The Secret of Life

If It Be Thy Will

For my Christmas post, I've decided to carry on the Leonard Cohen theme from last time. By coincidence, this has proved to be a topical decision, as here in the UK, rival cover versions of his most famous song, Hallelujah, are in the top two positions of the Christmas pop charts: not bad for a 74-year old!

This You Tube video features another of my favorite Cohen songs, 'If It Be Thy Will'. I hope you enjoy it. This particular performance is truly magical, I think, an effect which is only very slightly diminished by the presence in the audience of a man with a marrow on his head...

I always find this song tremendously moving - I think it speaks especially powerfully to those of us who have had a long-term illness: "if it be thy will/to make us well"... Yet at the same time I'm aware that the song doesn't entirely fit in with my current beliefs about our relationship to God. It appears to be very much about us bowing down before an all-powerful being, about us surrendering our will to His. It appears to be dualistic - based in the idea that 'God' is over there and 'we' are over here, whereas what I believe, and write about in this blog, is more about Unity, the understanding that 'the Kingdom of God is within you', that All is One.

It is worth mentioning in passing that I don't use the word 'God' all that much here at The Secret Of Life because some people find it off-putting. I tend to use other words that serve just as well, such as 'presence', 'the universe', 'What Is', even 'the quantum field'... But as far as I am concerned, it is all the same thing. Sometimes, words just get in the way...

Which is what Cohen, and writers in general, are about, I suppose: trying to use words in such a way that they don't get in the way. The difficulty of doing this is highlighted in another of Cohen's songs, 'Love Itself', about a peak experience. To me, this is a marvelous attempt to capture the wonder of such a moment. Others, who it seems to me are not really paying attention, have interpreted this song as a lament for lost love. But the lyrics in the song 'love itself was gone' are not, I believe, a lament at all. They are not about loss. They are a way of stressing that 'love itself' has been experienced.

'Love Itself' is a much more recent song than 'If It Be Thy Will' and seems to be much more rooted in 'Oneness', perhaps representing the current state of Cohen's spiritual understanding rather better. The intervening years he spent in a Zen Buddhist monastery may have influenced this! Yet Cohen still includes 'If It Be Thy Will' in his concert repertoire, so he clearly still believes it to be relevant - as indeed do I.

What it is important to understand is that in surrendering our will, we are not surrendering our power - quite the opposite. What we are surrendering is the little me, the ego, the part of ourselves which stands in the way of getting in touch with our true selves, our true power. For the God to which we bow is greater than ourselves yet not separate from ourselves. And if 'this night' is truly to end, we all have to play our part in making it happen.

Thank you for reading The Secret Of Life. I wish you a wonderful Christmas season and a peaceful New Year for us all!

(P.S. If you'd like to hear an audio version of these Christmas greetings - plus greetings from numerous other bloggers, some of them in song! - have a listen to Robin's 'Blogger's Recording Project'.)

Your Perfect Offering

At this time of year, it's easy to find ourselves rushing around in a mad dash to get everything done before Christmas, so maybe it's a good time to consider if we're being too hard on ourselves. Next time you're struggling to complete some task and make it exactly right, it's worth bearing in mind that the world is an imperfect place. It's meant to be that way. Indeed, if everything was perfect, we wouldn't even be here. Science has proved it.

For the earliest example of this inherent imperfection, we need to go back to the Big Bang, when the universe was created. At that time, scientists now understand, equal amounts of matter and something equal and opposite called antimatter were created. Except that as nothing is perfect in the universe, there is a slight flaw in the statement I just made. It should have read: "almost equal amounts of matter and antimatter were created". In actual fact, it now turns out, there was a tiny deviation of one extra particle of matter for every 10 billion particles. So slightly more matter than antimatter was created. This is an example of something called a 'broken symmetry', and the physicist Yoichiro Nambu has recently won a Nobel prize for his work in this field.

This particular broken symmetry is very important, because what happens when matter meets antimatter is that they cancel each other out. First you have stuff, now you don't. Poof! So just after the Big Bang happened, a lot of this canceling out took place. A lot of matter met antimatter and disappeared. Which means that... if there had really been equal amounts of matter and antimatter, everything would have disappeared. It's only because of the broken symmetry, the imperfection, that any matter remains at all. Otherwise, we - and the universe - wouldn't even exist.

But the importance of imperfection doesn't stop there. The human race, and every other race of creatures on this planet - with the possible exception of the amoeba :-) - are also a product of imperfection. Our race hasn't evolved in a smooth, orderly progression, but by throwing up random genetic mutations which occasionally suit the prevailing conditions better than their 'normal' parents and therefore thrive. These successful mutations then pass on their genes to subsequent generations, causing the species to evolve accordingly. People who have physical characteristics which differ from 'the norm' may often suffer ridicule at the hands of their fellows, but the fact is that without such examples of 'imperfection', evolution wouldn't have happened - and we'd still all be one step down from a barnacle.

So maybe we should bear in mind the beautiful imperfections of our world in our daily lives. And maybe we don't need to give ourselves such a hard time by dotting every 'i' and crossing every ''t. Maybe we don't even need to get all our apostrophes in the right place's. We may still want to do our best in life, but that may not require 100% perfection in very task we do.

I recently read an article by Bob Cox which suggested that we should ask ourselves: "have I achieved 90 percent of what I was aiming for with this project?" If the answer is yes, then maybe we'll be wearing ourselves out unnecessarily if we take it the extra ten percent. Maybe our efforts would be better applied elsewhere - or in giving ourselves a well-earned rest.

This idea has to be interpreted with care, of course. I'm not sure how applicable it is to brain surgery, for instance, and if I was working on a murder mystery, I wouldn't want to stop writing when I was 90% of the way through the book. But when I got to the end, I might choose to leave it at two revisions instead of three...

Some might consider the figure of 90% perfection to be too low. They might prefer to go for 95%, or even 98%. But the general principle remains the same. If you're trying to make it perfect, you're probably wasting your time. You're more likely to wear yourself out than achieve perfection - and the chances are that no one else but you will notice the difference anyhow.

So next time you knowingly leave off a task when it's less than perfect, there's no need to give yourself a hard time. Instead, rejoice in the fact that you are perfectly in tune with an imperfect world. As Leonard Cohen puts it in his song: "Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in."