Nevertheless, even in your minimal egoic state, those in your care anxiously anticipated those wondrous moments when you would begin to exhibit your glorious egocentric “personality." They dutifully trained you to become a unique and separate egocentric like them, but different (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 of your “self” by your “self” that you had no participation in altering or adjusting, 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. Values unfolded into a neuro-web of tangled circuits all criss-crossing and shorting others out, while intensifying the current of others. 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.
You allowed all of this to happen because you had no choice. Although you seemed to make decisions, your life moved in directions clearly not of you. But off you went anyway…tra la la...
Most of your childhood was influenced by a series of sensations completely outside the purview of any control you could ever assert. Of course, you did seek to apply control (in direct accordance with 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 almost totally 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? Note how egocentricity must always insist you did.
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 an entire 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 various “reasons,” 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 engaging in are meaningless, would lead only to deep anguish.
Although they say “the unexamined life is not worth living,” how far down that rabbit hole are you willing to go? 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.
Artwork by Mark Ryden - "Rosie's Tea Party"
