The Ninth Street Center Ninth Street Center Journal

Improvement, Perfection, Development
by Dean Hannotte

Everyone wants to change. But change is not always growth in the larger sense. Most people think that growth means learning macramé, or taking an art class, or raising children and having fights with a spouse. This is the self-improvement set. No one can deny that, after having taken their class or raising their children, they are different, better, than they were before. But this difference concerns the outermost layers of personality. It does not affect their values, their sense of self, or their sense of direction in life. Still, it is good for them.

A more intense level of growth is self-perfection. In this process, the person idealizes himself and believes that no real reaching out towards the world is required of him. All of his efforts to grow concern matters which lie immediately within his grasp. Any goal which is beyond what he can touch is disqualified, disparaged. The world is not real to him, and he treats people as figments of his own imagination. Mysticism becomes a badge of honor, communication a pointless chore. Such people seem to walk around with halos over their heads, and give numerous signals that their transcendent tranquility is not to be disturbed. Their simplest acts become corrupted with a saintly beneficence, where style is all and no merely human goal is worth breaking the spell. Some of them, though, are better off this way.

Self-development could be defined as the growth process which kills as much as it gives birth to. Unlike the other two stages, its purpose is to leave behind, to forget, as much as to learn. Self-development involves the total personality, and is not subject to formal definition and rationalization. In this, it comes as a surprise, like laughter. The experience of expansion is always more real than the memory or understanding of its prior occurrences. Whereas self-improvement seeks activities to serve values internalized from society and self-perfection judges experience according to its conformance with an ideal world, self-development shows us what an expanding relationship to reality is all about.

-- reprinted from The Ninth Street Center Journal 5, Winter 1985