Often, we mistake pride for arrogance and those who have arrogance mistake it for pride. But there is a clear distinction. Arrogance is being insensitive. When there is no humility in pride, that pride turns into arrogance. When there is no awareness in pride, that pride turns into arrogance. When there is no love or service along with pride, that pride turns into arrogance. It is the same knife. With just a little twist to it, you can either cut your butter or hurt your finger. Arrogance goes with the small mind. The small mind, being unaware of the magnitude of existence, thinks it is the greatest, the biggest, the highest.
Pride brings joy and in joy there is pride, but if you become insensitive, you get lost in your joy and pride. Pride accompanied by humility brings awareness of goodness, of beauty, of one’s luck, of one’s heart. Luck is a language of the heart. When the heart says, “lucky” or “unlucky”, it is referring to something that is beyond one’s capacity, beyond one’s mind, beyond one’s abilities. Something that is beyond the smallness of mind, something that is out of reach, something that is enormous, you call luck. Isn’t it?
The mind or head knows only facts, while the heart makes every- thing big. Poetry comes out of the heart. Poetry is exaggeration, and beauty is nothing but exaggeration. There is no fact in beauty. If you try to analyze beauty from your mind, the beauty is gone. Beauty is a language of the heart. The heart decorates, elaborates, exaggerates. When you read a poem, when you sing a song, when you describe something beautiful, it’s always from the heart. Justice is from the head. A quality comes from the head. From the heart comes only uniqueness, specialty. Everything is made special from the heart, but often we get it backward. If there is some negativity, we deal with it from the heart and if something is positive, we say it goes to our head.
We exaggerate problems. If a mistake has been made or there is some suffering, some misery, we blow it up beyond its dimensions. If a few people get sick in town, we say, “Everyone in town is sick. Everyone is always sick here.” We exaggerate and eternalize. Many newspapers thrive on this exaggerated negativity, but if something beautiful happens, they say, “Let’s see the facts.” They want to look at it from their head rather than through the heart. We do the same thing, don’t we? We need to switch it around. When you see the negative quality in someone, analyse it. Why is this person being so negative? What is behind it? What does he want? Reason it out. Don’t see negativity through the heart because then your heart becomes sore. Analysis of negativity brings compassion in you. An exaggeration of some good brings waves of beauty in you.
You have to take a step to make this shift. If you see one beautiful quality in another person, decorate it, exaggerate it, make it big. Whether the person is beautiful or not is immaterial. Those who exaggerate positive qualities become positive themselves because our body, which is nothing but space, gets filled with praise.
You have heard the phrase, “Praise the name of the Lord.” You are asked to do it not because God is going to be greater because of your praise or some person will become great because of your praise. No. In the act of praising, you become beautiful.
Whenever you have felt a sense of great beauty, that is when you have reached your home, that is when you have been in touch with your Self, because you are so, so beautiful. Whatever beauty you see in the world is only a projection of the being, of the Self — a glimpse of the Self. Meditation helps you see the beauty within and the beauty outside.
When you rejoice in beauty, the entire creation rejoices with you. The very purpose of such variety in this creation is to bring you back to your Self, to come to know that you are beautiful. And in that bliss, all that you need, all that you would want will simply keep happening.
Sri Sri Ravi Shankar is a humanitarian leader, spiritual teacher and an ambassador of peace.