Published in Cebu Gold Star Daily
If you’ve seen the film The Devil’s Advocate, you will certainly remember Al Pacino as the dark prince, repeatedly describing vanity as his “favorite sin”.
Indeed, it is the greatest evil we could allow into our lives because it is the essential first step in getting into more trouble. Pride is the attitude of the wicked and the cruel. It leads to selfishness, deceit, envy, greed, ignorance and finally, violence. History is filled with famous proud butchers: Napoleon Bonaparte, Hitler, Genghis Khan, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong and our very own Ferdinand Marcos. These highly intelligent and highly ambitious people were pinnacles of human pride and brutality. They just didn’t know when to stop, and so their own mortality silenced them and cursed them upon the dark pages of human history forever.
On the flip side of the coin, I believe that humility is the greatest virtue accessible to humanity. Great deeds of love and kindness are products of the most humble figures in history: Siddhārtha Gautama, Muhammad, Jesus Christ, Mahatma Gandhi and Mother Teresa. These are people that millions try to emulate, because they were great in their humility. They did not claim glory or wealth, but their small individual acts of kindness snowballed into global movements for change and unity.
Humility is also the key to successful relationships. It ensures that we do not put ourselves above other people. It keeps our eyes and ears open, giving us a life of perpetual learning. It reminds that everything we are, have and know are fleeting – that we are a fraction of a speck in the grand scheme of the universe.
Proud people just talk loud, exclude everyone from their tiny worlds and never run out of excuses each time they fail. They live in constant fear and distrust. They believe in the illusion of superiority, and waste their time chastising others who they consider inferior. They cannot survive even the smallest form of criticism, and so they shut themselves inside tiny boxes ignorance and fear. They become slaves to wealth and power, always clawing for more. Never having a moment’s rest. Never satisfied. They stop growing and drag everyone else down with them.
Humble people do not speak of their achievements and talents, but celebrate them by using them for others. They know that they live on borrowed time and work with borrowed resources. With this mindset of gratitude, they are able to create lasting good in their circles of influence. With humility comes detachment from material things and temporary successes, giving us freedom to move, discover and understand.
I say these things because I want to be reminded of that slippery slope we are prone to rolling into, as we grow older. That ominous tendency to glorify ourselves comes to haunt us more often as we accomplish more. Celebrating degrees, titles and awards are all well and good for a night. But when we get back into the difficult real world, we are all the same. None of it will matter. We all have to pull our own weight and help those who cannot.
The funny truth is this: The more we learn, the more we realize that we know so little.
As I end my long years formal education, I pray that I will never forget this… as well as those around me.
Showing posts with label morality. Show all posts
Showing posts with label morality. Show all posts
Saturday, May 2, 2009
Sunday, April 12, 2009
We The Spirits
Published in Cebu Gold Star Daily
For those of us who work with the law, we often think in terms of finality. We believe ourselves to be boxed in by parameters set by old men and women who seem all-knowing of all there is and all there ever will be. Our education implies that outside this box we call the Rule of Law, there is no other form of succor. But any person with a bit of life experience knows that there are forces greater than government, institutions, and people. There are virtues far greater than the decent human minimums of justice and fairness.
This holy week, I invite everyone to reflect on the greater things in life -- more than our business interests, our personal ambitions, and our dreams. These are the greater forces of compassion, kindness, and love -- super-natural urges that seem to always keep us off tangent from normal human behavior and reasoning. Why are we capable of being generous at a time of personal need? Why are we able to reach out and pull up those we fairly defeat in life’s race? Why do we still believe in miracles after all that education we’ve been put through?
There exists that great force that keeps humanity reaching out for its best qualities. Whether you are Christian, Muslim, Jew, Buddhist or even a self-declared atheist, there is reason and meaning behind every good work that you do and reprieve from your baser actions. The inevitable truth is that we are all spiritual beings and no denial, no backsliding, no distancing mechanism can change that.
Whatever may be your interpretation, there will always be room for greater things and greater ideas in your life. Call it God, goodness or love; we recognize it almost immediately when we see it. We are forever drawn towards it in our search for meaning.
Sometimes your cynicism may leak out through your words, but your actions will always betray the truth. How hard you work for your family will show it. How you comfort a friend at a time of loss will show it. How you tip the cab driver or the waiter will show it. How you call people through your mobile phone for no reason except to say “How’s it going?” will show it. How you forgive someone who took much from you or betrayed you in the most terrible way will show it.
