Self-importance is man's greatest enemy. What weakens him is feeling offended by the deeds and misdeeds of his fellow men. Self-importance requires that one spend most of one's life offended by something or someone.--Don Juan

Surface Simile: Making others wrong to make you right.  If the ego can make you emotional with its making wrong then you will be distracted as you can't reason in an emotional state. 

Self Importance

The flyers of the sorcerers' tradition are black shadows that we sometimes detect and explain away as floaters in the retina. Sorcerers know for a fact, by means of their capacity to see energy directly, that those shadows are predatorial and that they keep us alive in order to devour our awareness. Sorcerers say that our awareness is like a sheen around our total field of energy that looks to them like a luminous ball. To them, this sheen of awareness is like a plastic cover that would make the luminous ball shine even more if it were not for the fact that it has been eaten away down to the level of our heels.   Here is where the sorcerers description gets very disturbing to us; sorcerers say that the only sheen of awareness left in us by our eaters is the awareness of self-reflection. Therefore, all we are left with is the concern with me, myself and I. In our personal lives we have corroborated that the only force left in the immediate world around us is the force of self-importance, which comes disguised in the form of humility, compassion, altruism, kindness, you name it.

The only way to deal with peerless warriors is not to have self-importance, so that one can celebrate them unbiasedly.

Self-importance can't be fought with niceties.....Self-importance is our greatest enemy. Think about it--what weakens us is feeling offended by the deeds and misdeeds of our fellow men. Our self-importance requires that we spend most of our lives offended by someone.....Self-importance is not something simple and naive. On the one hand, it is the core of everything that is good in us, and on the other hand, the core of everything that is rotten. To get rid of the self-importance that is rotten requires a masterpiece of strategy.--Don Juan

Self-importance is the motivating force for every attack of melancholy. Warriors are entitled to have profound states of sadness, but that sadness is there only to make them laugh.

The articulation point of everything seers do is stopping the internal dialogue. The internal dialogue is what keeps the assemblage point fixed to its original position.

Once silence is attained, everything is possible. You stop talking to yourself by willing it, and thus you set a new intent , a new command. Then your command becomes the Indescribable Force 's command.

This is one of the most extraordinary things that the new seers found out: that our command can become the Indescribable Force 's command. The internal dialogue stops in the same way it begins: by an act of will . After all, we are forced to start talking to ourselves by those who teach us. As they teach us, they engage their will and we engage ours, both without knowing it. As we learn to talk to ourselves, we learn to handle will . We will ourselves to talk to ourselves. The way to stop talking to ourselves is to use exactly the same method: we must will it, we must intend it.

Infants are taught by everyone around them to repeat an endless dialogue about themselves. The dialogue becomes internalized, and that force alone keeps the assemblage point fixed.

The internal dialogue is a process that constantly strengthens the position of the assemblage point, because that position is an arbitrary one and needs steady reinforcement.

I have profound admiration for the human capacity to impart order to the chaos of the Indescribable Force 's emanations. Every one of us, in his own right, is a masterful magician and our magic is to keep our assemblage point unwaveringly fixed.

The force of the emanations at large makes our assemblage point select certain emanations and cluster them for alignment and perception. That's the command of the Indescribable Force , but all the meaning that we give to what we perceive is our command, our gift of magic.

The new seers say that since the exact position of the assemblage point is an arbitrary position chosen for us by our ancestors, it can move with a relatively small effort; once it moves, it forces new alignments of emanations, thus new perceptions.

Power plants have that effect; but hunger, tiredness, fever, and other things like that can have a similar effect. The flaw of the average man is that he thinks the result of a shift is purely mental. It isn't.

On both edges of man's band of emanations there is a strange storage of refuse, an incalculable pile of human junk.

 Any person can reach that storehouse by simply stopping his internal dialogue. If the shift is minimal, the results are explained as fantasies of the mind. If the shift is considerable, the results are called hallucinations.

