Crashing in the Same Car

Crashing in the Same Car

Liberation in the psychological realm, begins with the reduction or elimination of the sense of guilt and remorse. The liberation from guilt and remorse is a wonderful thing and is reliant upon sila. You freely set boundaries for yourself. Not having precepts imposed upon you, you willingly take them on. Through a practice in which you consistently are able to live within those boundaries a growing confidence in yourself arises. You know that you have certain principles that you can uphold even in situations or circumstances in which it might be quite difficult to do so. As a result, you don’t have to be constantly going over and over in your mind, ‘Why did I say that?!? Why did I do that?!?’

If any of you have done meditation retreats, you may have encountered a phenomenon in which a certain song arises in your brain and it won’t go away. This happened to me during a long retreat when I was a young monk. My song was by David Bowie and it was one that I had been very fond of as a layman. The song is called Always Crashing in the Same Car, and it sums up the idea that we make the same mistakes over and over and over again. You say, ‘Never again! Never am I going to be so stupid! Never am I going to do this ever again!’ Until the next time you do it, and so you crash in the same car over and over and over again. At that time I was in this state where I felt that I was making the same mistake again and again, and then suddenly, out of nowhere, popped up this song from the mid-seventies.

This is a real problem in meditation. If you are consistently acting is ways which undermine your principles and your goals and your ideals, then you lose a lot of energy and self-confidence. It’s then very easy to start looking on yourself in a very demeaning way. You lose your self-respect and self-esteem. If you’re not careful you start creating a harmful sense of self. ‘I’m a bad person. I’m hopeless. I can’t do this’. You believe in that little voice in your head, and you create this person - ‘me’ - who is no good. Sometimes even, in a chronic state, you see a path towards an increased happiness and growth, and you think, ‘Well I’m not good enough to deserve that.’ This is an awful, twisted state of mind. You finally see some sort of happiness in life, and then say to yourself, ‘But I don’t deserve this.’ The question that needs to be asked straight away is ‘Why not?’

These days, efforts have made to counter this kind of negativity with its opposite. But they has been focused on the most basic kinds of pleasure. ‘You deserve it! Buy this because you deserve it. Consume this because you deserve it. You deserve all the sense pleasures, the fame, the success that you crave’. The result is a wide spread sense of entitlement, a form of heedlessness. You do deserve happiness, but not quite in the way that the advertisers are intending. It’s not in a way that requires a credit card. You deserve happiness because you’ve done all the hard work to be born as a human being. You’d be surprised at how difficult it is to be born like this in the first place. Given that you have a body and mind, you do deserve to be able to realise true happiness in life. If there is a fundamental article of faith in Buddhism, it is a faith in the capacity of the human being for liberation - whether we’re men or women, Westerners or Easterners. Our gender, our backgrounds are irrelevant. Just by virtue of the fact that we were born as human beings we do have the capacity to find liberation and to find true freedom and happiness. We have earned our chance to create the causes and conditions for these things through a constant and patient application of the Buddhas’s teachings.

SOURCE : Mindfulness, Precepts and Crashing in the Same Car

by AJAHN JAYASARO

[https://cdn.amaravati.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Mindfulness-Precepts-and-Crashing-in-the-Same-Car-Ajahn-Jayasaro.pdf]