Andrew's
Awareness Diary

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DIVINE AND HUMAN DILEMMAS AND DIS-EASE
 
I want to point out a correlation between 'The Primary Dilemma' (God's need to find a way to release all potentialities of awareness into actuality referred to in Peter's earlier post on 'Awareness, Paramshiva and 'The Dreaming') and the nature of illness (see also Peter's article on 'Awareness and Illness'). I believe that understanding an aware relation to illness in terms of what Seth called this Primary Dilemma can cast light on both, in fact on all human dilemmas.

Example: I find myself with a pain in the neck or shoulder. I don’t feel myself. I find myself in a state of discomfort or 'dis-ease'. From this feeling a sense of self develops and I start to experience and say, “I have a pain in the neck or my neck is stiff”. Of course I wish to free myself of that pain, but in owning or possessing it as something 'I have' I am trapped. "Everything is an Awareness" is of course one of the two basic axioms, maxims or mantra of The New Yoga of Awareness.
 
It means that everything we are aware of is also an awareness of something beyond itself.
 
The pain too, IS an awareness in itself of something beyond itself, for example an awareness of feeling something or someone as a 'pain in the neck' or an awareness of feeling I am 'shouldering' too much in my job.

Not yet RECOGNISING the pain as an awareness of this sort - it remains just a plain old pain in the neck.
 
It is only POTENTIALLY an awareness.
 
Peter has compared illness with pregnancy in his writings.
 
The state of 'not feeling ourselves' because we experience symptoms of dis-ease is a prelude to 'feeling another self' and giving birth to that new self - one that we are pregnant with in the way All That Is was pregnant with countless potential selves.
 
The pain in the neck or shoulder is therefore also the awareness of a pregnant or potential SELF.

I prevent this new self from being actualised through my sense of ‘mineness’ or ‘ownership’. The pain increases, I feel worse, my desire to free myself of the pain grows as the agony does. By virtue of feeling ill at ease, I gain a sense of being a self. I identify with what has emerged from a field of awareness and I identify myself as the being who ‘has’ the pain, and I theorise how I caused the pain by doing this or that, for example, sitting in the wrong position.

To free 'myself' of the pain, I must overcome 'anavamala' - the sense of it being 'mine'. By reminding myself that the AWARENESS of a pain is not itself a pain and not itself anything painful, I apply the 'Fundamental Distinction’ central to The Awareness Principle - between anything we experience and the pure awareness of experiencing it. In other terms I start to become 'lucidly awake', aware of the pain as a sort of waking life "bodydream" (PW). Applying The Awareness Principle to the pain means recognising that:

1. I am the larger awareness FIELD out of which the pain emerges and not the intense FOCUS of awareness that constitutes the pain.
2.The pain is an awareness of something that I can awaken to.
3.The pain is also a potential self that I can give birth to from the awareness of it.
 
The notion of God 'withdrawing-into-presence' introduced in “Awareness, Paramshiva and 'The Dreaming’” can also be correlated with an aware relation to illness:

The "withdrawal" is into the transcendental awareness of the pain (for example by identifying with the space around it). In doing so I open up a space OF awareness within which I can experience its 'immanent' aspect - taking time to inwardly experience the pain as a particular way of feeling myself - as a felt self. By thus "taking time to be aware" (the most basic Practice of Awareness) the feeling and self embodied in the pain will, in time, transform into another feeling and another sense of self. Reminding myself that the awareness of pain is not itself a pain, I am able to grant more awareness to the pain - feel it more. This in turn allows the awareness it IS to come to mind. It also allows a feeling of the potential self it is pregnant with to be felt in a bodily way and embodied - for example a self that feels able to no longer shoulder more than it wants to at work, or that can and does disattach itself from whatever or whoever was felt as a 'pain in the neck'.

