On Letting Go of Self-Importance

It struck me how the character of Don Juan, in Carlos Castaneda’s Journey to Ixtlan, teaching the protagonist the Way of the Warrior, uncovers ideas that are close in spirit to Stoic philosophy.

One of those ideas is letting go of self-importance.

It begins with a simple scene: Don Juan asks the hero to kneel down, greet a plant, and talk to it. The man reacts with irony and a sense of superiority — convinced that he, homo sapiens, stands above supposedly soulless nature.

But then a deeper side of the question opens up, and I can’t help but agree with it.

There’s a term for this — “focus of attention.” It describes where our thoughts are aimed, and therefore where the resources of the brain and the subconscious go. It might be material things, events, actions, memories, fantasies, any ideas at all. At any given moment, our attention holds only a few objects.

As long as our attention is looped back on ourselves — how we look from the outside, what others will think, what we want to say — we notice the surrounding reality less: other people, their thoughts, their needs, the astonishing opportunities and the signs the universe sends us. And how much time and energy goes into taking one of our own ideas and inflating it in our heads, admiring it more and more, granting it an all-important significance on a world scale!

At some point we start to believe that if we’re doing something this important, others are simply obligated to help us pull it off. Expectation hardens into demand. And when the demand goes unmet, resentment and anger appear — anger that, for some reason, others didn’t attach the same significance to our plan as we did.

Letting go of self-importance lets us shift the focus from ourselves to the outer world, to be more open to what it offers, to what other people want to say. How can we be useful to them? How can we join forces toward a shared goal?

If we’re honest with ourselves, we’re just a grain of sand on the scale of the universe, and the only way to do something significant is to join with millions of other grains — like living cells in a body.

These ideas, by the way, are beautifully laid out in Ryan Holiday’s book on Stoicism, Ego Is the Enemy.

Here’s to letting go of our self-importance and staying open to the world and to other people! 😎