Perfection

You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect (ESV) – Jesus of Nazareth

You are complete, whole and lacking nothing as the source of all things which is complete, whole and lacking nothing – Flip Side Translation

What you are is not just your story.  You are the source of your story.  You are the consciousness that is aware of your story.  Jesus would say you are spirit and flesh, source and manifestation.  You are already complete exactly as you are including everything you think you are not…

The ego is a mechanism to get what you think you need.  The ego is a survival tool.  Your brain is a survival tool.  Your story, your separatist identity is a product of ego and mind that perceives you as something separate from everything else.  But if you look closely you will see something quite profound.  Your story as Jenny or Jerry, Sally or Sam, Mary or Michael does not exist without everything else.  Your identity as a person is nothing apart from everything else.  Mary is a story you tell yourself based on the interaction of your form with everything else.  The sun shines, your body senses it and a relationship is formed that becomes your perceived identity.  Without the sun there is no Mary.

If you take this reasoning to the farthest reaches of the universe, you are the universe.  Your form identity is the unique relationship of your form (called Mary) with the universe or all that there is.  Your body needs stuff to survive.  This stuff is perceived as something else based on the relational reality that your brain perceives.  An apple is food and you like apples because they bring you pleasure so you eat an apple to have pleasure and subsequently food that keeps you alive.  When you eat the apple, the apple becomes your body.  Think about it.  The apple was an apple but now it is you or what you perceive as you.  The story of you isn’t a separate you but the totality of the relationship of your bodily form and the all of everything else.

What you are, really are down deep is the one that is aware of these relationships.  This formless you is the observer of the story that you tell yourself is you.  This formless one is the awareness that has no boundaries, is timeless, is genderless.  It is the eternal consciousness that manifests as the bodily you.  It has no desire.  It is complete.  It isn’t an  IT at all but the awareness in which all thingness exists.

Meditation is popular as a method for relaxation, for health, for a sense of wholeness and has historically been a path to enlightenment.  Enlightenment is waking up to what you are beyond the limits of what your mind has been telling you as a product of egoic interactions with all things.  Realization of what you are is when you see the source of your story, the field in which all this happens.

God or Brahma or consciousness or whatever your brain wants to call “it” is the void of potential, the stillness of motion, the everything that is and is not.  God is rest and when she moves, what we experience exists.  Out of NO thing comes thingness when NO thing is expressed.  Knowing our true self or the divine that is beyond, before and inclusive of the “self” is when all comes to rest.  The sages, gurus, avatars, mystics and even “regular” people have known this “secret” since the beginning of time.  Jesus knew this well.  He would “pray” often, coming to rest to know himself as the divine self.  When we come to rest, we know the Brahma that we are.  In the divine, resting state we are complete, whole and lacking nothing.  Our story, our thoughts, our ego, our perceived lacks, our desires, our motivations, our exclusion, all thingness that appears as separateness is observed.  In awareness we see all that there is as complete, whole and lacking nothing.  We are perfect.

The word translated as perfect in the opening quote actually should be translated as complete.  This is the key to understanding what Jesus was telling his followers.  He begins the dialogue by telling us to love our neighbor and so on.  Love or the total acceptance of all things is the key to relaxing our egoic stronghold on our personal and self-centered perceived self.  We are softened.  We become more transparent.  We come to rest.  We are meditating as the awareness that is aware of it all.  Jesus knew we struggle with identity and the more rigid we are the less we are awareness.  He was telling us a secret about existence.  It isn’t a secret because it is being withheld.  It is a secret because we can’t see it when we are only an ego, only our story, only our rigid perceived self.

So we should be perfect as our father is perfect.  The source of our personal story is the consciousness in which the story takes place.  We are that source and we already know that when we let go of our identity as a separate self.

If you want to read more about another way to interpret the words of Jesus, check out the Flip Side.