Choose “Life”!

 
“Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family, choose a fucking big television, choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players, and electrical tin openers.

Choose good health, low cholesterol and dental insurance. Choose fixed-interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends.

Choose leisure wear and matching luggage. Choose a three piece suite on hire purchased in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who you are on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing sprit-crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pissing you last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked-up brats you have spawned to replace yourself. Choose your future. Choose life.

I chose not to choose life: I chose something else. And the reasons? There are no reasons. Who need reasons when you’ve got heroin?” (Trainspotting)

Does the the opium of your Buddhist philosophy maintain your comfort zone and keep you in good cheer and positive spirit? Does your Zazen provide you a sense of well-being through neurochemical whiz-bangs? Does your Advaita make you feel special and raise you above the quiet desperation of the ignorant masses? Does your meditation, meticulously scheduled-in twice daily, help medicate you from the meaningless rigors of your mindless middle class, status-quo existence? Does your particular brand of Christianity help cope with your continued participation in vacuous and insipid social games that you sometimes sense are absurd and pointless? Are your spiritual retreats sprinkled with love and comradery?

As the beloved guru was claiming that we must “serenely mirror the divine love of the universe,” and that we must “engage the world exclusively through universal compassion and unconditional love,” I looked out the side window to observe a cat shred a bird to pieces, devouring each piece then vomiting up the bones and feathers, only to lightly prance off into the trees, tra la la la la….

Does the cat not know of this "divine love"? Where is its “compassion” and “unconditional love”? Nature couldn’t give a rat’s ass about your dreams, goals and desires. Nature essentially sheits on your spiritual aspirations and practices. Nature doesn’t care if you’re satisfied, discontent or kumbaya happy. Nature doesn’t give a spit about “you” and you are an integral part of it, regardless of silly ideas and activities you employ to generate a belief of extracting your “self.”

If you are not nauseatingly depressed and morose. If you’re not discouraged, disgusted and disenchanted with every choice you have made, thus realizing every future choice can only mirror that same fucking generic futility, then you’re still hypnotized by the invisible jewels of your egocentric conditioning and aren’t even close to the truth of your confinement.

Therefore, you can only choose “life."

It does seem that when you finally reach a point in which nothing gives relief, then you can count on breaking through. Unfortunately, egocentrics struggle mightily against this natural current and it may take years to get to that point, if you get it at all. But that doesn’t matter because it’s not something you choose. Mostly, though, you will choose “life” in an attempt to find a way out of the massive sinkhole of despair you have serendipitously dropped into, but when no further ropes are available for which to climb out, then be of good cheer, for you are almost “’there” (from which you learn you’ve gottin’ nowhere at all and what a “happy” day that’ll be).

Alas, until then, egocentrics MUST choose “life” for no reason at all, except that its really no different than heroin.

Or you can choose something else…

…and very few will ever do that.

Artwork by Sean Donaldson - "Clyde The Evil Cat"

"The Dream Marks Are All Present..."

For as much as a year Satan continued these visits, but at last he came less often, and then for a long time he did not come at all. This always made me lonely and melancholy. I felt that he was losing interest in our tiny world and might at any time abandon his visits entirely. When one day he finally came to me I was overjoyed, but only for a little while. He had come to say good-by, he told me, and for the last time. He had investigations and undertakings in other corners of the universe, he said, that would keep him busy for a longer period than I could wait for his return.

"And you are going away, and will not come back any more?"

"Yes," he said. "We have comraded long together, and it has been pleasant--pleasant for both; but I must go now, and we shall not see each other any more."

"In this life, Satan, but in another? We shall meet in another, surely?"

Then, all tranquilly and soberly, he made the strange answer, "There is no other."

A subtle influence blew upon my spirit from his, bringing with it a vague, dim, but blessed and hopeful feeling that the incredible words might be true--even must be true.

"Have you never suspected this, Theodor?"

"No. How could I? But if it can only be true--"

"It is true."

A gust of thankfulness rose in my breast, but a doubt checked it before it could issue in words, and I said, "But--but--we have seen that future life--seen it in its actuality, and so--"

"It was a vision--it had no existence."

I could hardly breathe for the great hope that was struggling in me. "A vision? --a vi--"

"Life itself is only a vision, a dream."

It was electrical. By God! I had had that very thought a thousand times in my musings!

"Nothing exists; all is a dream. God--man--the world--the sun, the moon, the wilderness of stars--a dream, all a dream; they have no existence.

