True spiritual self-development does not mean struggling to improve the self but rather to transcend its limited levels through self-observation. The task is not to become something new, but to see through the parts of ourselves that stand between us and the new life that already exists within us as unrealized spiritual potential. It might be better said that self-development is the stretch of country we walk between the old world of what we have been and the new world we enter into when realizing the still, secret Self within.