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{|class= "wikitable" style= "background-color: #efefff; width: 100%;"|Read Summary of '''[[Perfection in Short =Summary|Perfection]]''' |}

== What is Perfection? ==

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">'''Perfection is all that we want to become in our highest aspiration.</span><ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/15/perfection#p10</ref><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"> </span>General'''

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">Perfection is not a summit, it is not an extremeall that we want to become in our highest aspiration. There is no extreme: whatsoever you do, there is always the possibility of something better and exactly this possibility of something better is the very meaning of progress.</span><ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/15/perfection#p4p10</ref>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"center>Perfection is not a maximum or an extreme. It is an equilibrium and a harmonisation. ~</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #0066cc;"><ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/15/perfection#p3</u></ref></spancenter>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">Perfection Some people put perfection at the apex. It is generally thought that perfection is the maximum one can do. But I say that perfection is eternal; not the apex, it is only not an extreme. There is no extreme—whatever you may do, there is always the resistance possibility of something better, and it is exactly this possibility of something better which is the world that makes it progressivevery meaning of progress. </span>(The Mother, 30 December 1950) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/1504/perfection30-december-1950#p5</ref>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"center>Our very way of thinking is wrong. The believers, the faithful, all of them—particularly in the West—when they speak of God, think of Him as "something else," they think that He cannot be weak, ugly or imperfect—they think wrongly, they divide, they separate. It is subconscious, unreflecting thought; they are in the habit of thinking like this instinctively; they do not watch themselves thinking. For example, when they speak of "perfection" in a general way, they see or feel or postulate precisely the sum-total of everything they consider to be virtuous, divine, beautiful, admirable—but it is not that at all! Perfection is something which lacks nothing. The divine perfection is the Divine in His entirety, which lacks nothing. The divine perfection is the Divine as a whole, from whom nothing has been taken away—so it is just the opposite! For the moralists divine perfection means all the virtues that they represent. ~</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #0066cc;"><ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/10/aphorism-63-64-65#p24</u></ref></spancenter>

== How The mundane perfection is sometimes conceived of as something outward, social, a thing of action, a more rational dealing with our fellow-men and our environment, a better and more efficient citizenship and discharge of duties, a better, richer, kindlier and happier way of living, with a more just and more harmonious associated enjoyment of the opportunities of existence. By others again a more inner and subjective ideal is cherished, a clarifying and raising of the intelligence, will and reason, a heightening and ordering of power and capacity in the nature, a nobler ethical, a richer aesthetic, a finer emotional, a much healthier and better-governed vital and physical being. Sometimes one element is stressed, almost to Achieve Perfection? ==the exclusion of the rest; sometimes, in wider and more well-balanced minds, the whole harmony is envisaged as a total perfection. A change of education and social institutions is the outward means adopted or an inner self-training and development is preferred as the true instrumentation. Or the two aims may be clearly united, the perfection of the inner individual, the perfection of the outer living. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/the-integral-perfection#p2</ref>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">"To work for your perfection the first step is to become conscious '''Elements of yourself."</span> (The Mother, 13 January 1951) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/04/13-january-1951#p16</ref>Perfection'''

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">To work for your perfectionIt is, the first step is to become conscious of yourselfthen, this spiritual fulfilment of the different parts urge to individual perfection and an inner completeness of your being and their respective activities. You must learn to distinguish </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">these different parts one from another, so that you may become clearly aware of the origin we mean first when we speak of the movements that occur in you, the many impulses, reactions and conflicting wills that drive you to action. It is an assiduous study which demands much perseverance and sincerity. For man's nature, especially his mental nature, has a spontaneous tendency to give a favourable explanation for everything he thinks, feels, says and doesdivine life. It is only by observing these movements with great care, by bringing them, as it were, before the tribunal first essential condition of our highest ideal, with a sincere will to submit to its judgmentperfected life on earth, that and we can hope to form are therefore right in ourselves a discernment that never errsmaking the utmost possible individual perfection our first supreme business. For if we truly want to progress The perfection of the spiritual and acquire the capacity pragmatic relation of knowing the truth of our being, that individual with all around him is to say, what we are truly created for, what we can call our mission second preoccupation; the solution of this second desideratum lies in a complete universality and oneness with all life upon earthwhich is the other concomitant result of an evolution into the gnostic consciousness and nature. But there still remains the third desideratum, then we musta new world, in a very regular and constant manner, reject from us or eliminate change in us whatever contradicts the truth total life of our existencehumanity or, whatever is opposed to it. In this way, little by little, all at the partsleast, all a new perfected collective life in the elements of our being can be organised into a homogeneous whole around our psychic centreearth-nature. This work of unification requires much time to be brought to some degree calls for the appearance not only of perfection. Therefore, isolated evolved individuals acting in order to accomplish itthe unevolved mass, we must arm ourselves with patience but of many gnostic individuals forming a new kind of beings and endurance, with a determination new common life superior to prolong our the present individual and common existence. A collective life of this kind must obviously constitute itself on the same principle as long as necessary for the success life of our endeavourthe gnostic individual.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #0066cc;"><ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/1222/the-sciencedivine-of-livinglife#p5</u>p19</ref></span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"center>If in passing from one domain to another we renounce what has already been given us from eagerness for our new attainment, if in reaching the mental life we cast away or belittle the physical life which is our basis, or if we reject the mental and physical in our attraction to the spiritual, we do not fulfil God integrally, nor satisfy the conditions of His self-manifestation. We do not become perfect, but only shift the field of our imperfection or at most attain a limited altitude. However high we may climb, even though it be to the Non-Being itself, we climb ill if we forget our base. Not to abandon the lower to itself, but to transfigure it in the light of the higher to which we have attained, is true divinity of nature.~</span><ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/21/the-destiny-of-the-individual#p9</refcenter>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">It takes insufficient account of the human consciousness and the human view from which we have to start; it does not give us the vision of the harmony it alleges, and so it cannot meet our demand or convinceThese three elements, but only contradicts by a cold intellectual conception our acute human sense of union with the reality of evil and imperfection; it gives too no lead to supreme Divine, unity with the psychic element in our natureuniversal Self, the soul's aspiration towards light and truth and towards a spiritual conquest, a victory over imperfection supramental life action from this transcendent origin and evil. By itself, through this view of things amounts to little more than the facile dogma which tells us that all that is is rightuniversality, because all is perfectly decreed by the divine Wisdom. It supplies us but still with nothing better than a complacent intellectual and philosophic optimism: no light is turned on the disconcerting facts of pain, suffering and discord to which our human consciousness bears constant and troubling witness; at most there is a suggestion that in individual as the divine reason of things there is a key to these things to which we have no access. This is not a sufficient answer to our discontent soul-channel and our aspiration which, however ignorant in their reactions, however mixed their mental motivesnatural instrument, must correspond to a divine reality deeper down in our being. A Divine Whole that is perfect by reason of constitute the imperfection essence of its parts, runs the risk integral divine perfection of itself being only </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">perfect in imperfection, because it fulfils entirely some stage in an unaccomplished purpose; it is then a present but not an ultimate Totality. To it we could apply the Greek saying, Theos ouk estin alla gignetai, the Divine is not yet in human being, but is becoming. The true Divine would then be secret within us and perhaps supreme above us; to find the Divine within us and above us would be the real solution, to become perfect as That is perfect, to attain liberation by likeness to it or by attaining to the law of its nature, sādṛśya, sādharmya.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #0066cc;"><ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2124/the-divineintegral-and-the-undivine#p7</u>perfection?search=perfection</ref></span>

== More Ways Towards '''Where is the Power of Perfection ==?'''

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">The Divine is Where in the radically imperfect shall we find the principle and power of perfection towards ? Mind rooted in division and limitation cannot provide it to us, nor can life and the body which we move. <ref><u>http://incarnatewordare the energy and the frame of dividing and limiting mind.The principle and power of perfection are there in/cwm/14/the-divine-and-man#p8</u></ref></span> <span style="color: #000000;">Fundamentally, whatever be subconscient but wrapped up in the path one follows—whether tegument or veil of the path of surrenderlower Maya, consecrationa mute premonition emerging as an unrealised ideal; in the superconscient they await, knowledge—if one wants it to be perfectopen, it is always equally difficulteternally realised, and there is but one way, one only, I know still separated from us by the veil of only one: that our self-ignorance. It is perfect sincerityabove, but perfect sincerity! (The Motherthen, 12 May 1954) and not either in our present poise nor below it that we must seek for the reconciling power and knowledge.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/0621/12the-mayproblem-of-1954life#p34p12</ref></span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">If you said to yourself, my children, "We want to be as perfect instruments as possible to express the divine Will in the world", then for this instrument to be perfect, it must be cultivated, educated, trained. It must not be left like a shapeless piece of stone. When you want to build with a stone you chisel it; when you want to make a formless block into a beautiful diamond, you chisel it. Well, it The Divine is the same thing. When with your brain and body you want to make a beautiful instrument for the Divine, you must cultivate it, sharpen it, refine it, complete what is missing, perfect what is thereperfection towards which we move. (The Mother, 13 May 1953) <ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/0514/13the-maydivine-1953and-man#p18</u>p8</ref></span>

<span style="color: #000000;">To perfect oneself, one must first become conscious of oneself. I am sure, for instance, that the following situation has arisen many times in your life: someone asks you suddenly, "Why have you done that?" Well, the spontaneous reply is, "I don't know." If someone asks you, "What are you thinking of?" You reply, "I don't know." "Why are you tired?"—"I don't know.Why are you happy?"—"I don't know", and so on. I can take indeed fifty people and ask them suddenly, without preparation, "Why have you done that?" and if they are not inwardly "awake", they will all answer, "I don't know." (Of course I am not speaking here of those who have practised a discipline of self-knowledge and of following up their movements to the extreme limits; these people can, naturally, collect themselves, concentrate and give the right answer, but only after a little while.) You will see that it is like that if you look well at your whole day. You say something and you don't know why you say it—is only after the words are out of your mouth that you notice that this was not quite what you wanted to say. For instance, you go to see someone, you prepare beforehand the words you are going to speak, but once you are in front of the person in question, you say nothing or it is other words which come from your mouth. Are you able to say to what extent the atmosphere of the other person has influenced you and stopped you from saying what you had prepared? How many people can say that? They do not even observe that the person was in such or such a state and that it was because of this that they could not tell him what they had prepared. Of course, there are very obvious instances when you find people in such a bad mood that you can ask nothing of them. I am not speaking of these. I am speaking of the clear perception of reciprocal influences: what acts and reacts on your nature; it is this one does not have. For example, one becomes suddenly uneasy or happy, but how many people can say, "It is this"? And it is difficult to know, it is not at all easy. One must be quite "awake"; one must be constantly in a very attentive state of observation. (The Mother, 13 January 1951) <ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/04/13-january-1951#p22</u></refcenter>~</spancenter>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">But we can attain to the highest without blotting ourselves out from the cosmic extension. Brahman preserves always Its two terms of liberty within and of formation without, of expression and of freedom from the expression. We also, being That, can attain to the same divine self-possession. The harmony of the two tendencies is the condition of all life that aims at being really divine. Liberty pursued by exclusion of the thing exceeded leads along the path of negation to the refusal of that which God has accepted. Activity pursued by absorption in the act and the energy leads to an inferior affirmation and the denial of the Highest. But what God combines and synthetises, wherefore should man insist on divorcing? To be perfect as He is perfect is the condition of His integral attainment. <ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/21/the-destiny-of-the-individual#p18</u></refcenter>~</spancenter>

