There is no charm in going to a cricket match after knowing the result. Similarly, there is no charm in living if there is nothing left to know. We are surrounded by both—knowledge and mystery. If you believe in God, then you have the problem of explaining who created Him. If you believe in materialism, you have the same problem of explaining what caused Big Bang, how energy turned into particles, how laws come into existence to govern various particle formations—inanimate and animate and all laws that enable life to be sustained with abundant provisions for the enjoyment of life. It is this mystery that makes you curious to know more and more and even to seek perfection, which makes life interesting. Thus imperfection is the charm of life, not a curse.
We also find another similar situation in which we find certain things as constant and certain things as transient. Take the case of trees—the silent food factories. The visible aspects of them are very familiar to us—birth, growth and death; yet the invisible programme that ensures the seed that contains in it the memory of all its future generations capable of perfectly copying all the features is constant. Thus everything is a play of what is constant and what is transient—something we can see everywhere—in micro universe and macro universe; and play of perfection and imperfection.
Similar thoughts came to my mind when I was trying to understand Kurt Godel’s Imperfect Theorem. His findings led him to make this interesting conclusion: “Our total reality and total existence are beautiful and meaningful . . . . We should judge reality by the little which we truly know of it. Since that part which conceptually we know fully turns out to be so beautiful, the real world of which we know so little should also be beautiful.” That means perfection and beauty exist somewhere which can elevate us into such perfection and beauty if we want to. Various cultures (prominent among them is the Bible) show that history had a perfect start. Genesis chapter 1 shows mankind was in God’s image for some time, and later they moved to the second phase of mixing perfection (“good”) with imperfection (“evil” or absence of good), thus becoming like “trees of knowledge of good and evil.” In other words, new system of things began to move into the process of becoming old. What has become old can be “renewed” by the Creator, says keenly insightful ones like Jesus. (Mathew 19:28) Otherwise system of things will plunge into a bottomless pit of decline which would not be permitted because of the very fact this was brought into existence by some Supreme Mind operating on it with some purpose. What is true of macro is true of micro too, and vice versa. Take our own case. My body (matter) was made into this shape because of some power other than matter was acting behind it because “in materialism all elements behave the same. It is mysterious to think of them as spread out and automatically united. For something to be a whole, it has to have an additional object, say, a soul or a mind,” says Mathematics legend Kurt Godel in his biography A Logical Journey, written by Hao Wang 9.4.12)
There are others too who are convinced of this. Nobel Laureate Max Planck [Father of Quantum Theory, also called Father of modern physics] said: “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.”(The Observer, 25 January 1931) Richard Conn Henry, Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins University, in his article“The Mental Universe” (Nature, International Journal of Science, July 07, 2005) quoted Pioneering physicist Sir James Jeans as saying: “Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter, we ought rather hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter.” Thus soul is the eternal and invisible reality that builds the ephemeral and visible reality called body, which explains why we have a subjective experience. Just like new body is created by soul, new system of things would be created by the Supreme Soul on earth when present system of things becomes too decadent. Only those who were humane in their dealings with one another (not on the basis of which God they worshipped) would benefit from this new world (Mathew 25:31-46).