Let me contrast the 5 Ways to self grow and Self Growth

	self growth	Self Growth
1	Better yourself.	Be yourself
2	Achieve your goals	Surrender your will.
3	Do before you die.	Die before you die.
4	Acquire knowledge	Allow for bewilderment.
5	Serve your self	Be of service to Love

Let me say this at the outset of this blog post related to self growth and Self Growth.  Both are needed.  One is not better than the other except that the pursuit of personal development in service to the small self alone – the I, me, mine of your existence – is the development of a prison.  Without the revelation of the direct knowing of the true Self you are living your life as if a casket of sand and sea water was the Ocean.  This is the Ocean of Love from which you have your very being.

Our cultural focus is on the development of the self as the idea of a separate person required to work and fit into society.  This is so even when the culture holds values that are not in the long term interests of the people and the life that exists on this planet.  The present dynamic that drives the culture is not the dynamic of Eros but the dynamic of Thanatos.  Thanatos is the will toward death rather than life.  This is the dynamic of death in the pursuit of the never enough.  This is the development of the collective self which feels no connection to the true Self.  The true self is that energetic which is driven from the direct knowing of Love and which is this blog post will be referred to as Eros.  In Greek mythology Eros is the God of Love.

In the movie trilogy Star Wars, based on the motif of the Hero’s Journey, this drive to never enough is represented by the death Star that threatens the existence of life on various planets.  It is the connection to the Force – the connection to the true Self – that gives the hero Luke Skywalker the power to destroy this drive that threatens to enslave life. This is a story that represents our own lives when we become focused on what is called the dark side.  This dark side represents our focus on the separate sense of self and our drive to safeguard this separate sense of self no matter what the cost.  This focus is the focus on ourselves alone rather than our focus on ourselves as All One.

So let me begin to contrast these two dynamics.  All mystics will advise you that without direct awareness of the Self – the drive of Love in form  – that you are living a kind of death within life.  You are in one sense living an illusion.  This is the illusion of separation created by the five senses and the body while living within the dimension of time and space.  This sense of separation and the need to overcome it is the primary reason for the cause of most suffering in the history of human kind.  This small self seeks to overcome this sense of separation by trying to secure the sense of separateness within more comfortable circumstances.  This is not the drive of Eros but leads to an embrace of the darker side of this sense of separation when we find we do not get what we want.  Here are the ways in which this sense of the separate sense of self can grow into a sense of fulfilment.

Better yourself and Be yourself.

Or do you simply enjoy watching them express the sense of delight that they have not learned to do but which arises from them being themselves.  These small children are living from being.  Being cannot be made better because it is the movement of Love in form from that which creates all forms.  This is who you are and is not subject to self improvement.  The idea of bettering yourself creates within you a tension.  This is often a necessary tension.  Tension is needed for growth but it isn’t needed as a value judgement and it isn’t needed and does not give you your true sense of worth.  Acquiring personal development and other skills that allow you to better express more fully the being that you are can be valuable but they are not something you acquire in order to replace your nature which flows direct from the Source.

This is why it is essential that you keep your focus on the experience of Eros.  This is the experience of following the energy that expresses the way in which love moves through you.  To say this in another way.  You focus, and you follow, the energy of what you Love to do.  The doing comes out of the experience of the joy of flow in being who you are intended to be.  This is not the usual way in which we focus our actions.  We live our life and do certain work that pays us enough money in order that we might spend some time engaged in what we love to do.  In this personal development and beyond blog you are invited to allow the doing of your life to arise from the creative force of Love that knows how to do you better than yourself.

Being loves and longs to create.  There is a kind of Zen paradox here.  This doing arises from the flow of non-doing.  If you constantly pursue a goal orientated focus then you will likely avoid the knowing of Love’s purpose as it is intended to express through you.  There needs to be a balance between doing and being but the primary focus needs to be on being.  Start with a primary focus on allowing yourself to be and follow action that arises in the moment.  Because you are so out of touch with being this needs to be a kind of re-education.  It is the education of self trusting that leads to true self confidence.  Real self confidence is the confidence experienced from knowing your true nature and being in alignment with that nature.  This doesn’t necessarily mean you become a better person.  You might turn out to be someone who is a radical and chooses to live a life of Love in service to humanity rather than follow a career that assures you of a life of comfort and security.  What it will mean is that you become integral.  You become one without a second.

Achieve Your Goals and Surrender Your Will

There are many great personal development writers who have written widely on how one can set and achieve goals.  The value in goal setting is, for this writer and storyteller, essentially the practice of goal setting as a discipline of the will.  It is the practice of focusing the will and the mind in order to create a boundary within form.  That boundary may be a sales target, a certain level of income or it might be a certain weight level.  Whether or not you are focused on achieving worldly or other worldly goals there is a place for disciplined goal setting.  I set a goal to write everyday, to pray everyday and to record my dreams everyday when I can recall them.  However,  I am not obsessive about these goals.  There are people who spend much of their lives simply working to achieve goals.  They are what I call goal junkies. They are addicted to achievement but this achievement is driven not from Eros, which is a sense of joy, but the drive to overcome Thanatos which is the drive to overcome an absence of meaning.

