Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

My Buddhist teacher talked yesterday about pride. I didn't think it would be very interesting, in the beginning, but of course it turned out to be insightful. He said people with outsized pride are inside insecure and unsure of themselves. Because pride is not healthy, but confidence is. Confidence helps make people around you want to be with you, and doesn't prohibit you from trying new things or taking certain risks. You don't think you will necessarily succeed, but you are interested in the process not success or failure. Pride compares yourself with others falsely and makes differences between people. Of course we are proud of ourselves for our college degrees or finishing a painting or helping others, but dwelling on it as something that makes us more important than another person is distortion and destroys equity. He applied it to people who think their political perspective makes them more "knowledgeable" or "rational", which sets us above people who do not agree with us. Pomposity is unattractive no matter what the argument. Congratulating oneself on not thinking like those other, more ignorant people, is ugly and distorting. A little warning to some of us liberals not to make difference where there are possibilities for consensus. Always be on the lookout for ego, it tends to sneak up on us and make us less compassionate than we can be.