all is perfectiOn, perfectiOn is all

image: https://www.quantamagazine.org/to-avoid-the-multiverse-physicists-propose-a-symmetry-of-scales-20140818/

my words:

you, reader, are creating the entirety

of your experience from a spirit of

unlimited knowledge, unlimited power, & unlimited love;

if you granted yourself access

to this omniscent, omnipotent, omniloving state,

you'd realize life's already exactly what you want,

including your disbelief & disgust at the notion

that this life, with all its pain & messiness, is ideal -

humbling ourselves to this truth & mystery

brings peace & freedom; begrudging life's particulars

is the root of all suffering, & is perfection;

choosing the path of peace & freedom

is the mercy we creators grant ourselves

in the unfolding maturity of our spirits

as we allow lOve, the higher power,

to alchemize our bitterness into gratitude

in the steady emergence of time, for while

our suffering is escapable, our perfection is not

"You are already perfect. You are already a buddha. In fact, there’s no difference between your true nature, right now as you sit reading this, and the true nature of the buddha, or any enlightened being for that matter.

That’s the view of Dzogchen, a Tibetan word that means 'Great Perfection.' Dzogchen is treasured above all other practices in the Nyingma school of Vajrayana Buddhism because it helps us connect directly with our own enlightened nature.

Your essence, and the essence of every living creature, is pure, whole, and complete. There’s nothing missing, and that’s why we call it the Great Perfection. YOU are the Great Perfection. Don’t forget that. Dzogchen is talking about you. This Great Perfection is you right now, right here in this moment, not some fully developed you after you do a lot more meditation."

https://www.lionsroar.com/you-are-the-great-perfection/

"I tried and tried to meditate my way to freedom. Meditation became my weapon in my battle against my own mind. But it didn’t work. There were times when my mind was calm and the panic seemed to disappear, but then it would re-emerge with even more force, and any small amount of confidence I’d developed would vanish like mist.

The big breakthrough came when I finally gave up. I had been fighting my emotions for so long, with so little success, that I finally let myself entertain a new possibility: maybe I couldn’t be fixed—not because I was fundamentally flawed, but because I wasn’t broken.

So I stopped playing the old game, and started a new one. Instead of fighting my panic and pushing away my fearful thoughts and anxious expectations, I let them in. I didn’t focus on them, but I didn’t ignore them. I dropped all the 'doing' and finally gave myself permission to simply 'be.'

It was so simple and ordinary, but it was a radical shift: I was no longer trying to win the old game.

In this moment of letting go, I started to see that I’d completely missed the point of meditation. In my endless quest to improve upon the present moment, I was blinding myself to what was already there, and always is. Buddhanature. Our inherent perfection. Our true nature."

https://www.lionsroar.com/buddhanature-youre-perfect-as-you-are/

"We tend to get trapped in the idea of a static perfection that leads to rigid perfectionism. Abstract speculation can create an image of God that is foreign to the human heart. . . [A God that does not contain our shadows.] Then we try to live up to the standards of a God that is purely light, and we can’t handle the darkness within us. And because we can’t handle it, we suppress it. But the more we suppress it, the more it leads its own life, because it’s not integrated. Before we know it, we are in serious trouble.

You can get out of that trap if you come back to the core of the Christian tradition, to the real message of Jesus. You find him, for instance, saying, 'Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect' [Matthew 5:48]. Yet he makes it clear that this is not the perfection of suppressing the darkness, but the perfection of integrated wholeness. [Richard: Emphasis mine.] That’s the way Matthew puts it in the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus talks of our Father in heaven who lets the sun shine on the good and the bad, and lets the rain fall on the just and the unjust alike [see Matthew 5:45]. It’s both the rain and the sun, not only the sun. And it’s both the just and the unjust. Jesus stresses the fact that God obviously allows the interplay of shadow and light. God approves of it. If God’s perfection allows for tensions to work themselves out, who are we to insist on a perfection in which all tensions are suppressed?"

Richard Rohr Meditation: The Shadow in Christianity http://email.cac.org/t/d-

242A307D300ACBFC2540EF23F30FEDED

"Ultimately the only sure cure for the Inner Critic is to practice. The Critic relies upon an idea of a self—a small self—that is imperfect and must be fixed. It feeds on comparing, on thoughts of past and future, of mistakes and anxieties. The Inner Critic has no traction in the present moment. When our minds become quiet, when we are resting in the this very moment, there is no past or future, there is no comparing. The small self expands to become a huge field of calm awareness in which sensations, thoughts, and voices come and go. Everything is just as it is, perfect in its own place, interconnected with every other piece of the Whole. Every being also is perfect as it is, including the temporary collection of energy we call our self."

https://www.lionsroar.com/getting-to-know-your-inner-critic/

Time when the Maker’s radiant sight

Made radiant every thing He saw,

And every thing He saw was filled

With perfect joy and life and light.

Wendell Berry, per Richard Rohr Meditation: Genesis: Everything Is Gift

http://email.cac.org/t/d-C2167235FAE667FB2540EF23F30FEDED