In this form the question is unanswerable, for it is founded on false premises. The Perfect is the All, the Totality, the Sum of Being. Within its infinity, as above said, is everything contained, every potentiality, as well as actuality, of existence.
All that has been, is, will be, can be, ever is in that Fulness, that ETERNAL. Only Itself knows Itself in its infinite unimaginable wealth of Being. Because it contains all pairs of opposites, and each pair, in affirming itself, to the eye of reason annihilates itself and vanishes.
It seems a Void. But endless universes arising in It proclaim It a Plenum. This Perfect never becomes the imperfect; it becomes nothing; It is all Spirit and Matter, Strength and Weakness, Knowledge and Ignorance, Peace and Strife, Bliss and Pain, Power and Impotence. The innumerable opposites of manifestation merge into each other and vanish in non-manifestation.
The All includes manifestation and non-manifestation, the diastole and systole of the Heart which is Being. The one no more requires explanation than the other; the one cannot be without the other.
The puzzle arises because men assert separately one of the inseparate pair of opposites—Spirit, Strength, Knowledge, Peace, Bliss, Power—and then ask: “Why should these become their opposites?”
They do not. No attribute exists without its opposite; a pair only can manifest; every front has a back, spirit and matter arise together; it is not that spirit exists, and then miraculously produces matter to limit and blind itself, but that spirit and matter arise in the ETERNAL simultaneously as a mode of Its Being, a form of Self-expression of the All, Pratyagatma and Mulaprakriti, expressing in time and space the Timeless and Spaceless.
***Excerpt from Annie Wood Besant. A Study in Consciousness: A Contribution to the Science of Psychology