Simply Noticing & the Zen Theory of Change   by Rick Carson

  

Your gremlin is the macabre master of misery lurking in the shadows of your very own mind.   

Your gremlin is not your negative thoughts and traumatic past experiences. He's not your fears, regrets, or self-limiting concepts. 

 

He's the one who uses them - and more - to create elaborate cinematic works suited to your unique vulnerabilities. He's the one who seduces you into watching them and into confusing them with the pure experience of your breath-to-breath existence.

 

Your gremlin is your gremlin by virtue of his intention, and his intention is to make you miserable by consistently diverting your attention from the simple peace and contentment already within your Heart. Untamed, he will destroy your health, foul up your relationships, dampen your creativity, hamper your productivity, send you tumbling into low-down funks, and wind you up into fits of panic. 

 

As I emphatically stated in the revised edition of Taming Your Gremlin, gremlin-taming has nothing to do with a Tom and Jerry cartoon in which one sees Tom or Jerry with an angel on one shoulder and a devil and/or gremlin on the other. Gremlin-taming is about freeing yourself from the entire dialogue.

 

Where does your gremlin come from?

I don't know.  But he's with you now, and he will continue to be with you so long as you are on the planet.  He's a thief, out to steal your attention moment to moment, breath to breath.  Your gremlin is not cute.

Simply noticing is the quintessential skill for quieting this vile monster of the mind - your gremlin - and for beginning to get a sliver of light between who you are and your ideas about who you are. Simply noticing has nothing to do with analyzing the past, predicting the future, or figuring out anything. Simply noticing has only to do with: simply noticing - paying attention.  Your primary tool for simply noticing is your awareness.

 

Your awareness is like a spotlight mounted in the current moment. From its base in the moment called 'now,' you are directing it. You are, at the moment, shining your spotlight of awareness on these words. You could as easily shine your spotlight of awareness on what is going on in your immediate surroundings or on what is going on within you. You can shine your spotlight of awareness into the past via memory or into the world of make-believe via fantasy.  The good news is you can use your awareness to simply notice your own ideas - your concepts about who you are and about how the world works. Keeping these concepts outside of your awareness is one of your gremlin's most effective tactics.

 

Concepts are beliefs.

Beliefs, even the noblest of them, are just opinions that we develop loyalty to, so that we can pretend that the world has order and is predictable. This helps us feel safe. Ironically, we sometimes fight to defend our beliefs, creating anything but a safe situation. Some of us even fight to defend our self-concepts with the same fervor with which we would fight to defend our God-given lives. 

 

Your self-concept, regardless how glorious,
is faulty and confining for one simple reason:
you are not a concept.

 

From the time you got pushed out onto the planet, kicking and screaming, sucking and gasping, you have been bombarded with experiences. From these experiences you've formed all sorts of ideas about who you are and who you imagine you're supposed to be. Based on these concepts, you've chosen certain behavior patterns and then woven these behaviors and the concepts on which they're based into what the rest of us know as your personality. 

 

As you bring an outdated concept into the light, if it no longer fits for you, it will begin to disappear. You needn't analyze it or fight with it. There is, deep within you, a powerful force.  Call it soul, prana, ki, chi, or the primordial vibration. What you call it doesn't really matter. It existed before the word. 

 

This force is the essence of the Natural You. 

It guided you to master complex tasks like walking and talking when you were an unsophisticated, funny-looking rookie at this game of life. Before you knew anything about anatomy or physics, the Natural You noted missteps and corrected them without a conscious thought on your part.

 

As an organism, on the most fundamental level, you would rather be in balance than out of balance. By simply noticing your self-limiting concepts, you will become aware of how you are getting in your own way in the very moment you are getting in your own way. You will automatically begin to re-center and re-connect with the truth of your existence and allow a sliver of light between who you really are and your beliefs about who you are. 

 

At the point you simply notice an out-dated concept, you are in touch, if only subtly, with the Natural You - the observer within. Beginning to gently attend to the Natural You is a little like breathing on a flame. As you simply notice the Natural You, your experience of who you really are becomes stronger. It's not necessary to define it or describe it. In fact to do so is to form another concept about it. As we've learned, any self-concept is limiting. 

 

Simply noticing, that is, shining your spotlight of awareness on your concepts about who you are, in the very instant these concepts are playing through your head, sounds simple, but it's not easy. It takes practice. Simply noticing is a gift that you can enjoy and refine breath-to-breath for the rest of your life, the benefits of which are perpetual and forever unfolding. 

 

The practice of simply noticing is mindfulness in action, and it makes mindfulness a living, moment-to-moment, practical experience. Its potency as a tool for personal and spiritual evolvement relies on the link between simply noticing and what I call the Zen Theory of Change. In Taming Your Gremlin: A Surprisingly Simple Method for Getting Out of Your Own Way, I describe the Zen Theory of Change this way:

 

"I free myself, not by trying to free myself, but by simply noticing how I am imprisoning myself in the very moment in which I am imprisoning myself."

 

The process described in the Zen Theory of Change is, of course, universal and has been expressed lots of ways by lots of people. Over 2,500 years ago, Lao Tzu brushed with picture symbols the Tao Te Ching, which included this wisdom:

 

"Simply notice the natural order of things. 
Work with it rather than against it. 
For to try to change what is only sets up resistance."

 

Simply noticing is a skill. It's not a philosophy. It relies on learning to control one's spotlight of awareness.  It is the first step in the extraordinarily powerful Gremlin-Taming® Method. The benefits of simply noticing and the Zen Theory of Change as tools for cleansing the channel between the soul and persona are inexhaustible. 

Rick Carson is a the author of Taming Your Gremlin and founded The GremlinTaming Institute where he and his staff help individuals, corporations and the next generation of gremlins, tame the beasts within through his own unique blend of Taoist wisdom & The Zen Theory of Change. You can visit Rick's site at any of the links provided above and be sure to stop by the Gremlin Gallery and drop off a rendering of your own little beastie inside.

Here's to your inner health and removal of those pesky gremlins that are robbing you of your peace of mind.

 

November 14, 2008  by Network Abundance Publications