Fill Your Heart

I must disagree with both of you, though I do agree this song is ironic to a certain extent.

During this period of his life, Bowie was experimenting with Thelema and the teachings of Alistair Crowley. It's all over this album, especially "Quicksand", the song right before this one (which isn't actually depressing at all if you read it right, but I'll mention that over on that song). He even has several Thelemically inspired pictures within the album liner (Egyptian stuff EVERYWHERE, sitting in metitative poses, etc).

This song is esentially a quick version of the first part of Book of the Law. There is only one rule in Thelema: "Do what thou Wilt shall be the Whole of the Law. Love is the Law, Love under Will." The "Love" he speaks of is the same Crowley described, which isn't love as we think of it. By Love, he means the awareness of the self and all others as complete individual entities with the potential to become gods, and the awareness that as such, individuals are free to do whatever they must in order to further their Will (goal in life, to oversimplify), so long as it doesn't affect anyone else's Will.

The whole idea of the past being only in your mind is a Thelemic concept rooted in the idea that all physical reality, and all time, is simply a construct by our minds to process our environment. Were we able to see our environment without our filtering systems, we would be able to see that all physical reality and time is simply an illusion covering the truth of the astral realm.

Of course, the only way to reach the astral realm, and the ultimate goal of Thelema itself (which I won't go into here), is to eliminate the Ego, thus "Forget your Mind."

It's interesting that "Free" is always capitalized, and I think it illustrates my point. Crowley always referred to people who have accepted the concepts of Thelema as "Free" people, no longer slaves to the chains of physical reality and organized religion. (Thelema is not a religion, it is a philosophy. To have religion, one must have worship, and Thelemites bow to no one.)

That he takes it to an extreme, verbally and vocally, does imply irony. It is obvious during this album he was studying the philosophies of Thelema, but never completely subscribed to them. By the time his next album came out, he had turned back to Christianity. Perhaps this song is almost a parody of the tenants of the Book of the Law, as if the idea is far too easy to be true.