I was lying in bed, thinking about what a bad IV start I am and I wondered, what if I were perfect? Then I thought, how horrible would that be? What a freak of nature would a perfectly perfect person be?
What if there were a perfect doctor? What if every decision he made were right? Then I right away thought, well, that presumes some kind of cosmic "rightness." What if there is none?
What is this perfection we presume? This perfection we imagine? It is not reality. It is not the universe we actually live in. Why is it that we imagine some other universe?
The concept of some kind of cosmic rightness is a very Christian one. The idea of a God who knows exactly what the "right" thing to do is and it is our job to try to act and think and make decisions in as close concordance as possible with the will of this God. That God is our cosmic measuring stick against which we always fall short.
But what if there is no cosmic measuring stick? Instead of saying, "We are not perfect," we should be saying, "This is perfection." However it is that we are is perfection because it is existence. It is extant and it is real.
Why then the ubiquitous dissatisfaction? From whence the sense that we ought to be other than we are? C.S. Lewis used this sense of moral rectitude, the lurking sense of cosmic rightness which we are not, to infer the existence of a God. He thought the difference between what we are and what we thought we ought to be reflected a subconscious knowledge of the existence of God, of moral perfection, of pure Good, of a way before the Fall, as they say. That this sense of lack was placed in us by God.
Why? What the discrepancy? To give us something to ever strive for? To give us a way to develop our consciousnesses? Or, as he posited, to give us a method for developing separate identities, individual consciousnesses.
Let's theorize otherwise. Hypothesize that it is not the Cosmos that want us to be perfect, not God that wants us to be perfect, but we ourselves who want this. It's a sort of selfishness, a sort of solipsism, a sort of projection of our own desires onto the Cosmos. I.e., I want to be pain-free and well-fed, therefore everyone on Earth should be pain-free and well-fed and the fact that they are not means there's something wrong with the world. I want to be healthy and beautiful, therefore everyone should be healthy and beautiful and the fact that they are not means there's something wrong with the world. I think polar bears and rainforests are cool, therefore polar bears and rainforests should exist forever and the fact that they are disappearing means there's something horribly wrong with the world and we have to change it absolutely. I want to live forever and never change form and never not exist, therefore everyone should live as long as possible and we should do everything in our power to keep people living and not ever make death come sooner or surrender in any way to the impending inevitability of death. We must struggle against it always.
