Perfectly Imperfect

Biting the bullet in the best of all possible worlds.

O, wretched sin what are you? You are nothing. For I saw that God is in everything; I did not see you. And when I saw that God has made everything, I did not see you. And when I saw that God is in everything, I did not see you. And when I saw our Lord Jesus Christ seated in our soul so honorably, and love and delight and rule and guard all that he has made, I did not see you. And so I am certain that you are nothing…

• Julian of Norwich

[Cosmic] consciousness shows the cosmos to consist not of dead matter governed by unconscious, rigid, and unintending law; it shows it on the contrary as entirely immaterial, entirely spiritual and entirely alive; it shows that death is an absurdity, that everyone and everything has eternal life; it shows that the universe is God and that God is the universe, and that no evil ever did or ever will enter into it; a great deal of this is, of course, from the point of view of self consciousness, absurd; it is nevertheless undoubtedly true.

• Richard Bucke

In his book, Cosmic Consciousness, Richard Bucke tries to define the mystical consciousness possessed by Buddha and Jesus, among others, and one of the traits he claims is common to that “cosmic consciousness” is the belief that there is no evil in the world and there never has been. To most of us, this seems like an incredible claim; “absurd,” as he acknowledges. A few times in the past couple weeks, I’ve made the claim that the universe is indeed perfect, at least from a certain perspective. Namely, I’ve claimed that the universe is perfect as a singular whole because it just is what it is and couldn’t have been otherwise; it is the One, the All, not only God’s creation but God itself. 

And yet, we’re living in a moment of climate crisis, rampant inequality, and genocide, with every reason to believe that things are going to get worse before they get better. How can we possibly call this perfect? In the sense that an acorn is perfectly itself, but is imperfectly the oak tree that it will become. Where we are now is a product of all our collective choices, and what we do next will come as a reaction to where we are now. Perfection is thus always mixed with imperfection so long as there is a gap between what a thing is and what it could grow to be. If we accept that this moment is a necessary step on the path to a better world, then this moment is also good in the sense that, despite the tremendous pain and suffering, it is bringing us closer to what we can become.

Many people will deny the necessity of our current situation and say instead that those “responsible” for the innumerable daily atrocities we witness could and should have acted differently. To this I say: they would have acted differently if they’d had different reasons for action, which would have been different if the situation had been different, which would have been different if history had been different, and on and on. These atrocities are merely the fruit of the tree of which we are all branches. I think people would prefer to believe that there is something innately good and moral in them that has nothing to do with the circumstances that created them, and that, even if they’d been in the same position of someone they condemn, lived that person’s same life exactly, they’d have made a different choice. From where I’m sitting, it’s much easier to see why someone would want to believe such a thing than to prove how it could possibly be so.

People will ask questions like, “so you think genocide is good?!” In the sense that this is meant, that is, whether I think genocide is laudable and something we ought to be doing, the answer is, obviously, no. I can, and do, fervently wish that things had happened differently without believing that they actually could have. There is danger in believing that a better world can be brought about by, on the one hand, congratulating ourselves on a moral fortitude most of us have never had to prove, and, on the other hand, condemning others for making the choices any of us would have made in their shoes.

The real work of bringing about a better world is that of realizing our dual nature as individuals who are nevertheless part of a whole. From our perspective as individuals, we are in some sense opposed to the universe outside ourselves, and we must in some way remain meaningfully separate, otherwise we would simply dissolve into it, as we do in death. But this separation is also why we can sometimes imagine that we and everyone else are not merely fruit of the same universal tree.

The crucial step is to realize that, though we are in some sense separate and distinct from the universe, we just as much rely on it for our substance, our literal sustenance. We come from it, are nothing without it, and need it to persist as these momentary eddies within the stream of the universe. We are different in arrangement and perspective, but not substance.

So, in the sense that we are part of the universe, we are perfect: we are what we are, and could not be otherwise. But we are imperfectly what we can and will become. The root of our imperfection, our suffering, and what we might call sin or evil is not our distinction from the universe, which is necessary, but the failure to subsequently bridge that distinction by realizing that the objective and the subjective, the infinite and the finite, the whole and the part are not mutually exclusive but are rather mutually essential. Neither can be anything without the other; there can be no whole without parts, no river without water.

This is why I argue that our primary ethical task, the ultimate goal toward which all our actions not only should but will lead, in time, is the realization of our true nature as an expression of the whole universe, of God, not by exalting or effacing our individuality but by recognizing it in its proper context. The sooner we do, the sooner things will really begin to change.