Dirty Enlightenment: The Inherent Perfection of Imperfection

by Peter Brown

Because the one thing leads to and includes all the other things ultimately. So fighting disease ultimately perpetuates disease as well as healing disease. They’re each part of the system that makes disease, and part of that same system that heals disease. Life and death are in the same inextricable relationship. So why bother to single them out? I mean, part of the problem is semantic; the way we use language, we have all these separate words, so we think there must be separate things. We have disease, we have health, we have war, we have peace; we have success, we have failure. And the semantic logic implies that if we have all these separate words, there must be actual separate conditions that they indicate, right? So we come to think we live in a world that’s sliced and diced into all these separate conditions, objects, and actions; but the reality of our situation isn’t actually LIKE that if you look closely. I think you’ll find that reality is an inclusive flow that includes all of its various designatable phases and states necessarily. So the fact that there're all these separate words doesn’t necessarily mean that there're separate, discrete things. There’s only one thing; there’s only the flow of being. There’s only the Tao. You know, whatever you want to call it.