Becoming lucid in the waking ‘dream’ of an illness, I can then fully become the new self through recognising what was merely a feeling that there was ‘more to it’ when I just wondered why 'I had' the stiff neck. The potential self too, is recognised in my thoughts and emotions, felt as a new bodily sense of self - one that is embodied through a new demeanour and behaviours.

Returning to the parallel with the Primary Dilemma - God's need to find a way to release the potential into actuality and the pain or "agony" that, according to Seth, he went through to do it - what I am suggesting is that not just 'my' pain in the neck but all human dilemmas and dis-ease are an ongoing expression and embodiment of that Primary Dilemma - since they TOO are a means whereby a potential awareness - and "potential selves" are actualised.

It 'was' through the Primary Dilemma that everything 'came' to be actualised, but it seems to be also an on-going template for anything that we can transcend and release ourselves from by releasing or 'giving birth' to the AWARENESS POTENTIALS and potential 'selves' or 'awarenesses' it bears within it.

THE PRIMARY DILEMMA AND TICKING CLOCKS

Woke up at 3 in the morning and ‘couldn’t go back to sleep’. I put it like that because I’m almost glad for these situations to play forth with awareness. Lying there and feeling the space around things and the silence around sounds. Heard the sound of the clock ticking and aware of the thoughts "Now I’ll fixate on the sound of the clock ticking and never go back to sleep". Then what came to me was a strange almost ‘double vision', an awareness uniting two seemingly distinct events. One was the clock ticking. The other was you writing in 'Absolute Awareness or Absolute Egoity' that:
 
"...ten thousand times each day the ego or ‘I’ works its way unawares into the life of every human being. It does so by appropriating for itself everything that emerges into experience from awareness, whether a perception, feeling or thought, and transforming the awareness from which it emerges into something quite different - the idea and experience of an "I" that is doing this perceiving, feeling or thinking, that 'owns' these perceptions, feelings and thoughts - and experiences awareness itself as its private property - the delusion called anavamala."

What came to me was that saying that I can hear the clock ticking is an example of the cause-effect thinking that afflicts the West in the light of the belief that things are simply present, there, waiting to be perceived. If we believe that, then of course a simple thing like hearing a ‘ticking’ sound must be CAUSED by something else - the clock. Ten thousand times a day we repeat this in ten thousand situations. I found myself in bed suddenly intellectually aware that there was no clock or ticking, there was a "playing forth" of the clock through its ticking, indeed a playing forth of the clock as such - a 'clocking' etc. In other words Paramshiva playing forth or releasing itself in the form of a clock and its ticking NOW, revelling in the joy of resolving Seth's account of the 'Primary Dilemma' (referred to in your essay on Awareness, Paramshiva and 'The Dreaming') by releasing from its ownership all potential things such as 'clocks', and all potential individuals that might look at or hear them.

In this way, I felt a different take on why we refer to ‘I’ ten thousand times a day. Because of the way we think about reality, that things are simply present, we feel that we are here, simply present, almost ‘waiting to be perceived by ourselves or others’, there must be a cause of that and that cause is the ‘I’. Just as the clock ticks so is the ‘I’ thinking, feeling, acting etc. And yet it isn’t like that. Intellectually I worked my way through the idea of Awareness ‘I’-ing, thinking feeling, acting etc. to a point where I've never felt it like that in that way before. And as I was lying there feeling the silence surrounding the ticking, I could sense Michael Kosok's wonderful phrase ‘endlessly once’. That is, that ticking is Shiva releasing that sound NOW and being released of that sound NOW - "endlessly once" and not back then. I got a real sense of just how present the Primary Dilemma still is and always will be the driving force.

Then I was playing with the question of why we must sustain the reality of God. It is obvious that if we are to save the earth and ourselves, we have to discover AWARENESS, take time to be Aware. If we don’t the earth will be destroyed as Seth says and another earth appear in its place and we have another go at it. So presumably, in order to not destroy earth, we must discover Awareness. That whole process is actually, like everything else, a process of dreaming it, feeling it, worshipping it (in the sense of me worshipping the search for truth) and finally giving birth to it. But it is obvious that if we destroy the earth, we have ‘fucked up’. Therefore to not fuck up - or undo the mess we have made, we must discover Awareness - which means re-discovering and, in the long run, sustaining and re-creating God as pure Awareness.