<span style="color: #000000;">But if you remain The characteristic law of Spirit is self-existent perfection and immutable infinity. It possesses always and in that consciousness and look from there, then you begin to understand something of its own right the truth. And this consciousness has to be so total, that even if things come directly against you, even immortality which is the physical movement aim of someone coming to beat you (you must not allow him to kill you, no; you have perhaps to do what is necessary not to get killed), but if you are yourself in this perfect consciousness Life and have no personal reaction, well, I give you the guarantee perfection which is the other cannot kill yougoal of Mind. He will not be able to, even if he tries. He will not be able to beat you, even if he tries. Only, you must not have a single violent or wrong vibration, you understand? Even if there is just a little false vibration, that opens The attainment of the door eternal and the thing enters realisation of that which is the same in all things and beyond all goes wrong. You must be fully consciousthings, equally blissful in universe and outside it, have untouched by the full knowledge, imperfections and limitations of the perfect mastery over everythingforms and activities in which it dwells, are the clear vision glory of the Truth—and perfect peacespiritual life. (The Mother, 20 May 1953) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/0523/20the-maythreefold-1953life#p54p7</ref></span>

<span style="color: #000000;">….one may act with a perfect knowledge of what should be done, and without intervention—the least intervention—of the reasoning mind. The mind is silent: it simply looks on and listens in order to register things, it does not act. (The Mother, 23 December 1953) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/05/23-december-1953#p8</refcenter>~</spancenter>

<span style="background-color: transparentMan, the mental being, has an imperfect life because mind is not the first and highest power of consciousness of the Being; color: #000000even if mind were perfected, there would be still something yet to be realised, not yet manifested. For what is involved and emergent is not a Mind, but a Spirit, and mind is not the native dynamism of consciousness of the Spirit;">It supermind, the light of gnosis, is its native dynamism. If then life has to become a manifestation of the Spirit, it is only the manifestation of a spiritual being in us and the supreme Consciousness divine life of a perfected consciousness in a supramental or gnostic power of spiritual being that you can attain must be the perfect expression secret burden and intention of yourselfevolutionary Nature. (The Mother, 29 February 1956) <ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/0822/29the-februarydivine-1956life#p24</u>p3</ref></span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">… if you are perfect in your self-giving and absolutely sincere, you are sure to attain the spiritual goal. (The Mother, 1 August 1956) <ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/08/1-august-1956#p4</u></refcenter>~</spancenter>

<span style="backgroundPerfection of all kinds is indeed good, as it is the sign of the pressure of the consciousness in the material world towards full self-color: transparent; color: #000000;">… </span><span style="backgroundexpression in this or that limit, on this or that level. In a certain sense it is an urge of the Divine itself hidden in forms that tends in the lesser degrees of consciousness towards its own increasing self-color: transparent; color: #000000;">sincerity is progressiverevelation. Perfection of an object or a scene in inanimate Nature, animate perfection of strength, speed, physical beauty, courage or animal fidelity, affection, intelligence, perfection of art, music, poetry, literature,—perfection of the intellect in any kind of mental activity, the perfect statesman, warrior, artist, craftsman, —perfection in vital force and capacity, perfection in ethical qualities, character, temperament,—all have their high value, their place as rungs in the ladder of evolution, the seried steps of the spirit's emergence. If one likes to call that spiritual because of this hidden urge behind it one can do so; it can at least be regarded as a preparation for the being progresses secret spirit's emergence. But thought and developsknowledge can only proceed by making the necessary distinctions. Much confusion is created by neglecting them. This mental idealism, ethical development, religious piety and fervour, occult powers and feats have all been taken as spirituality and the universe unfolds in spiritual evolution kept tied to the moorings of the planes of lesser consciousness which do indeed prepare the soul by experience for the spiritual consciousness but are not themselves that. For perfection can only become truly spiritual when it is founded on the being, sincerity too must go awakened spiritual consciousness and takes on perfecting itself endlesslyits peculiar essence. (The Mother, 19 December 1956) <ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/0828/19idealism-decemberand-1956spirituality#p25</u>p1</ref></span>

== Aim But always the whole foundation of Integral Yoga & Perfection ==the gnostic life must be by its very nature inward and not outward. In the life of the spirit it is the spirit, the inner Reality, that has built up and uses the mind, vital being and body as its instrumentation; thought, feeling and action do not exist for themselves, they are not an object, but the means; they serve to express the manifested divine Reality within us: otherwise, without this inwardness, this spiritual origination, in a too externalised consciousness or by only external means, no greater or divine life is possible. In our present life of Nature, in our externalised surface existence, it is the world that seems to create us; but in the turn to the spiritual life it is we who must create ourselves and our world. In this new formula of creation, the inner life becomes of the first importance and the rest can be only its expression and outcome. It is this, indeed, that is indicated by our own strivings towards perfection, the perfection of our own soul and mind and life and the perfection of the life of the race. For we are given a world which is obscure, ignorant, material, imperfect, and our external conscious being is itself created by the energies, the pressure, the moulding operations of this vast mute obscurity, by physical birth, by environment, by a training through the impacts and shocks of life; and yet we are vaguely aware of something that is there in us or seeking to be, something other than what has been thus made, a spirit self-existent, self-determining, pushing the nature towards the creation of an image of its own occult perfection or Idea of perfection. There is something that grows in us in answer to this demand, that strives to become the image of a divine. Somewhat, and is impelled also to labour at the world outside that has been given to it and to remake that too in a greater image, in the image of its own spiritual and mental and vital growth, to make our world too something created according to our own mind and self-conceiving spirit, something new, harmonious, perfect. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/22/the-divine-life#p6</ref>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"center>An integral Yoga includes as a vital and indispensable element in its total and ultimate aim the conversion of the whole being into a higher spiritual consciousness and a larger divine existence. Our parts of will and action, our parts of knowledge, our thinking being, our emotional being, our being of life, all our self and nature must seek the Divine, enter into the Infinite, unite with the Eternal. But man's present nature is limited, divided, unequal,—it is easiest for him to concentrate in the strongest part of his being and follow a definite line of progress proper to his nature: only rare individuals have the strength to take a large immediate plunge straight into the sea of the Divine Infinity. Some therefore must choose as a starting-point a concentration in thought or contemplation or the mind's one-pointedness to find the eternal reality of the Self in them; others can more easily withdraw ~</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">into the heart to meet there the Divine, the Eternal: yet others are predominantly dynamic and active; for these it is best to centre themselves in the will and enlarge their being through works. United with the Self and source of all by their surrender of their will into its infinity, guided in their works by the secret Divinity within or surrendered to the Lord of the cosmic action as the master and mover of all their energies of thought, feeling, act, becoming by this enlargement of being selfless and universal, they can reach by works some first fullness of a spiritual status. But the path, whatever its point of starting, must debouch into a vaster dominion; it must proceed in the end through a totality of integrated knowledge, emotion, will of dynamic action, perfection of the being and the entire nature. In the supramental consciousness, on the level of the supramental existence this integration becomes consummate; there knowledge, will, emotion, the perfection of the self and the dynamic nature rise each to its absolute of itself and all to their perfect harmony and fusion with each other, to a divine integrality, a divine perfection. For the supermind is a Truth-Consciousness in which the Divine Reality, fully manifested, no longer works with the instrumentation of the Ignorance; a truth of status of being which is absolute becomes dynamic in a truth of energy and activity of the being which is self-existent and perfect. Every movement there is a movement of the self-aware truth of Divine Being and every part is in entire harmony with the whole. Even the most limited and finite action is in the Truth-Consciousness a movement of the Eternal and Infinite and partakes of the inherent absoluteness and perfection of the Eternal and Infinite. An ascent into the supramental Truth not only raises our spiritual and essential consciousness to that height but brings about a descent of this Light and Truth into all our being and all our parts of nature. All then becomes part of the Divine Truth, an element and means of the supreme union and oneness; this ascent and descent must be therefore an ultimate aim of this Yoga.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #0066cc;"><ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/23/the-supermind-and-the-yoga-of-works#p1</u></ref></spancenter>

<div style="color: #000000;">Some people put perfection As you pursue this labour of purification and unification, you must at the apexsame time take great care to perfect the external and instrumental part of your being. It When the higher truth manifests, it must find in you a mind that is generally supple and rich enough to be able to give the idea that seeks to express itself a form of thought which preserves its force and clarity. This thought , again, when it seeks to clothe itself in words, must find in you a sufficient power of expression so that perfection is the maximum one can words reveal the thought and do. But I say that perfection is not the apex, deform it is not an extreme. There is no extreme—whatever And the formula in which you may doembody the truth should be manifested in all your feelings, there is always the possibility all your acts of something betterwill, and it is exactly this possibility of something better which is all your actions, in all the very meaning movements of progressyour being. (The MotherFinally, 30 December 1950)<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #0066cc;"> these movements themselves should, by constant effort, attain their highest perfection. <ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/0412/30the-science-decemberof-1950living#p5</u>p6</ref></span></div>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"><div style="color: #000000;">Perfection is not a static state, it is an equilibrium. But a progressive, dynamic equilibrium. One may go from perfection to perfection. There can come a state from which it would not be necessary to descend to a lower rung in order to go farther; at the moment the march of Nature is like that, but in this new state, instead of being obliged to go back to be able to start again, one can walk always forward, without ever stopping. As things are, one comes to a certain point and, as human beings as they are at present cannot progress indefinitely, one must pass to a higher species or leave the present species and create another. The human being as he is at the moment cannot attain perfection unless he gets out of himself—man is a transitional being. In ordinary language it may be said: "Oh, this man is perfect", but that is a literary figure. The maximum a human being can attain just now is an equilibrium which is not progressive. He may attain perhaps a static equilibrium but all that is static can be broken for lack of progress. </div>(The Mother, 30 December 1950)</span> <ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/04/30-december-1950#p19</u></ref><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #0066cc;"></span><span styleMind="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"><div style="color: #000000;">The condition to be aimed at, the real achievement of Yoga, the final perfection and attainment, for which all else is only a preparation, is a consciousness in which it is impossible to do anything without the Divine; for then, if you are without the Divine, the very source of your action disappears; knowledge, power, all are gone. But so long as you feel that the powers you use are your own, you will not miss the Divine support. (The Mother, 28 April 1929) <ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/28-april-1929#p14</u></ref></div>

The ethical mind becomes perfect in proportion as it detaches itself from desire, sense suggestion, impulse, customary dictated action and discovers a self of Right, Love, Strength and Purity in which it can live accomplished and make it the foundation of all its actions. The aesthetic mind is perfected in proportion as it detaches itself from all its cruder pleasures and from outward conventional canons of the aesthetic reason and discovers a self existent self and spirit of pure and infinite Beauty and Delight which gives its own light and joy to the material of the aesthesis. The mind of knowledge is perfected when it gets away from impression and dogma and opinion and discovers a light of self-knowledge and intuition which illumines all the workings of the sense and reason, all self-experience and world-experience. The will is perfected when it gets away from and behind its impulses and its customary ruts of effectuation and discovers an inner power of the Spirit which is the source of an intuitive and luminous action and an original harmonious creation. The movement of perfection is away from all domination by the lower nature and towards a pure and powerful reflection of the being, power, knowledge and delight of the Spirit and Self in the buddhi.<span style="background-colorref>http: transparent; color: #000000;"></span><span style="background/incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/purification-intelligence-and-color: transparent; color: #0066cc;">will</spanref>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">"We are not aiming at success—our aim is perfection." (The Mother, 30 December 1950) <ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/04/30-december-1950#p1</u></refcenter>~</spancenter>

