It’s one of those warmishly cool, humid mornings where low lying clouds make you feel a bit clausterphobic. I’m sitting out on my front porch, sipping coffee and feeling a bit befuddled. There was a book review in the paper this morning for an author who challenges the premise of God. He asks the typical questions, the most common being, “If there is a God, why does he allow evil?” I’m confused at how this likely smart, analytical author has missed the bigger picture. I wonder why he can’t see the forest through the trees. I’m not really thrilled with the weather today. Yet, while the weather is imperfect, people don’t discuss the imperfection of weather. When I came across a dead bird yesterday, I didn’t see it as a tragedy or feel it unfair that its life was cut short. When it comes to the ecosystem or the universe, we understand that everything is created in perfection and is happening as it should. When it comes to our human lives, we can’t seem to get our minds wrapped around the same belief. I regularly experience people bridling against the idea of their own perfection, and that of their lives. It’s hard to understand how hardship can be perfect. We just can’t believe it’s true. It just doesn’t make sense. Yet the idea of anything other than perfection seems scientifically and philisophically impossible.
I believe our inability to see the perfection in ourselves and our lives comes from our inability to recognize life’s higher purpose. We think that unless we’ve found a fulfilling career that directly serves others, we don’t have a purpose. Considering most of us view ourselves as imperfect parents, we don’t want to embrace that as a purpose to completely either. We believe a higher purpose is one we are able to fulfill without mistakes. While raising or serving others may be a part of our purpose, our higher spiritual aspiration is to experience and to evolve in our understanding of love. We fulfill this spiritual purpose every day whether we are conscious or desiring of it.
I got back from Charleston, South Carolina a couple of weeks ago, and found this city rich for the exploration of humanity’s experiential perfection. The city is an absolutely gorgeous one, filled with beauty and wealth. Yet as tourists take carriage tours and eat delectable foods, we don’t acknowledge the dark energy that lies in the city’s scarring history of slavery. As humans we tend to compartmentalize what we see for easy, comfortable consumption. Although we hear about slavery and intellectually know it was wrong, it’s hard to experientially comprehend. As I roamed the city I respected that this city has been, and still is, inhabited by good people. Yet I wondered how a city of church going citizens could have been so blind to the pain and suffering that supported their lifestyle. We universally ask similar questions, “How could this happen? How could someone treat me this way? How can they not see?” While we don’t embrace our ongoing curiosity, it is there. We are questioning experience all the time. Despite going to the old slave market and quarters in Charleston, I still didn’t get it. My intellect only enables me to see one dimensionally. It is only through experience that we can truly know and understand humanity.
To me, God is the positive and negative energy of the universe – literally. Since we are all made up of energy, we are then a part of God. God is the body, and we are all cells within it. We can see ourselves as separate, yet the reality of our separateness is impossible. The experience of each cell, including it’s inception and death, is imperative in the experiencial life arch which is the God body. Each cell life has a unique job and purpose. While there is an individual knowledge held within the experience of each cell, there is a communal knowledge held within the combined wisdom of all cells making up the God body in totality.
When you think of all the questions that you individually ask about yourself, others and the world… and combine them with the questions of everyone who makes up humanity…you can know how curious God energy is in totality. God wants to understand every experience from every perspective possible, within all time and space. God’s understanding and wisdom comes through our individual and then communal experiences. I believe God has a lack of judgment regarding what is positive and negative. Similarly, scientists don’t hold a value judgment that the positively charged proton is good and the negatively charged electron is bad. It is understood that both charges, along with the neutrality of the neutron are absolute necessities in the creation and sustainment of energy. Neither can exist without the other. The intertwining of positive and negative energy is what our entire universe, and everything in it, is created from. We as humans are the ones that place value on what seems good and bad. If something is making us happy and comfortable, then it must be good. If something is uncomfortable or causes pain, then it must be bad. Our judgments are based on individual experiences and are myopic.
In order to comprehend perfection, we must understand that each and every one of us is created of the same positive and negative energies of the universe. Every cell of our body is made up of atoms containing positive and negative charges. Hence we can deduce that it would be impossible for any of us to be perfect in the ideal of a totality of positive. As humans we see perfection as being physically flawless or to act in ways that only positively impact people. We view perfection as never making a mistake or causing pain. This human ideal doesn’t exist in the universe and couldn’t energetically be sustained. Our perfection comes from our human duality.