These things are who we are. These things fuel our hope.
Our failures, our pains, our frustrations fade in time because we are spiritual beings, mindful of things more important than simply what we go through this day. We are a constant work-in-progress and will remain this way until the day we die. This is our common journey towards perfection – towards the spirit.
Thus, we are not of this world. We will never be satisfied with what we have now because they lock us up in this place so fleeting and temporary. That bigger TV or faster car will become old and meaningless in time. Your clothes and jewelry will go out of style. Your gadgets will become obsolete and stop working. Your beauty will fade. Relationships will end, whether by choice or by death. Everything has an expiration date.
So survey your blessings. Value the good things in your life because all these are temporary: our careers, our material things, and our loved ones. Someday, we will lose them. Someday, only shadows and memories of the good old days will remain. But even on those days, we will survive. Through any war, recession, heartbreak or frustration, we will survive. Because at the end of every episode of pain, after every loss and even when everything else fades into wind, the human spirit remains.
Peace and blessings to you all. Happy Easter!
The disembodied spirit is immortal; there is nothing of it that can grow old or die. But the embodied spirit sees death on the horizon as soon as its day dawns.
- THOMAS HOBBES (1588 - 1679)
For those of us who work with the law, we often think in terms of finality. We believe ourselves to be boxed in by parameters set by old men and women who seem all-knowing of all there is and all there ever will be. Our education implies that outside this box we call the Rule of Law, there is no other form of succor. But any person with a bit of life experience knows that there are forces greater than government, institutions, and people. There are virtues far greater than the decent human minimums of justice and fairness.
This holy week, I invite everyone to reflect on the greater things in life -- more than our business interests, our personal ambitions, and our dreams. These are the greater forces of compassion, kindness, and love -- super-natural urges that seem to always keep us off tangent from normal human behavior and reasoning. Why are we capable of being generous at a time of personal need? Why are we able to reach out and pull up those we fairly defeat in life’s race? Why do we still believe in miracles after all that education we’ve been put through?
There exists that great force that keeps humanity reaching out for its best qualities. Whether you are Christian, Muslim, Jew, Buddhist or even a self-declared atheist, there is reason and meaning behind every good work that you do and reprieve from your baser actions. The inevitable truth is that we are all spiritual beings and no denial, no backsliding, no distancing mechanism can change that.
Whatever may be your interpretation, there will always be room for greater things and greater ideas in your life. Call it God, goodness or love; we recognize it almost immediately when we see it. We are forever drawn towards it in our search for meaning.
Sometimes your cynicism may leak out through your words, but your actions will always betray the truth. How hard you work for your family will show it. How you comfort a friend at a time of loss will show it. How you tip the cab driver or the waiter will show it. How you call people through your mobile phone for no reason except to say “How’s it going?” will show it. How you forgive someone who took much from you or betrayed you in the most terrible way will show it.
These things are who we are. These things fuel our hope.
Our failures, our pains, our frustrations fade in time because we are spiritual beings, mindful of things more important than simply what we go through this day. We are a constant work-in-progress and will remain this way until the day we die. This is our common journey towards perfection – towards the spirit.
Thus, we are not of this world. We will never be satisfied with what we have now because they lock us up in this place so fleeting and temporary. That bigger TV or faster car will become old and meaningless in time. Your clothes and jewelry will go out of style. Your gadgets will become obsolete and stop working. Your beauty will fade. Relationships will end, whether by choice or by death. Everything has an expiration date.
So survey your blessings. Value the good things in your life because all these are temporary: our careers, our material things, and our loved ones. Someday, we will lose them. Someday, only shadows and memories of the good old days will remain. But even on those days, we will survive. Through any war, recession, heartbreak or frustration, we will survive. Because at the end of every episode of pain, after every loss and even when everything else fades into wind, the human spirit remains.
Peace and blessings to you all. Happy Easter!
Thursday, June 30, 2005
The Lie That We Live
Originally published in the June 2005 edition of ThePalladium for my column Legal Personality.
Remember when you were in first grade, your teacher would always remind you: "It is wrong to steal, to cheat, to lie, to be dishonest."? Even more so for Catholic schools where the word "wrong" is effectively replaced by "a sin".
Have you ever been dishonest in your life? Are you a liar? A cheat? A thief? A criminal?
