FLAWED.. ?

You would think that at the end of two thousand years after Christ was born, leaving alone all those thousands of years that we lived through before, we would all have become enlightened souls. My soul which would remain long after I have departed from this mortal existence of mine would have learnt several lessons from the mistakes I have made and strive to be a better 'being' (notice I do not mention human. The likelihood of being born human cannot be too high if you were to apply the rules of probability to the total number of species existing in the world which is supposed to be at the least 5 million so 1/(5*10^6) is a number so unfathomable that I could be quite justified in assuming ‘I will not be human’).

If you were to take into account the number of years that have elapsed since I probably first made my appearance( me and the 6 billion odd humans alone) on the face of earth, I should have by now have become ‘ne plus ultra’, for the lack of any word that could fit the occasion better. The dictionary defines it to be ‘the state of being without any flaw or defect’. Yet, somehow, no amount of soul searching allows me to accept myself as being perfect, if not infinitesimally close to it. To be honest I would sooner concede to the blatant fact that I am in all likelihood as flawed as the preposterous theory which suggested the world as being flat. I lose my temper, I tend to be impatient, I can be quite prejudiced, I lack consistency… the list can go on and on.

But what made me what I so distinctly am today? If my soul in its eternal quest for knowledge had learnt a great deal in the thousands of years preceding my current existence, then why do I not show a superiority of thinking( superior to what??), greater perception and understanding, kindness and a million other traits that personify an ‘Ideal Being’? Why are you no closer to being an ‘Ideal Being’? In the unlikely eventuality that you don’t believe that you possess any imperfections I think it is time you look up the meaning of ‘narcissism’.

The society I have lived in, the people who surround me, the education I have received and so many other factors have played a deciding role in what I am today.
Innate nature? Do you notice that I neglected to mention it? Probably because I don’t accept that you exist when you are born. A child is just a desert, parched, ready to accept and greedily swallow anything offered to it in the way of knowledge. This naturally means that the adult you end up being is the end result of societal influences on you. The goodness and the flaws in you are the result of the way your intelligence was directed to interpret every incident that has occurred since the day you were born. If that were the case, would I not also be justified in absolving myself from all responsibility that dictates to me the unending list of all my imperfections, since all blame lies on society that misguided me? The society that did not teach me right, when the wrong around me could have been used as illustrations for what could have been made right? Could every single defect that exists in me be attributed to society that did not strive to set the world right? Do you agree that it rightly leads me to the conclusion that society in its entirety is flawed? If a teacher who taught you, taught you wrong, then definitely what you learn will not be right. Similarly, if the society in its entirety is indeed flawed and who you are, is the by product of societal influences, who can your soul learn right from? What enrichment of knowledge does the soul gain? How can it achieve enlightenment and thereby liberate itself? Is it no wonder that evolution has dictated us to have existed for thousand and thousands of years?

Does our liberation therefore lie solely in our destruction?