Time is the substance I am made of.  Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger;  It is the fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.  Jorge Luis Borges

I often have second thoughts when I post here on this blog.  Last week when I offered this wisdom of Jorge Luis Borges I had another flurry of recriminations stemming from the childhood fear, “Oh, my this is just too crazy to be thinking.”  I now realize that in my very early life I feared I was not “thinking right” but had an uncanny awareness of this “flaw” and so quickly set my precocious little mind/heart dynamo to learning how to “think right.”  And I’m glad I did as otherwise I would have had a very hard time finding a place in the world in which I found myself and would have created great difficulty for myself and others, especially my family.  But as I hyper focused on thinking, and behaving, in the “right way” I did subscribe to linearity but with some reservation, a hesitancy which has dissipated here in my later years.

Borges with this astute poetic observation put into words the profound Mystery I discovered upon my birth in 1952.  And, yes, it was a “discovery” even then as my innocent little mind/heart contrivance was alive and kicking, and had been even in the womb, as it is with all of us…… and the conclusions we draw shape the balance of our lives.  These “conclusions” are in the realm of perception which precedes cognition, a realm which will then shape the cognitive framework we formulate. Depending upon our neurological wiring and the familial/cultural environment in which we find ourselves, we can often find ourselves “hard-wired” in a cognitive framework from which we can never escape.  This framework is an algorithm which will dictate how we think and seek to make sure that we think in an “appropriate” way as defined by the social venue in which we find ourselves ensconced. We are then set on the path in which the Jungian phenomenon of individuation is challenging or even impossible.  The resulting quandary will be my focus next time.