The confrontation of growth

Each new discovery of life is a traumatic confrontation in proportion to the significance of the discovery. If I am to grow significantly, I am going to have to struggle significantly. The first great struggle is a confrontation with who and what I am. The theologian Sam Keen, in his book To a Dancing God said; "Awareness of what presents itself to me involves a double movement of attention: silencing the familiar and welcoming the strange. Each time I approach a strange object, person, or event, I have a tendency to let my present needs, past experience, or expectations for the future determine what I will see. If I am to appreciate the uniqueness of any datum, I must be sufficiently aware of my preconceived ideas and characteristic emotional distortions to bracket them long enough to welcome strangeness and novelty into my perceptual world." One of the great questions of personal growth and discovery then is am I courageous enough to accept the possibility that new datum could make my old familiar outdated and unreliable.