Life is like a vinyl record.

Be your own DJ.

If we consider how we think about ourselves then it often seems as if there are two people in our heads. We talk to ourselves. We admonish ourselves. We praise ourselves. So who is doing this? How can this be? Who is telling who off? Who is telling the other how wonderful they are?

The truth seems to be that there is the narrative, and the receiver of the narrative. The narrative is everything we have done and everything we anticipate doing, the past and the future. Our hopes and dreams, and our deepest fears. For those old enough to know about vinyl records think of the narrative (or the self) as a record, now consider the second person in your head as the needle or the stylus that plays the record. Put the two together and you get a vibration and that vibration leads to the music. In the case of an individual the music is the music of the self.

Ah I hear you saying that’s not right, you can’t change the grooves on a vinyl record once it has been pressed, it always plays the same tune, and we humans are flexible, we can change. Well in the first place the past has been ‘pressed’, we can’t change that, and in the second most people in life just endlessly play the same tune.

In the days when vinyl was the only way of playing music, if you got a scratch on the record, if it was damaged, you would find that it skipped back in an annoying way replaying the track until it reached the scratch again, over and over. This is how it is when you find yourself triggered by something, you hit a point where you are thrown back into melancholy or self doubt, and you replay things over and over in your mind.

The other thing that always happened with vinyl records was that if you didn’t maintain them they would collect dust, at first just irritating ‘clicks’, then if you still didn’t bother to clean the record / stylus, the needle would skate across the surface of the remaining tracks and you would end up reaching the end without experiencing any of the music. Lack of maintenance of the self leads to this collection of ‘dust’. Little things accumulate and build up. They distance you from the moment and before long you find your life is gone, and you wonder where, and why you didn’t enjoy it. We need to maintain the mind through meditation, to shed the dust of the day, to sharpen the stylus of focus in order to clearly experience the fullness of life.

Obviously the example above was used to make a point, I am aware it has it’s limitations, but I hope it makes you consider the process by which we read the narrative of who we think we are.

Now some of you may think this is a deterministic view of the self. A vinyl record might be might be alright as a metaphor for the past, i.e. already pressed, unalterable, but not the future. The future is unwritten, you might argue. Those of you who used to buy vinyl records will probably agree with me that there were tracks on every album you liked, and tracks you weren’t so keen on? You had to go to the record player, lift the stylus and skip the tracks you didn’t want to hear. It took effort, a conscious determination to do something to get to the good tracks. I would argue in my defence that this is where ‘free will’ comes into the metaphor I am using here. At any point in your life there are all sorts of tracks ahead of one, but if you can’t be bothered to make the effort to lift the needle /stylus and change the track then you may well spend your life playing something you don’t want to hear. Constantly dissatisfied with life’s music but too stuck or unaware to make the effort to change.

Meditation is taking the stylus off the record. It is lifting it off whilst the record still spins. There is silence but you can see the tracks. You can look at the record and say ‘do I really like that track? Do I really need to keep playing it?’ You can look at the rest of the record (i.e. the rest of your life) and ask yourself ‘what sort of life music do I want to play?’ Meditation allows you to see where the scratches are, where the damage is, without having the noise of the scratch interfere with your thoughts or send you back into repetition. In this way you can examine the self and realise where and when these damaged places are in the record of your life and knowing this you can take steps to avoid them. Lifting the needle when they occur, by meditating. Replacing the needle on another track, one you want to play.

Become your own DJ in life. Learn to lift that stylus. Choose the music for the rest of your life.

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