In order to feel full on the inside and live your visible life as effectively as possible, every one of us has to come to grips with who we are. Most people aren’t clamoring to be first in the self-knowledge checkout line. We’re afraid of what we might find out and prefer to remain giddily deluded. Throughout the ages, however, there have been men and women who, in the course of going about their business, bumped smack into self-knowledge (and into quite a few insights about life in general while they were at it). People who have received direct knowledge in this way we call mystics.

One definition of the word mystic is somebody who’s on the woo-woo fringe—you know, “For 20 bucks I’ll tell your fortune and for 20,000 I’ll cure your diseases.” That’s not a mystic; that’s a con artist. Genuine mystics are individuals who have had an experience of the truth. They enter into a state of being in which all they had held as true steps aside long enough for them to come to another knowing, more real than the book in your hand and your ability to read it.

Some of these people you’ve heard of: Jakob Boehme. the Baal Shem Tov, Catherine of Siena. Others have written poetry you’ve read for your own pleasure or because you had an English teacher who was in love with Wordsworth or Rumi, Whitman or Blake. Some used their experience to change society. Bill Wilson, for example, was a low-bottom drunk until he had a textbook-perfect mystical experience in the 1930s. After that, he never took another drink and went on to co-found Alcoholics Anonymous

Most mystics, however, aren’t known outside their time and their town. They’re just people who stumble onto magnificence and after they do, nothing is ever the same. They’re born again, although they might never use that term. They come from every religious tradition and from outside religious traditions. Gender, nationality, social status, and intelligence quotient (or devoutness quotient, for that matter) are of no consequence. What these people have in common is that they’ve been somewhere most of us will never go—the way you feel a strange camaraderie with someone who’s been to Malawi or Bulgaria if you’ve been there, too.

What the mystics say about the world is that it’s right on schedule. Even the awful parts have a place in the plan, although we’re still supposed to work to make things better. They implore us to get along, not just because it’s a good idea but because they know that there’s only one of us here anyway. Yep, we’re all part of a piece. And if that isn’t weird enough, they say that everything is made out of Love, or Light (synonyms these folks use a lot), and this Love or Light is what we’re made out of, too. We don’t always seem like loving little sunbeams because we (our souls, to use a familiar term, as opposed to our ego-selves or personalities) opted to come here. Planet Earth. Disneyland of the cosmos. This is the place to rock and roll, people.

First off, you get a body. The ancient Vedic texts of India claim that even the angels envy the human body because it can do so many things and through it we can experience such exquisite physical, emotional, and mental pleasures. There’s a whole alphabet of them: amusement, arousal, à la mode; beauty, bliss, bonding; candles, candy, chrysanthemums.

The price of these perks, however, is that signing up for life on earth means coming into a world of opposites—night and day, hot and cold, happy and sad, you know, the bunch of them. In a world of opposites it’s difficult to remain aware of the ultimate reality that there really is only one Power in the universe, the Beneficence that got us here in the first place. Thus (drumroll please), the truth about you: You are flawed. As a human person, you come equipped with the same pairs of opposites as everything else on this planet. You’re kind—and crabby. You’re generous—and self-serving. You made A’s in math and history—and had to have a tutor for Spanish. Your flaws are part of the texture of your personality. You can work on them and improve some of them quite a bit. The rest you’ll take to your grave. Other people (also flawed, by the way) will love you anyhow and life is decidedly more pleasant if you can love yourself, too.

Even though you are flawed—your human, personality-self—you are also perfect. I’m not talking about the perfect hair/perfect skin/perfect abs/perfect job/perfect spouse/perfect kids brand of perfection. This is about your nature, the reality of who you are that underlies and goes beyond your hair, skin, abs, job, spouse, kids, expectations, aspirations, and the rest. You are perfect because you are an expression of the Divine. You don’t have to do anything or believe anything for this to be true. You don’t even have to be aware of it, but if you are you’ll feel less emptiness and more power.

If the concept of being a perfect divine expression is new to you, or if it rubs uncomfortably against another belief you hold, just let it be for now. Eventually you’ll figure out where to fit it amid the concepts you’ve explored—some embraced, some discarded—all your life.

In my case, the exploration started early. It surprised no one that I studied comparative religions in college since I’d grown up in a sort of “United Nations of belief systems.” My dad wanted me to be Catholic so I went to Mass on Sundays and for “instruction” every Saturday morning. My mother wanted me to experience other churches (and synagogues) so we went to all of them—at least all the ones they had in Kansas City. Dede, the woman who lived with us to take care of me and who was, I see now, my first spiritual teacher, took me to her Unity church and regaled me with tales of Emerson, Mary Baker Eddy, and the Bhagavad-Gita. The nuns weren’t thrilled when I talked about reincarnation in catechism class, and I remember the reprimand I got for sharing what I thought was the edifying information that Krishna and Zarathushtra had virgin births too(!).     

Although I can swap Sister-Mary-Josephine-was-mean stories with the best of them, she planted some exquisite ideas in my consciousness that have stayed with me to this day. One of them was her question, “From what did God create us?” Correct answer: “God created us from Himself.” There was no other choice because God, by whatever name or conception, was all there was. Still is.

And that’s how you get to be perfect. With all your flaws. We gave up being perfectly perfect and agreed to be only borderline-excellent in order to experience this life. This way we get to grow and learn and, in the soul sense, strive to get back to where we started as consciously perfect, rather than unconsciously so.

The knowledge that you are flawed (because it’s the only way human beings come) and yet perfect (because your essence can be nothing less) gives you permission to fully exhale. It means you can lean on the notion that you’re part of something great and grand and good. Ideally, it will inspire you to go forward with the conviction that you have a place and a purpose that is uniquely yours. You don’t have to have perfect hair/skin/abs/job/spouse/kids because you’re already perfect in the only way you have to be and the only way you can be. Because this is the truth about you, you are fully entitled to the best imperfect hair/skin/abs/job/spouse/kids going, or something even better.

What to do with this flawed-but-perfect concept? Chew on it. Mull it over. Who you really are is an eternal idea, as perfect as the Mind that conceived it. Your body and brain and life experiences will never be as fabulous as that—this is earth, for heaven’s sake—but the closer you get to realizing
who you genuinely are, the closer to pretty darned amazing you’ll be, in every aspect of your life every day you live.