Nothing exists save empty space--and you!"

"I!"

"And you are not you--you have no body, no blood, no bones, you are but a thought. I myself have no existence; I am but a dream--your dream, creature of your imagination. In a moment you will have realized this, then you will banish me from your visions and I shall dissolve into the nothingness out of which you made me....

"I am perishing already--I am failing--I am passing away. In a little while you will be alone in shoreless space, to wander its limitless solitudes without friend or comrade forever--for you will remain a thought, the only existent thought, and by your nature inextinguishable, indestructible. But I, your poor servant, have revealed you to yourself and set you free.

Dream other dreams, and better!

"Strange! that you should not have suspected years ago--centuries, ages, eons, ago! --for you have existed, companionless, through all the eternities. Strange, indeed, that you should not have suspected that your universe and its contents were only dreams, visions, fiction! Strange, because they are so frankly and hysterically insane--like all dreams: a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice and invented hell--mouths mercy and invented hell--mouths Golden Rules, and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship him!...

"You perceive, now, that these things are all impossible except in a dream. You perceive that they are pure and puerile insanities, the silly creations of an imagination that is not conscious of its freaks--in a word, that they are a dream, and you the maker of it. The dream-marks are all present; you should have recognized them earlier.

"It is true, that which I have revealed to you; there is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream--a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought--a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!"

He vanished, and left me appalled; for I knew, and realized, that all he had said was true.

- The Mysterious Stranger, Chapt. 11, Mark Twain LINK

Ridding the World of Ego-Doers

‘Events happen, deeds are done, but there is no individual doer thereof.’ (quote from some ancient smarty pants)

Like zombies, the ego-doers are everywhere, interminably doing the same sheit over and over again....and each time they revel in their uniqueness.

Alas, the important seriousness of the ego-doer, who feels compelled to inform you that you must do THIS and not THAT or THAT and never THIS. To think… you've had it all wrong since birth.

The universal claim is that, from the moment of birth, you’ve been DOING the wrong damn stuff over and over again. Or so they tell you, in their most authoritative tone, “I am descended from the lineage of the great and venerable Master Grand Puba Rinpoche.” If you give a rat’s arse, they’ll have a great day. Otherwise, the Crypt Keepers of Doing True Stuff (as opposed to doing dumb things) become indignant that you could be so irreverent to their Grand Master Flash. Brainwashed Troglodytes of the Conceptually Divine, spewing out the ancient rules, demanding you fall in line and JUST DO IT.

Nevertheless, from the moment of your birth, completely unbeknownst to you, you were engaged in an unconscious constructive process of linking up billions of neurons to create an egocentric network as big as the universe and all right up under your thinking cap. This all began with your parentally inherited DNA, predetermining the expectation of certain responses, which then kicked into third gear with moment to moment experiences dumped upon your developing brain, turning fragile neural pathways into concrete superhighways of normalized expectations and socially sculpted responses.

With the most absolutely importantly significant response being...I AM DOING THIS.

Therefore, the only real purpose all those miles of dendrites serve is to insure that you’re always DOING something. Doesn’t matter what (except to you and the horse you rode in on) but all egocentrics must DO something because it is the very nature of Egocentric Mammalia to be incessantly DOING something. Indeed, it is the very nature of Ego-mammalian's to seek pleasure in what they DO in order to maintain the motivation for continued DOING. It is not important what "you" do...only that "you" think it is.

After it eats, sleeps, shits, fucks and dies, notice how expertly nature does absolutely NOTHING that means anything to nature.

But go ahead, keep trying to DO nothing. It’s impossible! All egocentrics are DOER’s and everything they do is essentially meaningless except to each individual egocentric mammalia, who attains pleasurable neurochemical experiences from the doing of 'special stuff.'

However, this herd believes that doing THIS is downright God ordained. But that gaggle over there demands that this is what God wants. So proclaims the moral neuro-circuitry of righteous ego doers when circuitry is linked up into herd formations.

One day your neural circuitry somehow brings you to a special book written by some grand wizard who informs you that your “ego” is the problem and must be discarded, transcended, destroyed and your ego hears this and screams “hallelujah!” Suddenly, what you spent decades shining and polishing must now be smashed to bits. You’ve been moving toward this your whole life and didn’t even know it. How’s that for “free-will”?

