(no subject)
If I had to sum up life on Earth in one word, I'd say "balance."
I would go with "perfect," except that people tend to think the wrong thing when we use that word. When people hear "perfect," they think of Utopia, of everyone being happy and living together and smiling in some pristine place where no one is poor and nothing is dirty or wrong.
In other words, impossibility.
But that's not what perfect means to me. Perfect is a concept that is completely beyond any of us, myself included. But perfect is precisely what all of this is. Perfect is everything. Perfect is balance itself, the act of things balancing other things. Newton's third law. Evolution. Chemical equations. We live in a perfect world. I don't mean any of this Candide "best of all possible worlds" horseshit, either. We live in the only possible world in which everything that has ever happened has happened just this way. In any other world, on any other wavelength, something would be different. But each one of those worlds is perfect and complete unto itself, just like ours.
Perhaps you're still confused. Maybe you're thinking something like "Why don't you ask a child starving to death in Africa if his world is perfect?" I'm not naive enough to tell you that, to that child, life is perfect. Because it isn't. It isn't perfect for me, you, or anyone else. In a living world, life can't be perfect to everyone. It's not a utopia, it's not a shiny, crime free, anti-bacterial sterilized world. THAT idea of perfect is stagnant. That perfect is dead.
(As a brief aside, this is why neither "conservatives" nor "progressives" have it right. Conservatives imagine that there was once a better, more nearly perfect world and if we hold onto as many things from the past as we can, we can get back to that better place. Progressives think that we have yet to reach a nearly-perfect state of being, but that there are things we can do to change the world and, one day, reach this perfect future. Both are really reaching towards stagnation, and isn't it just wonderful how well they balance each other out? )
We live in a living world, an extraordinary living ecosystem where every thing influences every other thing, from the tiniest sub-atomic particle, to the largest living creature, to the greatest forces in the universe. Where every event is both the cause AND the effect of every other event. We exist as part of a system that is built to seek balance. A system that is constantly adding or taking away weight from each side, overbalancing, counterbalancing, evening out and un-evening again. This system is perfect simply because only through CONSTANTLY changing, CONSTANTLY shifting and balancing, can things continue to grow, thrive, and exist.
Reaching a TRUE balance would signify an end to change, a point rather than a spectrum, a flat-lining, dead world. And, indeed, reaching such a point is completely impossible because it is innate to us and to every single thing around us to compete, to shift, to succumb to or overcome pressure. The real causes and effects are so far buried beneath other causes and effects, so far outside of our realm of cognizance, that we could never put a stop to them. Nothing in nature could.
This is why Utopia would not be perfection, why a "perfect" life for every single individual being would, in fact, be the furthest thing from perfection. In order for there to be good, there has to be bad. I mean this on a greater level than the old axiom that states "in order to appreciate the good, you have to experience the bad." Appreciation is irrelevant. In order for "good" as a concept to exist, there must be a concept that is "not good" or "bad." In order for there to be such a thing as "healthy," there needs to be such a thing as "sick." In more practical terms, if something must eat, then something must be eaten. If energy must be gained for one, it must be taken away from another. In any case, these words are human words, these limits human limits. This concept goes beyond the human, and, as previously stated, beyond everything we can conceive. It is an elusive topic, mainly because we lack the words to speak of it and because what little of it we can grasp is only a fraction of the whole.
The nearest approximation would be another cliche: the idea that we're all parts of a great machine, moving and performing roles that are necessary, whether they are pleasant or not. In the past, humans have conveyed this sort of thinking with a religious theme. "We are all part of God's divine plan," we've been told. "The Lord works in mysterious ways," and "everything happens for a reason." Out of these, only the last is true. Everything happens for a reason, indeed, but not the reason of any divine being or great human-like figure pointing his finger and making things so. Everything happens simply because it all happens. It happens because a long time ago, a thing occurred and set everything into motion. Approached linearly (and to the greatest extent that humans, one flawed part of the perfect machine, can see), this event would seem to be the big bang, the explosion that sent matter hurtling all throughout the universe and literally made everything, all the matter and all the rules by which it plays. Naturally, there would have had to have been SOMETHING before the big bang, some rules to cause it, some matter to feed it. This would cause a paradox if we take the big bang as a starting point, if we accept the limited human concepts of before and after, which is why this cannot be viewed linearly. Time is probably not linear, but cyclical or at least unfixed. This was not the first big bang, nor will it be the last.
In a way, the big bang (and the cycle surrounding it) is EVERYTHING, is balance, is perfection itself. It is the set of reasons why everything else happens. Our existence is but the playing out of that song, the myriad effects of that one cause, the branches of causality extended into bony fingers stretching out until the cycle inevitably begins again. We are, all of us, but the fragments of undertones of ghosted notes on one harmonic line in the Great Song of Everything. We cannot see the completeness of it all, any more than a single steel molecule can see a whole skyscraper, because we are, in the end, just another part of it. As are all the things we think or do, all of our wants and needs, all of what makes us what we are. All of these things are an action, awaiting an equal but opposite reaction. An adaptation which will be countered and readapted and re-countered again and again infinite times as the balance shifts and waggles about its central point.
In this way, we see how everything truly needs its opposite, indeed, IS its opposite. The constant instability of everything IS stability, in the sense of the stability of this "big bang cycle." This constant imbalance IS balanced. The infinity of the galaxy IS finite in its containment within this cycle. And, most likely, our infinite/finite cycle is just a piece of another larger cycle, also infinitely finite. It's all so great and impressive that we will never approach it, never understand it on greater terms than these: In order for the WHOLE to be perfect, each part must be IMPERFECT, or the cycle collapses into impossibility. This is Life, the Universe, and Everything; this is our fundamentally perfect world.
