Change is stability, Aleister Crowley used to say. Identity itself cannot be identified, it can only flow, since by nature it is fluid. It is based on dynamic interaction with the world-as-perceived.

I've always had deep suspicions of people who create for themselves a sense of a firm, integrated personality, because the idea itself is preposterous. So often with such “strong” individuals, there is some firm disapproval involved, of others in some ethnic or social grouping whose nature challenges that of the “socially integrated” personality. It's these blindnesses that create the lives we live, as much as the goals we seek: and often, the two are firmly interwoven, since the roots of the goals are not examined on any regular basis.

This isn't to say that strong personalities have no effects, and no purpose. On the contrary, the outer world is constantly re-shaped by them. But the world is rarely seen as the world, because we comprehend it through our various identities, whose various needs create the actual experience. Deconstructing these various identities is the work of a lifetime, and mostly we decline the job. The “stability” in Change-is-stability is an energised viewpoint. It is active beholding of the world, and the dialogue between this beholding and the phenomena, we experience is “life”. At root, living is that simple, though creating a proper alignment between the beholding identity and the phenomena - what Thelemites call living the True Will - isn't. Spiritual progress is seemingly glacial, since there are so many mixed identifications to un-make.