CAN MAN EVER CHANGE?

Man’s potential for self improvement has often been hotly debated. Educators have long maintained that a person’s I.Q. does not change during the course of a lifetime. There are prisons in society because we don’t know how to change criminal behavior. Apparently it’s considered a safer bet to lock people up than expect them to change. Religion has claimed that only God can save a person and scientists claim that the laws of physics are immutable. Yet it’s obvious that there is some change. Some criminals go on to lead productive lives. Diseases are cured everyday.

There is also much uncertainty about what causes change. Why does medical treatment sometimes stop cancer in a patient, yet sometimes the cancer reoccurs? In this society the arguments usually center on one of two points. Some say God is ultimately responsible when an operation was successful. Some say the doctor cutting out the liver was responsible. Both of these arguments are based on the assumption that only outside forces changed the sick man. Let’s examine this question from a new viewpoint.

Perhaps there are direct causes and indirect causes for change while the original source of these causes (the being himself) is one and the same. Of course, a being and a body aren’t one and the same, but if a being so considers he can be the effect or at the receipt point of a body’s energy output. If we take our sick patient, he must believe that he can feel the effects from his body, and from this the parts of the body like the liver can affect him. Once a being makes this assumption, he has granted his liver the power, the capability, the potential to modify or affect him. Then, if the liver becomes diseased then it follows that the being will also become the effect of the disease. When the doctor comes along and cuts out the liver and implants a donor liver, the man may now be convinced that the bad liver is no longer there, and so is no longer affecting him and thus be cured. On the other hand, if the man is convinced that the cancer is there regardless of the condition of the liver, the cancer may reoccur. Since doctors sometimes do have health care success by removing a diseased liver, it often appears that change in the body changes the being. But the real reason there was a change in the being is because his consideration of existence and life change; without this nothing can change.

Because beings have forgotten many of their own previously made considerations, and are no longer aware of them, when some change occurs that was based on the being’s own original consideration he will attribute this to God. Man often attributes to God that which he is unaware of causing. Doctors in this society are paid large sums of money for their services on the same basis. Yet changes brought about by outside forces are not one hundred percent predictable in their result. The missing ingredient is the being’s own considerations. A being must consider the existence of anything before it can be there for him. Force and change brought to bear on these considered things and objects are all alterations brought about after the fact of original consideration. If a carpenter builds a table and then someone saws the table in two, there will be no serious change to the carpenter, only to the table. The carpenter might feel regret, a sense of loss. He may get out of paying the bill on materials if he is covered for his loss by insurance, but that is as far as it will go. Medical treatments, shopping sprees for depression, or forcing students to sit in class so they will learn will only bring about those changes that a being is willing to consider can come about.

The only real change in life, the only real hope for improvement in a being’s existence that can occur is brought about by a being changing his own considerations of what is. Any medical, psychological, or spiritual approach that is not predicated on the basis of helping a being to gain control of his own thought, of his own considerations, of his own ideas will eventually fail. Any approach that is not based on helping a person to become the master of his own thinking is not one which will provide him with any real long term complete benefit. Knowing what is good for another, forcing another to behave in a certain pattern, will at best provide a transient, ephemeral change. This is why there is nothing you can do for another nor is there anything you can give another that will make them enduringly happy; a being can only do for himself. A being experiences only what he considers that he is experiencing, and beings are capable of changing their considerations. It is just a matter of releasing a being from past ideas that are sticking him in fixed viewpoints.

The Guide To Unconditional Personal Freedom has drills addressing this subject.

© 2008 SEEKERS LLC