www.radicaluncertainty.com

Author: Nicholas Williams

HOW CAN I CHANGE?

When I am frustrated with myself being the wretched way that I am it is natural that I ask myself “How can I change?” I am desperate to find some answer - something that I can do to break the pattern that has brought me so much pain and misery, so much loneliness and alienation. I am driven by the thought that there must be some ‘key’, some trick, some method that I can use if only I could think of it. It is this hope (coupled with the fear of what might happen if I don’t change) that keeps me going.

This type of thinking is self-deluding: the self that wants to escape from its bad old habits cannot ever change, not ever. The ‘me’ that wants to improve itself will always be that same old ‘me’. That’s what the ‘me’ is – it is that and nothing else. The ‘me’ is the bad old habit that it complains about, it is the thing it wants to improve. For the ‘me’ there is truly no escape – it is its own prison, it is the prison that it wants so badly to escape from, and so escape is an impossibility. When the self sees this impossibility it lets go of the hope that it had for itself, and when it lets go of this hope it dissolves because it was only ever able to carry on existing because of its self-deluding belief in its capacity to change, to escape. The game that the self plays is that it has a real capacity to change and when the integrity of this game is ruptured and it sees it has no possibility of ever getting anywhere different, then it ‘exits stage right’ with no further ado. It gives up the ghost, it relinquishes itself.

The self is the game, and so once the game is ‘up’ then so too is the self ‘up’. When the ‘me’ lets go of its delusions, then it ceases to exist because it only gets to exist through its unreal projections, its goals, its projected escape routes and diversions. When it stops diverting itself with its delusory ideas about what is possible for it, then it is no more. What meaning is there in ‘hope’ and ‘fear’ for a self that cannot ever change?

When the ‘me’ sees with absolute clarity that it can never ever change, not if it tried for a billion billion years, then it stops hanging on to the tired old ghost that is itself. And the paradox is that this perception of the impossibility of change is itself the most profound of all changes. This is the real thing – this is radical change, which is what Krishnamurti calls ‘freedom from the known’.