The first need is the clarity and the purity of the intelligence. It must be freed from the claims of the vital being which seeks to impose the desire of the mind in place of the truth, from the claims of the troubled emotional being which strives to colour, distort, limit and falsify the truth with the hue and shape of the emotions. It must be free too from its own defect, inertia of the thought-power, obstructive narrowness and unwillingness to open to knowledge, intellectual unscrupulousness in thinking, prepossession and preference, self-will in the reason and false determination of the will to knowledge. Its sole will must be to make itself an unsullied mirror of the truth, its essence and its forms and measures and relations, a clear mirror, a just measure, a fine and subtle instrument of harmony, an integral intelligence.<span style="background-colorref>http: transparent; color: #000000;"></span><span style="background/incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/the-power-of-the-color: transparent; color: #0066cc;">instruments</spanref>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">The first necessity But our mind is some </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">fundamental poise of the soul </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">both obscure, partial in its essential and its natural being regarding and meeting the thingsnotions, impacts and workings of Nature. This poise we shall arrive at misled by growing into a perfect equalityopposite surface appearances, samatā. The self, spirit or Brahman divided between various possibilities; it is one led in all and therefore one three different directions to all; any of which it ismay give an exclusive preference. Our mind, as is said in the Gita which has developed fully this idea of equality and indicated its experience search for what must be, turns towards a concentration on at least one side of equality, the equal Brahman, samaṁ brahma; the Gita even goes so far in one passage as to identify equality our own inner spiritual growth and yogaperfection, samatvaṁ yoga ucyate. That is to say, equality is the sign of unity with the Brahman, of becoming Brahman, of growing into an undisturbed spiritual poise of on our own individual being in the Infinite. Its importance can hardly be exaggeratedand inner living; for or it is the sign of our having passed beyond the egoistic determinations turns towards a concentration on an individual development of our surface nature, on the perfection of our having conquered our enslaved response to thought and outer dynamic or practical action on the dualitiesworld, on some idealism of our having transcended personal relation with the shifting turmoil of world around us; or it turns rather towards a concentration on the gunasouter world itself, on making it better, of more suited to our having entered into the calm ideas and peace temperament or to our conception of liberationwhat should be. Equality On one side there is a term the call of consciousness our spiritual being which brings into the whole of is our true self, a transcendent reality, a being and nature the eternal tranquillity of the Infinite. MoreoverDivine Being, it is not created by the condition world, able to live in itself, to rise out of a securely and perfectly divine actionworld to transcendence; on the security and largeness other side there is the demand of the world around us which is a cosmic action form, a formulation of the Divine Being, a power of the Infinite Reality in disguise. There is based upon and never breaks down or forfeits its eternal tranquillity. That too must be the character divided or double demand of our being of Nature which is poised between these two terms, depends on them and connects them; for it is apparently made by the perfect spiritual action; to be equal world and one to all things yet, because its true creator is in spirit, understanding, mind, heart ourselves and natural consciousness,—even in the most physical consciousness,—and world instrumentation that seems to make all their workingsit is only the means first used, whatever their outward adaptation to the thing to be doneit is really a form, always a disguised manifestation of a greater spiritual being within us. It is this demand that mediates between our preoccupation with an inward perfection or spiritual liberation and imminuably full of our preoccupation with the divine equality outer world and calm must be its inmost principle. That may be said to be the passive or basicformation, insists on a happier relation between the fundamental two terms and receptive side creates the ideal of equality, but there a better individual in a better world. But it is also an active within us that the Reality must be found and the source and possessive side, an equal bliss which foundation of a perfected life; no outward formation can only come when replace it: there must be the peace of equality true self realised within if there is founded to be the true life realised in world and which is the beatific flower of its fullnessNature. <ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2422/the-elementsdivine-of-perfectionlife#p2</u>p7</ref></span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">The next necessity of perfection is </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">to raise all the active parts of Perfection in the human nature to that highest condition and working pitch of their power and capacity, śakti,</span><span styleVital="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">at which they become capable of being divinised into true instruments of the free, perfect, spiritual and divine action. For practical purposes we may take the understanding, the heart, Then again there is the psychic prana and the body as the four members of our nature which have thus to be prepared, and we have to find the constituent terms of their pranic mind or desire soul; this too calls for its own perfection. Also there Here too the first necessity is a fullness of the dynamical force vital capacity in us (vīrya) of the temperamentmind, character and soul nature, svabhāva, which makes the its power of our members effective in action and gives them their type and direction; this has to be freed from do its limitationsfull work, enlarged, rounded so that the whole manhood in us may become the basis to take possession of a divine manhood, when all the Purusha, the real Man impulsions and energies given to our inner psychic life for fulfilment in usthis existence, the divine Soul, shall act fully in this human instrument to hold them and shine fully through this human vessel. To divinise the perfected nature we have to call in the divine Power or Shakti to replace our limited human energy so that this may be shaped into the image of and filled a means for carrying them out with the force of a greater infinite energystrength, daivī prakṛtifreedom, bhāgavatī śaktiperfection. This perfection will grow in Many of the measure in which things we can surrender ourselves, first, to the guidance and then to the direct action of that Power and of the Master of need for our being and our works to whom it belongsperfection, and for this purpose faith is the essentialcourage, faith is the great motorwill-power of our being effective in our aspirations to perfectionlife,—here, a faith in God and all the Shakti which shall begin in the heart and understanding, but shall take possession elements of all our nature, all its consciousness, all its dynamic motive-what we now call force. These four things are the essentials of this second element character and force of perfectionpersonality, the full powers depend very largely for their completest strength and spring of energetic action on the members fullness of the instrumental naturepsychic prana. But along with this fullness there must be an established gladness, clearness and purity in the perfected psychic life-being. This dynamis of the soul naturemust not be a troubled, perfervid, stormy, fitfully or crudely passionate strength; energy there must be, the assumption rapture of them into the its action of the divine Powerit must have, but a clear and glad and pure energy, a seated and firmly supported pure rapture. And as a perfect faith third condition of its perfection it must be poised in all our members to call and support that assumption, śakti, vīrya, daivī prakṛti, śraddhāa complete equality. <ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/the-elementspower-of-perfection#p3</u>the-instruments</ref></span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">Where in This heart and psychic being of man shot through with the radically imperfect shall we find threads of the principle life instincts is a thing of mixed inconstant colours of emotion and soul vibrations, bad and power of perfection? Mind rooted in division good, happy and limitation cannot provide it to usunhappy, nor can</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">life satisfied and the body which are the energy unsatisfied, troubled and the frame of dividing calm, intense and limiting minddull. The principle Thus agitated and power invaded it is unacquainted with any real peace, incapable of a steady perfection are there in the subconscient </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">but wrapped up in the tegument or veil of the lower Mayaall its powers. By purification, a mute premonition emerging as an unrealised ideal; in the superconscient they await, openby equality, eternally realised, but still separated from us by the veil light of our self-ignorance. It is aboveknowledge, then, and not either in our present poise nor below by a harmonising of the will it that we must seek for the reconciling power can be brought to a tranquil intensity and knowledgeperfection.</span><ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2124/the-problempower-of-life#p12the-instruments</ref>

<div style="color: #000000;">Perfection is so progressive that I believe nobody can say he is perfectly conscious; he is on the way to becoming perfectly conscious. (The Mother, 28 November 1956) <ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/08/28-november-1956#p20</u></refcenter>~</divcenter>

== Standard of Judgement Perfection in the Body ==

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">The distinction between the divine and the undivine life is in fact identical with When the root distinction between a life of Knowledge lived in self-awareness and in the power of the Light and a life of Ignorance,—at any rate it so presents itself in a world that is slowly and with difficulty evolving out of an original Inconscience. All life that body has still this Inconscience for its basis is stamped with the mark of a radical imperfection; for even if it is satisfied with its own type, it is a satisfaction with something incomplete and inharmonious, a patchwork of discords: on the contrary, even a purely mental or vital life might be perfect within its limits if it were based on a restricted but harmonious self-power and self-knowledge. It is this bondage to a perpetual stamp of imperfection and disharmony that is learned the mark art of the undivine; a divine life, on the contrary, even if constantly progressing from the little to the more, would be at each stage harmonious in its principle and detail: it would be a secure ground upon which freedom and perfection could naturally flower or grow towards their highest stature, refine and expand into their most subtle opulence. All imperfections, all perfections have to be taken into view in our consideration of the difference between an undivine and a divine existence: but ordinarilyincreasing perfection, when we make the distinction, we do it as human beings struggling under the pressure of life and the difficulties of our conduct amidst its immediate problems and perplexities; most of all we are thinking of the distinction we are obliged to make between good and evil or of that along with its kindred problem of the duality, the blend in us of happiness and suffering. When we seek intellectually for a divine presence in things, a divine origin of the world, a divine government of its workings, the presence of evil, the insistence shall be well on suffering, the large, the enormous part offered way to pain, grief and affliction in the economy of Nature are overcoming the cruel phenomena which baffle our reason and overcome the instinctive faith inevitability of mankind in such an origin and government or in an all-seeing, all-determining and omnipresent Divine Immanence. Other difficulties we could solve more easily and happily and make some shift to be better satisfied with the ready conclusiveness of our solutions. But this standard of judgment is not sufficiently comprehensive and it is supported upon a too human point of view; for to a wider outlook evil and suffering appear only as a striking aspect, they are not the whole defect, not even the root of the matterdeath. (The sum of the world's imperfections is not made up only of these two deficiencies; there is more than the fallMother, if fall there was, of our spiritual or material being from good and from happiness or our nature's failure to overcome evil and suffering. Besides the deficiency of the ethical and hedonistic satisfactions demanded by our being, the paucity of Good and Delight in our world-experience, there is also the deficiency of other divine degrees: for Knowledge, Truth, Beauty, Power, Unity are, they too, the stuff and elements of a divine life, and these are given to us in a scanty and grudging measure; yet all are, in their absolute, powers of the Divine Nature. 16 January 1972) <ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/2116/the-divine-and16-thejanuary-undivine1972#p2</u>p1</ref></span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">Once we admit a divine government of the universe, we must conclude that the power to govern is complete and absolute; for otherwise we are obliged to suppose that a being and consciousness infinite and absolute has a knowledge and will limited in their control of things or hampered in their power of working. It is not impossible to concede that the supreme and immanent Divinity may leave a certain freedom of working to something that has come into being in his perfection but is itself imperfect and the cause of imperfection, to an ignorant or inconscient Nature, to the action of the human mind and will, even to a conscious Power or Forces of darkness and evil that take their stand upon the reign of a basic Inconscience. But none of these things are independent of Its own existence, nature and consciousness and none of them can act except in Its presence and by Its sanction or allowance. Man's freedom is relative and he cannot be held solely responsible for the imperfection of his nature. Ignorance and inconscience of Nature have arisen, not independently, but in the one Being; the imperfection of her workings cannot be entirely foreign to some will of the Immanence. It may be conceded that forces set in motion are allowed to work themselves out according to the law of their movement; but what divine Omniscience and Omnipotence has allowed to arise and act in Its omnipresence, Its all-existence, we must consider It to have originated and decreed, since without the fiat of the Being they could not have been, could not remain in existence. If the Divine is at all concerned with the world He has manifested, there is no other Lord than He and from that necessity of His original and universal being there can eventually be no escape or departure. It is on the foundation of this self-evident consequence of our first premiss, without any evasion of its implications, that we have to consider the problem of imperfection, suffering and evil. <ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/21/the-divine-and-the-undivine#p13</u></refcenter>~</spancenter>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">It is only if our nature develops beyond itself, if it becomes a nature of self-knowledge, mutual understanding, unity, a nature of true being and true life that As for the question about the result can be a perfection of ourselves and our existence, a life of true beingillness, a life of unity, mutuality, harmony, a life of true happiness, a harmonious and beautiful life. If our nature is fixed in what it is, what it has already become, then no perfection, no real and enduring happiness is possible in earthly life; we must seek it not at all and do the best we can with our imperfections, or we must seek it elsewhere, in a supraterrestrial hereafter, or we must go beyond all such seeking and transcend life by an extinction of nature and ego in some Absolute from which this strange and unsatisfactory being of ours has come into existence. But if in us there physical plane is a spiritual being which is emerging and our present state is only an imperfection indeed part of half-emergence, if the Inconscient is a starting-point containing in itself ideal of the potency of a superconscience and supernature which has to evolveYoga, a veil of apparent Nescience in which that greater consciousness but it is concealed the last item and from which it has to unfold itself, if an evolution of being is so long as the law, then what we are seeking for is fundamental change has not only possible but part of been made in the eventual necessity of things. It is our spiritual destiny material consciousness to manifest and become that supernature,—for it is which the nature of our true selfbody belongs, our still occult, because unevolved, whole being. A nature of unity will then bring inevitably its life-result of unity, mutuality, harmony. An inner life awakened to one may have a full consciousness and to a full power of consciousness will bear its inevitable fruit certain perfection on other planes without having immunity in all who have it, self-knowledge, a perfected </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">existence, the joy of a satisfied being, the happiness of a fulfilled naturebody. <ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2231/theillness-divineand-lifehealth#p23</u>p57</ref></span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">A subjective spirituality can be established which refuses or minimises commerce with the world or is content to witness its action and throw back or throw out its invading influences with out allowing any reaction to them or admitting their intrusion: but if the inner spirituality is to be objectivised in a free world action, if the individual has to project himself into the world and in a sense take the world into himself, this cannot be dynamically done without receiving the world influences through one's own circumconscient or environmental being. The spiritual inner consciousness has then to deal with these influences in such a way that, as soon as they approach or enter, they become either obliterated and without result or transformed by their very entry into its own mode and substance. Or it may force them to receive the spiritual influence and return with a transforming power on the world they come from, for such a compulsion on the lower universal Nature is part of a perfect spiritual action. But for that the circumconscient or environmental being must be so steeped in the spiritual light and spiritual substance that nothing can enter into it without undergoing this transformation: the invading external influences have not to bring in at all their lower awareness, their lower sight, their lower dynamism. But this is a difficult perfection, because ordinarily the circumconscient is not wholly our own formed and realised self but ourself plus the external world-nature. It is, for this reason, always easier to spiritualise the inner self-sufficient parts than to transform the outer action; a perfection of introspective, indwelling or subjective spirituality aloof from the world or self-protected against it is easier than a perfection of the whole nature in a dynamic, kinetic spirituality objectivised in the life, embracing the world, master of its environment, sovereign in its commerce with world-nature. But since the integral transformation must embrace fully the dynamic being and take up into it the life of action and the world-self outside us, this completer change is demanded of the evolving nature. <ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/22/the-ascent-towards-supermind#p44</u></refcenter>~</spancenter>

