Judy wrote:
I wonder if you missed a post I made a week or two ago
about the "Everything is perfect just as it is" idea, in
response to a post of yours about it. I've reproduced it
below:
Bronte writes:
Yes, Judy, I did miss it, and I'm very glad you re-sent it. It is very
insightful. My comments below.
Judy:
Virtually every teaching I've ever encountered about
enlightenment has said the same thing (usually at
much greater length): experiencing (not just believing)
that everything is perfect just as it is does *not*
mean not wanting to change anything.
How could it? Are one's opinions and desires and
behaviors somehow not part of "everything" ? If
everything is perfect just as it is, so is wanting to
change things, as well as the changes one is able to
bring about.
"Just as it is" doesn't mean frozen in time and space,
never to be changed. It means *at this instant in time*
everything is perfect. If in the next instant "this" is
changed to "that", "that" is also perfect for that
instant. And so on...
Change is constant and inevitable. That being the case,
"Everything is perfect just as it is" cannot possibly
foreclose change to "just as it is."
(Why a *bad* thing should be perfect just as it is even
for an instant is a different question entirely. It's
known in theology as "the problem of evil," and people
have been wrestling with it for millennia, coming up
with many different solutions, some more satisfactory
than others. Most, however, do not conclude that the
solution implies that one is to refrain from fighting
evil, from working as hard as one can to change things.)
In the interview with Ramesh Balkesar, the interviewer
kept objecting that one could use the premise that
one's behavior was entirely determined by God's will
as an excuse to do bad things. Ramesh could have
pointed out that according to this premise, having the
motivation to use the premise as an excuse *would also
be God's will*.
Bronte writes:
I'm thinking of an anlogy to what you just said. Let's apply your reasoning
about God's will to a human being's will for a moment. Let's suppose Bronte is
wanting to bake a cake. Her WILL is to bake the cake. In the process of
cake-creating, she drops a bowl and breaks it. A little cat, watching from the
sidelines, might conclude that this god-like being who gives him his food,
heals his injuries and provides him shelter must -- in her almighty wisdom --
have dropped the bowl on purpose. "It was Bronte's will. All is perfect." But
Bronte knows her intention was not to drop bowls but to bake cakes.
In the same way, you (like the cat) are looking at creation and seeing it as
all God's will, all perfect, in spite of the large amount of bowl-dropping
going on. I maintain that the Infinite's intention in creating this universe to
cake-back not bowl-drop. The suffering is the bowl-dropping. It was not part of
the plan. It happens along the way, not because God wills it but because God,
like the rest of us, is doing the best It can and is learning in the process.
Learning sometimes entails mistakes.
Mistakes need to be forgiven in the interest of progress. To get mad or cry
over the broken bowl interferes with producing the cake. So we have to learn to
take suffering in stride, learn from it, and do better. But to go further than
that and conclude that suffering is God's will, part of God's plan, is like the
cat concluding from what it sees that Bronte intended to break the bowl. To say
all is perfect in the world in this moment is like saying Bronte did everything
perfectly in making the cake. No, she didn't. But she did her best, and in the
end, the cake will be produced, but she goofed up a few times along the way.
I still say that when spiritual people take the position that all is perfect
as it is, and that everything that happens is God's will, they are judging God
from a very limited level of understanding. If you answer "yeah, but the sages
say that, and they are one with God, so they ought to know God's mind," that's
like saying the cat must know Bronte's intentions because the cat is so
attached to Bronte.
A smarter way of discerning Bronte's true intentions would be to objectively
observe what happens when the bowl drops. Does she bleed? Does she cry out?
Does she use a swear word or two? Does she trip and fall on the slippery cake
batter? If any of those things happen, a smart cat would conclude that it was
not Bronte's intention to break that bowl.
Only a rather naive cat, who blindly gives Bronte the status of all-knowing
perfection, would ignore the evidence around him and insist that everything
Bronte does is her will and part of a perfectly executed plan, way beyond the
observer's humble capacity to understand. IMO, the Infinite is on a grand
adventure. It's working to bring into manifest life an incredibly beautiful
dream it has, and on the way it makes (through us) a damn lot of mistakes. From
these it learns (through our learning) and does better over time. Thus the
world is evolving.
But one sure way to slow that evolving is to take the position that
everything is perfect as it is, and that we have no free will, and that
surrendering attachment to action and desires allows God to act through us. I
remember a saying I learned as a kid. "God has no hands but yours. God has no
feet but yours." We have to step up to our "mission" of being divine doers --
dynamic, involved doers -- not sidestep it with misassumptions that everything
is perfect.
I DID get that you are saying change is part of perfection, and that from
your point of view people can try to make things better and still believe
that's everything perfect. But I find that contradictory. A person who believes
everything's perfect has little motivation to work hard for change. She tends
to lay back and coast, thinking what she does is not very important. She tends
to be "detached." That causes limp intentions, limp actions, and limp results.
It's why India is such a passive nation, as MMY used to label it. Thanks very
much to traditional Indian philosophy.
The apparent disadvantages of the determinist premise
(which is basically the same premise as that everything
is perfect just as it is) tend, in my observation, to
be a function of not taking it as an absolute, of
inadvertently assuming free will around the edges, as
it were.
Added this morning, 9/25: Note that what I've described
just above involves a paradox or an infinite regress.
That's because I'm describing it from the perspective
of duality. As I said at the top, I think from the
perspective of Unity, the free will/determinism conflict
is seen never to have existed in the first place, i.e.,
to have been an artifact of duality.
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