Therefore when a man begins to study himself he must understand that if he discovers in himself something that he dislikes he will not be able to change it. To study is one thing, and to change is another. But study is the first step towards the possibility of change in the future. And in the beginning, to study himself he must understand that for a long time all his work will consist in study only.
"Change under ordinary conditions is impossible, because, in wanting to change something a man wants to change this one thing only. But everything in the machine is interconnected and every function is inevitably counterbalanced by some other function or by a whole series of other functions, although we are not aware of this interconnection of the various functions within ourselves. The machine is balanced in all its details at every moment of its activity. If a man observes in himself something that he dislikes and begins making efforts to alter it, he may succeed in obtaining a certain result. But together with this result he will inevitably obtain another result, which he did not in the least expect or desire and which he could not have suspected. By striving to destroy and annihilate everything that he dislikes, by making efforts to this end, he upsets the balance of the machine. The machine strives to re-establish the balance and re-establishes it by creating a new function which the man could not have foreseen. For instance, a man may observe that he is very absent-minded, that he forgets everything, loses everything, and so on. He begins to struggle with this habit and, if he is sufficiently methodical and determined, he succeeds, after a time, in attaining the desired result: he ceases to forget and to lose things. This he notices, but there is something else he does not notice, which other people notice, namely, that he has grown irritable, pedantic, fault-finding, disagreeable. Irritability has appeared as the result of his having lost his absent-mindedness. Why? It is impossible to say. Only detailed analysis of a particular man's mental qualities can show why the loss of one quality has caused the appearance of another. This does not mean that loss of absentmindedness must necessarily give rise to irritability. It is just as easy for some other characteristic to appear that has no relation to absent-mindedness at all, for instance Stinginess or envy or something else.
"So that if one is working on oneself properly, one must consider the possible supplementary changes, and take them into account beforehand. Only in this way is it possible to avoid undesirable changes, or the appearance of qualities which are utterly opposed to the aim and the direction of the work.