Inquiry · “You Are Not Your Thoughts”
Erasing Personal History & Losing Self-Importance
To become ‘fluid’ and free by no longer being pinned down by others’ fixed image of you (erasing personal history) and by refusing to spend energy defending your self-image (losing self-importance), thereby freeing attention and energy for inner work.
Erasing personal history & losing self-importance in 5 lines: Stop constantly explaining and confirming who you are; loosen others’ fixed picture of you so you become fluid, not predictable — even to yourself. Drop the energy-draining defence of your self-image: offence, being-right, needing recognition. Use slights and difficult people as practice in not defending the ego, with death at your shoulder as adviser. Read it as inner non-attachment — don’t actually cut off the people who care about you.
What it is
Two linked disciplines from Journey to Ixtlan, aimed at freeing the self from its fixed social definition. Erasing personal history means ceasing to let others (and yourself) pin you to a known, predictable identity — building “a fog” around yourself so that no one, including you, can take your self for granted.
Losing self-importance means giving up the constant, energy-draining defence of your self-image — the offence-taking, the need to be seen a certain way, the seriousness about “me.” Don Juan presents both as ways to stop leaking energy and attention into the maintenance of a rigid ego, so that energy is available for the warrior’s inner work (later, for “dreaming”).
The Method
From Journey to Ixtlan: Erasing personal history
- Stop routinely explaining and confirming yourself. Don Juan instructs Carlos to “not reveal what he really does” — to stop handing everyone a fixed account of who he is and what he’s about.
- Loosen your hold on the people who ‘know’ you. In don Juan’s strong form, gradually withdraw from those who keep you locked in their settled picture of you, so their expectations stop defining you.
- Build “a fog” around yourself. The cumulative effect of (1)–(2) is that no one — crucially, not even you — can be certain of your facts, so you stop being predictable to yourself and become “fluid,” free of the weight of a fixed past and others’ expectations. Losing self-importance
- Catch and drop the defence of your self-image. Treat self-importance — taking offence, needing to be right, feeling slighted, demanding recognition — as the chief waste of personal energy. Each time it flares, notice it and let it go.
- Use “petty tyrants” and slights as practice. Difficult people and humiliations become training: opportunities to not spend energy defending the self.
- Pair with “death as an adviser.” Don Juan’s companion teaching: keep death at your left shoulder as a counsellor; against death, self-importance is revealed as trivial, which makes it easier to drop. (Sourcing note: “not revealing what one really does,” “leaving everyone who knows one well,” building “a fog,” and the framing of self-importance as the great energy-waste defended against by using death as adviser are Castaneda’s documented teachings via don Juan in Journey to Ixtlan. Faithful paraphrase.)
Source & Lineage
Carlos Castaneda (1925–1998) presented Journey to Ixtlan (1972) as factual anthropology of his apprenticeship to the Yaqui sorcerer don Juan Matus.
Important honesty: the don Juan material is widely regarded by scholars and investigators as fictional/invented — no independent evidence of don Juan exists, and the books carry internal contradictions and undisclosed literary borrowings.
Read Castaneda as the author of these practices, not a field reporter. → (Castaneda entry). “Losing self-importance,” “controlled folly,” and “death as adviser” became widely quoted in 1970s–80s consciousness culture.
The Traditions' versions
Anatta / non-attachment to self (Buddhism) — loosening the fixed, defended “I”; less clinging, less reactivity.
- Ego death / killing self-importance (mystical traditions broadly) — the recurring claim that the defended self is the main obstacle.
- Stoicism & memento mori — using mortality as a corrective to vanity and offence; near-identical to “death as adviser.”
- Self-inquiry (Ramana, “Who am I?”) — questioning the assumed fixed self.
- Non-defensiveness / dropping the need to be right (modern psychology & 12-step) — reducing ego-defence to free attention and improve relationships.
Common refinements
Mistaking secrecy for freedom. “Don’t reveal what you do” is meant as inner non-attachment to your image, not a license for deceit, manipulation, or chronic concealment.
- Confusing dropped self-importance with passivity. Losing self-importance is not having no standards or letting yourself be abused — it’s not defending the ego over trivia. You can still act decisively.
- Performing humility. Conspicuously “having no self-importance” is just self-importance in costume. The work is quiet and internal.
- Taking the “leave everyone” instruction literally as life advice. See Safety — apply it as loosening over-identification, not as severing your support network.
- Believing the literal energy claims. You can practise faithfully while reading “energy” as attention and emotional bandwidth.