Posted by Do we really need to tell the world about our skills, talents and the unnecessary titles (like ‘expert’) we hold? Is that really who we are? Or is there a deeper and more meaningful part of us being obscured by the creation of an “image” for public consumption?
Behind the compulsive need to make others aware of our “status” is often a human characteristic that Castaneda discussed regularly in his books: Self-importance.
Death is not impressed by our titles, however. We need to lose false identities before we die.
A useful step in our preparation for death is simply to ‘lose our self-importance’.
Most of our energy goes in maintaining our image, our sense of importance, our desire to be ‘someone’. This is what we call our “identity” – anyone doubting this need only to visit social media platforms to see people parading their “identity” on a daily basis.
This is not really a good way to spend our time, because if we could lose that ‘importance’, we would free up lots of energy which presently goes towards maintaining our ego/self-image.
We would then have more energy to provide to our energy body (the body that surrounds our physical body), which is where sickness starts. It should also be remembered that once a person gets sick, all attention diverts to the sickness, and that focus on “image” takes a back seat anyway.
Of course, losing our “self-importance” is almost impossible for most people.
How do we become a ‘no-body’ here on this plane of existence when we have spent so long building up our sense of importance?
Castaneda said that the process of ‘losing our self-importance’ was better described as “learning to see”. By stripping away all that wasn’t ‘us’ we could begin to see clearly who we really were.
This involves taking responsibility for everything that happens in our lives, discarding society’s programming and conditioning which is designed to limit and control us, and most of all, clearing the entities implanting thoughts into our minds. This is “clearing the mind” so we can see clearly who we are and discard the fake images we try and create for public consumption.
Which is more important, material or spiritual matters? That should be easy to answer: the focus should be on spiritual matters, because only the spirit survives death. The body we inhabit for a lifetime won’t, so why so much focus on our “body’s” image?
All that competitive worry about whether people we know have a better income, house, car, clothes, lifestyle or more ‘likes’ on social media than us is laughable at death. Castaneda called this ‘folly’, as we think what we are doing is important or worthwhile, but once we are able to understand that success or a failure doesn’t matter in the overall scheme of things, we will finally be getting somewhere.
Better to be able to leave this world behind without worrying about what our lasting ‘image and identity’ will be and if we will be remembered at all. The reality is that nobody remembers us for long after we die anyway. We fool ourselves about that.
Discovering who we really are before death, leaving behind what we aren’t, and not worrying about what we were or weren’t, in other words, a no-body, should allow transition to the correct end point: Back Home where we came from.
12 August 2025
Piers Morris Blogspot 