Grow, Change, Learn: Self as a work in progress

"Adolescence seems to provoke this difficult inner quest, since growth away from one's parents forces one to come to grips with life on one's own, but the quest for self-knowledge out not to be regarded as a "stage" that one passes through and leaves behind. Finding and maintaining self-identity can be a lifelong process. While it makes sense to expect that we can carry on the process without the pain and desperation often experienced in adolescence, it is a mistake to assume that once the pain has stopped the process is over. Rather than suffer the doubts and uncertainties of growth toward an indeterminate destination, many people fix a destination very early in life and then define themselves in terms of that destination: "I am a good parent"; "I am an engineer"; "I am a dropout." Many people imagine they can settle the account of self-identity once and for all and then live in the security of their certainty. But that premature decision is a subtle form of suicide. It amounts to opting out of life, for to live is to grow and change. "

(Self and World: Readings in Philosophy by James Ogilvy)

If you are alive you HAVE to be inconsistent -- you have grown, the world has changed, the river is flowing into new territory. Yesterday the river was passing through a desert, today it is passing through a forest; it is totally different. Yesterday's experience should not become your definition forever...one should be able to go on moving with time. Once should remain a process, one should never become a thing. That is intelligence." (Osho)

"Once you are in a relationship, you start taking each other for granted-that's what destroys all love affairs. The woman thinks she knows the man, the man thinks he knows the woman. Nobody knows either! It is impossible to know the other, the other remains a mystery...they are processes, they are not things. The woman that you knew yesterday is not there today. Relate again, start again, and don't take for granted." (Osho, "love, freedom, aloneness")