Date: 11/15/2025 11/16/2025
Location: Star Ocean Meditation Center
Teacher: Sara
Dharma Knowledge
The Dharma and Self-Growth
In contemporary discourse, “self-growth” usually refers to improving abilities, managing emotions, achieving goals, or optimizing personal performance. Without careful clarification, this notion easily overlaps with the language of the Dharma while remaining fundamentally incompatible with it. To examine the relationship between the Dharma and self-growth, one must first distinguish the kind of “self” each framework assumes.
Secular models of self-growth typically operate with an implicit center: a self that is taken to be real, continuous, and improvable. Growth is understood as making this self stronger, more stable, more successful, or less distressed. The underlying assumption is that the self is a fixed subject that can and should be optimized. The Dharma directly questions this assumption.
The Dharma does not deny the experience of selfhood. What it denies is that this experience corresponds to an independent, permanent, or controlling entity. What is called “self” is a contingent process composed of bodily states, sensations, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness. The problem lies not in having a sense of self, but in mistaking this process for a solid identity and organizing desire, fear, and expectation around it. This misperception is precisely what generates suffering.
For this reason, the Dharma is not concerned with how to make the self grow, but with how the concept of self operates. Practice does not aim at strengthening personal identity, but at observing its mechanisms. Through careful attention, one begins to see which reactions arise from attachment, which ambitions stem from insecurity, and which goals merely serve identity maintenance. When these patterns are clearly understood, their compulsive force weakens.
At the practical level, the Dharma often produces psychological stability, clarity, and ethical consistency—effects that may resemble personal growth. However, these changes are not achieved through self-affirmation or motivational techniques. They arise from structural understanding. Ethical discipline reduces harmful consequences, mental cultivation stabilizes attention, and wisdom reveals impermanence, suffering, and non-self directly. The visible outcome may look like growth, but the mechanism is not self-enhancement; it is self-deconstruction.
A crucial difference lies in direction. Secular self-growth is accumulative: more skills, more control, more certainty. The Dharma is subtractive: seeing the limits of control, understanding instability, and releasing the demand for a permanent self. The former requires continuous effort to maintain progress; the latter depends on correcting fundamental misperceptions. When misperception ends, many problems no longer require active struggle.
This does not mean that the Dharma rejects ordinary improvement. It does not oppose learning skills, regulating emotions, or living effectively. The distinction is that these activities are no longer used to validate identity. They become situational responses within conditions, not instruments of self-confirmation. When growth ceases to serve ego maintenance and instead supports the reduction of ignorance and attachment, its nature changes entirely.
Thus, the relationship between the Dharma and self-growth is neither oppositional nor identical. The Dharma does not offer a blueprint for becoming a better self. It offers a path for no longer being confined by the self-concept itself. In the language of growth, it does not promise an upgraded version of the self, but the dissolution of the assumption that constant upgrading is necessary.
From the standpoint of the Dharma, genuine growth is not defined by what is added, but by what is removed: misunderstanding, clinging, and the suffering they produce. When these diminish, clarity increases, relationships stabilize, and life becomes more adaptable. These are not goals pursued directly, but consequences that follow naturally from correct understanding.