== Duality The physical being of man has always been felt by the seekers of perfection to be a great impediment and it has been the habit to turn from it with contempt, denial or aversion and a desire to suppress altogether or as far as may be the body and the physical life. But this cannot be the right method for the integral Yoga. The body is given us as one instrument necessary to the totality of our works and it is to be used, not neglected, hurt, suppressed or abolished. If it is imperfect, recalcitrant, obstinate, so are also the other members, the vital being, heart and mind and reason. It has like them to be changed and perfected and to undergo a transformation. As we must get ourselves a new life, new heart, new mind, so we have in Perfection ==a certain sense to build for ourselves a new body.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/the-power-of-the-instruments</ref>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"center>If the human consciousness were bound to the sense of imperfection and the acceptance of it as the law of our life and the very character of our existence,—a reasoned acceptance that could answer in our human nature to the blind animal acceptance of the animal nature,—then we might say that what we are marks the limit of the divine self-expression in us; we might believe too that our imperfections and sufferings worked for the general harmony and perfection of things and console ourselves with this philosophic balm offered for our wounds, satisfied to move among the pitfalls of life with as much rational prudence or as much philosophic sagacity and resignation as our incomplete mental wisdom and our impatient vital parts permitted. Or else, taking refuge in the more consoling fervours of religion, we might submit to all as the will of God in the hope or the faith of recompense in a Paradise beyond where we shall enter into a happier existence and put on a more pure ~</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">and perfect nature. But there is an essential factor in our human consciousness and its workings which, no less than the reason, distinguishes it entirely from the animal; there is not only a mental part in us which recognises the imperfection, there is a psychic part which rejects it. Our soul's dissatisfaction with imperfection as a law of life upon earth, its aspiration towards the elimination of all imperfections from our nature, not only in a heaven beyond where it would be automatically impossible to be imperfect, but here and now in a life where perfection has to be conquered by evolution and struggle, are as much a law of our being as that against which they revolt; they too are divine,—a divine dissatisfaction, a divine aspiration. In them is the inherent light of a power within which maintains them in us so that the Divine may not only be there as a hidden Reality in our spiritual secrecies but unfold itself in the evolution of Nature.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #0066cc;"><ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/21/the-divine-and-the-undivine#p8</u></ref></spancenter>

<span style="background-colorTransformation and the Body : transparent; color: #000000;">When we say The supramental perfection means that all the body becomes conscious, is a divine manifestation, even filled with consciousness and that which we call undivine, we mean that in its essentiality all as this is divine even if the form baffles or repels us. Or, to put it in a formula to which it is easier for our psychological sense of things to give its assent, in Truth consciousness all things there is a presence, a primal Reality,—the Self, the Divine, Brahman,—which is for ever pure, perfect, blissful, infinite: its infinity is not affected by the limitations of relative things; its purity is not stained by our sin and evil; its bliss is not touched by our pain and suffering; its perfection is not impaired by our defects of consciousness, knowledge, willactions, unityfunctionings etc. In certain images of the Upanishads the divine Purusha is described as the one Fire which has entered into all forms and shapes itself according to the form, as the one Sun which illumines all impartially and is not affected become by the faults power of our seeing. But this affirmation is not enough; the consciousness within it leaves the problem unsolved, why that which is in itself ever pure, perfect, blissfulharmonious, infiniteluminous, should not only tolerate but seem to maintain right and encourage in its manifestation imperfection and limitation, impurity and suffering and falsehood and evil: it states the duality that constitutes the problem, but does not solve ittrue—without ignorance or disorder.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #0066cc;"><ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2128/the-divinetransformation-and-the-undivinebody#p4</u>p3</ref></span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">But even when we thus regard This is one of the universe, we cannot and ought not to dismiss things one discovers gradually as entirely and radically false and unreal the values body becomes ready for transformations. It is quite a remarkable instrument in the see that are given to it by our own limited human consciousnesscan experience two contraries at the same time. For grief, pain, suffering, error, falsehood, ignorance, weakness, wickedness, incapacity, non-doing There is a certain state of what should be done and wrongbody-doingconsciousness which brings things together, deviation totalises things that in other states of will consciousness alternate or even in certain others oppose each other. But if one has reached up there, in the vital and denial the mind, a development sufficient for harmonising opposites (that of willcourse, egoismis quite indispensable), limitationwhen one has succeeded in doing this, division from other beings with whom we should be onethere are moments when it alternates, all that makes up the effective figure of what we call evilyou see, are facts of one thing comes after the world-consciousnessother, not fictions and unrealities, although they are facts whose complete sense or true value while what is not that which we assign to them remarkable in our ignorance. Still our sense the consciousness of them the body is part of a true sensethat it can feel ("feel", our values of them are necessary to their complete values. One side of the truth of these things can we discover when we get into a deeper and larger consciousness; for we find then that there is a cosmic and individual utility in what presents itself to us as adverse and evil. </span><span style=say "feel"background-color: transparent; color: #000000;?—">For without experience of pain we would not get all the infinite </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;—the word "aware">value of the divine delight of which pain is in travail; expresses it best) all ignorance is a penumbra which environs an orb of knowledgethings simultaneously, every error is significant of the possibility as though you were hot and the effort of a discovery of truth; every weakness cold at once, as though you were active and failure is a first sounding of gulfs of power passive at once, and potentiality; all division is intended everything becomes like that. Then you begin to enrich by an experience grasp the totality of various sweetness of unification movements in the joy of realised unitycells. All this imperfection It is to us evilsomething much more concrete naturally, but all evil is much more perfect in travail of the eternal good;</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">for all is an imperfection which is the first condition—in the law of life evolving out of Inconscience—of a greater perfection body than in the manifesting any other part of the hidden divinitybeing. But at the same time our present feeling of This means that if things continue in this evil and imperfectionway, it will be proved that the revolt of our consciousness against them is also a necessary valuation; for if we have first to face and endure themphysical, the ultimate command on us material instrument is to reject, to overcome, to transform the life and the naturemost perfect of all. It That is for that end that their insistence why perhaps it is not allowed to slacken; the soul must learn the results of the Ignorance, must begin most difficult to feel their reactions as a spur to its endeavour of mastery and conquest and finally to a greater endeavour of transformation and transcendence. It is possible, when we live inwardly in the depths, to arrive at a state of vast inner equality and peace which is untouched by the reactions of the outer nature, and that is a great but incomplete liberationtransform,—for the outer nature too has a right to deliveranceperfect. But even if our personal deliverance is complete, still there is the suffering of othersall, the world travail, which the great of soul cannot regard with indifference. There it is a unity with all beings which something within us feels and the deliverance one most capable of others must be felt as intimate to its own deliveranceperfection.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #0066cc;">(The Mother, 21 April 1954) <ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/06/21/the-divine-and-theapril-undivine1954#p19</u>p31</ref></span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">For an age out of sympathy with the ascetic spirit—and throughout all the rest of the world the hour of the Anchorite may seem to have passed or to be passing—it is easy to attribute this great trend to the failing of vital energy in an ancient race tired out by its burden, its once vast share in the common advance, exhausted by its many-sided contribution to the sum of human effort and human knowledge. But we have seen that it corresponds to a truth of existence, a state of conscious realisation which stands at the very summit of our possibility. In practice also the ascetic spirit is an indispensable element in human perfection and even its separate affirmation cannot be avoided so long as the race has not at the other end liberated its intellect and its vital habits from subjection to an always insistent animalism. <ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/21/the-two-negations-the-refusal-of-the-ascetic#p23</u></refcenter>~</spancenter>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">No man It is perfect; precisely because the vital is there body decays, declines and ends in a complete degradation that death becomes necessary. But if the body followed the progressive movement of the inner being, if it had the same sense of progress and perfection as the ego is psychic being, there would be no necessity for it to die. One year added to prevent itanother need not bring a deterioration. It is only a habit of Nature. It is only when there a habit of what is happening at this moment. And that is exactly the total transformation cause of death. One can foresee quite well, on the external and contrary, that the internal being down to movement for perfection which is at the very subconscientbeginning of life might continue under another form. I have already told you that one does not foresee an uninterrupted growth, for that would need changing the height of the houses after some time! But this growth in height may be changed into a growth in perfection: the perfection of the form. All the imperfections of the form may be gradually corrected, all the weaknesses replaced by strength, all the incapacities by skill. Why should it not be like this? You do not think in that way because you have the habit of seeing things otherwise. But there is possible. Till then imperfection will remain as our common heritageno reason why this should not happen. (The Mother, 17 June 1953) <ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/3105/the-subconscient-and-the17-integraljune-yoga1953#p2</u>p36</ref></span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">The Master of our works respects our nature even when he is transforming it; he works always through the nature and not by any arbitrary caprice. This imperfect nature of ours contains the materials of our perfection, but inchoate, distorted, misplaced, thrown together in disorder or a poor imperfect order. All this material has to be patiently perfected, purified, reorganised, new-moulded and transformed, not hacked and hewn and slain or mutilated, not obliterated by simple coercion and denial. This world and we who </span><span styleWhy Do We Need Perfection? ="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">live in it are his creation and manifestation, and he deals with it and us in a way our narrow and ignorant mind cannot understand unless it falls silent and opens to a divine knowledge. In our errors is the substance of a truth which labours to reveal its meaning to our groping intelligence. The human intellect cuts out the error and the truth with it and replaces it by another half-truth half-error; but the Divine Wisdom suffers our mistakes to continue until we are able to arrive at the truth hidden and protected under every false cover. Our sins are the misdirected steps of a seeking Power that aims, not at sin, but at perfection, at something that we might call a divine virtue. Often they are the veils of a quality that has to be transformed and delivered out of this ugly disguise: otherwise, in the perfect providence of things, they would not have been suffered to exist or to continue. The Master of our works is neither a blunderer nor an indifferent witness nor a dallier with the luxury of unneeded evils. He is wiser than our reason and wiser than our virtue. <ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/23/the-master-of-the-work#p6</u></ref></span>