You might well die having achieved every goal you set yourself and lived a loveless life in service to the self and not to the Self.  This might well happen if you do not move into the phase of life that the poet Goethe calls higher love making.  This is the experience of union with the Self or what Sufi’s call the Beloved.  This is a paradoxical goal.  You set your intention, not to achieve it, but to surrender to the willingness to have this flow of Eros – the God of Love – express through you.  In a very real sense this is the true goal of life.  It is the goal of allowing Love to be expressed in form through you.

Do before you die and Die before you Die

I see written in various personal development books and personal development blogs across the world wide web lists of things you should do before you die.  Many of these things to do before you die are wonderful invitations but they can become another list of things to do along with so many other list of things to do.  In doing these things before you die, you may well in all likelihood, develop more confidence, more open mindedness and hopefully more open heartedness.  You might write yourself a bucket list and do everything that you set out to do except the one thing that you are here to be.  Without this direct knowing of who you are as a being, and not simply as a doer of lists, then you will have missed the one thing that makes whatever you do meaningful and purposeful.

Even if you do not yet know how to do it this storyteller advises you to place this at the top of any list you make

Die before you die

This invitation has nothing to do with the death of the body.  What is to die is the sense of separation you feel that is created by the experience of living in a body with five senses within a dimension of time and space.  This dying of the separate sense of self is not a loss.  It is the leaving of a prison and the entry into the living of a life from the flow of the Ocean of Love.

Acquiring Knowledge and Bewilderment

We are advised that the solution to many of our problems lies in the development of the knowledge economy.  This is where more and more of us become filled with more and more technological skills that make us more efficient and thus it is hoped more productive.  We thus try to answer the existential question “Who am I?” with the answer, “I am, therefore I produce.”  The futurist Buckminster Fuller stated some twenty or more years ago that we have enough knowledge to give everyone on this planet a basic standard of living whereby they could then spend time expanding their creativity to resolve much of the worlds suffering rather than fighting wars over scarce resources.  The problem is that collectively we neither have the political or spiritual will to make this happen.

The goal of personal development for the sake of your individual personal comfort and security can only go so far.  If it is focused beyond a certain point it becomes a prison and not the expansion that life intended for the creation called you.  This is the expansion into the infinite dimension called the Self and not the promotion and development of an isolated entity called the ego self.  In the movement of personal development into that phase of the true Self there is the phase of unknowing or what the poet Rumi calls bewilderment.

Trade logic for bewilderment – Rumi

Goal setting and achievement keeps you focused on the attainment of measured outcomes but doesn’t let you know what the meaning of life is and why you are here.  It keeps you focused on the idea of you as a separate individual.  The primary way of personal development operating in today’s world is the way of logic but this will not give you meaning.  The way of the heart gives you meaning but it is wild and is meant to invite the wild abandonment to the dynamic of Love.  You are meant to be wild in the sense that you are meant to be wildly free.

Service and service

Personal development focused on serving yourself might be necessary in the early stages of finding a self.  If this focus on self, however, continues throughout your life and the self that you develop continues to serve the self and not the true Self then you have not really developed in any true sense.  The world may reward you well but that is a reward that is only available within the limitation of time.

There is a paradox in the attainment of true personal development.  Real personal development begins when you realise directly that the less there is of you the more radiant the persona that is the identity you reflect in the world.  The more there is of true personal development the more you are being your Self.  There is less doing and more doing through you.  You may well set goals but their direction is fluid and arises from the moment to moment experience of your inner life and from what Eckhart Tolle calls presence.  There is less and less needing to force yourself to achieve but the increasing joy of being in flow with the movement of Creation.  You become the work of Love in form.  This is real information meaning the action of being in form moving from Love.

You will have achieved the ultimate personal development and beyond goal when you have given yourself completely away only to discover that the real you is infinite.  You find that there was no one to give away and that you are the eternal movement of giving and receiving.  You are the eternal movement of Love into form and beyond that is never born and never dies.  When you die before you die you get to live the life you love.  You then give and gift this life in service to the highest good of all.

Personal development as a goal can become a personal development prison if that goal is simply all about you.  In the beginning stages of life it has to be about you because it is essential that you establish clear boundaries and what this writer calls strong ego boundaries.  The idea is not to get rid of the ego but to be willing to have the ego expand into infinity.  In order to do this you need a strong boundary in order to be willing to contain the boundless.  Personal development is a paradoxical discipline if it is to achieve the pinnacle of its focus.  This is the development of the self in order that you willingly allow that self to disappear into the infinite Self and return home to the place it never left and can never leave.

If these ideas of personal development and beyond are of interest to you then I share with you those writers who I think provide you with wonderful invitations to the art of attaining a goal of true meaning and purpose in a life that can become a dying into the knowing of the forever and what we in Ireland call the Land of the Forever Young.    Let such writing perfume your life.  This perfume is not a goal but a kind of a cloak that you wear to protect you through all your days.  Essentially it is a perfume of the language of the beyond tahat keeps you from getting totally lost in time.  It keeps you from trying to have the time of your life in the place where you will never find the fullness of what that experience means.  These writings are the invitation to leave the grip of the God Thanatos and to dance with the God of Love – Eros.  Let it be so.

Recommended Reading for the Beyond Stages of Personal Development

• The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
• The Power of Intention
• Power vs. Force: The Hidden Determinants of Human Behavior

Please notice that although each of these titles has the word power within them this is the invitation to real power. May the Force be with you.