"Private "I," Private Property" (excerpt) THE TAO OF ABUNDANCE by Laurence Boldt
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Private "I," Private Property
The name that can be named is not the real name.
—Lao Tzu
The primary or original consciousness, the Tao—the innate intelligence of the universe—is there all the while, whether we are aware of it or not. The man who has amnesia has not become someone else—he has simply forgot-1 ten who he is. In the Western world, which is today (in a cultural sense) ] most of the world, we have a collective amnesia regarding the unnameable Tao—we have lost touch with a consciousness that is prior to the ego. It is j not only that we have failed to open the Wisdom Eye; we have forgotten that it even exists. As a result, the field of consciousness available to us is limited to that defined by the ego.
One manifestation of our collective amnesia regarding transcendence is ' our unwavering commitment to the concept of private property. Like the ego, private property may well serve a useful social function. Yet if we take a man-made social convention and confuse it with the underlying reality, we are sure to go astray. Standing out in the middle of the desert, a sign marks an imaginary line that separates the states of Arizona and New Mexico. Nothing in the landscape distinguishes this side from that. The boundary [line is clearly arbitrary and imaginary. In truth, this is the case with all property. The boundary lines are always arbitrary and imaginary. They exist as a function of belief—not in the physical world, and much less in the transcendent unity of all things. This is an obvious and easily demonstrable fact of life, yet one which, in our daily living, we choose to ignore.
We fail to understand that a particular thing is merely an artificial definition by our senses, of some indefinable . . . infinitely surpassing that thing.
—P. D. Ouspensky
Despite the implications that our belief in private property has on our 1 experience of abundance or lack, we seldom, if ever, hold it up to critical analysis. The concept of ownership is meaningless without a name to attach the object to. Name is, as we have said, the original seed of the ego. It bis through names that we distinguish differences, and it is by identifying \ with and clinging to our own names and their associations that we stake tout our personal territory. (We forget too easily that persona means "mask," which implies both an illusion and a cover.) Having marked the territory, Live look for how what is inside the boundaries can be distinguished from [what is outside. This territory is the original, and the most private, property. Name (and its associations) is the first thing that we own.
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Since name is the core of the ego, we seek to enlarge, protect, and prepare our names. We feel pleasure when "good" things are said about our names, and pain when "bad" things are said about them. From this comes the sense of gain and loss, the psychological origins of credit and debt. iMentally attaching an object to your name gives the sense of possession. ^Preserving possessions is a way of preserving your name, that is, the ego. [Since we realize that we as egos are destined to die, we want somehow to [extend our ego identities beyond the scant seventy, eighty, or perhaps ninety [years we are normally allotted. One device for achieving an illusion of ego [life-extension is the conception of the inheritance of private property. It allows us to pass on the possessions (objects attached to our names) to our offspring, and in so doing, preserve our names and ego identities beyond the grave. It is an attempt of the ego to find security and permanence in a world of constant change.
The universal human problem of recognizing, transcending, and integrating the ego is compounded by the artificiality of modern life. One who lives in nature is constantly in touch with, and immediately aware of, a field of power and experience transcendent to the life of ego and society.] People in most traditional cultures tried to live in accord with the cycles! seasons, and powers inherent in the natural world. Today, we try as much as we can to insulate and isolate ourselves in an artificial man-made world. I Like no other in human history, our society tries to project and protect the illusion that we are separate from nature and its universal life processes! Wrapped up in the complexity of modern technological society, we find it difficult to see that the order of nature governs our own lives collectively and individually, and therefore to put our trust in the Tao.
The Taoists, then, condemned the differentiation of society into classes. Rightly they associated the process with increasing artificiality and complexity of life. . . .
—Joseph Needham
If there is anything like a law of consciousness, it is this: whatever we focus our attention on expands in our lives. Every major spiritual tradition in the world employs this fundamental principle of consciousness a an essential part of its path to liberation. The first of Christ's two commandments is to love (focus on) the Lord with all of thy mind and heart and strength. The yoga tradition of India, from the sutras of Patanjali to the Bhagavad-Gita, tells us that awakening is achieved through the focus of attention—be it on the individual's own higher self, or Atman, the impersonal universal Brahman, or the personal deity forms of God, Bhagavan. Similarly, the Taoist teachings of Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu instruct us that we are to cultivate (become more aware of) the Tao.
In traditional cultures, myth, ritual, and art provided points of focus on transcendent symbols as means of projecting or pitching the consciousness beyond the field of the ego. For the society, this served two primary functions: First, it provided the mass of people with authentic rituals that promoted a temporary release from the ego state—a peek into the beyond. Second, it gave a relative few individuals a general blueprint for, or path to, enlightenment. The awakening of these individuals in turn enriched the whole society.
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