How to be perfect.
Non-variability or non-variable ability?
When I was little, I use to lose my mind any time a hair on my head was out of place.
I would ask my mom to just cut off the misbehaving hairs completely, and she would try to explain to me that that’s not how hair works.
One day, concerned with my constant mania, my mom asked sardonically if I’d rather just have a plastic hair helmet, like a Ken doll, than actual hair.
“Is that an option?” I asked excitedly.
This unhealthy obsession with follicular perfection plagued my youth. I can remember writing a journal entry for school centered on my dad taking me to the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, and the entire first page detailed earnestly my frustrations with not being able to get my hair to sit the way I wanted it to that morning. I was eight years old in 1996.
This continued for decades—desperately trying to hold my homemade hair helmet in place with increasingly impregnable gels, pastes and sprays.
The hair styling wasn’t necessarily the problem—it was a metaphor, a microcosm of the misconception I had that, with enough effort, I could control the world, or at least my little corner of it, amidst all the chaos.
But no matter how much extra strength putty and finishing spray I used, there was always a stronger gust of wind.
The problem with perfection is that it means the cessation of evolution. If something is perfect, there’s no more room for it to evolve.
Since learning and evolving are the primary objectives we have here on Earth in these bodies, that necessarily means that perfection and life as we know it are mutually exclusive.
“Perfection is the culmination of evolution, so it cannot be happening at the same time as evolution.”
—Maharishi Vyasanand Sarasvati
This is why perfection simply isn’t found in the relative world.
But while we can’t find perfection, we can still be perfect.
We achieve perfection through perfect balance.
Perfection is the empirical understanding of how to ride a bicycle. We can’t control the wind, or the traffic, or the pedestrians, or the conditions of the road underneath our tires—but with time, we learn to maintain perfect balance in spite of these things.
Non-variability is not found in nature—but non-variable ability can be cultivated in ourselves.
It’s not about fortifying ourselves against change; it’s about learning to embrace the change, in the way a cyclist might lean into the wind.
It can’t be learned in books or on TikTok, because although there’s a science to riding a bike, the physics are so complex it’s almost indescribable—you just have to hop on and figure it out through firsthand experience.
By closing our eyes and stepping beyond thought, we allow the mind and body to accede to a level of rest many times deeper than the deepest phases of sleep, in which deeply held stresses can be released, enabling us to emerge as much more effective versions of ourselves each day.
The less stress we have strapped to our bicycle frame, the easier it is to maneuver and balance it amidst the chaos.
In this way, meditation doesn’t make everything perfect, but it empowers us to achieve perfect balance in spite of that.
Quite simply, it’s easier to wear shoes than to cover the world in leather.
You can’t learn how to step beyond thought from books or TikTok (or meditation apps) either. A proper meditation practice requires personalized instruction from a qualified teacher, which includes a combination of conceptually delineated information and empirical evidence gained from direct experience in practicing it together for a few days and working out the kinks. Just like learning to ride a bike.
And practice makes perfect.
Let’s discuss these and other ideas during Collective Effervescence, our online group meditation series, this Sunday May 26 at 12PM ET. Drop in for meditation only (first 30 min) or stay for discussion + Q&A on this and other life topics from the Vedic perspective. Join the WhatsApp group to receive reminders 24 hours before each session, or use the below links to have all upcoming dates automatically sync to your calendar.
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Music today is The Perfect from Gesaffelstein’s new GAMMA album, which is wholly excellent in every way as it examines the ethics of transhumanism and technology today through a new wave aesthetic reminiscent of early electronica and post-punk. It is as close to perfect as I could imagine him coming with this latest offering, and by the looks of the visual teasers on YouTube, the music videos might rival his iconic Aleph-era works—all of which have been created by Division Paris over the years. If a culmination of evolution in the music video realm ever occurs, Gesaffelstein and Division will be the ones to break the boundary.