Pride: Causes and Overcoming

Many people still do not reflect on what pride is, what causes it, and what signs indicate that it has taken reign in the soul and begun the deterioration of health and destiny, leading to numerous losses and misfortunes.

Pride arises when the need for love and faith in God disappears.

A person who has lost the need for unity with the Prime Cause is like a tree that rejects its roots. Its crown may remain lush for a while, but the tree is already dead.

There are many manifestations of pride, and as varied as our lives are, so too can the phenomenon of pride appear unexpectedly. We are accustomed to a simple definition: pride is superiority, arrogance, and contempt for people.

However, excessive self-deprecation is also a form of pride. A person who thinks poorly of themselves or is dissatisfied with the world does not realize that they are intensifying their pride and creating numerous problems for themselves.

And one who selflessly helps people but, in their zeal, begins to corrupt them with this help, does not suspect that their improper behavior increases pride both in themselves and in others.

The cause of pride is attachment to the world. The more we cling to various aspects of existence, the faster we forget that the source of our life is the Prime Cause, with which we connect through love in our soul.

Greed, envy, intemperance, complexes of superiority and inferiority, worship of well-being or certain ideas—all these are signs that our soul, forgetting about love, reaches for pleasure and begins the unnoticed process of losing the main meaning of our life.

To cure a disease, one needs to correctly diagnose it. To overcome pride, one must understand how it appears and forms.

God is one, He is the source of everything, positive and negative in our world exist naturally. On the Divine level, everything is unified, while outside, the world is diverse.

When a person can think dialectically and has love in their soul that allows them to be independent of both happiness and unhappiness, then they begin to overcome their pride, understanding that life, instincts, desires, and all that we have are merely tools for our development and knowledge of the Creator.

The extent to which we understand and feel the danger of pride, the extent to which we change our character for the better every day, learning to love, forgive, educate ourselves and others—this is how much we become truly happy, not obscuring the soul with external varieties of happiness.

Seraphim of Sarov said: «Acquire a peaceful spirit, and then thousands of souls will be saved around you.»

By saving our own soul and improving our character, we can help not only ourselves, not only our children and grandchildren, but all of humanity.

S.N. Lazarev, «Faces of Pride»