Acceleration
Personal change is a fallacy.
Change, real and complete change, cannot possibly be achieved by a man. In a physical sense human beings each grow and "change" as they age, of course, but in the "higher" sense, in the mental sense all change is impossible.
One cannot change one's self-- a sensible enough statement when unpacked, but one that is nevertheless widely disbelieved. Witness:
1) The woman who becomes involved with a man whose habits are unsavory to her on the basis that she can change him. For the better of course.
2) The man who begs at the feet of the woman leaving him, proclaiming: "Baby, I can change!"
3) The woman who speaks to her friends over a cup of coffee not long after taking back a formerly hated ex, citing: "But you don't understand-- he's changed."
4) The man who in a moment's reflection realizes he hates himself and decides, once and for all, to change.
Further example is not required. People believe in self-change. But it is a ridiculous concept. Consider for a moment the implications: To change one's self is to become not one's self but another self. Another person entirely. If I am I, and I change, then I become not I-- another pronoun is required. I am, perhaps now him. I am him. The statement sticks in the craw, jars the brain; it seems wrong because it is wrong. Human beings who are not fully enlightened Buddhists operate on the principle of individuality. I am such a human being. I believe fully and truly that my self has independent existence and is a real thing. Most people are in this camp with me, and given the assumption that a self exists at all it must needs be immutable. If the fundamental essense of who I am is subject to change, then I am in fact an infinite series of permutations. I am infinite, and if my self is infinite then in there is no self--not in the common sense of the word. I am not a fully enlightened Buddhist, and I do not believe this. I do not even wish to.
Most people, I think, understand this. I am not telling you anything you do not already understand. When a man says, "I will change," or "I am a different person now," he does not literally mean these things. He means that he has changed his outward behavior, or that his outlook on life is different now, or that his perspective is altering. Not that he has, in fact, become a different person.
At this point you're wondering what the crux of all this is. This seems a smallish point to be making. You're musing to yourself that Prime is exhibiting a level of anal attention to lingusitic detail that is both irrelevant and slightly boring. But my friends, you know but little. The difference between saying, "I will change," and saying "I will change my actions" is not insignificant, but crucial.
You are shaking your collective head right now (Prime sees all) and exclaiming, "They're just words!" But listen to me as I say to you all that words can be as tyrranical as they are communicative. When wielded with full knowledge a word is a tool, a valuable device by which one can express thought to both one's self and to others. But when used improperly, in ignorance, a word still expresses thought to the self and to the masses, but it becomes uncontrolled. To use a word out of its context or meaning is to unleash a thing with real consequences and to then ignore it.
All the same, it happens often. You say one thing, but you mean another. Maybe it's because you are being intentionally cryptic, or perhaps because you cannot readily convey your precise meaning into words. Often you do it out of laziness: it takes more words, more time, to express your full meaning-- why bother with that when you can more or less get your point across in a few short sentences? This behavior is reinforced by the fact that most of the time, when you approximate in this manner, there are no apparent immediate consequences. You therefore become conditioned to speak approximately, which is to say, wrongly.
But just because the consequences are not immediately apparent does not mean that they are nonexistent or minor. An example:
A boy attends a school for many years. He is a bright boy, brighter than most of his peers. His school is small, and the general intellectual level of the other students ranges from poor to average. He therefore impresses his instructors. They remark upon his acuteness with praise and proclaim him "genius." Genius, though his intellect is in fact not far above the norm, his creativity not very high at all. Still, he hears the word again and again throughout his schooling, and he swells with pride and self-satisfaction. The word conjures visions of Einstein and DaVinci, Shakespeare and Socrates. He believes himself to be all of these men and more. Because of this belief, brought upon by this word, he grows complacent. He studies less, and plays more. He speaks with authority on most subjects, and he brooks little argument to any given position he takes on any given matter. But he is at a small, average school and this does not seem too terribly bad a thing. He does in fact know more than do most of his peers, and since the subject matter taught is not particularly challenging, the fact that he has stopped applying himself to his studies affects his grades and work but little. He graduats from the little school and moves on to a bigger, more cosmopolitan school. He takes on a challenging courseload. "I am a genius," he says to himself, "no matter the classes, I will still excell." But he does not. He assumes that he will just absorb the material as it is presented to him, and so he does not study, does not work at his learning. It has been so long since he cracked a book that he has, in fact, forgotten how to study. When he sees the first grade on his first test he is angry and frustrated. "But I am a genius! How could this happen?" More grades come in, worse and worse still. Robbed of any tools to help fix the problem his frustration only deepens until it becomes despair. Finally at the end of his first year at the new school, he drops out before they can kick him out. His grades are deplorable, and he has learned nothing. This single word, "genius," used injudiciously started him down a path of self-destruction. Had he been another boy, perhaps he would have responded differently. Perhaps he would have flourished, to rise to the challenge of the role. Perhaps he would simply have smiled imwardly, proud to be praised and gone on as he was but with more confidence. But even in these, happier cases the word would have affected his actions and his perspective, and not in the way intended by its original speakers. His instructors meant to say, "He is a bright boy." Instead they used a word improperly, a word with many subtle meanings attatched to it inherently. And since they did not use the word with those meanings intended, the consequences were unpredictable to them.
Words posses power. It is not power in a tangible sense, not a power over matter, but a power over mind--a much more insidious thing. To speak or think a word is to exercise that power. And power should not be exercised carelessly, or rashly, yet people often use words quite casually, never considering that to do so can be dangerous.
To return to the original point (which is very probably lost to you now in this sea of seemingly very tangential other points): the word "change" has power. It has the volatile, idea-power of a word. When you say, "I will change," you are wielding that power and you are doing it with no mind to the consequences inherent in the fact you are proposing an impossibility. Proclaiming self-change is in truth nothing but subtle self-sabotage. Witness:
1) The woman who is an alcoholic and has a moment of clarity. She sees bad behaviors in herself, but to alter them she says, "I will change." In so doing she implants the idea that her very self is the thing that is deficient and bad. The bad thing is in fact only her behavior, her actions. But she does not see that, and her self-esteem ebbs away into nothingness as she considers the badness of her self. And with this belief that she is bad she cannot make her actions good. She drinks for the rest of her days, frustrated and desparing.
There is a difference between a person's actions and a person's self. To say, aloud or internally, that you want to/will/need to change when in fact you mean to say that you desire to change your actions is to deny this separation. It is to say that a person's actions are incontrovertably the same as a person's self. And since the self is immutable, unchangeable-- you can feel that internally, sense its verity without even looking at the logical side-- to link the two is to make ones actions unchangeable as well. This is self-defeating and will end only in frustration. When you say "I will change," you are also, simultaneously telling yourself: "I cannot change my actions, my behavior or my outlook. I am stuck in this pattern forever. My actions are who I am." This makes progress impossible, this makes shaping your own life impossible.
Accept your immutable core self as a given, and say what you mean: "I will change my undesirable behaviors." I say man cannot change, but he can unfold. He can evolve his outward self into a creature more like his self. He can become a creature more like himself, as it were. If you see a behavior in yourself as improper then it is in fact improper for you and you are capable of changing it. Because you are not your actions. You would realize and use that knowledge fully if you would only stop lying to yourself. You cannot change, but you can unfold. Go unfold.
Prime has spoken.