== Imperfection to Perfection For Discovering the Truth of Living==

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">In this light we can admit that all works perfectly towards a divine end by a divine wisdom and therefore each thing is in that sense perfectly fitted in its place; but we say that that is not For the awakened individual the whole realisation of the divine purpose. For what is is only justifiable, finds its perfect sense his truth of being and satisfaction by what can his inner liberation and will perfection must be. There ishis primary seeking, no doubt—first, a key in the divine reason because that would justify things as they are by revealing their right significance and true secret as other, subtler, deeper than their outward meaning and phenomenal appearance which is all that can normally be caught by our present intelligence: but we cannot be content with that belief, to search for and find the spiritual key call of things is the law of our being. The sign of the finding is not a philosophic intellectual recognition and a resigned or sage acceptance of things as they are because of some divine sense and purpose in them which is beyond us; the real sign is an elevation towards the spiritual knowledge and power which will transform the law and phenomena and external forms of our life nearer to a true image of that divine sense and purpose. It is right and reasonable to endure with equanimity suffering and subjection to defect as the immediate will of God, a present law of imperfection laid on our membersSpirit within him, but on condition that we recognise also because it also as the will of God in us to transcend evil is only by liberation and suffering, to transform imperfection into perfection, to rise into a higher law and realisation of Divine Nature. In our human consciousness there is the image of an ideal truth of being, a divine nature, an incipient godhead: in relation to that higher man can arrive at truth our present state of imperfection living. A perfected community also can be relatively described as an undivine life and exist only by the conditions perfection of the world from which we start as undivine conditions; the imperfections are the indication given to us that they are there as first disguisesits individuals, not as and perfection can come only by the intended expression discovery and affirmation in life by each of the divine his own spiritual being and the divine naturediscovery by all of their spiritual unity and a resultant life unity. It is a Power within There can be no real perfection for us, the concealed Divinity, that has lit the flame except by our inner self and truth of aspiration, pictures the image spiritual existence taking up all truth of the ideal, keeps alive our discontent instrumental existence into itself and pushes us giving to throw off the disguise and to reveal orit oneness, in the Vedic phraseintegration, to form and disclose the Godhead in harmony. As our only real freedom is the manifest spirit, mind, life discovery and body disengagement of this terrestrial creature. Our present nature can only be transitionalthe spiritual Reality within us, so our imperfect status a startingonly means of true perfection is the sovereignty and self-point and opportunity for the achievement effectuation of another higher, wider and greater that shall be divine and perfect not only by the secret spirit within it but spiritual Reality in its manifest and most outward form all the elements of existenceour nature. <ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2122/the-divine-and-the-undivinelife#p9</u>p37</ref> </span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">The more perfect the contact, the greater the power. (The Mother, 20 June 1956) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/08/20-june-1956#p11</refcenter>~</spancenter>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">There is nothing you cannot understand if you give your brain a Reality, a truth of all existence which is greater and more abiding than all its formations and manifestations; to find that truth and Reality and live in it, achieve the time most perfect manifestation and formation possible of it, must be the secret of perfection whether of individual or communal being. This Reality is there within each thing and gives to widen each of its formations its power of being and perfect itselfvalue of being. (The Motheruniverse is a manifestation of the Reality, 12 December 1956) and there is a truth of the universal existence, a Power of cosmic being, an all-self or world-spirit. Humanity is a formation or manifestation of the Reality in the universe, and there is a truth and self of humanity, a human spirit, a destiny of human life. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/0822/12the-decemberdivine-1956life#p15p36</ref></span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">=For one who wants to grow in selfSelf-perfection, there are no great or small tasks, none that are important or unimportant; all are equally useful for one who aspires for progress Progress and self-mastery. It is said that one only does well what one is interested in doing. This is true, but it is truer still that one can learn to find interest in everything one does, even in what appear to be the most insignificant chores. The secret of this attainment lies in the urge towards self-perfection. Whatever occupation or task falls to your lot, you must do it with a will to progress; whatever one does, one must not only do it as best one can but strive to do it better and better in a constant effort for perfection. In this way everything without exception becomes interesting, from the most material chore to the most artistic and intellectual work. The scope for progress is infinite and can be applied to the smallest thing. <ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/12/the-four-austerities-and-the-four-liberations#p17</u></ref></span>Fulfillment==

<span style="backgroundIn the Dhammapada: a supreme disinterestedness and a supreme liberation is to follow the discipline of self-color: transparent; color: #000000;">Andperfection, finallythe march of progress, not with a word precise end in view but because this march of advice: be more concerned with your own faults than with those progress is the profound law and the purpose of others. If each one worked seriously at his own self-perfectionearthly life, the perfection truth of universal existence and because you put yourself in harmony with it, spontaneously, whatever the whole would follow automaticallyresult may be. <ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/1303/aims-andthe-principlesbrahmin#p147</u>p43</ref></span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">It is all right to see the imperfections and deficiencies but only on condition it brings a greater courage for a new progress, an increase of energy in the determination and a stronger certitude of victory and future perfection. <ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/14/mistakes-no-torment-worry-or-sadness#p12</u></refcenter>~</spancenter>

= Mind For one who wants to grow in self-perfection, there are no great or small tasks, none that are important or unimportant; all are equally useful for one who aspires for progress and Perfection =self-mastery. It is said that one only does well what one is interested in doing. This is true, but it is truer still that one can learn to find interest in everything one does, even in what appear to be the most insignificant chores. The secret of this attainment lies in the urge towards self-perfection. Whatever occupation or task falls to your lot, you must do it with a will to progress; whatever one does, one must not only do it as best one can but strive to do it better and better in a constant effort for perfection. In this way everything without exception becomes interesting, from the most material chore to the most artistic and intellectual work. The scope for progress is infinite and can be applied to the smallest thing. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/12/the-four-austerities-and-the-four-liberations#p17</ref>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">But our mind Perfection is obscure, partial in its notions, misled by opposite surface appearancesnot a static state, divided between various possibilities; it is led in three different directions to any of which it may give an exclusive preferenceequilibrium. Our mindBut a progressive, in its search for what must be, turns towards a concentration on our own inner spiritual growth and dynamic equilibrium. One may go from perfection, on our own individual being and inner living; or it turns towards a concentration on an individual development of our surface nature, on the to perfection of our thought and outer dynamic or practical action on the world, on some idealism of our personal relation with the world around us; or it turns rather towards . There can come a concentration on the outer world itself, on making state from which it better, more suited would not be necessary to descend to our ideas and temperament or a lower rung in order to our conception of what should be. On one side there is go farther; at the moment the call march of our spiritual being which Nature is our true selflike that, a transcendent realitybut in this new state, a instead of being of the Divine Beingobliged to go back to be able to start again, not created by the worldone can walk always forward, able to live in itselfwithout ever stopping. As things are, one comes to rise out of world to transcendence; on the other side there is the demand of the world around us which is a cosmic formcertain point and, a formulation of the Divine Beingas human beings as they are at present cannot progress indefinitely, one must pass to a power of higher species or leave the Reality in disguisepresent species and create another. There The human being as he is too at the divided or double demand moment cannot attain perfection unless he gets out of our himself—man is a transitional being of Nature which is poised between these two terms. In ordinary language it may be said: "Oh, depends on them and connects them; for it this man is apparently made by the world and yetperfect", because its true creator is in ourselves and the world instrumentation but that seems to make it is only the means first used, it is really a form, a disguised manifestation of literary figure. The maximum a greater spiritual human being within us. It can attain just now is this demand that mediates between our preoccupation with an inward perfection or spiritual liberation and our preoccupation with the outer world and its formation, insists on equilibrium which is not progressive. He may attain perhaps a happier relation between the two terms and creates the ideal of a better individual in a better world. But it static equilibrium but all that is within us that the Reality must static can be found and the source and foundation broken for lack of a perfected life; no outward formation can replace it: there must be the true self realised within if there is to be the true life realised in world and Natureprogress. (The Mother, 30 December 1950) <ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/2204/the30-divinedecember-life1950#p7</u>p19</ref></span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">The characteristic law of Spirit is self-existent perfection and immutable infinity. It possesses always and in its own right the immortality which is the aim of Life and the perfection which is the goal of Mind. The attainment of the eternal and the realisation of that which is the same in all things and beyond all things, equally blissful in universe and outside it, untouched by the imperfections and limitations of the forms and activities in which it dwells, are the glory of the spiritual life. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/23/the-threefold-life#p7</refcenter>~</spancenter>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">There All life is a world secret Yoga, an obscure growth of ideas without form Nature towards the discovery and it is there that you must enter if you want to seize what is behind the words. So long as you have to draw your understanding from the forms fulfilment of words, you are likely to fall into much confusion about the true sense; but if divine principle hidden in a silence of your mind you can rise into the world from her which ideas descend to take formbecomes progressively less obscure, at once the real understanding comes. If you are to be sure of understanding one anothermore self-conscient and luminous, you must be able to understand more self-possessed in silence. There is a condition in which your minds are so well attuned and harmonised together that one perceives the thought human being by the opening of the other without any necessity all his instruments of words. But if there is not this attunementknowledge, there will always be some deformation of your meaning, because action, life to what you speak the other mind supplies its own significance. I use a word Spirit within him and in a certain sense or shade of its sense; you are accustomed to put into it another sense or shadethe world. ThenMind, evidentlylife, you will understandbody, not my exact meaning in it, but what all the forms of our nature are the word means to you. This is true not of speech onlythis growth, but of reading also. If you want they find their last perfection only by opening out to understand a book with a deep teaching in itsomething beyond them, first, you must be able to read it in because they are not the mind's silence; you must wait and let whole of what man is, secondly, because that other something which he is, is the expression go deep inside you into the region where words are no more key of his completeness and from there come slowly back to your exterior consciousness and its surface understanding. But if you let the words jump at your external mind and try brings a light which discovers to adapt and adjust him the two, you will have entirely missed their real sense whole high and power. There can be no perfect understanding unless you are in union with the unexpressed mind that is behind the centre large reality of expressionhis being. (The Mother, 26 May 1929) <ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/0324/26the-mayintegral-1929#p21</u>perfection?search=perfection</ref></span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">For here there is the same process of evolution Our soul's dissatisfaction with imperfection as in the rest of the movement of Nature; there is a heightening and widening law of the consciousnesslife upon earth, an ascent to a new level and a taking up of the lower levels, an assumption and new integration of the existence by a superior power of Being which imposes its own way of action and its character and force of substance energy on as much as it can reach of aspiration towards the previously evolved parts elimination of all imperfections from our nature. The demand for integration becomes at this highest stage of Nature's workings a point of cardinal importance. In the lower grades of the ascension the new assumption, the integration into not only in a higher principle of consciousnessheaven beyond where it would be automatically impossible to be imperfect, remains incomplete: the mind cannot wholly mentalise life but here and matter; there are considerable parts of the now in a life being and the body which remain in the realm of the submental and the subconscient or inconscient. This is one serious obstacle where perfection has to the mind's endeavour towards the perfection of the nature; for the continued share of the submental, the subconscient be conquered by evolution and inconscient in the government of the activitiesstruggle, by bringing in another are as much a law than that of the mental our being, enables the conscious vital and the physical consciousness also to reject the law laid upon them by the mind and to follow their own impulses and instincts in defiance of the mental reason and the rational will of the developed intelligence. This makes it difficult for the mind to go beyond itself, to exceed its own level and spiritualise the natureas that against which they revolt; for what it cannot even make fully consciousthey too are divine, cannot securely mentalise and rationalise—a divine dissatisfaction, it cannot spiritualise, since spiritualisation is a greater and more difficult integrationdivine aspiration. No doubt, by calling in In them is the spiritual force, it can establish an influence and a preliminary change in some parts inherent light of the nature, especially in the thinking mind itself and in the heart which is nearest to its own province: but this change is not often a total perfection even power within limits and what it does achieve is rare and difficult. The spiritual consciousness using the mind is employing an inferior means and, even though it brings which maintains them in a divine light into us so that the mind, a divine purity, passion, ardour into the heart or imposes a spiritual law upon the life, this new consciousness has to work within restrictions; for the most part it can Divine may not only regulate or check the lower action of the life and rigorously control the body, but these members, even if refined or mastered, do not receive their spiritual fulfilment or undergo be there as a perfection and transformation. For that it is necessary to bring hidden Reality in a higher dynamic principle which is native to the our spiritual consciousness and by which, therefore, it can act secrecies but unfold itself in its own law and completer natural light and power and impose them upon the membersevolution of Nature. <ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2221/the-ascentdivine-towardsand-the-supermindundivine#p16</u>p8</ref></span>