I can’t help but express myself on my face. I am constantly expressing myself. And just as my face expresses or reveals the vitality and aliveness within, so does my body express and reveal the vitality and aliveness within awareness. That vitality and aliveness is Prana, the breath of awareness which pervades space.

We cannot NOT express on our faces what is within. That is, it is not that we, as egos, express ourselves, but that our inner being is expressive by nature, and since aliveness and vitality ARE, they reveal themselves as much as the body reveals itself. How could it be otherwise? Just as ‘I’ do not have thoughts or have emotions, ‘I’ do not have looks on my face. The look on my face IS the revelation of what is within.

I look in a mirror. There is my body and on my face is a ‘look’, which reveals an inner world. There is a non-dual reality, I am not just a body. Awareness looks in a mirror. There is an unbounded field and on that field, beings, which reveal an inner world of vitality and potentiality. It is not just awareness. There is the power of awareness manifesting constantly as beings. Looks and postures are constantly being born on my face and in my body. They are constantly emerging from an inwardness, and ‘play’ on my face and body, and we cannot stop them from doing so. That is, they are part of the base structure of reality. Awareness (Shiva) and the power of awareness (Shakti) are equiprimordial. The potentialities of awareness are constantly being born as beings, and play on the face and body of awareness. They are born from the womb or matrix of awareness just as looks on the face emerge from within.

The revealing of what is within awareness IS beings. Within a vast field of awareness individual consciousnesses play on the surface constantly. When I look at another person, the meaning of that person, what they mean and intend, is revealed on their face and posture. It is all there made manifest as the look and posture. Nothing is hidden, there is nothing behind the body. All is a revelation of a person’s intent. I understand the meaning of an individual’s existence just through being present and opening myself to what is in front of me. Similarly with Awareness itself, the meaning and purpose of Awareness is all there, revealed. There is nothing hidden, nothing to be ‘worked out’. Just as the meaning and purpose of an individual is all there to be read, so is the meaning and purpose of Awareness all there, revealed. It is ‘the looks and postures’ on the face and body of Awareness - beings. That is why Seth said, the purpose is being as opposed to non-being!

The entire world and everything in it is a sacred revelation of the Divine. Texts are a revelation of meaning. We read them, and the meaning is revealed. The Divine manifests AS the world, thus the world is its divine manifestation, its revelation. Just through being present to the world we are present to a miracle. 

The real meaning of Heidegger’s recognitions of things not simply being there, present, like mere end 'products' of a Big Bang or a God - is that things are a revelation of the divine, that is they are constantly being manifested NOW! Right NOW! Right Now, the Divine is manifesting them, playing them as if on an instrument - NOW! The divine is lovingly maintaining them in their own existence NOW! The divine is constantly plucking the strings, playing things and beings NOW! All being is be-ing, not the presence of things but their presencing.

In other words I grasped a real sense of the world and objects as emerging from and a manfestation of, an inner world of vitality and aliveness. Intellectually, of course, I always knew this, but not until I looked in a mirror and noticed the blindingly obvious, did it occur to me that faces reveal an inner vitality or aliveness and that this was a perfect metaphor for creation itself. There was something uncanny in seeing that in a mirror, there is not just the body present, but that it is merely a ‘stage’ for the ‘play’ of feelings and states of awareness. It is a non-duality in itself. Then it came to me that the whole universe was such a ‘play’ on the face of Awareness.

What joy, what bliss. 

“… nothing can be more evident to anyone that is capable of the least reflection, than the existence of God, or a spirit who is intimately present to our minds, producing in them all that variety of ideas or sensations, which continually affect us, on whom we have an absolute and entire dependence, in short, in whom we live, and move, and have our being.”

