The mystery is this: the world is perfect, already and always. In the deepest sense, at the level of religious reality, the reality through which all others pass through, everything is, currently, perfect; everything, all the pain, suffering, and horror…Engels’ makes a similar statement when he says that in the last analysis, even if we can never arrive there, everything is economic, determined by class relations, or if you prefer, in the deepest sense everything is predetermined, by God or fate or geography or causality or necessary illusion—whatever.
Nevertheless, at present, perfection is hidden or fails to be linked or channeled together, and as such, all the transcendent acts of human kindness (or beauty or truth or humanity—) fall dead into earth or lay silent behind a veil…as opposed to flowing ever more brightly together, the not-of-this-world that could be, the mysterious, hidden, kingdom of heaven in your hearts
And if we are to take the shattering of the vessels at its word, how are we to heal the world and heal God? Both need healing and the processes are inseparable! The challenge, as put forth by Jesus is not to appear generous but to be generous, or in middle school talk, not to appear cool but to be cool, not to seem to be changing the world but, really, to be doing it. And so we get the confusion of another world, or of heaven, but as Jesus says, God is the God of the living!
And so we must then go beyond Christian anti-worldism and Buddhist escape to what one could call a world of bodhisattvas, but human ones, human ones in a world lost of the shall-not-morality, and hence of death, (if not of guilt and repair) even what one might call egotistical humans, if by that we mean the seriousness of childhood, and the joy, of living the present as time being spent, history being made.
This presentness, this history making living, this living not coping, this traction is the not-of-this-world that makes real the mystery and is the living out of the perfection that always, already is, the deepest meaning of existence itself…to exist/existing/ex-istence
Of course, the living out of this is not the elimination of self-alienation but the reification, the objective creation of that world, of a new commons, of a ‘non-representational’ public sphere (a public one!) a hope, a cast, a global societal transformation…
This is from the tradition of Jewish mysticism, Kabbalah. As it has been explained to me, after God cleared some space from himself to create the world, he created vessels, matter, and then proceeded to fill them with himself…but this was too much for the vessels and they shattered, falling apart and trapping inside them pieces of God. And this is the world, the destruction of God’s creation through exposure to perfection, yet imbued with and trapping perfection inside it. Our task within this framework then, along with the Holocaust insight that when we suffer God too suffers, is to heal the world, and in doing so to heal God and in making the world complete, complete God, as well. In realizing perfection at the level of world, we realize perfection at the level of God.
See Mark 12:27 (also, Matthew 22:23)
These are those who are capable of reaching nirvana, but, unlike Buddhas who leave the world, they hold on to one desire so as to constantly be reincarnated back, the one desire being the enlightenment of all sentient beings…
That is, the previous claim—“I make history” or “we make history”—is inherently spectacular, based in representation, of the appearing to be generous; what is crucial is to make good that claim at the level of life itself, everyday life.