<div style="color: #000000;">In your meditation the first imperative need is a state of perfect and absolute sincerity in all the consciousness. It is indispensable that you should not deceive yourself or deceive or be deceived by others. Often people have a wish, a mental preference or vital desire; they want the experience to happen in a particular way or to take a turn that satisfies their ideas or desires or preferences; they do not keep themselves blank and unprejudiced and simply and sincerely observe what happens. Then if you do not like what happens, it is easy to deceive yourself; you will see one thing, but give it a little twist and make it something else, or you will distort something simple and straightforward or magnify it into an extraordinary experience. When you sit in meditation you must be as candid and simple as a child, not interfering by your external mind, expecting nothing, insisting on nothing. Once this condition is there, all the rest depends upon the aspiration deep within you. If you ask from within for peace, it will come; if for strength, for power, for knowledge, they too will come, but all in the measure of your capacity to receive it. And if you call upon the Divine, then too—always admitting that the Divine is open to your call, and that means your call is pure enough and strong enough to reach him,—you will have the answer. (The Mother, 23 June 1929) <ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/23-june-1929#p23</u></refcenter>~</divcenter>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">At the same time it must be added that the power It is enough; the abstention from all physical action is not indispensableonly if our nature develops beyond itself, the aversion to action mental or corporeal is not desirable. The seeker of the integral state if it becomes a nature of self-knowledge must be free from attachment to action and equally free from attachment to inaction. Especially must any tendency to mere inertia , mutual understanding, unity, a nature of mind or vitality or body be surmounted, true being and if true life that habit is found growing on the natureresult can be a perfection of ourselves and our existence, the will a life of the Purusha must be used to dismiss it. Eventuallytrue being, a state arrives when the life and the body perform as mere instruments the will of the Purusha in the mind without any strain or attachmentunity, mutuality, without their putting themselves into the action with that inferiorharmony, eager and often feverish energy which is the nature a life of their ordinary working; they come to work as forces of Nature work without the fret and toil true happiness, a harmonious and reaction characteristic of beautiful life . If our nature is fixed in the body when what it is , what it has already become, then no perfection, no real and enduring happiness is possible in earthly life; we must seek it not yet master of at all and do the physical. When best we attain to this perfectioncan with our imperfections, then action and inaction become immaterial, since neither interferes with the freedom of the soul or draws we must seek it away from its urge towards the Self elsewhere, in a supraterrestrial hereafter, or its poise we must go beyond all such seeking and transcend life by an extinction of nature and ego in the Selfsome Absolute from which this strange and unsatisfactory being of ours has come into existence. But this state of perfection arrives later if in the Yoga us there is a spiritual being which is emerging and till then the law our present state is only an imperfection of moderation laid down by half-emergence, if the Gita Inconscient is a starting-point containing in itself the best for us; too much mental or physical action then is not good since excess draws away too much energy potency of a superconscience and reacts unfavourably upon the spiritual condition; too little also is not good since defect leads supernature which has to evolve, a habit veil of inaction apparent Nescience in which that greater consciousness is concealed and even to an incapacity from which it has afterwards to be surmounted with difficulty. Stillunfold itself, periods if an evolution of absolute calmbeing is the law, solitude and cessation from works then what we are highly desirable and should be secured as often as seeking for is not only possible for that recession but part of the soul into itself which eventual necessity of things. It is our spiritual destiny to manifest and become that supernature,—for it is indispensable the nature of our true self, our still occult, because unevolved, whole being. A nature of unity will then bring inevitably its life-result of unity, mutuality, harmony. An inner life awakened to a full consciousness and to a full power of consciousness will bear its inevitable fruit in all who have it, self-knowledge, a perfected existence, the joy of a satisfied being, the happiness of a fulfilled nature. <ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2322/the-releasedivine-from-subjection-to-the-bodylife#p8</u>p23</ref></span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">Mind finds fully its force and action only when it casts itself upon life and accepts equally its possibilities and its resistances as the means of a greater self-perfection. In the struggle with the difficulties of the material world the ethical development of the individual is </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">firmly shaped and the great schools of conduct are formed; by contact with the facts of life Art attains to vitality, Thought assures its abstractions, the generalisations of the philosopher base themselves on a stable foundation of science and experience. <ref><u>http://incarnateword.To Grow in/cwsa/23/the-threefold-life#p18</u></ref></span>Spiritual Oneness==

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"center>The calm established in the whole being must remain the same whatever happens, in health and disease, in pleasure and in pain, even in the strongest physical pain, in good fortune and misfortune, our own or that of those we love, in success and failure, honour and insult, praise and blame, justice done to us or injustice, everything that ordinarily affects the mind. If we~</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">see unity everywhere</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">, if we recognise that all comes by the divine will, see God in all, in our enemies or rather our opponents in the game of life as well as our friends, in the powers that oppose and resist us as well as the powers that favour and assist, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">in all energies and forces and happenings</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">, and if besides we can feel that all is undivided from our self, all the world one with us within our universal being, then this attitude becomes much easier to the heart and mind. But even before we can attain or are firmly seated in that universal vision, we have by all the means in our power to insist on this receptive and active equality and calm. Even something of it, alpam api asya dharmasya, is a great step towards perfection; a first firmness in it is the beginning of liberated perfection; its completeness is the perfect assurance of a rapid progress in all the other members of perfection. For without it we can have no solid basis; and by the pronounced lack of it we shall be constantly falling back to the lower status of desire, ego, duality, ignorance. <ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/the-action-of-equality#p5</u></ref></spancenter>

<span style="backgroundSo long as he remains in the world-color: transparent; color: #000000;">As you pursue existence, this labour of purification and unification, you perfection must at the same time take great care to perfect the external and instrumental part of your being. When the higher truth manifestsradiate out from him, it must find in you a mind —for that is supple and rich enough to be able to give the idea that seeks to express itself a form necessity of thought which preserves his oneness with the universe and its force beings,—in an influence and clarity. This thought, again, when action which help all around who are capable of it seeks to clothe itself in wordsrise to or advance towards the same perfection, must find in you a sufficient power of expression so that the words reveal the thought and do not deform it. And for the formula rest in an influence and action which you embody help, as only the truth should be manifested in all your feelings, all your acts of will, all your actionsself-ruler and master man can help, in all leading the movements human race forward spiritually towards this consummation and towards some image of your beinga greater divine truth in their personal and communal existence. Finally, these movements themselves should, by constant effort, attain their highest perfectionHe becomes a light and power of the Truth to which he has climbed and a means for others’ ascension. <ref><u>httpttp://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/1224/the-scienceperfection-of-living#p6</u>the-mental-being?search=perfection</ref></span>

=== Soul, Mind and How to Achieve Perfection ==? =

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">The character Master of these higher states of the soul and their greater worlds of spiritual Nature our works respects our nature even when he is necessarily difficult to seize. Even transforming it; he works always through the Upanishads nature and the Veda only shadow them out not by figures, hints and symbolsany arbitrary caprice. Yet it is necessary to attempt some account This imperfect nature of their </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">principles and practical effect so far as they can be grasped by ours contains the mind that stands on the border materials of the two hemispheresour perfection, but inchoate, distorted, misplaced, thrown together in disorder or a poor imperfect order. The passage beyond that border would All this material has to be the culminationpatiently perfected, purified, reorganised, the completeness of the Yoga of selfnew-transcendence by self-knowledge. The soul that aspires to perfectionmoulded and transformed, draws back not hacked and upward, says the Upanishad, from the physical into the vital hewn and from the vital into the mental Purushaslain or mutilated, from the mental into the knowledge-soul not obliterated by simple coercion and from that self of knowledge into the bliss Purushadenial. This self of bliss is the conscious foundation of perfect Sachchidananda world and to pass into we who live in it completes the soul's ascension. The mind therefore must try to give to itself some account of this decisive transformation of the embodied consciousnessare his creation and manifestation, this radiant transfiguration and self-exceeding of he deals with it and us in a way our ever aspiring nature. The description narrow and ignorant mind can arrive at, can never be adequate to the thing itself, but cannot understand unless it may point at least falls silent and opens to some indicative shadow of it or perhaps some half-luminous imagea divine knowledge. <ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/23/the-laddermaster-of-selfthe-transcendencework#p13</u>p6</ref></span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">But always the whole foundation of the gnostic life must be by its very nature inward and not outward. In the life of the spirit it is the spirit, the inner Reality, that has built up and uses the mind, vital being and body as its instrumentation; thought, feeling and action do not exist for themselves, they are not an object, but the means; they serve to express the manifested divine Reality within us: otherwise, without this inwardness, this spiritual origination, in a too externalised consciousness or by only external means, no greater or divine life is possible. In our present life of Nature, in our externalised surface existence, it is the world that seems to create us; but in the turn to the spiritual life it is we who must create ourselves and our world. In this new formula of creation, the</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"> </span><span stylePrerequisites="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">inner life becomes of the first importance and the rest can be only its expression and outcome.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">It is this, indeed, that is indicated by our own strivings towards perfection, the perfection of our own soul and mind and life and the perfection of the life of the race. For we are given a world which is obscure, ignorant, material, imperfect, and our external conscious being is itself created by the energies, the pressure, the moulding operations of this vast mute obscurity, by physical birth, by environment, by a training through the impacts and shocks of life; and yet we are vaguely aware of something that is there in us or seeking to be, something other than what has been thus made, a spirit self-existent, self-determining, pushing the nature towards the creation of an image of its own occult perfection or Idea of perfection. There is </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">something that grows in us in answer to this demand, that strives to become the image of a divine.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">Somewhat, and is impelled also to labour at the world outside that has been given to it and to remake that too in a greater image, in the image of its own spiritual and mental and vital growth, to make our world too something created according to our own mind and self-conceiving spirit, something new, harmonious, perfect. <ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/22/the-divine-life#p6</u></ref></span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">If consciousness is the central secret, life is the outward indication, the effective power of being in Matter; for it is that which liberates consciousness and gives it its form or embodiment of force and its effectuation in material act. If some revelation or effectuation of itself in Matter is the ultimate aim of the evolving Being in its birth, life is the exterior and dynamic sign and index of that revelation and effectuation. But life also, as it is now, is imperfect and evolving; it evolves through growth of consciousness even as consciousness evolves through greater organisation and perfection of life: a greater consciousness means a greater life. Man, the mental being, has an imperfect life because mind is not the first and highest power of consciousness of the Being; even if mind were perfected, there would be still something yet to be realised, not yet manifested. For what is involved and emergent is not a Mind, but a Spirit, and mind is not the native dynamism of consciousness of the Spirit; supermind, the light of gnosis, is its native dynamism. If then life has to become a manifestation of the Spirit, it is the manifestation of a spiritual being in us and the divine life of a perfected consciousness in a supramental or gnostic power of spiritual being that must be the secret burden and intention of evolutionary Nature. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/22/the-divine-life#p3</refcenter>~</spancenter>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">These are The next necessity of perfection is to raise all the first major results active parts of the spiritual transformation human nature to that follow as a necessary consequence highest condition and working pitch of their power and capacity, śakti, at which they become capable of being divinised into true instruments of the nature of Supermindfree, perfect, spiritual and divine action. But if there is to be not only a perfection of For practical purposes we may take the inner existenceunderstanding, of the consciousnessheart, the prana and the body as the four members of an inner delight our nature which have thus to be prepared, and we have to find the constituent terms of existence, but a their perfection . Also there is the dynamical force in us (vīrya) of the life temperament, character and actionsoul nature, svabhāva, two other questions present themselves from our mental view-point which have to makes the power of our human thought about our life members effective in action and gives them their type and direction; this has to be freed from its dynamisms limitations, enlarged, rounded so that the whole manhood in us may become the basis of a considerabledivine manhood, even a premier importance. Firstwhen the Purusha, there is the place of personality real Man in us, the gnostic beingdivine Soul,—whether shall act fully in this human instrument and shine fully through this human vessel. To divinise the status, perfected nature we have to call in the divine Power or Shakti to replace our limited human energy so that this may be shaped into the building image of and filled with the being force of a greater infinite energy, daivī prakṛti, bhāgavatī śakti. This perfection will be quite other than what grow in the measure in which we experience as can surrender ourselves, first, to the form guidance and then to the direct action of that Power and life of the person or similar. If there Master of our being and our works to whom it belongs, and for this purpose faith is the essential, faith is the great motor-power of our being in our aspirations to perfection,—here, a personality faith in God and it is the Shakti which shall begin in any way responsible for the heart and understanding, but shall take possession of all our nature, all its consciousness, all its actionsdynamic motive-force. These four things are the essentials of this second element of perfection, there intervenesthe full powers of the members of the instrumental nature, nextthe perfected dynamis of the soul nature, the question assumption of them into the place action of the ethical element divine Power, and its perfection a perfect faith in all our members to call and fulfilment in the gnostic naturesupport that assumption, śakti, vīrya, daivī prakṛti, śraddhā. <ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2224/the-gnosticelements-of-beingperfection#p28</u>p3</ref></span>