“That the discovery of this great truth which lies so near and obvious to the mind, should be attained to by the reason of so very few, is a sad instance of the stupidity and inattention of men, who, though they are surrounded with such clear manifestations of the Deity, are yet so little affected by them, that they seem as it were blinded with excess of light.” 
 
George Berkeley

I was walking around yesterday and it came to me that just because there is a world, that is all the proof of God we need. If awareness is not a product of the body which is self evident, then the world is a manifestation of the Divine (awareness).

July 12th, 2008

‘IT’

The presencing of the Sun is ITS shining
The presencing of the blue sky is ITS bluing
The bodying of the body is ITS bodying
  
Yet this IT is not the Sun and not the sky
IT is not blue and it is no-body
 
For that which presences is not its presencing
Its presencing is ITS presencing, that of
Awareness beyond identity

Peter Wilberg


Thought I’d keep you up to date with my experiencing. I’ve wanted to find a way to be aware all the time and this involved ‘remembering’ - that is, not forgetting to be aware as you wrote. I’ve also wanted to tie together all the reflections on Samuel Avery stuff that were triggered in me. And I’ve wanted to connect together these two streams with something you mentioned - to give my sensory awareness as much to to ‘objects’ as I was doing to my body. It all seemed to ‘come to a head’ after reading your little ‘IT’. I was looking at a chair in my room, gazing at it, and it came to me that it was a verb, not a noun. That is, even in its complete non-action, just seemingly sitting there, present, immobile, THAT was ‘action’, ‘activity’, movement, and that it was the activity or ‘doing’ of Awareness. I think before I was always conceiving (without knowing I was) of ‘ing’ as, say, the movement of a tree’s branches (what the tree was doing). I think that I was conceiving of ‘oranging’, chairing, bricking, etc (I’m talking of ‘objects’ here) as something that these things did, while believing that I wasn’t, if you catch my drift. For when I was gazing at the chair, I could feel and knew that the chair itself, whatever it was, was in its essence, awareness chairing. I suppose what I am saying is that I have rid myself of the concept of ‘movement’ — things don’t have to be ‘moving’ in order to be a verb or a process! Not such a surprise when you consider that I have been intending to meditate while not moving! In fact, you could say, poetic justice! From that insight I quickly moved to there being no things at all as things simply present, waiting to be perceived! The sun is shining. No, Awareness is shining! It manifests as ‘the sun’ and shines through that manifestation. There actually is no sun itself which is shining. In the same way as in meditation, when I have a thought that I take as ‘mine’ (Anavamala) I not only step back from it, and identify with Awareness, thus confirming that the local Identity, Andrew Gara, is just that - a local identifying of this thought as belonging to the manifestation – but also step back and see that both the thought AND the local
manifestation are the manifesting or presencing of ‘It’ - Awareness.

There is no sun simply present. There is only Awareness presencing as ‘The Shining’ of the sun, the bluing of the sky, the bodying of the body. I then felt something extremely difficult to put into words but it involves a thought from Samuel Avery. It went like this. If, in my simple fleshyness, still and unmoving, I am a verb, a presencing of Awareness, that could be likened to a state of ‘constant velocity’. And thus any action which ‘I’ perform, say, have an idea, or decide to walk to the kitchen, could be likened to ‘acceleration’, a change in velocity, velocity ‘velociting’. And in gazing at the chair I felt it like a ‘sounding’ of Awareness. Just as sounds emerge from silence, and only ‘exist’ while the strings are being plucked or the keys pressed, so do ‘sights’ like a chair, emerge from the silence of Awareness, and ‘exist’ only as long as Awareness keeps playing the ‘chair’. I write every day. A baker bakes loaves of bread every day of the week. How many times has Beethoven’s 5th been played since he wrote it? How can people go along and here it for the 50th time? How can an orchestra perform it more than once? We constantly do the ‘same’ things over and over again. How else could we
do this and get fulfilment from it, were these repeated things, not constantly new and emerging fresh from Awareness? I could feel around me the utter newness of each moment, of each thing.

