People who are self-centered filter everything they experience through their own egos. Obviously, we all do this to some extent, but some do it more and stronger than others. It is in this way that everything is “about them,” whether they admit it or not. Such people see the world, and everything that happens around them, as happening in relation to themselves. They can only see from their own perspective, and are thus closed to other perspectives, other ways of seeing things.
This is egotism.
Such people think they are important, that their “opinion” matters, that what they believe is important to—and even supersedes—how and what things are. Such people think about “importance” in terms of people’s opinions (that things are important if it is “important to them.”)
There are those who say that we can only see things from our own perspective. This is true only of those who are dualistic and closed. Those who are open and non-dualistic have their perspective but also respect and are open to other perspectives (not “opinions”) just as much as their own, and understand that we do not own perspectives (“my” perspective) any more than we “own” land or objects.
Incidentally, this concept of “ownership” is more pervasive and counter-productive than most people think. To those who are more enlightened, the concept of ownership is simply laughable. But just think about how we talk: when someone says “my wife” or “my boyfriend” that is an expression of relation, but it also contains an underlying implication of ownership. My. Mine. My car, that idea was mine. While most of us are no longer so stupid as to think we own our wife, we do think we own our car. But we use the same wording. We use these words for ownership, claim, and also relation. This is confused, and so it is understandably confused in people’s minds as well, for how else do I let you know the relationship of this person to me unless I use a possessive expression? Why must human relation be possessive? This is but one illustration of how much we mistake grammar for reality, for the way things are as opposed to how we talk and think about them, without even realizing we are doing it. This is, in fact, one of the most under-acknowledged and far-reaching obstacles to awareness for most people.
But, back to the egotists. They cannot fathom something that has nothing to do with them, for anything of which they are aware is understood in terms of them and is therefore about them. To them, their opinion of a thing is what is important. They do not really understand that the world, the universe, things, are not subject to our minds and perceptions for their actual existence, only our perceptions of their existence. Egotists mix up what exists with their perceivings of it.
The only things that exist in, and because of, our own minds are our perceivings of things by way of our senses by which we interpret and infer meaning from and about those perceivings. We can only define our own “identity”—our perceptions of our selves. In fact, the only thing we can really say exists at all in this situation is the process of perceiving. We can say that there is perceiving going on, but it does not necessarily follow from that that there is something doing the perceiving, only that there is perceiving. Reality is that only our illusory selves, dependent upon concepts such as “identity” and “ego” and “self,” are thusly defined. Reality is that things in the universe “exist” independently of our opinion of whether they exist or not; the things that do not are the illusions we have of ourselves and the universe which we assume to be the way we and the universe are. Remember that “exist” is but a concept, and that something can only exist within a larger context.
Reality is the absence of illusion. See the reality of your illusions, of your perceptions, and you will “see” “reality.” You might not like what you see, but that’s your problem.
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From my personal notes, 8/25/99.
