Beyond Change.

Or, How to Cure Fear of Change.

Growth. Change. Once heresies, then privileges, now demands. Hence, anxiety and fear about them define our lives. How much did you grow last year? How much have you changed? Only a loser doesn’t change, right?

In this little essay, I’ll discuss why we’re (really) so afraid of change, and how we can give ourselves the power not to be.

Let us come face to face with true change. Not just the little matter of changing our knowledge, our facts, our expressions. But our profound fear of change, which, no matter how much we seem to change, is always with us. Why do we fear change so?

To let go of the self that we struggled for, that we have been grasping with clenched hands, is not just difficult: it brings us face to face with death. In a small but true way. It’s a terrifying thing. Now we are beginning to know what life is.

That is why change is a baffling and frightening thing. Every change reminds us of mortality, whether we know it or not. Nothing is permanent in our lives now, right? Not our possessions, our homes, our friends, our jobs. Instability, fragility. So we live with a sense of anxiety and fear of impermanence that permeates us, coloring every word we speak to one another, every thought we have. What are we if we are not our things, lovers, objects…names, identities, titles? We cling to them like life preservers. The more afraid we are of change, the tighter we grasp. And the less we grow.

But change cannot be without the unchanging. For us to know change, there must be something unchanged, something absolute, permanent. What is that something? It is not the earth or the stars, though we might think so. Like us, they too are always changing. What then, do we reference this thing that we call “change” to? If it didn’t exist, then our notion of change wouldn’t either.

Heraclitus observed that one never steps in the same river twice. The Buddha called all things transient arisings, and spoke of it being the source of all true insight. Christ spoke of the eternal soul. The Vedantists spoke of Atman, the self in all things. These are all ways of speaking about the changeless being the only seer of change. Change cannot know itself, right? Think about it for a moment. The relative cannot see the absolute. Only the absolute can see the relative. So something must be absolute, and that something must be that we have a window into.

It is us. The silent witness, the observer, the knower. You may not know that being. Yet they are there, in each of us. They are the truest us that we are. Your mind is speaking. But who is listening? Your mind is visualizing. But who is seeing? Your heart is beating. But who is feeling? The one that you suppose is you is just the illusion of you, then, and it is the witness, the observer, that is the real you.

The silent witness is the unchanging in us. The mind is a vessel that we can fill with knowledge, and change. The heart is an instrument, that we can play, and change. But the knower, the silent witness, does not change. There is nothing for it to learn, understand, grasp, conceive, because it does not see things, separations, divisions, only essences, truths, oneness. And it knows all those already, does it not? It is what tells you you are in love, you are in the right, this is true, you are not just existent, but alive.

The witness is just there. Experiencing, luminous, never grasping, always holding. Pure. It is absolute, permanent. Beyond time, past space. How can it be otherwise? Either it does not exist at all, or it is more than what the mind or heart can operate upon. When we connect with it, whether it is in the moment of true love, or consuming passion, then we know that time stops and distance ceases to be. That is the smallest little glimpse of the absolute that is always within us.

So there is something within in us that is as unchanging as the sky. The clouds pass across it, emotions, thoughts, concepts. But the sky behind them remains clear, pure, still.

When we finally know that in us which is beyond change, then what is there for us to fear in change? Then we understand, at last, that this game of change is just name and form. They are life delighting in transformation, reveling in illumination, each name and form teaching the next what possibility is. But beneath, within, beyond those, there is the knower. Like the sky, still, unchanging, pure.

Now we are free. There is no anxiety or worry about change now, which was really just our fear of death disguised. So change is something that we can finally be. Whatever we give up is not a loss. Whatever we win is not a gain. Growth is simply transformation seeking the arms of the knower, then, is it not? It is like a cloudy sky that, every moment, grows a little clearer.

Name and form are impermanent. Let them be. What is in us is greater than those. The world around us sheds it forms and names faster and faster. The result is that we, little things, are ever more fearful of change. What will tomorrow bring? Let us be still as the sky. And realize that we, in this frenzy, are changeless. That is the truest and mightiest power in all creation, is it not? Not the power to change name or form — but the power simply to be.

Perhaps if we can all do that, then we will know what change truly is. Not us, nor that which is not us, but all that is. How can that be? How can change be all that is — but we somehow be beyond change? Being illuminates for us all the possibilities of life, through the endless dance of names and forms that we call change. The witness in us watches these manifestations, names and forms colliding, struggling, growing, climbing.

But where are they ascending to?

The very witness that we now know we already are. It is the knower of all being, which is really one.

That is all change is. Life seeking its highest name, form, expression, which is the truest awareness of the oneness of all things. Let us not just know that, nor feel that, but experience it. The moment that we do, we will be forever changed. Into who we truly are. Our fear and anxiety of change will never have been at all. Just us. The eternal, the timeless, the changeless.

Umair
London
May 2016