Finally on my walk this morning, as I meditated on your particular way of seeing the Atman in the eyes of your mirror reflection, I began to feel the Awareness self in a certain ‘mudra’. Totally in Awareness I could feel the cast of my face, how it felt in my eyes and cheeks, as if there was a certain smile on my face. This all went with a certain ‘idea shape’ — a feeling of ‘my outer gaze turned inwards as my inner gaze turned outwards’. I can best summarise this whole experience by referring to what it feels like when I am in an accelerated state of consciousness (to use Jane Robert’s terminology) usually while reading. A certain relaxed alertness, a taking in of the words, while feeling them out inwardly, a waiting, a an awareness attuned to the slightest bodily feelings and an awareness attuned to the words. That was how I felt on my walk. As if I was ‘intending’ to read the environment I was in like reading a page and waiting for felt
sense to come to me. I was giving my awareness to the environment around me as I give my awareness to text I read, allowing it to shape me or me to shape myself to it. There were times on my walk when the environment was ultra alive, sparkling, luminescent, like on acid. I can take on that ‘mudra’ anytime I want. I can evoke that feeling in
my face and quickly body it completely. I can feel the act of identification shift from Andrew Gara, to It Andrew Gara-ing.

Edited by author 02-10-2008 05:56 PM
February 10th 2008

Thanks for your untitled piece. I’ve titled it and included it below because I want to make some comments:

                                       EXPROPRIATING THE EXPROPRIATORS

"THE EGO IS THE ‘I’ THAT TAKES ALL EXPERIENCING AS ITS ‘OWN’. Through the use of the single word 'I' - indeed in the very act of uttering it in speech, the ego SEIZES UPON, GRASPS and APPROPRIATES all experiencing as its own personal private property - saying to itself and others: "I think this" or “I feel that”. The ego’s delusion of owning its experience is the essential block to higher awareness known in the yogic tradition as ANAVAMALA. In owning or APPROPRIATING all experiencing for itself, the ego both traps our everyday self in identification with 'its' personal experiencing, and EXPROPRIATES that experiencing from that trans-personal awareness that is its divine source - and the ultimate experiencer. That is why if, when instead of thinking 'I think or thought this' or 'I feel or felt that' we recognise and recall, sense and say to ourselves 'There is or was AN AWARENESS of thinking this' or 'There is or was AN AWARENESS of feeling that', we prevent the ego or 'I' from appropriating experience as its personal private property. No writings on yoga have yet pointed out the profound connection between Anavamala – the ego’s delusion of owning its experience, identity and body as PRIVATE PROPERTY - and Marx’s analysis of the role of property relations in shaping human consciousness. ‘Enlightenment’, then is not the destruction of the ego as such but the transcendence of the proprietorial or possessive ego – that ‘I’ which takes conscious experiencing as its ‘own’ activity, takes all experiences as its private property – and treats ‘its’ body and brain as a material ‘means of production’ of experience. In Marxist terms, overcoming ANAVAMALA means allowing awareness to 'expropriate the expropriator' – the capitalist or ‘bourgeois’ ego. When this happens the ego itself ceases to take itself as the EXPERIENCING self and owner of its experiences. Instead it becomes just one aspect of an experienced self among others – a self that THERE IS AN AWARENESS of experiencing. Out of this trans-personal AWARENESS OF EXPERIENCING comes an entirely new EXPERIENCE OF AWARENESS and an entirely new experience of self - an experience of that Self that IS awareness and of that AWARENESS which IS our deepest Self - identical with the Divine. The LIBERATED EGO or 'I' no longer immediately seizes upon, grasps, owns and 'appropriates' its experiencing as ‘our’ own. Instead it is itself ‘enowned’ - reowned and reappropriated by that trans-personal awareness which IS our divine Self. To be able, in everyday speech and communication to utter the word 'I' in this sense - from OUT OF AN AWARENESS wholly transcending it - is the highest and most demanding accomplishment in the Practice of Awareness that is 'The New Yoga'." Peter Wilberg
 
Read this short piece umpteen times and each time felt stuff bubbling beneath the surface. Slept fitfully last night; dreamt of Marx in a Sikh turban, and Shiva the Marxist revolutionary and other mixed metaphors. Woke up with a headache and started writing and words started flowing. Went to the market, came back, went back to sleep, the headache went away, went for a walk and now writing this.

