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Ch… Ch… Ch… Changes…..
Was one of my favorite songs when I was a teenager. If you don’t know it, you should be ashamed of yourself. It’s one of David Bowie’s great songs and for me meant a lot more than just its surface structure. It’s not just a nice tune!
The lyrics were about impermanence. Impermanence of the self and the environment. It’s one of the driving principles of Early Buddhism and is central to its main teaching that life is Dukkha.
“Still don’t know what I was waiting for
And my time was running wild, a million dead-end street and
Every time I thought I’d got it made
It seemed the taste was not so sweet
So I turned myself to face me
But I’ve never caught a glimpse
Of how the others must see the faker
I’m much too fast to take that test”
“Bloody brilliant”
I thought when I first put my all-time favourite Bowie Album on the turntable. The Album I am of course talking about is Hunky Dory. Check out Quicksand, yet another great track. Maybe I will chat about that on another day.
So before this post turns into the David Bowie Appreciation Society; back to the task at hand. Writing this blog…
I realised at an early age that everything was subject to change.
My early life was peppered with what some people would consider catastrophic changes.
The certainty of my childhood was shattered when my father left my mother for another woman and I still think that remember it clearly. My mother was left with 6 kid, of which I was the eldest, and the family went through some sort of crises.
I was 12 and just getting into my study of Zen Buddhism and it was meditation and reading that actually helped me make sense of it all. My mother attempted suicide and I vaguely remember her being taken to hospital as I was packed off to my grandmothers a mile away.
Her house always seemed large and spacious compared to our little two roomed terrace. She had a big black range with a constant fire burning in the grate. I used to love making toast on a fork in front of it. She had butter and jam to go on the crisp white bread. At home we used margarine! My grandparents also had a front garden and a large backyard with a shed! Very posh!
She even had an upstairs. It was great and I could lie in bed and listen to the town hall clock chime on the hour, every hour with its deep resonant tone. Even as I write this I am transported back to Broughton Road and I can smell the faint whiff of mothballs. A smell you no longer have in houses, but the thought takes me back to the 60s.
So change for me was the norm, and I embraced it. If I hadn’t, I would probably have ended up with all sorts of neuroses. Which some of my siblings did suffer. I tried to explain my ideas to them over the years, but my attempts fell on deaf ears sadly.
I now tell my students to Embrace change and let go of the reactive habitual responses they have. When they do they achieve what can only be described as Freedom.
Freedom though is never an absolute and is always relative to something else.
“Freedom from Debt”
“Freedom to Grow”
“Freedom to believe”
“Freedom for others”
and so on…
My understanding of freedom was that once I realised that things weren’t permanent, were not fixed, I was released from self-centred confusion. These confusions were the chains that would bind me. I never believed that the ego, my sense of self, was real. I never felt I had a fixed identity and still don’t.
“I still don’t know what I will be when I grow up!”
In the words of Mr Bowie:
“So I turned myself to face me
But I’ve never caught a glimpse”
I think I live my life simply, having a response appropriate to the situation I find myself in without judgement and having no fixed pre-conceived ideas or opinions. I have opinions that I share but go to great pains to understand that they too are subject to change.
If that makes sense?
These attitudes allow me to realise the possibilities of creating an authentic path through life unhindered by attachments and cravings.
I realised that reactive habits are the chains of the free.
This is why I use some NLP in my work as it gives me the tools to help people intervene when the shit hit the fan. It’s a quick fix that allows you to move on.
We lose our freedom by clinging to ideas, and beliefs that we believe have permanency. Usually we hang onto them because they’re familiar and safe. Confusion and Fear fill our minds and all because we need to hang onto our sense of self. A self we believe exists independently of impermanence.
Self-Help and positive thinking play on that fear, which is why people go back to it time and time again. Which is exactly why the Self-Help industry makes so much money!
It’s a great model for creating wealth because you get trapped by thinking you are going to be free.
For me this is where the Meditation crossed over with the NLP and Hellenistic philosophical thought.
Meditation is not the be all and end all to end your unhappiness. If you think that, you have missed the point.
We simply use meditation to cultivate awareness of this moment in time.
The present moment.
When we do that, we can think clearly. When we meditate we have no expectations, no desire and then we suddenly find that the chains fall away.
We are Awake as the Buddhists say!