Arrogance - A Spiritual Disease

Arrogance is a painful spiritual disease and it psychologically provides major life difficulties that are hard to address. Arrogance is one of the worst characteristics of human consciousness and is a normal by-product of the mind flying in the stratospheres of its own conceit. The main problem with arrogance is that it only listens to itself, and in that, the mind's light goes out. It has been said that the mind cannot know itself, cannot get out of its own skin so to speak, and yet it is not able to perceive this. When it comes to the heart or to any pure process of communication, arrogance interferes dramatically with communication flow and leads directly to absolute walls of separation between one being and another.

Martin Luther King, Jr. said that Gandhi criticized himself and whenever he made a mistake, he would confess it publicly. Here was a man who would say to his people, I'm not perfect, I'm not infallible. Gandhi was considered a great man for this quality of humility. When we confess our weaknesses or imperfections we make ourselves more vulnerable. We open ourselves and are thus able to grow through the confrontation with that which is most weak or negative in us. Arrogance is the opposite of vulnerability; it represents a closeness of mind and usually, a selfishness of purpose. Arrogance hardens the heart. In the end, the only medicine for arrogance is humiliation. Humiliation is the process that brings things that are up high down. Humility is what is most low; it is familiar with the soil. Humble people cannot fall for they are already on the ground and do not want to leave it.

HeartHealth talks much about the dualities below, which are always happening on a continuum. Though Victor Frankl said, “From all this we may learn that there are two races of men in this world, but only these two - the "race" of the decent man and the "race" of the indecent man. Both are found everywhere; they penetrate into all groups of society. No group consists entirely of decent or indecent people,” it would be more correct to state that no individual either is completely good and decent, and no individual completely bad or indecent. Arrogance is an extreme and totally indecent human characteristic and does take us into the darker side of mankind.

What marks a person with little or no heart, what we might call the indecent or truly mental man, is an attitude that scoffs at the suffering of others; an attitude that sees others who feel, suffer, cry and experience the occasional agony of being a being on this planet as beneath their dignity. These people loose all sense of compassion and these attitudes block all capacity for empathy. Dangerous to be around, such people truly challenge the souls of the descent people they touch. A great aspect of life and suffering is seen in the struggle between these two groups, the decent and indecent. In the bible and in most films this is framed as the struggle between good and evil. Scott Peck uses the terms sick self and healthy self when referring to the internal nature of this battle that goes on even in the most noble of noble souls.