The Navajo Blanket

Everybody wants to be perfect. We don’t realize the secret. We don’t realize that what they have been seeking is already achieved. The world, in all of its complexity, is totally perfect the way it is. Yes, the world suffers from flaws like hatred, greed, and other things that are totally bad. But the fact that we know the difference between good and bad is good in itself. One cannot know perfection if he does not know imperfection. So we take the bad with the good, cherishing the good and surviving the bad. Because we know while there are terribly unfair things in the world, there are still wonderfully beautiful, awesome things at the same time. Everything, good and bad, fair or unfair, in  in perfect balance. The balance being perfect means that the world is perfect. Perfectly balanced. Siddhartha figures this out towards the end of his life; he learns it from the river. He figures out that for his son to be able to find happiness and enlightenment, he must go through the same trial and error as he did. One cannot know enlightenment if one does not know bewilderment. He realizes that he himself went through the struggles that young Siddhartha will have to go through to get to this point in his life. Everything breaks even, everything comes around eventually, and that is the perfection of the world.

            Siddhartha, on his quest to enlightenment, experiences karma. Karma being the belief that everything comes back around in the end. Good deeds will merit good deeds upon you. The show My Name Is Earl is entirely based off of karma. In the show a redneck wins the lottery, loses the ticket and gets hit by a car. He finds out from Carson daily about karma and he makes a list of all the bad things he did in an effort to gain forgiveness. Siddhartha goes through the process of being an ascetic, and he wasn’t satisfied with it. So he took the opposite route, gambling and living for money. In return, he wasn’t happy with himself, he felt empty, trapped by possessions. “The world had caught him; pleasure, covetousness, idleness, and finally also that vice that he had always despised and scorned as the most foolish- acquisitiveness. Property, possessions, and riches had also finally trapped him.”(Hesse 78-79) He had fallen to materialism and in return he received guilt and unhappiness. He then goes back to the woods, trying to find enlightenment. Where he finds the ferryman, as foreshadowed earlier in the story. “’I did not expect any payment or gift from you. You will give it to me some other time.’ ’do you think so?’...’Certainly, I have learned that from the river too; everything comes back. You too, Samana, will come back’”(Hesse 49). The ferryman, who is already enlightened, knows the effects of karma and that things have their own way of figuring themselves out. So he lets Siddhartha go, knowing that someday he will repay him in some way or another. Karma will solve everything in the end. Because that is how the world works. Although there are unpleasant things or bad occurrences, there is always some way that the situation stabilizes itself.

            The world is visually perfect too, not just in the way that it balances itself out. Sometimes we, as humans, take for-granted what time has done to this planet. Earth is gorgeous, and much of the time, in our efforts to find perfection and achieve perfection ourselves, we forget that perfection is all around us. Years, uncountable, have made the world into the crazy beautiful thing that it is today. Siddhartha has little epiphanies where he feels the intensity of the world around him and how he came to be there and wondering about the things he had done. “He looked up and was surprised to see the trees and the sky above him. He remembered where he was and how he came to be there. He felt a desire to remain there for a long time.”(Hesse 90) He stops and looks around, and when he does, he gets a glimpse of enlightenment. He isn’t quite enlightened yet, but he gets a feeling here and there. He kind of sees that the world, in that second is living, dying, and birthing, all at the same time. Each species functioning entirely off the rest of the ecosystem. The world is one big machine, with each cog in perfect synchronicity. “He saw that the water continually flowed and flowed and yet it was always there; it was always the same and yet every moment it was new. Who could understand, conceive this? He did not understand it” (Hesse 102) No one can explain it, so many things happening at once. It is crazy that the world can function separately but in unison, in total perfection.

            The world has many lessons to teach us. We should learn from it, because after all it has much more experience with life than we do. Some people fight the teachings of nature; they try to tame the world. They think of society as nothing but a tactical game to be played emotionless and without passion. Humans don’t understand  humanity, morality, and the instinctual gut feelings of humans. But no one can truly understand, no one can truly understand why humans like a specific sequence of noises called music. No one can truly understand why we find a picture or a painting beautiful, we only know that they are beautiful. “’I have taken thousands of people across and to all of them my river is nothing but a hindrance on their journey. They have travelled for money and business, to weddings and on pilgrimages; the river has been in their way… However amongst the thousands there have been a few, four or five, to whom the river was not an obstacle’”(Hesse 106) People need to live in the moment rather than planning so much ahead. It is always good to think ahead, but don’t get so caught up in what is going to happen in your life that you don’t see what’s going on around you. Appreciate the world you own rather than waiting on the future. There is no way to make the world better or worse. The best laid plans of mice and men oft go astray, you don’t own the future.

            The world is perfect. It is perfect because it is imperfect. We love it because it appears to us the way it is now, not because it will be perfect later. “The world, Govinda, is not imperfect or slowly evolving along a long path to perfection. No, it is perfect at every moment; every sin already carries grace within it, all small children are potential old men, all sucklings have death within them, all dying people- eternal life”(Hesse 144). There are faults in everything, propriety in everything too, and they balance each other out. This balance is the perfection in the world, and the reason there is happiness.