If all this sounds even remotely true, we have every reason to ask why we don't enter into the transformative as a natural and if not inevitable part of our lives. This sort of question came up in the classes where I introduced many of these thoughts. From the child with the endless and chaotic pieces through our creation of perspectives and conceptions, we can see that we feel an impulse toward making form out of the world, and we do so. This impulse to form might well lead us into the transformative learning that brings us to liberation and returns us to the search for and participation in the becoming self which seems our natural state. We seek the authentic, and our becoming self provides us with that authentic sense of being. That authenticity, we intuit, will bring us a kind of inner security and a sense of personal stability. All this can happen. When that happens, when we reach for the becoming self, our identity and ego take part in that authentic becoming. Our becoming identity and ego can reach for the authentic as well. They find motivation for our identity's manifestation in the world from within, from its becoming. It no longer expresses itself and defends itself in pleasing, impressing, or surrendering to the world. We escape the life of the persona that T.S. Elliot delineates: "To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet."[119]
Generally, we don't even look at or for self-awareness, that awareness that enters into a beginning to becoming. As I found out in those interview and many other classes, given all the forces that we face as we have discussed in these pages, we fear self-awareness because we fear what we will find. After all the years of battered vulnerability, of unsatisfied desires for unconditional positive regard, we fear meeting the person we must find if the world has done what's done to that person. Indeed, given our identity's constant need to adjust to the world and deal with the world, we internalize what has happened to us. All of these rejections, doubts, and dismissals have created an identity and ego that feel that the resulting meaning perspectives are essential to our personal survival. We feel we are completely dependent on these meaning perspectives to survive as an identity. Self-awareness might well bring us to a place where we do question, and in this questioning we fear we will lose ourselves. We will cease to exist and reenter the formless chaos we have always feared. The ultimate power of meaning perspectives to keep us from moving into the transformative comes from its creating our sense of an inextricable bond between our identity and the meaning perspectives. In that way, we become transfixed on those perspectives, frozen like a butterfly on a pin. We may look beautiful and successful in many ways, but we are stuck in the past, in the perspectives that others helped build but over which we have taken ownership.
No matter how long we remain transfixed, no matter how painful it promises to feel, we can choose liberation anytime we want. As soon as we become aware of our unquestioned meaning perspectives, question them and critically reflect on them, we choose to make new choices in our lives. We may have forgotten, or maybe we didn't notice when we chose what we chose in the past, what have become meaning perspectives, but we did choose. As Frankl says, under all circumstances, we can still make choices.