Self-importance requires spending most of one's life offended by something or someone.

Intent is what sends a shaman through a wall, through space, to infinity.

Feeling important makes one heavy, clumsy and vain. To be a warrior one needs to be light and fluid.

What is a truthful life? A life lived with deliberateness, a good, strong life.

Let's say that when every one of us is born we bring with us a little ring of power. That little ring is almost immediately put to use. So every one of us is already hooked from birth and our rings of power are joined to everyone else's. In other words, our rings of power are hooked to the doing of the world in order to make the world.

In the Art of Dreaming Don Juan tells Carlos, "... most of our energy goes into upholding our importance... if we were capable of losing some of that importance, two extraordinary things would happen to us. One, we would free our energy from trying to maintain the illusory idea of our grandeur; and two we would provide ourselves with enough energy to ... catch a glimpse of the actual grandeur of the universe."

We have to balance the lineality of the known universe with the nonlineality of the unknown universe.