One of the most mysterious aspects of the seers' knowledge is the incredible effects of inner silence. Once inner silence is attained, the bonds that tie the assemblage point to the particular spot where it is placed begin to break and the assemblage point is free to move.

If the assemblage point moves beyond a crucial threshold, the world vanishes; it ceases to be what it is to us at man's level.

Most of the so-called bad things that happen in people's lives are due to unconsciousness.....they are self created, or rather ego-created...."drama".  When you are fully conscious, drama does not come into your life anymore....the basic ego patterns are designed to combat it's own deep seated fear and sense of lack.  They are resistance, control, power, greed, defence, and attack.  Some of the ego's strategies are extremely clever, yet they never truly solve any of it's problems, simply because the ego is the problem itself.  (The Power of the NOW by Eckhart Tolle p150)

Ego

"If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us."---- Hermann Hesse

The people we judge and hate in life are in fact reflections of our disowned selves.--Dr Hal Stone.[Classic.  Not many people want to take this on board.  Best judgement killer of all time.]

"When the game is over, the king and the pawn go into the same box."-- Italian proverb [On a soul level we are all equal.]

"My benefactor used to say that a warrior who stumbles on a petty tyrant is a lucky one."--Don Juan (The Fire From Within) [Petty tyrants work on your ego.  La Gorda taught Castaneda Detachment

Whenever I climb I am followed by a dog called "Ego".---- FRIEDRICH WILHELM NIETZSCHE

Those that fight don't listen those that listen don't fight.---Fritz Perls

Take the cotton wool out of your ears and put it in your mouth.--AA saying.

A good listener is a silent flatterer. (Spanish)

[The ego works the tongue. Listening is the first tool to deal with ego.]

"With most people unbelief in one thing is founded on blind belief in another."—Lichtenberg

"All great truths begin as blasphemies."--George Bernard Shaw. [The main reason the ego denies the truth. The rigid belief in lies.]

The result you got was the communication you intended.--Werner Erhard. [The content may be OK, but the tone was hostile.]

Observations are OK, not criticism. [Criticism is hostile.  "Was that an observation or a criticism?"]

Every upset is a set up.[Classic.  The ego hides its role if it can get away with it.]

Every loving thought is true, everything else is an appeal for healing. [A better perspective to put on someone who is caught in ego programming, what NLP calls reframing.]

Never criticize a man until you've walked a mile in his moccasins. --American Indian Proverb[The ones to kill judgement.  If you walked in their shoes you would be doing exactly the same.]

Respect yourself and others will respect you. --Confucius [What you think about yourself, you project out onto others who reflect it back for you.]

"Only when we know little do we know everything; doubt grows with knowledge."—Goethe [The ego knows everything.]

"Truth is a fruit that can only be picked when it is very ripe."—Voltaire [Ego denial.  The truth may be too much to stomach.]

"The only way to stave off boredom, in a complex domesticated primate like humankind, is to increase one's intelligence.  This is not appealing to the average primate, who instead invents emotional games (soap opera and grand opera dramatics)."--Robert Anton Wilson [Ego programming is promoted by Big Brother.  Emotional addictions etc.]

"It is weakness rather than wickedness which renders men unfit to be trusted with unlimited power." -- John Adams, 1788 [Power is the third enemy of man.]

"All the world 's a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts" - (As You Like It, Act II, Scene VII).  [Activate the Observer. We get too wrapped up in playing the game of life, especially drama games.]

"We are not human beings here for a spiritual experience, but spiritual beings here for a human experience."----Dannion Brinkley.

"All paths are the same, leading nowhere. Therefore, pick a path with heart!" [One for avoiding spiritual guru traps.  And the trap of seeing.]

"He (Krishnamurti) said he did not want to belong to any organization of a spiritual kind, because such an organization becomes a weakness, a bondage, and cripples the individual. He said that he did not want any followers or disciples, because the moment you follow someone you cease to follow Truth. He said that no one holds the key to Truth, that key is your own self, and in the purification and incorruptibility of that self alone."---Asit Chandmal (one Thousand Suns)

http://www.whale.to/b/ego_q.html