There is no perfection in the body

Many seek perfection in some aspect of their personality, whether it be their physical body or their mental capabilities.

From the time we are born, many try to push us to excel. Our parents want us to walk and talk as soon as possible. Our teachers want us to perform well academically. Our schools want us to excel at sports. Our bosses push us to perform better. What all these have in common is that while they purport to want us to be better, what they really want is the kudos for getting us there. Rarely is the real motivation for us to be better for our own sakes, but for the aggrandisement of others in the eyes of their peers or their so-called betters. It forms a cycle of abuse of our capabilities against us.

All these pressures are based on the assumption that we can be pushed to ever-greater limits, and that that is good for us and supposedly makes us better people. It is actually a recipe for making us into manic perfectionists that we can never achieve. We are not built to perform at high levels all the time. The more we try to, the more likely we are to damage ourselves, at which all those who supposedly wished for our betterment will desert us. We have bought into a cycle of stress that we are shamed out of opting out of.

So, what is perfection in the body? Our bodies are adaptable, but also very generic. That means that while we can make ourselves better at some ability, we will never be as good as a machine made for that purpose. We can only exceed our body's capabilities by wielding tools, and we have built such a surfeit of those that we can buy a cheap tool, look at a video of how to use it, and then make something that's passible as being useful, whether we needed to or not. At every point, we seem to be inundated with things to achieve, as if that is all that we are here for.

We can watch videos of monks dragging rocks around by their testicles, as if that is some pinnacle of achievement of their mental prowess over their body. It is an achievement, but really only for those who are in charge of them. Again, people who have control over us pushing us to achieve dubious goals for their own aggrandisement. YouTube is full of some self-promoted achiever imploring us to undertake some dangerous or ridiculous endeavour for a moment of social media uselessness. We are capable of so much of enduring benefit to ourselves and others, yet we succumb to the useless for the transient indulgence of the ignorant. Time to turn off to the world of the unimportant.

The assumption underlying all these manic activities is that we are all meant to achieve something big, even if that is subsumed into the mediocre, at which point we are meant to be comforted by the notion that trying anything is worth the effort. Sometimes we have to try lesser goals so that we get used to the process, but when the end activity is fairly useless and often just a fluke anyway, the whole process is just nonsense.

The bodies of our personality are not all-capable, but seem to have propensities towards being better-suited to some activities than others. If we follow where those take us more than the idiocies of some random YouTube activity, we are likely to be more fulfilled, even if that doesn't bring the adoration that others want us to bring them. We are not here to be fodder for someone else's ambitions, even though those pushing the current socio-political order implores us to believe that for – again – their own self-aggrandisement.

Living for what we are best-suited for, even if it doesn't bring us fame and fortune, it what we are here for. We are living out the wishes of our higher selves as it seeks to build personalities that best represent it. Now, while that seems like just another means of exploiting us, it is a part of us that is setting the agenda, and it is only because we have been distracted from acknowledging it that we seem so separate from it. The more we identify with it, the more we will come to know it as us.

That identification is real, as opposed to the myriad of personas we take on to appease those wanting to exploit us. The more we identify with our higher self, the more we see that it is really us making the decisions and the more those decisions actually help us be and feel better about ourselves and the real and useful accomplishments in our lives. To our higher selves, it is not the peaks that matter but the activities that make up the substantive parts of our lives.

To our personalities, the perfection we really seek is the identification with our higher self. Our personalities will always be made to be whatever is required for learning in a life, so will never be some super-human aggregation of all possibilities, even when the higher self masters the process. Personalities are sufficient for their purpose, using a human form because it has evolved into being the most adaptable. If we get to push it, that may just be part of the process of our learning. Pushing it to breaking point may be undermining what we are meant to be doing with it.

We have a choice in how we live our lives, and we can use that free will to be distracted or do something worthwhile for our higher self. Our choice, our life. Make it work for our future, which also happens to be the future of humanity and the earth.