What a grand project! Finally, you have a true purpose (as the circuits subsequently link up to this new self-righteous neural train wreck that you will spend your life crashing into repeatedly)

Unfortunately, the million miles of dendrite-synaptical circuitry that make up egocentricity is beyond your power to reprogram, except for tiny acts of behavioral conditioning (like ending your nicotine addiction, but even that was a royal bitch, yo!).

Egocentric Mammalia is what you are and the power that innately fuels that egocentricity is your moment to moment non-acceptance of what your DOING in that moment. Your daily non-acceptance keeps the joint jumpin’ (brain), demanding ever more new things be DONE to assuage your egocentric self-abnegation over what could be DONE but wasn’t and what what was DONE but shouldn’t be, in opposition to what you DO but don’t want to DO and what you aren’t DOING but want to DO.

Let’s face it, you basically can’t DO anything “right” and, in those moments that you might actually do something right for once, it eventually fades away to become just not good enough. But the whole huge religio-spirituo industry is entirely founded on your NOT being good enough and needing to DO something else to be better by DOING better things.

We must rid the world of ego-doers by short-circuiting the guilt that fuels them.

Hence, the best way to rid the world of ego-doers is to tell them to simply keep DOING whatever it is their DOING. Just go ahead and do whatever the hell ya want to do or do what you think you have to do, while wishing you were doing something else. No need to reroute the circuits, just go with it, cause you have NO choice. Even if transcending the ego is what you feel compelled to do, go ahead and keep doing it, even though my ego feels compelled to tell you what a dodo you are for attempting such a silly thing. Ha! Ain’t this sheit grand!

The only way to rid the world of ego-doers is to tell them that they are doing exactly what they should be doing, each and every moment their doing it. This insures the ego will ultimately crumble from the immense weight of such unconditional acceptance that comes from a complete and total lack of free-will.


 Top Artwork by Dimitri Kozma - "The Gold Brain"

Actually, on average, it strikes me about 5 to 6 times a day, and in seemingly 'normal' times too, and that number is growing. I imagine I will soon wake to my own raucous laughter over all the absurdities I will engage with throughout the coming hours....Ha!

Sadly, there are few this can be shared with....

Who am I? Damn…I forgot.

“It takes a lot to make a memory. New proteins have to be synthesized, neuron structures altered. While some of these memory-building mechanisms are known, many are not. Some recent studies have indicated that a unique group of molecules called microRNAs, known to control production of proteins in cells, may play a far more important role in memory formation than previously thought.” LINK

Indeed, neuron by neuron, science is deconstructing “you" down to tiny little incoherent, totally chaotic, microdots of electrochemical goop.

“And it looks as though miR-182 may be promoting local protein synthesis, helping to support the synapse-specificity of memories.”

Egocentrics are defined exclusively by a past they seek to alter due to its lacking, even though the memory of the past exists as nothing more than synaptical spurts of electrochemical current, lighting up in tandem with current thoughts. Note once again, how you never really leave the moment, because each moment is nothing more than instantaneous brain firings provoking other synapses to engage and fire. Even a memory is… NOW.

And “you” have absolutely nothing to do with any of it....

You have about as much to do with reading this post as I had in writing it…NOTHING, Zero, zilch, nill, nada.

No need to defend any of our brief, episodic, spur-of-the-moment “truths” anymore or…go ahead and defend till your hearts content. You will only ever go where the neurons take you. There is no choice in the matter and that ultimate absence was initiated upon your birth.  

"My mind is preoccupied with past thoughts."

"This idea is, of course, the reason why you see only the past. No one really sees anything. He sees only his thoughts projected outward. The mind's preoccupation with the past is the cause of the misconception about time from which your seeing suffers. Your mind cannot grasp the present, which is the only time there is. It therefore cannot understand time, and cannot, in fact, understand anything.

The one wholly true thought one can hold about the past is that it is not here. To think about it at all is therefore to think about illusions. Very few have realized what is actually entailed in picturing the past or in anticipating the future. The mind is actually blank when it does this, because it is not really thinking about anything.

The purpose of the exercises for today is to begin to train your mind to recognize when it is not really thinking at all. While thoughtless ideas preoccupy your mind, the truth is blocked. Recognizing that your mind has been merely blank, rather than believing that it is filled with real ideas, is the first step to opening the way to vision." (ACIM, Wkbk Lesson 8).

Artwork by Shaytan666 - "Neuron"

"Thoughts Just Emerge in Consciousness"

"If you pay attention, you can see that you no more author the next thing you think than the next thing I say...thoughts simply arise in the mind"
-Sam Harris