Two Plus Two Need Not Be Four For Everyone Now!

Long ago, when I began my professional career as an engineer in a large iron and steel company, I was posted as the engineer in charge of a water utility plant of the steel plant's captive thermal power plant.

When I joined, the plant facility was a new one under erection expected, to be commissioned for production in a few months time.

As a fresh chemical engineering post graduate from a premier engineering university of India, my knowledge in the practice of engineering was practically zero. While being engineering students in the graduation and post graduation levels, we were exposed to several units of study materials from which we acquired bits and pieces of information and knowledge in varying degrees. Our lecturers and professors were mostly good in making us exposed to some aspects of the information already available in the form of internationally accepted text books. They also made us undertake various practicals in well defined pedagogy. The authorized university authorities under the authority given to them by the statutes, tested us as per their procedures and awarded us the degree certificates which essentially provided us the license to get employed as engineers.

But each one of us understood engineering in a different manner. It was not a simple 'two plus two equals four' for us. Each one of us would be going to realize engineering differently in our later years!

Unfortunately or fortunately, those like us who started their profession as working engineers also realized the content of engineering differently in accordance with the work culture and work requirements of their own working areas. In other words, every one understood two plus two of engineering differently! Perhaps in the later years some of our kind added our own concepts and ideas and contributed to the creation of several pieces of non material creations on the face our earth. But we could never agree to any thing that we created as perfect or defect free!

Extending that analysis further down, I would be able to prove some thing which many of my readers might not agree. In my humble opinion, such a thing happens because of our imperfection of mind development.

We keep arguing over our discoveries, theories, inventions and ideas. We argue, because we cannot possibly agree on anything as perfectly alright. 

Let me now come back to the story of my initial days of work as the plant operation and maintenance engineer-in-charge. 

I found that there were several imperfections and defects in the plant which was planned by a reputed engineering consultancy group and executed by a reputed EPC (Engineering, Procurement and Construction) contracting company. Those imperfections existed in my view point. Had those imperfections were not there, the plant would have been easier for my group to operate and maintain. That was what I thought. Those imperfections were going to have much headache to me in the future. I remember my struggles with the consultants and the EPC contractors to rectify the issues which were defects in my view point. I could only succeed partially.

Some years later, my role changed. From the role of a plant operation and maintenance in-charge, I was made as a plant design engineer in our company's in house project engineering consultancy group. By chance, I got an opportunity to independently plan another new water utility plant for another purpose in the steel plant. 

I took all the pains to plan one of the best possible plant design which did not cause any of the problems that I faced. The plant was erected and commissioned smoothly and was handed over to a different group of plant operation and maintenance engineers. I was expecting the new custodians of the plant giving me the praise for giving them such a wonderfully designed plant.

I was wrong. The new custodian engineers of this plant expected the plant to be in a different way than what I thought. There was no logic in what they were demanding according to my thoughts. Obviously, when I honestly considered two plus two as four in this case, my counterparts on the other side were not agreeing! 

All of us find these kinds of conflicts every where in our day to day life. 

We find it in hour families. The wife may not agree with the husband's idea or vice versa. When ideas and opinions do not match, it becomes a potential source for conflicts and might develop in to full scale aggravations. 

Adolescents and youths would seldom agree with their parents' ideas because of the wide difference in the maturity levels that exist between them.

In an evolutionary world of progress like that of our earth, each and every person exist with varying degrees of perfection levels. All are imperfect with regard to knowledge, experience, wisdom and maturity. We can say that all exist under varying degrees of perfection or imperfection.

God is the only one who is eternally and infinitely perfect.  God cannot personally know imperfection as His own experience. Experiencing the outcomes of imperfection is left to us!

In a way, we are better than God in this context, because we have the experience of imperfection while God does not have it directly. God has to gain the experience of imperfection from us.

In fact, God shares the consciousness of all the experience of imperfectness of all the struggling men and women of not only earth, but also of all the evolutionary worlds of the universe. 

God desires that all those imperfect evolutionary beings like us gradually mature to attain perfection through life experiences and become true sons and daughters of God who are fully willing to live according to the will of God.

Learning by experimentation and experience is better than learning by other means. We learn the comparative desirability of beauty when we are able to recognize ugliness. We understand the desirability of good when evil also is experienced.

God actually participates and is in touch with all human beings in their struggle of attaining perfection through their life experiences under situations of imperfections. We may not be aware of His presence within us.

Human limitations which are the causes of potential evil should not be construed as part of the divine nature God.

Evil is a potential outcome of the imperfections of free-willed beings like we humans. God does not cause evil nor He likes evil. 

Because of our misunderstandings arising out of our present imperfections, there is a possibility that we may attribute good and evil both as a result of God's will. 

If I say that is not the case, all of us are not going to agree anyway.

Because, there are many among us for whom two plus two is not four, yet. Till every one attains the peak practical level of knowledge and maturity, our problems of our own make, arising out of our misunderstandings will remain. And we keep on experiencing the contrasts of good and evil to conclude the desirability of good over evil, perhaps at some distant future!