DAILY THOUGHTS
(collection)

Can a human being change?

One must have asked oneself, I’m quite sure, whether one changes at all. I know that outward circumstances change; we marry, divorce, have children; there is death, a better job, the pressure of new inventions, and so on. Outwardly there is a tremendous revolution going on in cybernetics and automation. One must have asked oneself whether it is at all possible for one to change at all, not in relation to outward events, not a change that is a mere repetition or a modified continuity, but a radical revolution, a total mutation of the mind. When one realizes, as one must have noticed within oneself, that actually one doesn’t change, one gets terribly depressed, or one escapes from oneself. So the inevitable question arises, can there be change at all? We go back to a period when we were young, and that comes back to us again. Is there change at all in human beings? Have you changed at all? Perhaps there has been a modification on the periphery. but deeply, radically, have you changed? Perhaps we do not want to change, because we are fairly comfortable...

I want to change. I see that I am terribly unhappy, depressed, ugly, violent, with an occasional flash of something other than the mere result of a motive; and I exercise my will to do something about it. I say I must be different, I must drop this habit, that habit; I must think differently; I must act in a different way; I must be more this and less that. One makes a tremendous effort and at the end of it one is still shoddy, depressed, ugly, brutal, without any sense of quality. So one then asks oneself if there is change at all. Can a human being change?