At the top of your head, it would be very easy to answer these questions with a firm "NO". You would never imagine yourself being called these degrading names – labels that only belong to those people on the streets or in prison.
Let me pose more questions closer to home: "Do you have pirated (stolen) video, music, or software CD’s in your home? Have you ever corrected a waiter who mistakenly charged you for three drinks instead of the four that you consumed? Have you ever cut into a line of people during registration or in a bank just because a friend of yours happened to be there?
Where does this kind of behavior come from when all our lives, we have been taught to love one other, to be good, honest, kind, polite, patient, respectful, obedient, responsible… and all that? Is this really the easy way out? Or can we justify this trend of dishonesty a "necessary evil" for our very survival?
We Filipinos live in the most ridiculous of circumstances. We are a first-world culture trapped in a third-world country. Everyday, we are enticed by the wonders of the modern world: mobile phones, TV’s, computers, movies, shopping malls, video games, designer clothes, signature perfumes, skin-whitening products… these things are added to our cart of "learned necessities" while our means remain less than sufficient to meet even the most basic of our "real" needs. We Filipinos constantly live in denial. We refuse to show the world that we cannot afford to enjoy these things.
So what do we do? We imitate and approximate. We create copies (though inferior) of what other people are enjoying. We try to find some semblance of satisfaction in our lives by pretending to have much more than we actually do.
An optimist would say: Then we are a creative people – Dreamers – people who are resilient and determined to find happiness even in scarcity.
A pessimist, on the other hand would remark: We are truly lost. We deny what is real and focus on the things that can never be. We are plagued by this "national delusion" that would do more damage than good.
Whenever something goes wrong, we immediately blame the government, we blame religion, our superiors, and even the weather? We have nothing but heroic expectations from other people yet we meet our own responsibilities with empty nods and phony grins. We have enough blame in our hearts to go around for the next century and, yet, many of us cannot even find peace in our own households, our barkadas, and in our own relationships.
So... how can we not be dishonest, when even the very life that we live is a lie?
What I say: We are in a place that we need to get out of soon.
Remember when you were in first grade, your teacher would always remind you: "It is wrong to steal, to cheat, to lie, to be dishonest."? Even more so for Catholic schools where the word "wrong" is effectively replaced by "a sin".
Have you ever been dishonest in your life? Are you a liar? A cheat? A thief? A criminal?
At the top of your head, it would be very easy to answer these questions with a firm "NO". You would never imagine yourself being called these degrading names – labels that only belong to those people on the streets or in prison.
Let me pose more questions closer to home: "Do you have pirated (stolen) video, music, or software CD’s in your home? Have you ever corrected a waiter who mistakenly charged you for three drinks instead of the four that you consumed? Have you ever cut into a line of people during registration or in a bank just because a friend of yours happened to be there?
Where does this kind of behavior come from when all our lives, we have been taught to love one other, to be good, honest, kind, polite, patient, respectful, obedient, responsible… and all that? Is this really the easy way out? Or can we justify this trend of dishonesty a "necessary evil" for our very survival?
We Filipinos live in the most ridiculous of circumstances. We are a first-world culture trapped in a third-world country. Everyday, we are enticed by the wonders of the modern world: mobile phones, TV’s, computers, movies, shopping malls, video games, designer clothes, signature perfumes, skin-whitening products… these things are added to our cart of "learned necessities" while our means remain less than sufficient to meet even the most basic of our "real" needs. We Filipinos constantly live in denial. We refuse to show the world that we cannot afford to enjoy these things.
So what do we do? We imitate and approximate. We create copies (though inferior) of what other people are enjoying. We try to find some semblance of satisfaction in our lives by pretending to have much more than we actually do.
An optimist would say: Then we are a creative people – Dreamers – people who are resilient and determined to find happiness even in scarcity.
A pessimist, on the other hand would remark: We are truly lost. We deny what is real and focus on the things that can never be. We are plagued by this "national delusion" that would do more damage than good.
Whenever something goes wrong, we immediately blame the government, we blame religion, our superiors, and even the weather? We have nothing but heroic expectations from other people yet we meet our own responsibilities with empty nods and phony grins. We have enough blame in our hearts to go around for the next century and, yet, many of us cannot even find peace in our own households, our barkadas, and in our own relationships.
So... how can we not be dishonest, when even the very life that we live is a lie?
What I say: We are in a place that we need to get out of soon.
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