Wasting Time....

Out you popped from your utopic fluid existence, only to be compelled to employ muscles to suck in rancid air. Your senses sprang to life and immediately microscopic neurons started to branch out into umpteen billion electrochemical connections.


You had no choice in this process, because choice was not yet part of the circuitry. You were a complete and utter victim of your environment, and all who populated it, and this included the actions/reactions of your body. You sheit and pissed without discrimination and when hungry you howled in pain till the peas, that you now loathe, were shoved down your gullet.

Nevertheless, even in your minimal egoic state, those in your care anxiously anticipated those wonderful moments when you would begin to exhibit your glorious egocentricity “personality” and, adept in their own egocentric skills, dutifully trained you to become a unique and separate egocentric (in cooperation with the genetic DNA they unconsciously blessed and cursed you with). You had no choice in this egocentric instruction and even when the day finally came and “you” made the ultimate distinction between “them” and “me,” that distinction was packed full of judgments on your “self,” by your “self,” that you had no participation in constructing, other than to express what was writ upon you.

You were told do this, not that, act this way, not that way, be this and definitely never that. Value circuits unfolded into a neuro-web and models appeared, mirroring the behaviors you would mimic.

Egocentricity blossomed and you reveled in it. Your childhood ecstasy of wonder and awe was distinctly coupled with perceiving the world as an “I-me.”

Before that, there was nothing (and "nothing" is a very frightening idea now).

You allowed all of this to happen because you had no choice.

Your childhood was influenced by a series of sensations, most of them completely outside the purview of any control you could ever assert. Of course, you did seek to apply control, in adherence to your egocentric training, and offset ‘chance’ events through preparation and prediction skills, but much more powerful forces honed and shaped even those brief moments of self-assertion in ways you had no control over. In fact, you have been trained to be completely oblivious to your complete lack of control and you had nothing to do with that either. Whether you were showered with love or beat mercilessly (or a little of both) outside processes influenced your neural development and channeled you directly to this very moment right now.

Do you believe you had a “choice” in reading this blog post right now? Why this? Why now?

Indeed, we cannot argue that you did make that choice, but why did you make it just now? Was that choice available before you made it? What other choices were not made that could have been made? Was that specific choice merely waiting to be made, in the certainty that it would be made at the moment it was, because of the choices that preceded it? What choice preceded this choice, from this moment now, all the way back to your first breathe?

Could it be that all your separate choices are merely parts of a whole?

Can you see that whole, or only the choices that seek to influence the parts? Could it be that every choice made was meant to be made so that the next choice could be made as it was, so that the next will be made as it must?

Does it feel as if there is a “force” beyond your comprehension directing and channeling you down specific avenues that subsequently, at the time, you wish you had chose differently, yet now, you see it all as crucial to this moment? If so, are you open to the destiny you’re able to see? Do you understand the pieces that make up the whole? Do you no longer reject some parts as bad or tragic nor long for the parts that were wonderful or good? Has the past lost the capacity to influence the choices you make now because, in seeing the whole, you realize the certainty of all the parts?

Can you accept the CERTAINTY of every choice you have made and will continue to make?

Egocentric individuality is constructed entirely upon doubt as to what it is and what purpose it must serve between birth and death. Although it struggles to inject a reason, it exists with no real idea of why it was born or why it must die. It exists in a sweltering cauldron of uncertainty and confusion that it must routinely deny or eventually be devoured by. To consider, on a daily basis, your true purpose while, simultaneously recognizing that the purposes you have been, and will, engage in are meaningless, would lead only to deep and unendurable anguish.

To constantly doubt every meaning and truth you’ve been taught can only result in a life of quiet desperation. 

Yet, logically, if every choice made was CERTAIN to be made, so that every preceding choice could be made as it must, then egocentricity obviously cannot exist within that certainty and….

….has never really existed at all.


Sittin' in the morning sun
I'll be sittin' when the evening comes
Watching the ships roll in
Then I watch them roll away again, yeah

I'm sittin' on the dock of the bay
Watchin' the tide roll away, ooh
I'm just sittin' on the dock of the bay
Wastin' time

I left my home in Georgia
Headed for the Frisco Bay
Cuz I've had nothing to live for
And look like nothing's gonna come my way

So, I'm just gon' sit on the dock of the bay
Watchin' the tide roll away, ooh
I'm sittin' on the dock of the bay
Wastin' time

Looks like nothing's gonna change
Everything still remains the same
I can't do what ten people tell me to do
So I guess I'll remain the same, listen

Sittin' here resting my bones
And this loneliness won't leave me alone, listen
Two thousand miles I roam
Just to make this dock my home, now

I'm just gon' sit at the dock of a bay
Watchin' the tide roll away, ooh
Sittin' on the dock of the bay
Wastin' time
(Ottis Redding)


Artwork by Best Design - "Illustration of In The Midst Of Surreal Time"