Something I glossed over in my earlier post. The how and the what of difference from the before/after. What is the essence of perfection? Being itself.

The aspiration for perfection is, I believe, a component of nature. It is a natural process, the longing for endless life, it is the search for a kind of cosmic unity that seems nostalgic, perhaps longing for the great tranquility prior to the initiation of the universe as we know it. Maybe everything was once one thing, and we are hurting from the separation, striving, striving for the wholeness deep down things, a memory residually haunts us and leads us toward a sort of new heaven and new earth, where the equilibrium of the stardust has been restored by way of heat death or some other force.

In a human being, we have a neocortex, we have language, we have formal concepts, sounds symbolically associated to objective things, actions, or qualities. This denotative structure sets up a problem, because we can start to gravitate to the symbol over the symbolized, and the mind fixates on the sense of inner control we have over the world by way of concepts. Some react to the power-hunger of consciousness by rejecting the symbols and adhering to the physical realm of perception. In doing so, it is usually the case that people do not actually forgo the attachment to symbols, they just make it subconscious. They cease to knowingly project, they unknow their projection, instead of grappling with the tension of having potentially wrong symbols. They miss out on the special grace available there.

We have a longing for ideals, and following them brings us added fitness for survival, but it also poses the risk of putting us at odds with the outside world, becoming controlling with our understanding. This is the challenge of being pro-intellect, pro-individuality. One must frequently adjust to reality if they are to affirm their perspective truthfully. Otherwise, they devolve into something that is not objective.

Then there is the problem of objectivity. Namely, what is objectivity? Is it one or many? Is it a fiction, an illusion? I would say there is an objectivity, but it cannot be confined. Objectivity is a kind of tendency or direction rather than a fixed, well-defined state. One leans toward truth, and truthfulness is what is attained. There is no hard end or confirmation, only the resonance of connection between the knowledge and the known. Life is tenuous like this. The more you abstract, the more rarefied reality becomes, at the same time, the more unified reality becomes. It is surprisingly and fittingly paradoxical!

As you fly higher and higher, worlds become bubbles, and the greatness becomes vanity and the vanity becomes joy. Scale ceases to matter: the microcosm and the macrocosm are simply different cosmos. The tiniest detail and the greatest themes kiss in the knowledge of the infinite and the finite. The hummingbird and the whale are together. All sorts of oppositions become romances of the physical forces in the world. The phenomenal and the noumenal, the yang and the yin twirl together.

There is no perfection, it is always a quality. To be perfect is simply to relate to being itself. The aspiration for perfection seeks to be real, to exist. It is our conceptual mind, our neocortex that feels divided from the outside world, because it is an abstraction from it, and lacks the substance. The sense of inner continuity and self-awareness we can have tricks us into dividing rather than differentiating. Yes, subjectivity differs from objectivity by way of degrees, but there is no hard separation. There is a continuity, they are part of a polycosmic continuum.

The paradigm of perfection and imperfection become renewed and radically shift when we recognize the difference between ideals and objects, and we empathize with the suffering caused within this juxtaposition. One’s reference frame can impose upon reality itself, a majority’s collective reference frame can impose upon minority group reference frames. We have a biology of realities, evolving for survival. The ages of ages are testing us, growing us, suffering with us.

There is no radical failure on our part. We are inherently good. Life is good, death is change, and control is evil. Control is an attempt to perpetuate using the mechanism of change. I do not know if I believe in eternal life. But I do believe in eternal love. The baton of life can be given, it cannot be kept forever. Maybe someday, in a transtemporal domain, the interrelationships of all things past/present/future did/do/will exist together.

Imperfection is good. Nature is always changing, glancing, asymmetric. Mathematics is not evil, because the purity of reason/ideality is simply part of nature. If the human reality is an extension of nature, our ideals are similarly organic. The longing for perfection finds peace when it locks onto being itself, when it touches the process of its own generation. The mechanism varies depending on many circumstantial things unique to one’s perspectival history. Technology is not evil, math and science do not divide and reduce, art and engineering are one. Engineering takes the denotative habit of connotation and makes an entire field out of it. This can be an evil. But if it maintains connection with the arbitrariness of the connotation, the connection of the root of knowledge with physical action, abstracting with doing, then it can stay peaceable. I’m rambling. I’m sketching. It’s important to convey in some form, even if metastatically. If you try to eliminate shame from the equation, that is difficult, and can put extraordinary pressure on the self to isolate itself from its imperfections, the imperfection of not accepting one’s own imperfection, the presence of perfectionism can seem like a terrible sin, but that’s just perfectionism perpetuating itself in an anti-intellectual, anti-rational, anti-individual, misanthropic shadow-form, which is actually still intellectual, rational, individuated, anthropocentric. The paradigm of perfectionism is transcended when we allow our little perfections to remain as pursuits. They can only find vent in the real. We must constantly be recharged by the real. Otherwise, we fall into illusion. We must be exposed again and again to reality beyond ourselves, nature becomes our great teacher of what it looks like to have a loving and true reality, one that is not absent of strife, but allows it to work itself into a grand harmony of all things. Maybe the end of time reveals one great ecosystem of realities supercomposed into a single polyglot song. Maybe.

Perfectionism, at its ultimate end, discovers grace. The perfect finds grace, the self finds love. This infusion is an inversal of the apparent tendency, so that one, like the apostle Paul, is suddenly converted. So let Icarus fly, maybe he will melt into the sun and shine down upon the ocean, rising its waters into steam that then rain. And is that an evil thing to be avoided? Stay moderate, and you will never become another thing. You will die yourself. Give yourself to your deepest self, you will become dynamic, metamorphosize, and you will touch the world. The asymptotic gives way to the asymptote itself. The calculus of being is one of togetherness. Joy and free play are hidden deep in perfectionism, but they are hard to find that way. Only crazy people continue this way. Most turn round to this freedom and bliss before seeing the perfectionist within them change and kiss the body of heaven. There are many ways, and the way of perfectionism is not a dead end. There is so much more to say. I’m just going and going to say it before I leave back for work.


June 16, 2023
Gorda