In The Fire from Within, Carlos Castaneda hears these words from his sorcerer teacher: “Self-importance is man’s greatest enemy. What weakens him is feeling offended by the deeds and misdeeds of his fellow man. Selfimportance requires that one spend most of one’s life offended by something or someone.”
This is a major impediment to connecting to intention; you can all too easily create a no match here. Basically, your feelings of selfimportance are what make you feel special, so let’s deal with this concept of being special.
It’s essential that you have a strong self-concept and that you feel unique. The problem is when you misidentify who you truly are by identifying yourself as your body, your achievements, and your possessions. Then you identify people who have accomplished less as inferior, and your self-important superiority causes you to be constantly offended in one way or another.
This misidentification is the source of most of your problems, as well as most of the problems of humankind. Feeling special leads us to our self-importance. Castaneda writes later in his life, many years after his initial emergence into the world of sorcery, about the futility of self-importance. “The more I thought about it, and the more I talked to and observed myself and my fellow men, the more intense the conviction that something was rendering us incapable of any activity or any interaction or any thought that didn’t have the self as its focal point.”
With the self as a focal point, you sustain the illusion that you are your body, which is a completely separate entity from all others. This sense of separateness leads you to compete rather than cooperate with everyone else. Ultimately, it’s a no match with Spirit and becomes a huge obstacle to your connection to the power of intention.
In order to relinquish your self-importance, you’ll have to become aware of how entrenched it is in your life. Ego is simply an idea of who you are that you carry around with you. As such, it can’t be surgically removed by having an egoectomy!
This idea of who you think you are will persistently erode any possibility you have of connecting to intention.