With our duality of positive and negative, we are incarnated to learn and teach about love. And all of our lives are perfectly intertwinned. Each day we think and act in positive love, and negative fear, based ways. We are yelled at and we yell. We are judged and are judges. We give and yet we are entitled. We have been hurt and yet we also hurt. We are all bouncing off one another in continual positive and negative energy sparks. We all can’t be positive all the time. Everything we do and say, both positive and negative, is perfect in that they hold an opportunity for learning. Every relationship we are in, both unhealthy and healthy, is perfect. Every experience of suffering, including death, is here to teach us. Everyones’ experiences are to be witnessed by all and used as communal food. Our purpose is to find our spirit within this energetic chaos of perfection and rise above. Yet as we individually grow into the enlightenment of positive love energy, there must somewhere in the universe be a life deteriorating into negative fear energy. Everything is continually birthing and dying, expanding and retracting.
The differing views of slavery in the south is a perfect example of an overall experience of perfection. Wealthy planters felt they were helping black people by enslaving them, and saw it as a part of their Christian duty. They truly believed they were right and true. The northerns thought their indignation and intellectual understanding about slavery made them morally correct. The northeners may have seemingly had a moral high ground, however, they burned, pillaged and looted unnecessarily through the war. Were they liberators or offenders? As the southern life was unnecessarily destroyed, did the wealthy planters become victims? Through having their lifestyle literally destroyed and dismantled did they then have the opportunity to experientially empathesize with the slaves whose lives for whom they did similarly? In the middle was the actual slave experience presenting, them and us, with morality questions that can be asked for the rest of time. For the slave there was the experiential question of freedom to explore. How are we to learn and explore the ideas of morality without all of the components for the existence of it? As with the atom… in order for us to learn and grow as spirits… the positive, negative and neutral must exisit. On the surface, the individual life of a slave seems tragic and unfair. Many would wonder how God could have forsaken this slave. Yet each slave had the profound purpose of learning, sharing and questioning issues of morality and love. The life of each slave has an impact on anyone who contemplates the issue at any time in history. The life of a slave was a perfectly profound gift to all of humanity.
Dictionary.com, defines the word perfect as, “excellent or complete beyond practical or theoretical improvement; exactly fitting the need in a certain situation or for a certain purpose.” When we think of all there is for humanity to learn, how can perfection not exist in all that takes place? We need there to be annialation, terrorists, starvation, and suffering in order for the world to grapple with morality and love on a macro level. In order to learn about love on a personal level, we must experience every shade of what love isn’t. The more seemingly benign the experience, the more nuanced and powerful the lessons to be learned. We must also be put under extreme circumstances in order for us to see and know ourselves.
I don’t believe God allows evil in the world. It isn’t a caprecious energy who sits back, with arms folded in complacency. Dark negativity is inherent in the energy of which God exists. Since we are all made up of energy…God is in us and we are literally a part of God. That means God is right here in the experiencing of all the joy and pain with us. God is experiencing and learning through the combined incarnations of everything in the universe, including what we understand to be evil.
We have a hard time comprehending the perfection of ourselves and our experiences because we can’t see our lifetime in the perspective of eternity. Most of us believe in life after death and that heaven is eternal. If that’s so, then how long is our lifetime of possible suffering…no matter how bad…in context to infinity? It would mean that our lifetime is literally a spark or a blink in the overall, never ending, existence of God’s eternal energy. There is also the possibility of reincarnation. In order for me to experientially know the truth of what it means to be human, then I must be a victim and an offender…and then evolve into neither so I can see both in objectivity. The totality of life’s perfection is beyond our comprehension. Our understanding of existence can only go as deeply inward and outward as the most powerful micro or telescope will allow. Yet even with our limitations we know that, like the view of earth from space, the farther we back up and allow our vision to expand…the more beautiful this perfection becomes.
I am extremely grateful for the book review against God I read this morning. The author’s views are perfect. That doesn’t mean that I agree with him. Without his and others’ view against God, I wouldn’t have ever had the reason to define what I believe. The more nuanced their arguement against, the more detailed my own must be as a counter point. Without the author’s book, I wouldn’t be sitting here writing this article today. In turn, my own article can be none other than perfect as well. Whether you agree or disagree; are inspired or irritated - this article will provoke you to think more deeply for yourself. And that is the beauty of all of our true perfection.
This pondering of perfection is causing a craving for two songs. First by Sting… Russians. Second, Firework by Katy Perry.