I have come across an attitude that before one can change anything else one has to change himself. I have come to the realization that this is a trap. To these people, no work you do on yourself will ever be good enough. Nothing suffices except complete
personal evisceration. The person is told to put in vast amount of time and effort into a worthless, self-disfiguring task. Meanwhile the world is denied the benefit of what he has to offer.

Some changes that people make are for the better. Others are for the worse. The baby boomers changed for the worse. They started out with compassion and caring; they ended up becoming careless and short-sighted. Whatever work they did on themselves has
had a negative rather than a positive effect.

So we have such attitudes as that there are no innocent victims and that everyone is in charge of everything that happens to them. That is completely wrong. These people don’t owe their situation only to themselves. They also owe it to parents who
raised them, teachers who educated them, military and police that protect them, business and labor that create their prosperity, and intellectuals and Freemasons who gave them their freedom. Pursuant these beliefs, they have done away with their
compassion and ethics. And that means that they have changed for the worse.

Is it valid to work on yourself? Of course it is. However it has to be done in a right way rather than a wrong way. It has to be done in a way that maximizes virtues and minimizes flaws. The work done toward that effect must make you a better, not a
worse, person. And what I have seen so far in these people is that their work on themselves made themselves worse people.

If the work that you have done on yourself has taken away your compassion and ethics, then you have done on yourself the wrong kind of work. If it has lead you to become a bully, once again, you have done on yourself the wrong kind of work. Not all
change is improvement. Some changes that people make are a degradation. And it is very important to figure out what changes precisely are to be made before proceeding with the work.

I have had counselling, and some counsellors were better than others. A counsellor who does not like you can do serious harm. My worst experiences were with people who obsessively fixated upon me and kept psychologically attacking me. These people did
what they did in pursuit of wrong beliefs. And those beliefs made them worse people, even if they didn’t start out being bad.

So it is important to find out what beliefs one is dealing with. And it is important also to avoid traps. Self-improvement is a valid task; self-disfigurement is not. As for changing other things, a person who has the discernment to see a problem should
be fixing the problem instead of making himself more like the people who caused the problem. This discernment is a valuable trait, and one that is necessary to make the world a better place.

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