Through the Green Fuse

Unless humility can be explained in terms of power, force, and energy, it can be of little use to us in our quest for Self-realization. We have to find out what it is, actually. If it motivates a movement of the Spirit, we need to know how. Spirit is real – it has energy, it is capable of producing effects in our lives, it heals people. It is not a theological concept, though many have tried to make it that. We need more. If Spirit is real, we need to know how it works, and humility is the key.

If you can sense the power of God, if you have a sense of life as energy in action and not just a set of circumstances, if you’ve had the experience of seeing the world pregnant with possibility, bursting from within with the urge to demonstrate itself in outward manifestation, if you know it as the “force that through the green fuse drives the flower,” then you know that Spirit is real. It is not just energy, it is also intelligence, it is sentient, and it pours itself into the world in a way that can only be called love. Whether we are conscious of it or not, Spirit is always working, always expressing. It does so because it has to; moving into form is its very nature. Once we know this about it, our most natural reaction is to want it to move towards us. Once we know that God is real and not just a concept, once we know God and not just believe in God, we want the experience, and we want as much of it as we can get. And when we have it, we want to share it, because sharing it increases its power. The more power it has, the more we can experience it, so we share it as much as we possibly can.

As a word, “humility” has lost nearly all of its meaning, because it does not address the aliveness of God. If we saw God as the source of Life, we would rush toward God with eagerness. But the word “humility,” the way it is used today, would have us crawl toward God in shame in a kind of reverse egotism that would deny the flow that is God’s will to bestow upon us. The Spirit cleans everything it touches, so why feel shame? Shame and humility are antithetical to each other. Shame is a clever dodge of the ego to keep the ego in play. In order to be truly humble, shame has to go.

Humility is the expectation of a movement of the Spirit. It doesn’t try to force that movement; it knows the movement will happen. It knows the same way a catcher knows that the ball is going to land in his glove. He doesn’t even have to think it, because he IS it. The way you can tell if a person is truly humble is by the way he expects God to act. Certainty is the hallmark of humility.