I used to think that being spiritual, evolved, awakened—or whatever the proper word might be—involved being some kind of woo-woo person who never had a bad moment, never got anxious or angry or depressed or whatever, but was always serene no matter what. And of course, everybody would always think highly of him/her.
I no longer think that. It seems to me now that any kind of evolvement is about fully embracing our humanity, which includes contradictions, moments of bitchiness, sadness, tension and all the other things that go with being a human being. It seems to me that that's part of our real beauty. Can we really embrace the totality of our beauty?
Even Ramana Maharshi, the mystic's mystic of the 20th Century, at least once got angry enough at someone to tell them off. Jesus cursed the fig-tree and was bothered by the money-changers at the temple. I like that; it shows the humanity of the man, where perfection always lies coiled within a mysterious imperfection.
That's true for all of us. Our perfection lies in our very imperfection, or rather, the embracing of our essential and beautiful imperfection, the essence of being human.
And the same goes for the world, for existence itself. When we can embrace the imperfection of the world, now our heart is moving past mere liking and disliking to something more profound, where we're truly in love with the ups and downs, the victories and defeats, the joys and sorrows, the beauty and pain of reality as-it-is.
When that happens, the absolute is once again enabled to fall in love with itself—through these human eyes of ours, through this human consciousness. You could say that humans and other sentient beings are how existence is potentially enabled to appreciate itself, is potentially enabled to wake up to the mystery and beauty of itself.
But only potentially. We don't have to fall in love with all that is. We can continue to feel compassion for this group but not for that one, compassion for "our kind" but not for the "other kind." But down that road, the mystery of existence remains forever obscured.
Only when we begin to see all of it with compassion—with absolutely nothing left out—does the mystery that is always in front of us begin to reveal itself to itself.
—jim sloman, 7/29/02 for 9/4/02
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