In my opinion people can never change. It sounds a bit unorthodox but let me explain. A living being as we all know is made out of a physical body and an astral body. In simple terms every one of us carries a soul within us. So what has this got to do in defining who we are? What a person becomes depends on many factors. One obvious factor is the Karma that one brings from the previous lives. The other strong factor is one’s background in which a person grows, from which one’s character gets molded. The third and the most important is the soul.

I would define soul as the real person behind the face we see. When a person becomes an adolescent, he is already the person who he is going to be in the rest of his life. So changing what is already concrete would be something impossible. What we see as change is just the different sides being exposed from time to time. It is not a change but a matter of putting something out that was already residing in a person.

Take an example. A man who is once a thief can later become a good man. This does not mean he has changed. It could be two things. Either this man still has a desire to steal but controls it and pretends to be decent for some benefit or it could be that he was a good man from the beginning who did not get a proper guidance towards good and bad social conducts.

Just because we see a difference in a person does not mean that he has changed. It is just that we see a different side of his which we did not see before. A person can have so many facets. So when we wish someone to change, what we really mean is to get some of his positive facets uncovered while suppressing few undesirable facets.

A good man, so to say, can’t be turned in to a bad one. If it ever seems to happen, then a good chance is that, he had always had a bad side within him and that it just surfaced. If a person’s soul is so untainted, he can never become evil no matter what and vice versa.

Having an entirely good or evil soul is more or less a hypothesis. Anyone is a mixture of the two in different proportions. People often juggle their good and evil facets throughout their lives. It is very deceiving that it actually makes others believe they are changing whereas they are not.

Expecting a person to change unless you see all his facets, would take you nowhere. Try to take a peek into one’s soul which is of course easier said than done. But if you did, that would help you identify who that person really is and what are his facets. This will tell you who he can become, what he is capable of doing and what are his weaknesses and strengths and so forth.

In a nutshell, people can never change and they will keep on juggling their facets until they find their true selves one day.