Self-Importance

"What I have learned bears no other fruit than to make me realize how much I still have to learn." –Montaigne

The seventh obstruction of foresight is self-importance. 

A Visionmaker checks the ego at the door when he or she goes out to meet the unknown. Self-absorption and narcissism are useless in the inevitable encounter with the primordial forces of Death and Destiny. 

Not only are they useless, they are dangerous. When we are so wrapped up in looking good and being admired, we are preoccupied and fail to notice what is emerging around us. Pride goeth before a fall, goes the old proverb.

Besides, what else can you see when you are so busy looking at yourself?

When the will is engaged in pride and inflation, it draws to us only those possibilities that can be used to feed the pattern.  Everything else remains hidden or ignored. Self-importance traps us in a narcissistic hall of mirrors where every choice feeds the illusion, and every choice results in greater disorientation.

Fattened on a steady diet of delusion of our own grandeur, we become weak, susceptible and addicted to feeding the voracious appetite of the ego. This severs any connection to the Four-Chambered Heart, which is every Visionmaker's compass in pursuing Destiny.

Visionmakers prefer to remain humble.  They recognize that even the most successful person is insignificant in the relation to the mysterious and uncontrollable forces of Death and Destiny.

Visionmakers are also acutely aware that there is always more to see and learn.  They recognize that transformation is only possible when one adopts this attitude.  Pride closes the mind and heart to growth and change. It is a dangerous affectation.

Spanish poet, Antonio Machado, directs our vision to more fruitful territory:

Don't trace out your profile–

forget your side view-

all that is outer stuff.

Look for your other half

who walks always next to you

and tends to be who you aren't.

Narcissism

is an ugly fault,

and now it's a boring fault too.

But look in your mirror for the other one,

the other one who walks by your side.

© Patrick O’Neill 2009. All rights reserved.