Chasing perfection

10 paragraphs.

I am reading a very interesting, if also at 541 pages quite long, book called “Reality Transurfing”. I mention it because it may interest some of you. I will do a full post on it eventually. His ideas are not new, but his framing, the lens through which he sees and describes the world, is innovative and in my view useful (and fulfilling, if I might practice his ideas a bit). The following idea is a riff on his ideas:

Is it possible that the most radical and positive change any of us could make is self acceptance in depth? This is yes kind of a truism, but my point is still perhaps new. New to me any way. What I mean is that there is a difference between objectively improving behaviorally—better ethics, perhaps, more work, more meditation etc—and the improving the lens through which we view ourselves.

Until we can accept ourselves we cannot SEE ourselves—feel our selves—and without that knowledge how could any amount of outer change be intelligent, or even truly OURS? The task is not to be a more efficient machine but to BE and to KNOW and to LOVE who you are.

There is no outer perfection in this life. We are all messed up and messy in our own ways. Why deny it? The love of Others and of Life has to begin with love we have within us, that is simply expanding organically.

Actually I will add another thought: the heart can only be free in spaces where it is acceptable to be wrong, to be confused, or to have no explicit goal or intention at all. This both requires and enables healthy self love. The habit of meeting a clear standard daily is in some ways—and perhaps absolutely— soul-numbing, at least if that standard does not come from love.

Another thought—this is iterative as I sit and smoke on Saturday, when I wrote this: if you are not bringing your true self along, every road is a dead end. I know this feeling well. And knowing this, on a deeper level, is paralyzing. If no decision COULD be right, why make any? Its a fair question.

Now this whole “finding your self”, “actualizing your self”, “being your self”, “taking care of yourself” has been the locus of a lot of “self”-absorbed idiocy.

My premise is simple: our deepest need is peace. Tranquility. Everything good starts with that. Our True Self is tranquil.

Logically, finding peace requires less, not more motion. So how COULD you find it out there? Jack Kerouac never did.

The corollary is simple: you are already where you need to be. This is a truism too—in some worlds—but my derivation is my own.