A Quote by Carlos Castaneda
Self-importance requires spending most of one's life offended by something or someone.
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Think about it: what weakens us is feeling offended by the deeds and misdeeds of our fellow men. Our self-importance requires that we spend most of our lives offended by someone.
Consider God's charity. Where else have we ever seen someone who has been offended voluntarily paying out his life for those who have offended him?
I think a lot of self-importance is a product of fear. And fear, living in sort of an un-self-examined fear-based life, tends to lead to narcissism and self-importance.
Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one's self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily.
I've learned that loving your self requires a courage unlike any other. It requires us to believe in and stay loyal to something no one else can see that keeps us in the world - our own self worth.
All of us use crutches of popularity amongst friends, society, social media for self-importance. People go to any extent to feed their ego, even if that means to show someone down, self-destruction or to kill someone.
It is a mistake to look at someone who is self assertive and say, "It's easy for her, she has good self-esteem." One of the ways you build self-esteem is by being self-assertive when it is not easy to do so. There are always times when self-assertiven ess requires courage, no matter how high your self-esteem.
Those who are offended by something are most often those who deserve to be offended by it.
Seriously, we all need to get over being offended every time someone says something you don't agree with. Guess what? That's life. And I'd rather have that life any day than only hear from people who agree with me.
The way to stop political correctness is to not do it. If someone says, You offended me then you say I don't care! If they're offended by the truth, that's their issue!
Examine yourself to see whether you have within you a strong sense of your own self importance, or negatively, whether you have failed to realize that you are nothing. This feeling of self-importance is deeply hidden, but it controls the whole of our life. Its first demand is that everything should be as we wish it, and as soon as this is not so we complain to God and are annoyed with people.
You can't find intimacy - you can't find home - when you're always hiding behind masks. Intimacy requires a certain level of vulnerability. It requires a certain level of you exposing your fragmented, contradictory self to someone else. You running the risk of having your core self rejected and hurt and misunderstood.
Personally, I think people need to get over this 'being offended' thing. Being offended does not give you the right to silence people. I get offended by things all the time - it's just part of life. The right not to be offended is not a human right, especially in a democracy.
Truth, acceptance of the truth, is a shattering experience. It shatters the binding shroud of culture trance. It rips apart smugness, arrogance, superiority, and self-importance. It requires acknowledgment of responsibility for the nature and quality of each of our own lives, our own inner lives as well as the life of the world. Truth, inwardly accepted, humbling truth, makes one vulnerable. You can't be right, self-righteous, and truthful at the same time.
When we believe or say we have been offended, we usually mean we feel insulted, mistreated, snubbed, or disrespected. And certainly clumsy, embarrassing, unprincipled, and mean-spirited things do occur in our interactions with other people that would allow us to take offense. However, it ultimately is impossible for another person to offend you or to offend me. Indeed, believing that another person offended us is fundamentally false. To be offended is a choice we make; it is not a condition inflicted or imposed upon us by someone or something else.
I think seriousness is a mask of self-importance and self-importance in turn is a mask for self-pity. So if you're really going to pursue a spiritual way of living in the world, you must be lighthearted and carefree, have humor, be able to tolerate ambiguity and embrace uncertainty, and be forgiving of yourself and everybody else.
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