Waking Up
and a World that Appears to Need Fixing
“Wisdom tells me I am nothing. Love tells me I am everything.
Between the two, my life flows.”
— Nisargadatta Maharaj
The Paradox at the Heart
It really is a wonderful conundrum—the awakening recognition that the Whole arising in each moment is already and inherently perfect... and yet, alongside that, the many questions that arise: How do we square this realisation with our inner moral compass, which recoils at the suffering in the world and impels us to respond?
Is there a resolution—or does the path lie in finding the capacity to live within the tension between these two poles of being? A creative tension that asks not for resolution, but for integration. It becomes the demand to live—and keep living—the deepest truth discovered.
Already Whole, Still Unfolding
The realisation of perfection often arrives with a profound sense of flow. I often return to the image of a flower slowly opening from a tight bud into blossom and then into a seedpod—each stage perfect in itself, and yet each carrying the momentum of becoming. It is not driven or forced, yet it moves.
The universe too is perpetually unfolding. Nothing is static or fixed. Nothing appears pre-ordained or planned—and yet there seems to be a teleological pull toward coherence, a deepening order that arises not through control, but through participation.
Some have spoken to this hidden tendency: Teilhard de Chardin saw a movement toward an Omega Point, where the divine immanent in matter becomes conscious of itself. Whitehead envisioned a world composed not of static things, but of moments of becoming—each a creative act, woven into Being. Non-dual traditions speak of lila, the divine play—where action arises not from lack, but from fullness.
Two Kinds of Time
Once awake, we realise we live in two overlapping dimensions of time.
There is timeless time—Just This, Just Now—where only Wholeness is seen, and everything is as it must be, in the ever and only present moment.
And there is evolutionary time—where we appear to move from fragmentation to integration, from ignorance to wisdom. This is the time of development, of healing, of learning to walk in alignment with what we have glimpsed. Both are real. Only one is ultimate.
So the question remains, almost as a thread woven into one’s inner DNA:
How can a universe be inherently perfect, and yet still be evolving toward something more?
The Limits of the Mind
I’m not sure the mind can fully grasp this paradox. And perhaps it’s not meant to. Still, it’s a fascinating and fruitful inquiry—worth exploring with genuine curiosity, worth entering into for the sake of clarity and deepening.
The Taoist parable comes to mind—the one where each event is met with “that’s good,” “that’s bad,” and the story unfolds to reveal the partiality of all such judgments. What seems unfortunate becomes a blessing; what seems fortunate leads to loss.
The point isn’t that we shouldn’t care—but that the mind can never hold the Whole. It sees from one view at a time, never all views at once.
Indeed, much of the world’s suffering arises from the arbitrary divisions imposed by the human mind—perhaps as a way to avoid the raw demands of a perspective that, in its infinitude, calls us to radically reimagine what it means to be human.
It may fall to some of us to attempt a return to living from the infinity of our being as our primary refuge. Not as escape, but as presence. To keep the link alive—and perhaps, over time, to serve as quiet catalysts for a deeper shift in the human condition.
Becoming as Being
More and more, I find myself surrendering—not in passivity, but in reverent release—to the truth already known. Not just glimpsing it occasionally, but letting it unravel the mind’s grip on explanation.
There’s a recognition here: this apparent duality is not a problem to solve, but the texture of lived experience. Two sides of the one coin. The radiant perfection of the Divine coexisting with the messy, painful, contradictory beauty of human life.
In this light, we can begin to distinguish Being-as-Becoming from human development as a time-bound process:
• Being-as-Becoming is the eternal flow: the divine side of the equation, the ever-renewing now.
• Development is our human participation: waking up to Being, and growing up over time—developing, integrating, responding.
As Ken Wilber suggests, waking up is not the same as growing up. Realisation is not maturity—and certainly not embodied perfection, as some gurus have claimed. This is the ongoing challenge of embodiment: to live the realisation is to become porous, even transparent, to the truth. Not to grasp it, but to be moved by it.
Sacred Participation
To follow our heart’s longing—and to act from it—is to begin embodying what we know to be true as our lived experience in the world. And this, I’ve come to feel, is nearly impossible to do alone.
To share this work with others—to explore and be transformed in the presence of others committed to the same unfolding—may be the next evolutionary gesture. It is a place where autonomy meets belonging. Where eros, the creative intelligence, begins to inform and deepen our understanding.
In such a space, we soften. We become more available to the shared field between us. And that changes us—not always dramatically, but subtly, pervasively. Those changes ripple outward in ways we may never fully see.
Does the World Need Fixing?
So the question returns, in a more contemplative tone now:
Does the world need fixing?
Or is that simply the view of the separate self—wanting to correct what it cannot yet embrace?
Could it be that Being is inherently Becoming… and that our developmental impulse is not a problem to solve, but a sacred participation in the divine unfolding?
Expanded from an email response to Jared
