The Best Laid Schemes of Mice and Men

But, Mousie, thou art no thy lane [you aren't alone]
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o' mice an' men
Gang aft a-gley, [often go awry]
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promised joy. (Robert Burns)

I have no idea what will happen after writing this sentence. Oh sure, I have a repertoire of what I want to happen and what I don't want to happen (and it looks like I just went ahead and wrote the next sentence, beat that!). But not one ounce of certainty as to what will happen and that’s certain. Whatever happens I may interpret as good or bad, but that really doesn’t make a difference to what actually happens, cause something is bound to happen and something happens all the time. I will most likely interpret my 'self' as cause of much of what happens, but all I can really count on is just a succession of neuro-circuit influences continually bringing me to a 'happening.'

This then begs the question, if your life is a series of happenings, then the only choice you have is in your response to that stimuli? But then, if you are utterly defined by your responses, are your responses truly yours or are they simply indoctrinated influences, originating from birth, that have defined your responses up to death by sculpting neuro-circuit networks?

“One day can change your life. One day can ruin your life. All life is, is three or four big days that change everything.” (Beverly Donofrio)

Your most well laid plans, all those years of hard work and struggle toward that illustrious goal, can come crashing down simply through the consequence of an apocalyptic sneeze while driving on the interstate.

Nevertheless, the primary avocation of egocentricity is CONTROL. Nothing else matters, because the “pain/pleasure principle” demands it. You move away from pain and toward pleasure. Some circuits cause pleasure, some pain. So it seems your job is to redirect the electrochemical currents (problem is, you sometimes don’t know the difference). You’re wired for this.

Yet, deep down (most likely in the brain stem) all egocentrics understand their complete lack of control and, hence, turn to an ideological afterlife through which they fantasize of achieving complete control (if only through an absence of anything to control) in which all desires will be miraculously met.

This is it my friends. There is nothing else. No afterlife. No infinite eternity. Nothing else but what you got and what you will continue to get. Experience is NOW and is completely egocentric. Not tomorrow because, as we all recognize, tomorrow may never come. But egocentrics don’t like to “think” about that for some reason. If this is all there is, then nothing you do in this life makes a spit of difference.

Stop fighting your egocentricity and taste the freedom...

Heisenberg’s "Uncertainty Principle" basically states that you never know what’s gonna happen. But you can always be certain something will happen, you just can’t predict ‘what’ with any degree of certainty because your predictions alter what happens in ways you can’t predict. You can predict probabilities, based on past outcomes. Yet, all probabilities must essentially affect other probabilities which, in turn, affect other probabilities, making the measurement of your life’s direction obscure and basically useless.

It’s your predictions that obfuscate any chance of surprise and make your life an utter cesspool of abject routine boredom.

Nevertheless, this is what you predict and what you’re in constant preparation for experiencing. It does seem that even though your life changes, there is a predictable undercurrent that remains the same and gives you generally the same egocentric experiences day after day.

"Flies in the Vaseline, we are. Sometimes it blows my mind. Keep getting stuck here all the time" (Stone Temple Pilots)

I will admit to an unusual, and somewhat strange sense of "understanding" when you finally get that there is no way out and there never has been.

But then egos become free simply to be egos, which is all you can ever be until death do you part. It’s what your wired up for. You can be a big ego (like me!) or a little ego. You can be a sociopathic ego or a save-the-world ego. You can be a guru ego, an "asleep" ego, an "awakened" ego, etc, etc, but you will always be... ego.

But egos don't like this, for some peculiar reason, and continue to run around trying to extract themselves from themselves. They read umpteen spiritual books (yo-yoing from one "master" to another), watch innumerable "enlightened" videos, engage in a lifetime of seeking the next "spiritual practice" and fixate on one "transcendence" ideology after another in the hope they will one day generate an experience that will immediately (like a bolt of lightening!) inform that they are not what they are, because they are now something different.

Silly, I know, but it's been going on for centuries...

Artwork by Igor Mosrski

The Disenchanting Egocentric Dream of Meaningful Delusions

Many have seen the WHOLE dream, but most spend a lifetime attempting to understand and accommodate to this maladaptive perception.

Fluctuating periods of macabre dissociation pop-up for the un-accommodated, simply because they fail to recognize they are IN a process of accommodating. Rather, many experience a morose depression from interpreting a cascade of disappointments and do not realize that their disillusionment is necessary.

