Andrew's
Awareness Diary

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.