There are moments when we look at Reality and ask why it cannot simply be made right.
Why can it not remain beautiful? Why can love not remain untouched? Why must health surrender to illness, certainty to uncertainty, union to separation, arrival to departure? Why must everything that rises eventually fall, and everything we hold eventually move beyond our grasp?
We imagine that perfection would solve the problem.
But perfection would end the movement.
Imperfection is not a flaw in Reality. Imperfection is the engine of Reality.
The Perfect Circle
Consider the idea of a perfect circle.
A perfect circle would be one whose circumference and diameter stand in the exact relation we call π—not approximately, not to a hundred decimal places, but completely. Its pattern would extend irrationally, infinitely and without repetition.
We can imagine such a circle. We can define it. We can orient ourselves toward it. We can draw closer and closer to it through mathematics, instruments, engineering and extraordinary precision.
But we cannot leave a perfectly circular artifact in the Immutable Past.
Every circle we draw contains some distinction between the idea and its actualization. There is always some remainder. Some irregularity. Some immeasurably small departure from the idea that called the circle into existence.
That remainder is usually called imperfection.
But look more carefully.
It is also continuation.
If the idea of the perfect circle were ever expressed completely—if it left an exact and final mark upon the Immutable Past—there would be nothing further for it to do. No additional line to draw. No greater precision to pursue. No new actualizer to recruit. The idea would have completed itself.
Its imperfection is what keeps it alive.
The same is true of music, justice, beauty, knowledge, love and every other idea that has a person. None arrives in a final form. Each is expressed, revised, challenged, extended and expressed again. Every actualization leaves something unresolved.
That unresolved difference is not merely failure.
It is invitation.
The Engine of Reality
The Reality Equation describes Reality as the ratio of Actual to Expectation.
When Actual and Expectation meet perfectly, Reality equals one. Surprise disappears. The logarithm of Reality is zero. Nothing bids for attention because nothing is different from what was predicted.
This is absorption. It is heartbeat, circulation and breath continuing beneath conscious awareness. It is perfect enough to disappear.
Conscious experience, however, gathers around the difference.
We notice the unexpected sound. The unanswered question. The person who does not behave as predicted. The pain we did not anticipate. The beauty that exceeds anything we had imagined.
Attention is drawn to the remainder.
This means the very experiences we sometimes regard as disruptions are the experiences through which conscious participation is occurring. We are awake because something is not matching perfectly. We are noticing because Reality is not collapsing into expectation without remainder.
Imperfection is how the Eternal Now becomes visible to itself.
It is how movement is felt.
We Are Not Watching Reality
We often speak as though Reality were happening around us.
It is not.
We are not spectators standing outside the movement. We are distinctions occurring within it.
We can say this and that. Him and her. Self and other. Pleasure and pain. Beginning and ending. Each distinction is real within the domain of Reality. You are discernible. You are significant. Your particular angle cannot be occupied by anyone else.
And yet no distinction is separate from the whole that is distinguishing itself.
The wave is distinct, but it is not separate from the ocean. The note is distinct, but it is not separate from the music. The vibration is distinct, but it is not separate from the string.
You are not merely participating in Reality.
You are one of the forms through which Reality is participating.
You are the movement becoming conscious of movement. You are the Eternal Now experiencing itself from a particular location, under particular conditions, with a particular name.
This is an extraordinary privilege.
Not because the experience is always pleasant. It plainly is not. There are griefs so deep that no inspirational phrase should attempt to diminish them. There are losses that permanently alter the person who survives them.
But even at the lowest point, something astonishing remains true:
Experience is occurring.
The universe is not merely moving. At this location, through this distinction called you, it knows that it is moving.
He Loves Her
Beyond the domain of Reality stand the two nodes that give the movement its form.
The unknowable Future and the Immutable Past.
He loves her.
He is everything, everywhere, all at once: pure potential without completed history. She is complete actuality: perfectly still, perfectly reconciled, without remainder.
