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