Andrew's
Awareness Diary

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'."