Everything is Perfect Just the Way It Is

This episode was prompted by an email that I received from a listener He wrote:

My question is this: If there is no puppeteer, why do I see circumstances that line up in ways that there is no possibility that they are random? I see this on a regular basis and can give you instance after instance. I used to use this awareness to maintain my dualistic thinking. I believe flow happens in a different way now, but I wondered how you approached perceived providence.

He goes on in this and a follow-up email. He is talking about the sense that at times we sense the pattern that is at work being the scenes. If human history is a cosmic drama, then once in a while we glimpse the script. 

I deal with that a bit in the episode where I talk about the closing vision in Herman Hesse's book Siddhartha. We try to make sense of our visions at such times. We use words like Providence, synchronicity, déjà vu, predestination, kismet, divine coincidence, which the pastor at our church calls God-incidence. 

Transcript

This episode was prompted by an email that I received from a listener He wrote:

My question is this: If there is no puppeteer, why do I see circumstances that line up in ways that there is no possibility that they are random? I see this on a regular basis and can give you instance after instance. I used to use this awareness to maintain my dualistic thinking. I believe flow happens in a different way now, but I wondered how you approached perceived providence.

He goes on in this and a follow-up email. He is talking about the sense that at times we sense the pattern that is at work being the scenes. If human history is a cosmic drama, then once in a while we glimpse the script.

I deal with that a bit in the episode where I talk about the closing vision in Herman Hesse's book Siddhartha. We try to make sense of our visions at such times. We use words like Providence, synchronicity, déjà vu, predestination, kismet, divine coincidence, which the pastor at our church calls God-incidence. 

Déjà vu is the feeling that one has already lived through the present situation before. Psychologists consider this a trick of memory, as if the brain is having a hiccup. But I think it is a taste of the eternal. At all such times we are getting a glimpse behind the curtain. 

It is possible that this is just the brain trying to find patterns where there are none. Like seeing the shapes of animals in the clouds or images of the Virgin Mary in a piece of toast or a knothole.  And that may be part of it. Our brains are pattern seeking instruments. 

I live in a timber frame house. The ceiling of our living room is knotty pine, and I swear those knotholes look like faces. That is because as infants we have built-in mental software to recognize the face of our parents. So there is a psychological element behind these phenomena. But there is more going on here than a psychological blip. 

Physicists tell us that time is an illusion. So is space. The physical universe as we perceive it is the creation of the mind. It is a product of five senses and a brain that is trying to make sense of all the sensory input. 

At the same time human senses and nervous system are products of the universe. Humans are an expression of the universe as well as the universe being an expression of us. The two create each other. The universe creates us and we create the universe. Which came first? The chicken or the egg? 

The nondual universe is experienced as duality by humans. We see the world made up of billions of separate little objects, of which we are one of those separate objects. So we feel separate; that is the problem. But that is our brain. We have divided up the universe into little parts in order to try to make sense of it. Then we mistake our mental divisions for the nature of reality. But it is not.

Reality is nondual. In reality there is no time or space. Albert Einstein wrote in 1955 "the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion." Einstein's view was that time is a mental framework used to order events, but in fact all moments exist simultaneously but are ordered by us to create the illusion of a linear experience. 

John Archibald Wheeler, one of the great physicists of the twentieth century, summed it up this way in a scientific paper: “Time is nature’s way to keep everything from happening all at once.” In a footnote, Wheeler writes that he discovered this quote among graffiti in the men’s room at the Pecan Street Café in Austin, Texas. So I guess wisdom – the words of the prophets - are “written on the subway walls” as Simon and Garfunkel sang. 

Most physicists today agree with Einstein that time’s passage is an illusion. Reality is timeless. Which means it is also spaceless, since time and space are two sides of the same dualistic coin called space-time or time-space. In reality everything is here now. “Be Here Now” as Ram Dass said in his famous book. 

These experiences that we have labeled as providence, synchronicity, déjà vu, divine coincidence, God-incidence are glimpses of nondual reality. Our brains try to make sense of the experiences by attributing them to divine messages or prophecy or destiny or fate. But what they actually are is a glimpse of the whole.  Everything that has ever happened and ever will happen is actually happening here now. That  is what déjà vu is. That is what uncanny coincidences are. That is what prophecy is. Prophets see the Eternal Now and people think they are predicting the future. In actuality they are seeing the Now. 

Everything is here now. Dualistically that sounds like fate and destination.  Like everything is determined. That is true when looking at it dualistically. Looking at it from a theistic perspective it looks like God is working all things together for good. And that brings comfort.  

When seeing it from a nondual perspective everything is perfect just the way it is. I am not saying there is no evil and suffering and right and wrong in this dualistic world. There is. But it all fits into a bigger nondual reality that transcends all such dualities. Nondual reality is whole and complete. That is what the biblical words for perfect mean. And in this wholeness and completeness is perfect peace. Shalom. This is the peace that transcends human understanding. 

It is the peace that we an know in the midst of dualistic living. That doesn’t mean we do not care what happens or do not hurt. We hurt. I have been having dental pain recently. If it persists I will have to go to the dentist to stop the pain. We have a close friend who is dying of ovarian cancer. She is in pain all the time. We hurt with her. She was just sharing her bucket list with us the other day and we will try to make those happen. Her husband who is also a good friend is hurting. We hurt with those who hurt. There is emotional and physical pain in this dualistic world.

But it is all parts of a bigger whole. That whole is what I call God. That whole is what I call perfect. That whole is what I call good with a capital G, which is bigger than the good with the lower case c which is a dualistic good that is the opposite of evil. Good with a capital G includes good and evil. All things work together for that bigger Good, which is divine. Looking beyond time everything is perfect just the way it is. 

That is why I am not bent out of shape by American politics, as I have been writing in my blog. The political right and left both say that the sky is falling, and our world is coming to an end. They predict an apocalyptic dystopia if the other side wins the White House or Congress. It can seem that way if one sees things only from within time and space. But beyond time and space, then everything is perfect just the way it is. To think it is not perfect is the cause of all suffering.