Make your ego porous. Will is of little importance, complaining is nothing, fame is nothing. Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything.

The passage urges a deliberate thinning of the self—making the ego “porous” so experience, suffering, and beauty can pass through without being immediately seized, defended against, or turned into self-importance. It devalues the usual props of ambition (willpower as force, complaint as self-justification, fame as external validation) and elevates inner disciplines that enable genuine perception and artistic or spiritual growth: openness to what arrives, patience with slow formation, receptivity to the world, and solitude as the condition in which one can hear one’s own deeper life. In Rilkean terms, the self becomes a vessel rather than a project, and maturity comes through sustained attention rather than conquest.