also learned that reality is much wiser than I could have ever imagined.

So practical optimism is recognizing that wisdom and so—not falling into fatalism or permanent despair. But having a sense that things can be worked with. That there's always a way to work with whatever circumstance that's happening, even if it's a horrible circumstance, like being in a prison camp or something, starving to death, or whatever the circumstance is.

When we have contact with that wisdom, then we realize we're being addressed by every circumstance, and every circumstance could be responded to in a practical way. And the reason I like that word practical, I like to have a very worker-like attitude towards life.

Just plain. What can I do here? How can I engage here? I'm not really one for just sort of sitting around contemplating things and talking about them and moaning. [laughs] I like to be engaged. That's just how I showed up.

So a lot of us these days get very embroiled in worrying. Worrying is not practical. It gets nowhere. It's just sort of spinning. And I like to be practical and engaged.

STUDENT 3
So there's no practical pessimism? [laughter]

SHAMBHAVI
I don't know.

STUDENT 3
It sounds like you're saying the optimism is that there's always communication with wisdom.

SHAMBHAVI
Yeah.

STUDENT 3
So if you were practically pessimistic, it would mean that you lost confidence in that.

SHAMBHAVI
Practical optimism without an opposite. [laughter] It would be great if when you get into a jag of worrying, you could just stop yourself and say, how can I engage in a practical way here? And you don't even have to have a plan. You just need to feel what your next step is.

And then you take a step, and then something else unfolds. And then you take another step, and then something else happens. And then you take another step. You don't even need a plan beyond your next move.

STUDENT 4
I think modesty comes in there too. One of the things that's helped me in the last few months to worry less is just realize how little I can do. I can't swoop in and shift whole systems.

SHAMBHAVI
Yeah, that's also an aspect of modesty and practical optimism. Like recognizing you can always do something. There's always some way to move in a situation, but it might be very, very limited. And that's just the way it is.

There's no point getting all exercised about that. It's completely natural to be in situations that are really limited. Restricted. Or not, to have things open up at other times. Right?

But that's just part of the texture of life, that sometimes we are in situations that are very restricted, and we can't move very much. And we just have to sort of digest and figure out what small things we can do to make the situation more workable.

And then other times, things just seem to move along really openly. We like when that happens, but then we tend to really moan when we're too restricted, and it's just completely natural. It's just part of how things are.

It's like bamboo. It's very useful to think of a bamboo plant in relationship to human life, because the bamboo grows very, very quickly. And then it starts to form a knot, and the growth rate slows down enormously. That's where you get those little nodules in the bamboo.

Those nodules are where it's collecting and storing nutrition for the next growth spurt. And so the bamboo just becomes really, really tall by going through fast, slow, fast, slow, fast, slow. And this is the image that I learned from the divination tool that I use. And I think it's really useful.

It's just completely natural. And if we think of human life in its real context, which is that a single human life is very short, then we can adjust our time frame, too. We think, okay, it's all right if it slows down for a little while. [laughter] 12 hours? [laughter] But it could be a whole life.

Life is very, very long. And this little part of it we're in is the blink of an eye. So whatever rhythm we're in, whatever section of the bamboo we're in, that's where we are.

And we just look around and think, how can I work with what's here? Work with means, how can I help myself to wake up more in this situation? Or how can I be of use?

STUDENT 5
Is there any sort of yin and yang in the bamboo—slow phase and the fast phase?

SHAMBHAVI
Yeah, I'm sure that the fast phase is the yang, and the slow phase is the yin. I haven't read that specifically, but it just makes sense.

STUDENT 6
It seems like those little nodules, too, in the bamboo make it stronger, flexible.

SHAMBHAVI
Yeah, if bamboo was just like one smooth, quick growth with no nodules it would be boring. I mean, we wouldn't make all that furniture out of it. Or it just wouldn't look the same. It would just be like a weed. Wouldn't have any design element. [laughs]

So the slow bits are an aesthetic also. Creating an aesthetic experience. Whatever situation we find ourselves in, we should be trying to enjoy something about it.

For me, that's always, how can I be of use? What can I give in this situation? That makes it enjoyable for me. Or what can I appreciate and enjoy aesthetically here? Or something like that.