It's Hard To Change When You're Perfect In Every Way

I like to think that I'm making a token effort to grow as a person.  I may be phoning it in.  I may have decided that it isn't worth the effort, that this is as good as it's going to get.  It's hard to change, especially when you are totally in love with yourself.

"What's the point?" I muse.  "I'm perfect in every way."

I'm glad SuperK is, at best, a casual reader of this stuff, for she would be annoyed that I keep bringing up the INTJ shit.  I really am trying to keep an open mind about information that may not paint me in the best light.  I really do try to keep the spotlight trained on myself although, lord knows, I'd rather slice and dice the character defects of other people.  They are SO obvious.

I'm reading a modern translation of one of the world's great spiritual books.  A lot of it I find kind of boring.  There's a lot of stuff about why this particular religion's modus operandi is the best one; indeed, the only right one.  But there's a lot of good, solid spiritual sense in there, too.  I'm trying to look past the stuff I don't like and absorb the stuff that I do.

Here's a few verses, mixed up a little for continuity's sake: "You have no right to criticize you brother or look down on him.  For god has accepted them to be his children.  They are god's servants, not yours.  They are responsible to him, not to you.  Let him tell them whether they are right or wrong."

And from our literature:  "Putting out of our minds the wrongs others had done, we resolutely looked for our own mistakes.  Though a situation had not been entirely our fault, we tried to disregard the other person involved entirely.  Where were we to blame?  The inventory was ours, not the other man's.  Where other people were concerned, we had to drop the word 'blame' from our speech and thought."

I mean really, how different is the thinking here?