In order for us not to fall into the trap of self-importance after the Reval, I’d like to make a distinction between self-importance and divine importance.
As a social phenomenon, self-importance received its greatest boost from the social Darwinist view of life. (1) Social Darwinists represent life as a struggle for existence, in which only the fittest survive.
Their theory was often bent to the service of the upper class, on the premise that those who conspicuously survived must, by that fact, have proven themselves to be the fittest.
We fuel this way of thinking when we say things like: The man who dies with the most toys wins. Others are out to eat our lunch. Etc.
Self-importance is a goal sought by a survival-oriented mind which seeks evidence in the outside world or feedback from it of the certainty of its own survival. One who is important, the thinking goes, will survive.
And we pursue a whole host of self-important attributes out of commitment to that goal – looks, determination, physique, etc.
A well-entrenched, largely-invisible self-serving bias results from this way of being. (2) We play up our triumphs and play down our failures.
We emphasize our role in things that go right and blame the other guy for things that go wrong. And so on. And our friends are those who support our self-serving version of events.
Bundle up everything I’ve just said and you have what I consider the Third Dimension’s most influential social way of thinking throughout the Twentieth Century. It all stems from a conviction that we are separate and in competition with each other for survival.
None of us probably wants to go forward reproducing that system. I know I don’t. It isn’t true and never was. (3)
So what’s really true? Are we important or not?
I can only say what’s so for me. And to do that I have to talk about the only important thing in life to me and that is God (and God’s many forms). And since God has become all this, then all this is important to me, from the perspective of being God’s servant.
Every experience I’ve had that has carried me closer to God has been more spectactular than the last, more addictive, more seductive.
Whoever God proves to be, I can think of nothing more desirable than knowing and reuniting with God.
The wisest among us tell us that we ourselves are God. How could it be otherwise? We’ve accepted that God is everything. Therefore, since we’re part of everything, we must be God. It can be no other way.
In my view, my importance derives from the fact that I am God. You might say from your perspective that your importance derives from the fact that you are God. We are all God and our importance derives from the fact that we are God. I see this as “divine importance.”
My importance doesn’t derive from the fact that I am “me.” Not in the end. Not in the final analysis. Just think about it
Everything “me” is destined in the end to fall away like a coat we take off. The last minute is probably as Bayazid described it: “O Thou I!” (4)
When there’s nothing left but God and me, that’s the moment the scriptural writer talked about as the time when Christ himself (the individuated soul) bends the knee to God (the supreme soul) — when the Natural Self surrenders to the Supreme Self – so that only God survives.
Any “I” separate from God is not the final “I.”
I only matter in that I am God. And that is something I share with everything and everybody. The more I realize this truth, the more I escape the trap of self-importance.
I met a person today who has very likely escaped that trap. That’s what set me writing about the subject. I had lunch with her – a reader from back East.
If you hear me sounding very optimistic that there are those among us, much younger than us, who are ready and able to take the lead, I guess I got concrete proof today that it can and will happen.
Not a drop of self-importance. I was impressed, amazed. It can be done! Yay, Emily! Yay, lightworkers! Yay, next generation!
Footnotes
(1) See also “What Philosophy Underpins Economic Inequality?” at https://goldenageofgaia.com/2016/09/17/philosophy-underpins-economic-inequality/
(2) See “The Self-Serving Bias – I at https://goldenageofgaia.com/spiritual-essays/the-path-of-awareness/selfserving-bias/,” ‘The Self-Serving Bias – II” at https://goldenageofgaia.com/spiritual-essays/the-path-of-awareness/the-self-serving-bias/; “The Self-Serving Bias: The Chief Barrier to Life Working” at https://goldenageofgaia.com/spiritual-essays/the-path-of-awareness/the-self-serving-bias-the-chief-barrier-to-life-working/
(3) And yet the upper echelons of many groups in society fell for it from the 1870s to the Millennium. I remember putting together a dictionary of automation that was full of social-Darwinist statements from contemporary business and financial spokespeople of the 1990s.
(4) “I went from God to God, until they cried from me in me, ‘O thou I!” (Bayazid of Bistun in Aldous Huxley. The Perennial Philosophy. New York, etc.: Harper and Row, 1970; c1944, 12.)