Perfect Imperfections

Let's start with the day of your birth. As a first attempt to gather what that day must have been like, let's think about your life in the womb. In short, it was nine months of pure bliss and continued comfort. In this phase of your creation, you were still very much connected to the perfection that we all share. There was no reason for you to feel or know anything else.

But then on the day of your birth, all of that changed. Your ideal environment gave way to bright lights, noise, cold, pain, and hunger. This was certainly a jarring experience, but all of these terrifying and troubling new sensations were nothing compared to the notion that overshadowed them all: at the moment of your birth, you began to experience separation from Infinite Wisdom for the first time. No wonder you cried so much. This new human experience was entirely unpleasant.

So on that day of your birth, you began to experience separation. That very unpleasant feeling established the basis of your present state of being. If you were physically nurtured and sustained by caring parents, you survived and thrived in amazing ways. If you were abused or neglected, your separation anxiety multiplied as your perception of reality was ingrained into your subconscious mind.

Unfortunately, the picture did not get any better as you grew up. After just a few years of interaction with your new environment, you learned another perspective: believing that you are not perfect. You also learned that, no matter what you did, you could never get enough of anything. You learned the opposite of perfect contentment — that love is conditional.

All of us got to this state because our parents did what parents do: they domesticated us. Yes, they did their best. They taught us their values, language, and culture. They also ingrained their fears, doubts, religion, prejudices, and addictions into the core of our consciousness. (By the way, we will call this collection of entities/ emotions/conditions "detractors.")

With all of these detractors dragging us down over the years, by now most of us have become just like our parents in all their imperfections. And it doesn't stop there. Whether we have children now or intend to have children in the future, we will eventually become agents that help perpetuate the insanity. In our careers, families, business dealings, and relationships, we do and will perpetuate the insanity.

I do not mean to lay all the blame on our parents, of course. Our teachers did not teach us well. They taught that our intuition is not dependable. They taught that we must accept ideal standards of control in order to be safe and that we must behave in a certain way if we hope to earn a reward. At almost no point during our schooling and upbringing did they allow us to be intuitive and spontaneous. And we rarely experienced unconditional love. They did not actively teach us to put an end to conflict, struggle, and resistance. Rather, they taught us to believe in the illusions of competition that they themselves treasured as pure truth.

From the time we could first understand words and direction, parents and teachers innocently began their never-ending task of convincing us that we are not perfect. As early as the age of three, we had completely forgotten the bliss of our previous existence. We had already become one of the disconnected people of this "natural" world. We no longer could practice unconditional love, mostly because every attempt to do so was met with a stern, bleak lesson.

Later on in our lives, other teachers, siblings, and friends joined the chorus that would rob us of our perfection. Collectively, our teacher's and peer group's favorite word was no. Through this constant cacophony of things we were not supposed to do, we slowly learned that we were not perfect. With this realization, our core beliefs and self-image became twisted and deformed into an insane pattern of cultural conformity accompanied by the detractors. We learned to assume the role of son or daughter, student, friend, brother or sister, lover, spouse, and father or mother. And the consequence of these relationships is always dictated by love based on some condition.

The overarching lesson is "Everything is conditional. Every act of love comes with a price. And love means control." In other words, we slowly learned that "I love you" also means "I control you." Through this harsh lesson, we came to realize (incorrectly and inconsistently) that it is good to gain comfort and avoid pain (at any cost); to gain attention and escape being ignored; to gain approval and escape rejection; to gain importance and escape feeling inferior. These values were molded into our consciousness and continue even into adulthood to control our thoughts, actions, ambitions, and relationships. On the world stage, these erroneous values, now ingrained in our collective consciousness, have created all the chaos that exists on the planet.

The true self-destruction — the true exodus from perfection — begins when we start seeking validation for our position in respect to everything we learned from the people and culture that raised us. It does not matter who we are; eventually, there comes a time when we seek validation in everything we do. Through all the negativity that surrounds us, we find ourselves needing to know that we are acknowledged, respected, and heard, not marginalized or dismissed. When we check ourselves in the mirror each day, we validate that we are ready to face the world by comparing our appearance to the sum of a culturally constructed understanding of what looks "good" or "acceptable." When we ask an opinion of another, we are seeking not their answer but rather their validation. In these ways, we always seek personal validation from someone other than ourselves.

It is no secret why so many of us have become driven by this hollow kind of validation, for receiving acknowledgment and validation from others can be an incredible rush. It feels like genuine respect and always provides a sense of security and belonging. It keeps us from feeling worthless or dismissed as immature or even crazy. In the extreme, needing validation from external sources (culture) often results in fanatical belief systems with the potential to sustain conflict between individuals, groups, religions, and countries.

Now think about the contrary ethos. If we do not...