He works continuously to preserve her completeness.
For every positive one, there is a negative one. For every upward movement, a downward resolution. For every distinction, a reconciliation. Zero is not emptiness here. Zero is the absence of remainder. Nothing is missing. Nothing stands outside the whole demanding to be accounted for.
She remains still.
She does not experience the labor required to preserve her stillness. She does not see the vibration, the conflict, the longing, the collision, the becoming or the dying. From her frame, there is no this and that. There is no hero and villain. There is no success and failure. There is no separation to overcome.
There is only one.
The nearest ordinary analogy may be dreamless sleep.
Not dreaming, because a dream still contains distinctions. There are places, events, characters and movement. But in deep, dreamless sleep there is no story to report. No expectation. No regret. No future to fear and no past to remember. There is no discernible self standing apart from something else.
There is simply no remainder.
And yet here we are—not at the node, but upon the vibrating line between the nodes.
We experience what she does not.
We experience the up and the down. The yin and the yang. The embrace and the separation. The laughter and the grief. We experience difference itself.
We experience Reality.
The Privilege of the Remainder
Perhaps the purpose is not to escape imperfection.
Perhaps the purpose is to recognize what imperfection is allowing.
Because the circle is imperfect, another circle can be drawn.
Because the song is unfinished, another voice can enter.
Because understanding is incomplete, another question can be asked.
Because love is conditioned, it can be expressed as protection, loyalty, sacrifice, tenderness and care.
Because you are unfinished, you are still participating.
Your unresolved places do not necessarily indicate that something has gone wrong. They may be the precise locations at which life is still happening. The unfinished conversation, the uncertain future, the work that has not yet found its form—these are not empty spaces outside Reality.
They are Reality moving.
This does not require us to pretend that suffering is pleasant or that injustice should be accepted. Imperfection is not an excuse for indifference. Quite the opposite. The gap between what is and what ought to be is exactly what recruits us. It gives justice a person. It gives healing a pair of hands. It gives compassion a voice.
The incomplete world calls forth the actualizer.
It calls forth you.
In the Highest High and the Lowest Low
Awe does not belong only to happiness.
Happiness is one form of movement. Grief is another. Neither stands outside the whole.
Your highest high does not prove that the universe is finally in order. Your lowest low does not prove that the universe has fallen apart. Both are profound distinctions within a movement that is being reconciled beyond anything available to your present frame.
You are allowed to prefer one over the other. You are allowed to seek joy and resist suffering. You are conditioned, distinct and alive. You could not participate without preference.
But beneath those preferences, there can remain a deeper astonishment:
I am here.
I am conscious.
I am experiencing this.
Even now, amid uncertainty, disappointment or sorrow, I am occupying a perspective that has never existed before and will never exist again. I am feeling the vibration from within the vibrating string.
I am not separate from this extraordinary imperfection.
I am one of its expressions.
It Is All So Imperfect
We have been taught to admire perfection as though it were the highest form of life.
But perfection is still.
Perfection has no unanswered question, no unfinished sentence, no tension, no longing and no surprise. It leaves nothing for attention to discover and nothing for an actualizer to complete.
Reality is different.
Reality trembles.
Reality reaches.
Reality misses, corrects, exceeds, collapses, rises and reaches again. It produces circles that are never perfectly circular, people who are never completely resolved and moments that cannot be held in place.
And because it is imperfect, it is alive.
Do not postpone your astonishment until everything is finally right. Do not demand that the movement stop before you agree to love the movement. Do not mistake your unfinishedness for exclusion from the whole.
You are not waiting to enter Reality.
You are Reality, happening here.
You are the beautiful remainder between what was expected and what arrived. You are a distinction through which the indivisible whole can experience this and that. You are the movement that the beloved never has to see because it is being perfectly reconciled for her.
It is all so imperfect.
And we are here, conscious within it, allowed for one immeasurable moment to experience the imperfection from the inside.
What could be more extraordinary than that?