Conceit, A Dharma talk by Rev. Meian Elbert, Abbess of Shasta Abbey

CONCEIT: 

She speaks about conceit where there are several meanings to the word and one meaning is it is an idea , a conception. Nowadays we tend to think of conceit as a kind of Pride…. somebody praises you and if you’re conceited, thinking we’re better than other people. It can mean thinking we’re worse than other people because that’s a kind of conceit also. Most of us compare ourselves with other people a lot of the time – it’s a part of the critical mind to which we are all prone: seeing fault in other people or seeing thoughts in ourselves as well kind of conceit in a sense comparing making endless comparisons between ourselves and others. If we didn’t make comparisons there’d be no judgment no ground for criticism. All this comparison is not the reality, it’s just an idea we have so that’s related to conceit in the oldest sense, a conceit of something that really isn’t true. The Buddha said:  thinking I’m better than somebody else is deluded thinking,  I’m worse than somebody else is equally deluded and even thinking I’m equal to somebody else is deluded. And we all do this we all compare ourselves with others it’s a habit of mind that we might often not even be aware of. It’s just so endemic somehow if we tend to think generally that we’re better than other people we tend to look down on them and we don’t really respect them. You might be dismissive or rude, you might prejudge somebody based on our own biases or maybe we just don’t like that person so we tend to think they’re less good than we are in some way or we think they’re not as smart or as wise or competent or whatever as we are. We might not even be aware that we’re thinking we’re Superior to other people. It’s just a habit of mind we are caught into and we don’t even see it because we’re used to it or we think it’s true: “well yes I really am better than other people! What’s the problem? I’m seeing clearly.” Or you might think: oh no I’m not like that I think everybody’s equal I don’t think I’m better than other people I respect everybody but if we look more closely we might see those little seeds of conceit little waves that we think we’re better than somebody else because we all have them. We might have a little bit of conceit but praise is always in relation to unpraise! …it’s a proud vs inadequacy thing as Rev. Master Jiyu used to say: the two sides of one coin. We we try to prop ourselves up if we’re feeling badly about something. We look for thoughts on another person to make us feel better sometimes…thinking I’m anything if deluded. it’s separating ourselves off from other people: there’s me over here and then others over there. And this is the false conceit that the Buddha talks about: the false view of oneself that we think is real. …Our body is impermanent, painful and subject to changes. it will age it’ll change and eventually it’ll die and it’s just a body we’ve been given. There’s no cause for pride in it at all. The illusion of being a me, a self with its attributes a strong body or a weak mind-all those attributes that we might attribute to ourselves. In fact they all change they all come and go, Nothing lasts forever. Our minds change constantly – thoughts-they’re not our own. Whoever we think we are, we’re responsible for what we do with them. We can actually keep letting go over and over and over.