Scale

            Vatican mural by Raphael, Lady Justice, 1512

I decided to weigh my imperfections in a scale against any faint perfection I might find in my soul, expecting my sins to outweigh my goodness substantially.

So I set on one side all that is imperfect in me, which I soon found to be everything that has form. For all forms shift and perish. My body and its deeds, every cell and molecule down to the least photon of light is insubstantial, impermanent, and therefore tainted with mutability.

Then, determined to set on the other tray what little perfection I could find, I looked into myself. And I beheld nothing perfect. Yet this perfect no-thing was everywhere!

Perfection, I saw, must be unchangeable, motionless, unbounded Being. Only vast emptiness is perfect: only the void, the vacuum of space. Yet quantum physics shows us that this vacuum is the womb of every form. All creatures are unbalanced equations that decline and fall from the null set of pure mathematical symmetry, each composed of vibrant abstract probability-waves, desperately seeking to re-balance themselves into that perfect zero...

I beheld the unfallen diamond-hearted emptiness of this perfect zero filled with galaxies, yet pervading every cell and each particle of my body. For the space that outdistances the stars is the same space stretched out between each atom, yes, between the electrons in the atom, between the shimmering quarks inside a proton!

And I saw, at the very source of my seeing, a Void awake with Self-delight: the boundless Being of my own pure consciousness. I understood, beyond knowledge, that this alone is perfect.

Then I turned to my imperfections, that riot of changeable forms and deeds, and I condensed them into a thimbleful of stuff. But what stuff? I condensed these forms even further into a mote of dust. But what was the dust mote made of? Further I distilled it down, until my imperfections occupied only a dimensionless point, a bindu, אין סוף, utterly weightless!*

I compared this infinitesimal no-thing on one side of the scale to the infinite perfection of empty space on the other, and I perceived that they were equally weightless, and in fact identical. 

Imperfection is less than a pinprick in the fabric of the universe. Perfection is omnipresent and eternal. Imperfection dances as a mirage of mere form in the stillness of perfection, without conflict or difference. 

Therefore, a pure blue sky pervades the fabric of my flesh, down to the least photon. I am pure. I am stainless. I am eternal. I can find no imperfection. And if this is true for a hopeless sinner like me, dear friend, how much more true is it of Thee?
______
* אין סוף: "ain soph," in Hebrew Kabbala, the point of infinite No-thing from which  יהוה generates the light of the universe.

* Bindu: In Sanskrit, the dimensionless and silent point from which Om emerges to create the universe as a stream of sound.