You're confusing terms that are well defined. Let's break it down:
As a default, percentages for these individual categories are displayed. Where two labels
are shown below, those for more recent kernel versions are shown first.
us, user : time running un-niced user processes
sy, system : time running kernel processes
ni, nice : time running niced user processes
id, idle : time spent in the kernel idle handler
wa, IO-wait : time waiting for I/O completion
Yes this is of total CPU availabe - also see below.
1. %CPU -- CPU Usage
The task's share of the elapsed CPU time since the last screen update, expressed as a
percentage of total CPU time.
Let's see what CPU time means:
CPU time (or process time) is the amount of time for which a central processing unit (CPU) was used for processing instructions ... Often, it is useful to measure CPU time as a percentage of the CPU's capacity, which is called the CPU usage. CPU time and CPU usage have two main uses.
I do agree that the wording is a bit odd, but I must assume that "total CPU time" is everything, including idle time. So I can only understand this as each task's CPU time as a percentage of the total elapsed CPU time - meaning the task's share of CPU resources out of total CPU available.
2. %MEM -- Memory Usage (RES)
A task's currently used share of available physical memory.
There is only one way to understand this. "Share of available physical memory" is of course just that - so percentage of total available RAM.
Overall, it wouldn't make any sense to output neither CPU nor RAM as percentage of current usage, because this metric would change all the time. So percentage of current usage wouldn't have any practical value.