The irony of self-centeredness is that, when one is trapped in a self-centered state, the self, and all of its tendrils extending into the world, appear to be the world itself. Others exist only in as far as they deliver the goods required or fail to do so. All else drifts spectrally at the edge of the visual horizon, an optical shimmer, no more.
This is ironic because what appears to be the grandiosity of
occupying the universe is really the small-mindedness of self-occupation, the
containment of real grandeur of the Higher Self in a teapot or a thimble, not
to mention the obliteration or denial of the grandeur of the infinitely larger
physical and metaphysical universe that sprawls unfathomably in all directions,
unplumbable, the well in which the dropped pebble can never generate a splash.
The greatest denials of God are the idolatry of creation-by-others and, often its response, self-creation. Creation-by-others: you did this to me; I’m like this (however this is) because of them, because of then, because of you, you with your godlike powers of creation created me, and I do not like it. Self-creation: I will throw of the yoke of them, then, you, and reform, remake myself, constructing myself out of titbits of the world, the magpie’s collection of identities and attributes over which I squawk in my tiny twigged nest, protecting my treasured particularities.
The way out is, as the reading suggests, to look up and see the heavens, and see that which was created neither by me nor by you and ask: can there really be two creative forces? That Which Lies Beyond the material universe itself and the tiny little generators of claim, counter-claim, and blame in the purely human world, in a grotesquely imbalanced dualism? Or could That Which Created at all really have created all, including you and me?
The only viable answer to this rhetorical question leads me to see others as they are, and, by extension, me as I am: the created, the creature, not the Creator, and, at that, the Immanent heaves into view, and one falls utterly silent in awe.