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Peggy Black and the Team talked abut our “shadow side.” (1)
Prominent in my shadow side is a vein of self-importance and entitlement. It isn’t far below the surface. I can feel it.
I don’t say this as if it’s unique to me. I think we all struggle with both of these conditions.
It just seems important, seemingly to all of us, to feel important, as if our lives mattered, as if we made a difference by being here. I’m not sure I’ve ever met a person who didn’t have this desire operating.
I think the desire to feel important is what drives us to express our opinions on how the President is doing or what the United Nations should do.
We often don’t seem to care as much for facts as we do for our own evaluation of the situation. We seem to want so deeply to be acknowledged, validated, valued.
Instead of experiencing that felt need for self-importance to completion and becoming supple with it instead of coralized, we go through life seeking validation from outside.
But validation from outside is at best a stop gap. If it doesn’t translate into validation from inside, then it won’t be received and assimilated. When we have low self-worth we don’t translate it very well.
Entitlement is the sidekick of self-importance. Any time I’ve ever “come from it,” it’s cost me.
Entitlement says: “You can’t do that to me. I don’t need to take that from you. I deserve better.”
If I have a seed of entitlement, the Reval will irrigate it into a great tree. And it won’t be the birds of heaven that come to nest in it. It’ll be a great tree of ego.
If anything scares me, it’s that my sense of entitlement will skyrocket and I’ll become insufferable.
My awareness being lowered, I’ll probably be unaware that I’m being insufferable.
Both self-importance and entitlement are not supported in our society. It’s only the ones who feel them that enjoy how it feels when coming from them.
But we inevitably find, after achieving the “importance” we seek, that it’s a hollow victory; it’s still the way we feel inside that’s uppermost. That’s not changed by “being important,” save to increase our sense of entitlement.
We may come to see, sooner or later, that we’ve built our house upon sand. We’ve bet on the wrong horse again this lifetime. Self-importance and entitlement – like so many other traps of the ego and its constructed and constricting self-image – has few benefits and many costs.
All this is easy to say but how hard it is to root out self-importance and entitlement.
I don’t have the answer. But I’m going to need to, to make it through the next phase of service.
Footnotes
(1) “‘The Team’ via Peggy Black: Transform The Shadow of the Collective,” Feb. 24, 2017, at https://goldenageofgaia.com/2017/02/24/team-via-peggy-black-transform-shadow-collective/