The most interesting thing is that the insights I got about Anavamala illuminated Marxism and those insights further illuminated my understanding of Anavamala. It was as if the language of Marxism was ideal to illuminate Anavamala!

While I was asleep I could feel the parallels between the ego using awareness as a tool to produce thoughts and companies using workers as tools to produce commodities. The ego thinks it owns its thoughts as private property just as the company owns the commodities and the workers. Waking up now and then I was struggling to express to myself the felt sense of awareness ‘selling’ its ‘labour POWER’ to the ego as the workers sell their labour power to the boss. Of this labour Power of awareness as Shakti! Whenever I turn MY thinking as a tool on reality, I am expropriating the power of awareness from awareness itself, owning that power as MINE and in the process disempowering myself!!! And somewhere in there I felt that the ‘compensation’ or payment received from the ego for doing this deal with the devil was a sense of power OVER reality at the expense of a power OF!!!

Through all this I was going back and forth between Marxism’s obvious truisms about the evils of capitalism and the destruction of the planet and its metaphorical re-statement of the evils of egohood and its destruction of human being-ness. That is, through knowing and feeling how true Marxism is (it is a blindingly obvious fact to me and has been for 40 years) I gained a fresh and new positive affirmation of the truth of awareness as the source of everything. When I went for my walk, I wanted to be in awareness, to be the source out of which emerged thoughts, trees, bodies, cars, selves, I’s. I wanted this and the impetus came from a fresh understanding and connection with the desire for a true respect from all people for the source of life on this planet, the Earth itself. By wishing for whales to not be slaughtered, for water to not be polluted, for disgusting advertising to stop, for dumbing down to stop I could feel that the expropriators had to be expropriated, that capitalism had to go, and, on my walk, that seemed to be the same task and endeavour as the ego having to be expropriated by awareness!

On returning from my walk I wrote: The earth produces everything, it is the source of everything, it is the mother. But capitalism treats it as an infinite bank of re-sources to be exploited. In claiming ownership of our experiences and self, thoughts and feelings, actions and sensations, we treat the Source, awareness, as an infinite bank of re-sources to be exploited. We use them never CREDITING where they come from but TAKING CREDIT for PRODUCING them ourselves. We are the channel through which they enter the world. We do not make them or 'produce' them, we 'e-duce' them - bring them out. A woman does not make a baby. She is pregnant with it. It grows and emerges from her. Thoughts, feelings, actions, sensations, cars, selves, I’s autonomously and spontaneously gestate within and emerge from the womb of awareness. They are independent, autonomous beings. They cannot be owned, they cannot be the private property of anyone, anymore than slavery is allowed. Aborigines have always said that they took care of the land, the earth, that their role was one of a caretaker. They owned nothing, built nothing, left an almost invisible footprint on the land. That is what the ego needs to learn. It is the caretaker of awareness. Walking lightly over its surface, guarding it because it is its mother!

And lastly I just remembered that the dominating feeling from my walk was one of feeling my I as the sky and light and space of awareness. The Blue. And I could deliberately contract that expanded feeling of awareness, of I-Ness, to the old, familiar, ego sense of I, where I was rumbling around within myself thinking I am this or that, or feel this or that etc etc. I felt in a very real way: "To be able, in everyday speech and communication to utter the word 'I' in this sense - from OUT OF AN AWARENESS transcending it - is the highest and most demanding accomplishment in the Practice of Awareness that is 'The New Yoga'."