Planned vs. Self-Emergent In early spring, you are so overjoyed and moved by those tiny wild flowers sparkling between dried leaves on the still-barren land: not that they have perfect forms (some of them have one or two defected or broken petals or a strange-looking stem), but they are so full of spirit and self-expression. However, when you try to remember the tulips in those cultivated fields in that small town Holland near Lake Michigan, you can only see some vague colors of red, yellow or purple. It seems they all look good, but exactly because they all look good, you don't remember any of them. In nature, each plant or flower grows in a "self-emergent" way (you thus call it), producing a large collection of shapes, colors and looks, and each is original. In this diversity, there is also interestingness and creativity. But whenever a species is cultivated, the growth of each plant or flower is controlled by a man-made plan (watering, cutting, lighting or shading...), and they all grow into same things. True, they may be all good, but originality, interestingness and creativity are all lost for this goodness. And the best can only be found among many, of which each is a full self-expression. Therefore, greatness exists among natural self-emergent lives not in cultivated lives. Could this be true also for human life? Suppose a person lives his life with a plan. The plan usually begins with the parents' dreams when he is a child. Though all parents have high hopes for their children, how many parents really know their children (what they like and what they are good at) or take helping them discover their internal traits/talents as their major parenting task? And how many geniuses are treated as retarded because of their strangeness in daily life? And the plan is often made by a person too early, that is, when he is young and still too much influenced by forces from outside. How many high school or college students truly know who they are? You suspect the number of people who don't know who they are at the end of their lives is not small. Therefore, it is very likely that the plan does not reflect the self. So when a person follows such a plan, the self is suppressed even before it begins to express itself (not to say realize itself), and life becomes just another instance of multitude, which again reinforces the multitude through generations. It is in this way that human life as a whole has become banal and mediocre. On the contrary, if a person doesn't have a plan, instead he follows his instincts to satisfy his curiosity (lets his life self-emerge), and the self will get fully expressed and developed. Such a life is original. Interestingness, creativity, greatness and prosperity will naturally follow for humanity from the diversity of such original lives. Every person is born with some talents or inherent unique traits that can be further developed to make an original and interesting life, but most get lost as a result of planning (which unfortunately has little to do with the self). Self-emergence is a mechanism to discover the self and fully express and realize the self. Think about this: is there a better way to find out the inherent traits/talents than following your instincts? Life is not a goal but a process of becoming. If there were a goal, it could only be, at the end, to say "I have lived!"
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Note: in this text and the following texts, he and his are used only for simplicity, no gender implication.