Dirty Enlightenment: The Inherent Perfection of Imperfection

by Peter Brown

We may have leaped to conclusions at some point, that “Oh, I’m a human being living in a material world, and there're various things I need to do if I want to achieve happiness” and so on, but we can back up from that. We can say “Ok, I jumped to that conclusion at one point in my life. But is it REALLY true? Let me reexamine the evidence. The evidence is all still here; the initial conditions from which I originally drew those conclusions, consciousness, is still here. The body is still appearing, all these things are still here. Let me reexamine that, and see if there are any clearer ways I can piece all this evidence together, and maybe arrive at a more accurate picture of what’s going on; I don’t necessarily have to be stuck with my old unexamined conclusions, just because I’ve been living with them for all these years.” And we may find that some of our root assumptions that have gone into building our stories about what our situation is, are erroneous or arbitrary, and just won’t hold water as certainties. There might be OTHER possible interpretations that bear looking into. That’s the point - to investigate for yourself. The point is for us to not just take things for granted, because we may have been sold a bill of goods; by our own ignorance, as well as by the ignorance of those around us; by interpreting accidental events in our lives as if they meant something, when they may not have in the sense we have taken them to.