== Perfecting ...perfection of our instrumental nature... the perfection of the intelligence, heart, vital consciousness and body, the perfection of the fundamental soul powers, the perfection of the surrender of our instruments and action to the divine Shakti, depend at every moment of their progression on a... power that is covertly and overtly the pivot of all endeavour and action, faith, śraddhā. The perfect faith is an assent of the whole being to the truth seen by it or offered to its acceptance, and its central working is a faith of the soul in its own will to be and attain and become and its idea of self and things and its knowledge, of which the belief of the intellect, the heart’s consent and the desire of the life mind to possess and realise are the Body =outward figures.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/faith-and-shakti?search=perfection</ref>

<div style="color: #000000;">This is one of the things one discovers gradually as the body becomes ready for transformations. It is quite a remarkable instrument in the see that it can experience two contraries The condition to be aimed at , the same time. There is a certain state real achievement of body-consciousness which brings things togetherYoga, totalises things that in other states of consciousness alternate or even in certain others oppose each other. But if one has reached up there, in the vital final perfection and the mindattainment, for which all else is only a development sufficient for harmonising opposites (that of coursepreparation, is quite indispensable), when one has succeeded a consciousness in doing this, there are moments when which it alternatesis impossible to do anything without the Divine; for then, if you see, one thing comes after are without the otherDivine, while what is remarkable in the consciousness very source of the body is that it can feel ("feel"your action disappears; knowledge, power, can we say "feel"?—"experience"—the word "aware" expresses it best) all things simultaneously, are gone. But so long as though you were hot and cold at once, as though feel that the powers you were active and passive at onceuse are your own, and everything becomes like that. Then you begin to grasp the totality of movements in the cells. It is something much more concrete naturally, but much more perfect in the body than in any other part of the being. This means that if things continue in this way, it will be proved that not miss the physical, material instrument is the most perfect of all. That is why perhaps it is the most difficult to transform, to perfect. But of all, it is the one most capable of perfectionDivine support. (The Mother, 21 28 April 19541929) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/0603/2128-april-19541929#p31p14</ref></div>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">Be on your guard against the wrath of the body. Control your actions, and leaving behind wrong ways of acting, practise perfect conduct in action. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/anger#p10</ref></span>=Process==

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">One who aspires to the ineffable Peace, one whose mind is awakened, whose thoughts are not entangled in the net of desire, that one is said to be "bound upstream" (towards perfection). <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/pleasure#p10</ref></span>==By Education and Training===

<span style=If you said to yourself, my children, "background-color: transparent; color: #000000;We want to be as perfect instruments as possible to express the divine Will in the world">As , then for the question about the illnessthis instrument to be perfect, it must be cultivated, educated, perfection in the physical plane is indeed part trained. It must not be left like a shapeless piece of the ideal of the Yogastone. When you want to build with a stone you chisel it; when you want to make a formless block into a beautiful diamond, you chisel it. Well, but it is the last item same thing. When with your brain and, so long as the fundamental change has not been made in the material consciousness body you want to which make a beautiful instrument for the body belongsDivine, you must cultivate it, sharpen it, refine it, complete what is missing, one may have a certain perfection on other planes without having immunity in the bodyperfect what is there. (The Mother, 13 May 1953) <ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/3105/illness13-andmay-health1953#p57</u>p18</ref></span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">Transformation and the Body : The supramental perfection means that the body becomes conscious, is filled with consciousness and that as this is the Truth consciousness all its actions, functionings etc. become by the power of the consciousness within it harmonious, luminous, right and true—without ignorance or disorder. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/28/transformation-and-the-body#p3</refcenter>~</spancenter>

== Body Perfection The way to attain to this perfect consciousness is to increase your actual consciousness beyond its present grooves and limits, to educate it, to open it to the Divine Light and to let the Divine Light work in it fully and freely. But the Light can do its full and unhindered work only when you have got rid of all craving and fear, when you have no mental prejudices, no vital preferences, no physical apprehensions or Immortality ==attractions to obscure or bind you. (The Mother, 30 June 1929) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/30-june-1929#p8</ref>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">When the body has learned the art of constantly progressing towards an increasing perfection, we shall be well on the way to overcoming the inevitability of death. (The Mother, 16 January 1972) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/16/16-january-1972#p1</refcenter>~</spancenter>

<span style="color: #000000;">We are on earth in order Fundamentally, whatever be the path one follows—whether the path of surrender, consecration, knowledge—if one wants it to progress be perfect, it is always equally difficult, and to there is but one way, one only, I know of only one: that is perfect ourselves in the course of many successive lives. What we cannot do this timesincerity, we shall do next time; and every progress we make this time will help us then. but perfect sincerity! (The Mother, 15 November 197112 May 1954) <ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/1706/1512-novembermay-19711954#p1</u>p34</ref></span>

<span style="color: #000000;">Ah! No. You are looking from the wrong side. They could escape dying only if their body did not decay. It is just because their body decays that they die. It is because their body becomes useless that they die. If they are not to die, their body should not become useless. This is just the contrary. It is precisely because the body decays, declines and ends in a complete degradation that death becomes necessary. But if the body followed the progressive movement ==By Becoming Conscious of the inner being, if it had the same sense of progress and perfection as the psychic being, there would be no necessity for it to die. One year added to another need not bring a deterioration. It is only a habit of Nature. It is only a habit of what is happening at this moment. And that is exactly the cause of death. One can foresee quite well, on the contrary, that the movement for perfection which is at the beginning of life might continue under another form. I have already told you that one does not foresee an uninterrupted growth, for that would need changing the height of the houses after some time! But this growth in height may be changed into a growth in perfection: the perfection of the form. All the imperfections of the form may be gradually corrected, all the weaknesses replaced by strength, all the incapacities by skill. Why should it not be like this? You do not think in that way because you have the habit of seeing things otherwise. But there is no reason why this should not happen. (The Mother, 17 June 1953) <ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/05/17-june-1953#p36</u></ref></span>Oneself===

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">But, you see, when our little humanity says three hundred years with the same body, you say: "Why! when I am fifty it already begins to decompose, so at three hundred it will be a horrible thing!" But it is not like that. If it is three hundred years with a body that goes on perfecting itself from year to year, perhaps when To work for your perfection the three hundredth year first step is reached one will say: "Oh! I still need three or four hundred more to be what I want to be." If each year that passes represents a progress, a transformation, one would like to have more and more years in order to be able to transform oneself more and more. When something is not exactly as you want it to be—take, for example, simply one of the things I have just described, say, plasticity or lightness or elasticity or luminosity, and none become conscious of them is exactly as you want it, then you will still need at least two hundred years more so that it may be accomplished, but you never think: "How is it? It is still going to last two hundred years more!" On the contrary, you say: "Two hundred years more are absolutely necessary so that it may be truly doneyourself." And then, when all is done, when all is perfect, then there is no longer any question of years, for you are immortal. (The Mother, 20 May 195313 January 1951) <ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/0504/2013-mayjanuary-19531951#p44</u>p16</ref></span>

== Ego To work for your perfection, the first step is to become conscious of yourself, of the different parts of your being and Perfection ==their respective activities. You must learn to distinguish these different parts one from another, so that you may become clearly aware of the origin of the movements that occur in you, the many impulses, reactions and conflicting wills that drive you to action. It is an assiduous study which demands much perseverance and sincerity. For man's nature, especially his mental nature, has a spontaneous tendency to give a favourable explanation for everything he thinks, feels, says and does. It is only by observing these movements with great care, by bringing them, as it were, before the tribunal of our highest ideal, with a sincere will to submit to its judgment, that we can hope to form in ourselves a discernment that never errs. For if we truly want to progress and acquire the capacity of knowing the truth of our being, that is to say, what we are truly created for, what we can call our mission upon earth, then we must, in a very regular and constant manner, reject from us or eliminate in us whatever contradicts the truth of our existence, whatever is opposed to it. In this way, little by little, all the parts, all the elements of our being can be organised into a homogeneous whole around our psychic centre. This work of unification requires much time to be brought to some degree of perfection. Therefore, in order to accomplish it, we must arm ourselves with patience and endurance, with a determination to prolong our life as long as necessary for the success of our endeavour.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/12/the-science-of-living#p5</ref>

