CHAPTER 8 Bob Dylan’s Ten Commandments – a Method for Personal Transformation

Abstract

Over the years, Bob Dylan has been able to go through many changes as an artist and as a person – always flexible, always in touch with his life, his aging, always true to himself, but not to his audience. While so many of us seem to stick to our old ways, Dylan has had this rare ability to keep on moving on, like a rolling stone. How has this been possible? In this chapter I present what I call Bob Dylan’s method for personal transformation. I have found ten commandments, or ten rules, that Dylan seems to be following. To show the importance of the commandments I assess Dylan’s method for personal transformation in relation to Philip Salim Francis’s research among 82 Evangelicals who underwent a sea-change of religious identity through the intervention of arts, published in the book When Art Disrupts Religion. Bob Dylan’s ten commandments are not only 10 great tools for a creative life, they are also a great roadmap for a flexible religious life and good medicine against all sorts of fundamentalism.