Knockin' on Heaven's Door

KNOCKIN’ ON HEAVEN’S DOOR

To be all things, God also has to be this thing that is me. Tat tvam asi. This is that.

God is perfect. Creation is imperfect. God is actual. Creation is potential. The potential does not precede the actual. On the contrary. The actual encompasses the potential. (See Aristotle.) Must not perfection, then, encompass imperfection? 

It is a paradox. If perfection is a lack of imperfection, then God lacks something that Man has. Then Man knows something that God can never know. But that cannot be. Perfection lacks nothing. To be perfect, God must also encompass imperfection in all its myriad forms: 

Time and space.
Growth and decay.
The noblest of men
and the basest of men.
This suffering that I suffer
and that suffering that you suffer.
This moment-by-moment
experience of existence
that I call “I.” This “I”
that is a verb,
not a noun.

Potential is imperfect because it is change. It is time – movement from one state of being to another state of being, each state of being incomplete, a fraction of the whole. 

If I am an experience of God, this unique imperfection, this piece of the whole, this experience of change and time, isolated from the whole, fractured from eternity, if I am this, why do I still ask why? Why do I wish for things to be other than they are?

I see Vishnu dreaming the world and all its creatures into existence in less than a wink of Brahma’s eye. The mystic perhaps is one who becomes lucid in the dream and sees that he is, not just the dream, not even just the dreamer and the dream (for Atman is Brahman), but the dreaming too! 

The dreamer, the dream, and the dreaming.
The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva.
The dreamer dreaming the dream.
Tat tvam asi. Thou art that.