Whether you label it a dream, illusion, delusion, Maya, unreality, dualism, universal consciousness, or whatever, it makes little difference since concepts only have illusory patents anyway. You can argue that the “world” is real or illusion till the cows come home, but your conceptual interpretations are nothing but electrochemical spasms designed to adapt to perceptive sensation and it is through those concepts that you experience anything at all. Experience is never devoid of concept.

You have never had an experience you could not, or did not conceptualize. Reality is not experienced through sensation, but only through concepts superimposed upon sensation. An un-conceptualized sensation is like a fart on a windy day. A non-memorable event.

For many there does seem to be a feeling of detachment from the usual learned aspirations that most center their lives around. There is a general dissociation from conventional value systems dredged up from the past associations. Most get little further than this nagging sense of meaninglessness, with meaningful purposes fading like fog on a sunny morning. A sense that all endeavors do not lead to fulfillment but only result in further disappointment. Most will attempt to invest heavily in a particular sociocultural aspect, hanging on for dear life.

Once the disenchanted disillusionment sets in, egocentricity works diligently to avoid attaining any substantial understanding from that experience. There is a constant yo-yoing between egocentric goals and seeing the emptiness of all conditioned aspirations. Hence, egocentrics will struggle mightily in anchoring to some sustaining value system, conventional or cultish, religious or spiritual, political or philosophical. Some distinct cause or reason must be chosen for which to fill time by giving time meaning. Meaningless time cannot be experienced (which is why "being in the moment" is meaningless (if you’re in the moment and it’s ‘meaningful,’ then you’ve obviously missed the point by conceptualizing it).

This can be a difficult period and can last many years, even a lifetime, and is very limited in anchor points or concepts for which to define the experience.

Yet, this is only preliminary, because “you” are NOT the dreamer. Hence, the dreamer cannot be part OF the dream, but is utterly fixated and under the control of the ‘meaningful’ delusions it dreams up. 

A constant nagging uneasiness with status-quo convention tends to gradually percolate throughout the circuitry from which a new understanding begins to take over, rerouting messages and constructing new experiences within the dream. Hence, one has not left the dream or transcended the experience of dreaming, but clearly sees its full nature as a whole, rather than distraction with the parts .This is NOT "awakening" or "enlightenment." It is merely a transitional period of accommodating to a new type of perception that can assimilate a complete lack of any meaning to the whole. Hence, preferences tend to dissolve, since past associations no longer direct perception. Without a full spectrum of meanings, perception would simply NOT know what, or even how, to ‘perceive’ anything whatsoever. Temporarily losing the capacity to ‘discriminate' is a type of ego death and has occurred for many, but only briefly.

Unfortunately, all this is outside your realm of control. There’s little you can do and this gives “you” a sense of being controlled from an external force that is not “you” (hence, the concept of “God”).

“You” are NOT the dreamer, but the dream and, hence, you're seeking your source. The purpose of the dream is to locate the dreamer.

This usually runs up and down the spectrum from intense excitement to utter boredom to penetrating fear to chaotic confusion and back up the ladder once again. Most likely this has been occurring for you over a period of many years (but if you’ve been “diagnosed” then you may fail to recognize it). It is hard to pinpoint the exact transitional moment, because the past is receding (as so much becomes meaningless, the past obviously loses flavor and fails to direct perception down the usual avenues). No one evades or escapes this experience. They just interpret it away until it becomes too difficult to resist.

Most of the modern “mystics” who claim “awakening” have merely attained a momentary glimpse of the WHOLE dream and not just the parts they prefer or disdain. Discriminating or judging between parts is what we all do. But to take in the whole is a different experience entirely. This is what the mystics talk about. Yet, many tend to mistake this for “awakening,” “enlightenment” or non-duality, because it is a complete jolt to the neuro-circuits, thereby, involuntarily redirecting perception (even shutting it down for a brief time). These descriptions do a disservice in attempting to apply ‘rules’ to the experience, but there is always an incredible desire to share what cannot be shared because it does not adhere to the rules of dreaming. However, all conceptual interpretations must adhere to rules.

The most that can be said is that it will come to you when you’re ready, but you can never know when that is and, therefore, preparation based on years of prediction, requiring rules of action or thought, are utterly useless (although they do well too fill up time).

In the disenchanting dream of meaningful delusions, only ONE can awaken.

But first you have to find the dreamer.

Artwork by grohsARtig - "THE INDISPENSABILITY OF DREAMS"