If the becoming self offers us so much of what we naturally and dearly want from and for ourselves and the world, why do we endlessly move away from that becoming self? The very presence of that becoming self makes connections with us and the world that allow us and open us to wonderful possibilities of living, yet we deny these things happen. We deny this connection to the becoming self. The step isn't just close. It's not even a step but a simple recognition and acceptance of the existence of this inwardly motivated and powerful force with us. It's like some story by Kafka. We seek the Hall of Meaning and Liberation, the Hall of the Becoming Self. We ask how to get to that hall. We pray about finding it. We might even follow someone or something else for years to do so. In some cases, we intoxicate ourselves in one way or another to try to find our way and ameliorate the pain of not finding it. At the end of the story we discover we have been inside the Hall all the time. We simply haven't opened ourselves to the truth; we live within the Hall all the time. We haven't opened our thinking, our senses, our feelings to the Hall until, in Kafka-land, it is too late. Happily, it is never too late, and the becoming self, the defiant human spirit, remains by us and in us until we open ourselves to that becoming self.
Why don't we do it? What prevents us from entering into this experience? Forgotten we search? Fear of something else we know not of? What in the world keeps us from this positive and productive state of being and becoming?
I don't ask those questions because I have long known the answer. Whatever I may offer you, I do from a place right next to you, the reader with whom I share the creation of this work. At this writing, I am well on to way to reaching sixty-five years old. Most of what I write here, I have come to know and made sense out of in that last few years. It has taken all my life to do so, but enough clarity to write this has come lately. I spent many years of that life immersed if not swallowed by the very negative self-assessment I chose for myself, in a self-destructive identity and ego.[112] For a very long time, I did not choose to wake up to the becoming self I lived with every day. So when I ask the question, "what keeps us from this," I ask it as much of me as I ask it of you. Why don't we?
We fear chaos and the loss of our existence, to become undefined and nothing. Out of that fear comes the rejection of the becoming self and the transformative learning experiences that will take us there which, after all, is really right here.