This, in summary
I would go with "perfect," except that people tend to think the wrong thing when we use that word. When people hear "perfect," they think of Utopia, of everyone being happy and living together and smiling in some pristine place where no one is poor and nothing is dirty or wrong.
In other words, impossibility.
But that's not what perfect means to me. Perfect is a concept that is completely beyond any of us, myself included. But perfect is precisely what all of this is. Perfect is everything. Perfect is balance itself, the act of things balancing other things. Newton's third law. Evolution. Chemical equations. We live in a perfect world. I don't mean any of this Candide "best of all possible worlds" horseshit, either. We live in the only possible world in which everything that has ever happened has happened just this way. In any other world, on any other wavelength, something would be different. But each one of those worlds is perfect and complete unto itself, just like ours.
Perhaps you're still confused. Maybe you're thinking something like "Why don't you ask a child starving to death in Africa if his world is perfect?" I'm not naive enough to tell you that, to that child, life is perfect. Because it isn't. It isn't perfect for me, you, or anyone else. In a living world, life can't be perfect to everyone. It's not a utopia, it's not a shiny, crime free, anti-bacterial sterilized world. THAT idea of perfect is stagnant. That perfect is dead.
(As a brief aside, this is why neither "conservatives" nor "progressives" have it right. Conservatives imagine that there was once a better, more nearly perfect world and if we hold onto as many things from the past as we can, we can get back to that better place. Progressives think that we have yet to reach a nearly-perfect state of being, but that there are things we can do to change the world and, one day, reach this perfect future. Both are really reaching towards stagnation, and isn't it just wonderful how well they balance each other out? )
We live in a living world, an extraordinary living ecosystem where every thing influences every other thing, from the tiniest sub-atomic particle, to the largest living creature, to the greatest forces in the universe. Where every event is both the cause AND the effect of every other event. We exist as part of a system that is built to seek balance. A system that is constantly adding or taking away weight from each side, overbalancing, counterbalancing, evening out and un-evening again. This system is perfect simply because only through CONSTANTLY changing, CONSTANTLY shifting and balancing, can things continue to grow, thrive, and exist.
Reaching a TRUE balance would signify an end to change, a point rather than a spectrum, a flat-lining, dead world. And, indeed, reaching such a point is completely impossible because it is innate to us and to every single thing around us to compete, to shift, to succumb to or overcome pressure. The real causes and effects are so far buried beneath other causes and effects, so far outside of our realm of cognizance, that we could never put a stop to them. Nothing in nature could.
This is why Utopia would not be perfection, why a "perfect" life for every single individual being would, in fact, be the furthest thing from perfection. In order for there to be good, there has to be bad. I mean this on a greater level than the old axiom that states "in order to appreciate the good, you have to experience the bad." Appreciation is irrelevant. In order for "good" as a concept to exist, there must be a concept that is "not good" or "bad." In order for there to be such a thing as "healthy," there needs to be such a thing as "sick." In more practical terms, if something must eat, then something must be eaten. If energy must be gained for one, it must be taken away from another. In any case, these words are human words, these limits human limits. This concept goes beyond the human, and, as previously stated, beyond everything we can conceive. It is an elusive topic, mainly because we lack the words to speak of it and because what little of it we can grasp is only a fraction of the whole.
The nearest approximation would be another cliche: the idea that we're all parts of a great machine, moving and performing roles that are necessary, whether they are pleasant or not. In the past, humans have conveyed this sort of thinking with a religious theme. "We are all part of God's divine plan," we've been told. "The Lord works in mysterious ways," and "everything happens for a reason." Out of these, only the last is true. Everything happens for a reason, indeed, but not the reason of any divine being or great human-like figure pointing his finger and making things so. Everything happens simply because it all happens. It happens because a long time ago, a thing occurred and set everything into motion. Approached linearly (and to the greatest extent that humans, one flawed part of the perfect machine, can see), this event would seem to be the big bang, the explosion that sent matter hurtling all throughout the universe and literally made everything, all the matter and all the rules by which it plays. Naturally, there would have had to have been SOMETHING before the big bang, some rules to cause it, some matter to feed it. This would cause a paradox if we take the big bang as a starting point, if we accept the limited human concepts of before and after, which is why this cannot be viewed linearly. Time is probably not linear, but cyclical or at least unfixed. This was not the first big bang, nor will it be the last.
In a way, the big bang (and the cycle surrounding it) is EVERYTHING, is balance, is perfection itself. It is the set of reasons why everything else happens. Our existence is but the playing out of that song, the myriad effects of that one cause, the branches of causality extended into bony fingers stretching out until the cycle inevitably begins again. We are, all of us, but the fragments of undertones of ghosted notes on one harmonic line in the Great Song of Everything. We cannot see the completeness of it all, any more than a single steel molecule can see a whole skyscraper, because we are, in the end, just another part of it. As are all the things we think or do, all of our wants and needs, all of what makes us what we are. All of these things are an action, awaiting an equal but opposite reaction. An adaptation which will be countered and readapted and re-countered again and again infinite times as the balance shifts and waggles about its central point.
In this way, we see how everything truly needs its opposite, indeed, IS its opposite. The constant instability of everything IS stability, in the sense of the stability of this "big bang cycle." This constant imbalance IS balanced. The infinity of the galaxy IS finite in its containment within this cycle. And, most likely, our infinite/finite cycle is just a piece of another larger cycle, also infinitely finite. It's all so great and impressive that we will never approach it, never understand it on greater terms than these: In order for the WHOLE to be perfect, each part must be IMPERFECT, or the cycle collapses into impossibility. This is Life, the Universe, and Everything; this is our fundamentally perfect world.
This, in summary