The desire to be perfect produces an experience of our selves over and over again of being full of defects. We are all fallible as individuals. Our knowledge is limited as well as our power. Yet we want to be perfectly good looking, intelligent, successful, competent, healthy, and many other impossible things. Perfection as an individual is a notion not a reality. It is impossible. Does that mean we won’t then strive for this God like perfection? Of course not. Many of us feel driven to attain perfection even though it brings us much pain and suffering. However a sense of being defective produces a desire in us to be free of defects. The fact that we fail at times or make mistakes is a fact that has to be accepted because such things are going to happen to us for the rest of our life. However if we are involved in the quest for perfection, when we fail at things that we want to succeed at, we don’t just acknowledge the fact that we failed. We AUTOMATICALLY form a self-evaluation of ourselves as a self-defective person BECAUSE of the failure and this turns into an experience of ourselves as a person who is defective. This is a very uncomfortable form of self-dissatisfaction. This in turn makes us in turn strongly desire to be perfect to free us of this experience. So we are back to square one of striving to BE AN IDEA which we think will make us safe from the experience of imperfection. This perfection/imperfection cycle just keeps on going on round and round and is productive of lots of self-rejection and more useless efforts to ward of the self-criticism by trying to be perfect. We think we know ourselves. However if the self we take ourselves to be can be described we can be sure that this notion or self-description is not true. This is because if we are looking at such a description we can’t BE what we are looking at. This is a fundamental Vedantic principle. Is it not interesting when we feel like a person full of defects or not good enough, we have BECOME an idea that we can describe that we take this idea to be ourselves. If I quack all day it does not turn me into a duck. If I do a stupid thing it does not make me stupid. This stupid action can’t determine my nature. Even though we can accept this intellectually this intellectual acceptance does not shift the emotional feeling that we are stupid, defective or not good enough. When we feel this way it is AS THOUGH we are these ideas. via:Bede Clifford
I believe I'm perfect because this is the way God made me. And I'm thankful for this life and experience of life.
