The Perfection of this Moment

We can learn to experience the perfection of this moment, right now. 
The perfection of any moment, right now. 

To be able to talk about the perfection of the moment, I obviously need to explain it, because our moments often don’t feel perfect at all.
For example, as I write, I am having some knee pain and so from the point of view of me feeling pain in my knee, this moment is not even close to perfection.
But from a wiser, more enlightened, universal point of view, the knee pain is just part of the perfection of the whole. 
It is like if at a certain point, in a very good movie, the main character has a bad accident. From the point of view of the character, that moment is not perfect at all, but from the point of view of the movie, the moment is as perfect – and as necessary – as every other part of it. 
In the same way, from the point of view of the person wanting to be relieved from his knee pain, this moment is not perfect at all, but if one is able to step out of the little person into the bigger picture of ‘what is’, then the pain in the knee is but an aspect of that perfect whole. 

Of course this does not mean that I have to bear the knee pain without doing anything about it. The perfection of the next moment may be to put on some cream, go to a doctor, do some particular exercises or whatever else that I can do. And doing that will be part of the perfection of that moment. 
Perfection does not mean that I have knee pain and so I need to sit with it for the rest of my life because it is perfect. No! Perfection lies in ‘what is’, and ‘what is’ happens only in the moment, and the moment may mean pain in the knee, or it may mean doing something to get rid of that pain. 

From the point of view of the little person, only getting rid of the pain would mean perfection, and this view, from its view, has value. But the whole point of this note is to help us see that besides the little person’s point of view there is a bigger perspective, a larger, more connected point of view, what the stoics used to call being in harmony with nature and I like to call ‘what is’: exactly what is supposed to be according to the movement of this immense, beautiful, unaccountable whole, this infinite web of causes and effects, so large, so immense, that we cannot talk about causes and effects anymore but is more accurately referred to as ‘the one movement of the whole’. 
And it is this ‘one movement of the whole’ what creates this moment exactly as it is, including the knee pain. Or in another moment may include the solution to the pain…or an increase of it…or anything else…

What is necessary is to have enough space in the mind to be able to see that bigger picture. By space I mean a silent, clear, calm, alert mind, or in what other places I refer to as a sattvic mind.¹ 
Without that space in the mind, all I will see is the little perception of the little person that wants ‘this’, but does not want ‘that’, that wants what is pleasant and rejects what is unpleasant, that wants what it likes and rejects what it does not like. With a busy, worried, agitated mind this is all we can see. And because of this desire for the impossible – for always getting what I want and avoiding what I don’t – all the stress, fear and anxiety – the suffering – that prevails in our society appears in our lives. (Suffering is not in what happens, but in our expectation that only some things should happen, and not others.)

What we need is to have both points of view together at the same time.
Of course the little person does not want the knee pain; of course the little person does not want accidents, old age or death; of course it does not. 
But at the same time, the larger view knows that things are as they are, that things are as they need to be, that the universe is in charge, not the person.²

Yes, there are reasons why ‘what is’ is as it is, but most of the time the reasons are beyond the comprehensions of the human mind. I mean, what do we know about the universe? Even with all the amazing and incredible new discoveries of modern science, or we can even say, precisely because of those, now we know that what we can see and perceive is only 4% of the universe; the other 96% is made of stuff we can’t see, detect or even comprehend. These mysterious ‘substances’³ are now called dark energy and dark matter, but they have had other names throughout history.   

We don’t really know the reasons why anything happens, but at any moment we can come back and feel the perfection of the moment, of this moment right now.
Not perfect because I like it or I don’t like it, but perfect because it is exactly what is supposed to be. 
This perfection may not ever be completely understood or rationalized by the mind, but if that same mind is silent, alert, open and at peace, it can ‘intuitively’ grasp this truth; it can recognize the perfection that expresses itself as this moment right now. 

1. See note A Sattvic Mind in my book About Presence, page 
2. Even if the universe is in charge, the person has the power to try to make things according to its likes. I like this quote very much (this is a modern rendering of it): ‘The person proposes, the Universe disposes.’
3. I put substances in brackets because the reason we think of them as substances is because the 4% we know, we know it as substances. But does that mean that what we don’t know has to be the same as what we know?