<div style="color: #000000;">Why do you say that sensitivity is the sign of a strong ego? It does not seem to be evident at all. Moreover, there are many different kinds of sensitivity: some stem from weakness, others—the best—are the result of refinement. The ego generally governs the development of the individual, but the most developed individualities are not necessarily those in whom the ego is strongest—on the contrary. As the individuality perfects itself, the power of the ego diminishes, and indeed it is by perfecting himself that the individual arrives at that state of divinisation which liberates him from the ego. (The Mother, 2 September 1964) <ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/16/2-september-1964#p3</u></refcenter>~</divcenter>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">Never forget that here it is for the perfection of the work that we are striving, not for the satisfaction of the ego. <ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/13/organisation-and-work#p55</u></ref></span> <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">The egoism of the instrument can be as dangerous or more dangerous to spiritual progress than the egoism of the doer. The ego-sense is contrary to spiritual realisation, so how can any kind of ego be a thing to be encouraged? As for the magnified ego, it is one of the most perilous obstacles to release and perfection. There should be no big I, not even a small one. <ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/31/ego-and-its-forms#p54</u></ref></span> <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">If you think there is no ego or desire in you, only pure devotion, that shows a great unconsciousness. To be free passing from ego and desire is a condition which needs a high siddhi in Yoga—even many Yogis of a great spiritual attainment are not free from it. For a sadhak at your stage of development to think he is free from ego and desire is to blind himself and prevent the clear perception of one's own nature movements which is necessary for progress towards spiritual perfection. <ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/31/ego-and-its-forms#p74</u></ref></span> <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">This vairagya, or loss of zest, as you have yourself said, began before you came here. I have indeed laid some stress on the conquest of sex, for obvious reasons; but I have hardly laid a compulsory stress on anything else. Certainly, I have not encouraged you domain to lose joy in vital creativeness; I have only held up the ideal of turning it towards the Divine and away another we renounce what has already been given us from the ego. To keep the vital full of life and energy and to trust mainly to the inner growth and the descent of a higher consciousness eagerness for a change, using the will too but for self-masteryour new attainment, not for suppression, but for subordination of the lower to the higher, has been my teaching. The turn to vairagya, to tapasya of an ascetic kind was the impulse of something in your own nature; it insisted on its necessity just as a part of the vital insisted on its opposite: even it condemned my suggestion of something less grim and strenuous as an easy-going absence of aspiration etc. I do not say that vairagya and tapasya are not ways to reach the Divine, but done like that they are painful ways and long; if one takes them, one must be determined and go through. For one part to push all zest out of the vital and for the other </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">to regret and say, why did I ever do it, will never do. And it is in this kind of tapasya that perfection or at least perfect purification is demanded before there can be any realisation. I have never said that for my Yoga; reaching the only thing I insist upon is some faith, inner surrender and opening of oneself to receive,—not absolute, but just sufficient. Experience has to begin long before perfect purification and from experience to experience one comes to realisation and through realisation to more and more perfection; anything that can be called real perfection can only come at the end. But there is something in you that is impatient of gradualness, of small mercies; its motto seems to be all mental life we cast away or nothing. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/29/asceticism-and-belittle the-integral-yoga#p9</ref></span> == The Mundane and Divine Perfection == <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">A divine perfection of the human being is our aim. We must know then first what are the essential elements that constitute man's total perfection; secondly, what we mean by a divine as distinguished from a human perfection of our being. That man as a being is capable of self-development and of some approach at least to an ideal standard of perfection physical life which his mind is able to conceive, fix before it and pursue, is common ground to all thinking humanity, though it may be only the minority who concern themselves with this possibility as providing the one most important aim of life. But by some the ideal is conceived as a mundane change, by others as a religious conversion. <ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/the-integral-perfection#p1</u></ref></span> <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">The mundane perfection is sometimes conceived of as something outward, social, a thing of action, a more rational dealing with our fellow-men and our environment, a better and more efficient citizenship and discharge of duties, a better, richer, kindlier and happier way of living, with a more just and more harmonious associated enjoyment of the opportunities of existence. By others again a more inner and subjective ideal is cherished, a clarifying and raising of the intelligence, will and reason, a heightening and ordering of power and capacity in the nature, a nobler ethical, a richer aestheticbasis, a finer emotional, a much healthier and better-governed vital and physical being. Sometimes one element is stressed, almost to the exclusion of the rest; sometimes, in wider and more well-balanced minds, the whole harmony is envisaged as a total perfection. A change of education and social institutions is the outward means adopted or an inner self-training and development is preferred as the true instrumentation. Or the two aims may be clearly united, the perfection of the inner individual, the perfection of the outer living. <ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/the-integral-perfection#p2</u></ref></span> <span style="color: #000000;">We know, if we have said this many a time, that all work is a prayer made with reject the body mental and that the true attitude physical in work is an offering to the Divine. Well, this was satisfied with the way the thing was done. For I was looking on, to see, as I said, if there were things which were not as they should have been. But in any case, to the eye of this consciousness which was looking on, it was satisfying. Materially, you see, I said, "In the outer human consciousness this can be done much better." That of course is understood, we haven't reached the height of perfection, far from that, but it must also be said that it is only a very small part of our activity... that we are trying much more than this, that it is only one of the movements of our sadhana, you see. We are busy with many other things besides this... one thing among many others... and to put up something like this according attraction to the accomplishment which the laws of human perfection demandspiritual, infinitely more time, infinitely more work and infinitely more means would have been necessary. But we are not seeking an exclusive perfection in one thing or another, we are trying to make everything go forward together to a common, integral perfection. And these things have their place and importance, but they don't have an exclusive place and importance. Therefore, from the external point of view, one may criticise and find something to say and all that; but it is not that, the true point of view. Inwardly, it is well. (The Mother, 30 November 1955) <ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/07/30-november-1955#p28</u></ref></span> <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">The divine existence is of the nature do not only of freedom, but of purityfulfil God integrally, beatitude and perfection. An integral purity which shall enable on the one hand the perfect reflection of the divine Being in ourselves and on the other the perfect outpouring of its Truth and Law in us in the terms of life and through the right functioning of the complex instrument we are in our outer parts, is the condition of an integral liberty. Its result is an integral beatitude, in which there becomes possible at once the Ananda of all that is in the world seen as symbols of the Divine and the Ananda of that which is not-world. And it prepares the integral perfection of our humanity as a type of the Divine in nor satisfy the conditions of the human manifestation, a perfection founded on a certain free universality of being, of love and joy, of play of knowledge and of play of will in power and will in unegoistic action. This integrality also can be attained by the integral Yoga. <ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/23/the-synthesis-of-the-systems#p19</u></ref></span> == Perfection of All Kinds == <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">Perfection of all kinds is indeed good, as it is the sign of the pressure of the consciousness in the material world towards full His self-expression in this or that limit, on this or that levelmanifestation. In a certain sense it is an urge of the Divine itself hidden in forms that tends in the lesser degrees of consciousness towards its own increasing self-revelation. Perfection of an object or a scene in inanimate Nature, animate perfection of strength, speed, physical beauty, courage or animal fidelity, affection, intelligence, perfection of art, music, poetry, literature,—perfection of the intellect in any kind of mental activity, the perfect statesman, warrior, artist, craftsman,—perfection in vital force and capacity, perfection in ethical qualities, character, temperament,—all have their high value, their place as rungs in the ladder of evolution, the seried steps of the spirit's emergence. If one likes to call that spiritual because of this hidden urge behind it one can We do so; it can at least be regarded as a preparation for the secret spirit's emergence. But thought and knowledge can only proceed by making the necessary distinctions. Much confusion is created by neglecting them. This mental idealism, ethical development, religious piety and fervour, occult </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">powers and feats have all been taken as spirituality and the spiritual evolution kept tied to the moorings of the planes of lesser consciousness which do indeed prepare the soul by experience for the spiritual consciousness but are not themselves that. For perfection can only become truly spiritual when it is founded on the awakened spiritual consciousness and takes on its peculiar essence. <ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/28/idealism-and-spirituality#p1</u></ref></span> <span style="color: #000000;">"The supramental world has to be formed or created in us by the Divine Will as the result of a constant expansion and self-perfecting." (The Mother, 27 June 1956) <ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/08/27-june-1956#p31</u></ref></span> <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">Moral perfection is to have all the qualities that are considered moral: to have no defects, never to make a mistake, never to err, to be always what one conceives to be the best, to have all the virtues. (The Mother, 1 October 1958) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/09/1-october-1958#p3</ref></span> == Consciousness and Perfection == <span style="color: #000000;">The way to attain to this perfect consciousness is to increase your actual consciousness beyond its present grooves and limits, to educate it, to open it to but only shift the Divine Light and to let the Divine Light work in it fully and freely. But the Light can do its full and unhindered work only when you have got rid field of all craving and fear, when you have no mental prejudices, no vital preferences, no physical apprehensions our imperfection or attractions to obscure or bind you. (The Mother, 30 June 1929) <ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/30-june-1929#p8</u></ref></span> <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">Ignorance is dispelled by a growing consciousness; what you need is consciousness and always more consciousness, at most attain a consciousness pure, simple and luminouslimited altitude. In the light of this perfected consciousness, things appear as they are and not as they want to appear. It is like a screen faithfully recording all things as they pass. You see there what is luminous and what is dark, what is straight and what is crooked. Your consciousness becomes a screen or mirror; but this is when you are in a state of contemplation, a mere observer; when you are activeHowever high we may climb, even though it is like a searchlight. You have only to turn it on, if you want be to see luminously and examine penetratingly anything in any place. (The Mother, 30 June 1929) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/30-june-1929#p7</ref></span> <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">This power of the soul over its nature is of the utmost importance in the Yoga of selfNon-perfection; if it did not existBeing itself, we could never get by conscious endeavour and aspiration out </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">of the fixed groove of our present imperfect human being; climb ill if any greater perfection were intended, we should have forget our base. Not to wait for Nature to effect it in her own slow or swift process of evolution. In abandon the lower forms of being the soul accepts this complete subjection to Natureitself, but as to transfigure it rises higher in the scale, it awakes light of the higher to a sense of something in itself which can command Nature; but it is only when it arrives at self-knowledge that this free will and control becomes a complete reality. The change effects itself through process of naturewe have attained, not therefore by any capricious magic, but an ordered development and intelligible process. When complete mastery is gained, then the process by its self-effective rapidity may seem a miracle to the intelligence, but it still proceeds by law of the truth true divinity of Spirit,—when the Divine within us by close union of our will and being with him takes up the Yoga and acts as the omnipotent master of the nature. For the Divine is our highest Self and the self of all Nature, the eternal and universal Purusha. <ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2421/the-psychologydestiny-of-self-perfection#p8</u></ref></span> = Individual Perfection = == Perfect Individual == <span style="color: #000000;">A child should never be scolded. I am accused of speaking ill of parents! But I have seen them at work, you see, and I know that ninety per cent of parents snub a child who comes spontaneously to confess a mistake: "You are very naughty. Go away, I am busy"—instead of listening to the child with patience and explaining to him where his fault lies, how he ought to have acted. And the child, who had come with good intentions, goes away quite hurt, with the feeling: "Why am I treated thus?" Then the child sees his parents are not perfect—which is obviously true of them today—he sees that they are wrong and says to himself: "Why does he scold me, he is like me!" (The Mother, 8 January 1951) <ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/04/8-january-1951individual#p31</u>p9</ref></span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">In the Dhammapada: a supreme disinterestedness and a supreme liberation is to follow the discipline of self-perfection, the march of progress, not with a precise end in view but because this march of progress is the profound law and the purpose of earthly life, the truth of universal existence and because you put yourself in harmony with it, spontaneously, whatever the result may be. <ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/the-brahmin#p43</u></refcenter>~</spancenter>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">If In the process of this is our evolutionary destiny, it remains for us to see where we stand at this juncture in change there must be by the evolutionary progression,—a progression which has been cyclic or spiral rather than in a straight line or has at least journeyed in a very zigzag swinging curve necessity of the effort two stages of advanceits working. First,—and what prospect there is of any turn towards a decisive step in will be the near or measurable future. In our human aspiration towards a personal perfection and the perfection endeavour of the life of the race the elements of the future evolution are foreshadowed and striven afterhuman being, but in a confusion of half-enlightened knowledge; there is a discord between the necessary </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">elementsas soon as he becomes aware by his soul, an opposing emphasismind, a profusion heart of rudimentary unsatisfying this divine possibility and ill-accorded solutions. These sway between turns towards it as the three principal preoccupations true object of our idealismlife,—the complete single development to prepare himself for it and to get rid of the human being all in himselfhim that belongs to a lower working, of all that stands in the perfectibility way of his opening to the individualspiritual truth and its power, a full development of the collective so as to possess by this liberation his spiritual being, the perfectibility of society, and, more pragmatically restricted, the perfect or best possible relations turn all his natural movements into free means of individual with individual and society and its self-expression… The second stage of community with community. An exclusive or dominant emphasis is laid sometimes on the individual, sometimes on the collectivity or society, sometimes on this Yoga will therefore be a right and balanced relation between the individual and the collective human whole. One idea holds persistent giving up of all the growing life, freedom or perfection action of the human individual as nature into the true object hands of our existencethis greater Power,—whether the ideal be merely a free self-expression substitution of its influence, possession and working for the personal being or a self-governed whole effort, until the Divine to whom we aspire becomes the direct master of complete mind, fine the Yoga and ample life and perfect body, or a effects the entire spiritual perfection and liberation. In this view </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">society is there only as a field ideal conversion of activity and growth for the individual man</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">and serves best its function when it gives as far as possible a wide room, ample means, a sufficient freedom or guidance of development to his thought, his action, his growth, his possibility of fullness of being. <ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2224/the-divineintegral-life#p34</u>perfection?search=perfection</ref></span>

It isBut if you remain in that consciousness and look from there, then, this spiritual fulfilment you begin to understand something of the urge truth. And this consciousness has to individual perfection and an inner completeness of being be so total, that we mean first when we speak even if things come directly against you, even the physical movement of a divine life. It someone coming to beat you (you must not allow him to kill you, no; you have perhaps to do what is the first essential condition of a perfected life on earthnecessary not to get killed), and we but if you are therefore right yourself in making the utmost possible individual perfection our first supreme business. The perfection of the spiritual this perfect consciousness and pragmatic relation of the individual with all around him is our second preoccupation; have no personal reaction, well, I give you the solution of this second desideratum lies in a complete universality and oneness with all life upon earth which is guarantee the other concomitant result of an evolution into the gnostic consciousness and naturecannot kill you. He will not be able to, even if he tries. But there still remains the third desideratumHe will not be able to beat you, a new worldeven if he tries. Only, you must not have a change in the total life of humanity single violent orwrong vibration, at the leastyou understand? Even if there is just a little false vibration, a new perfected collective life in that opens the earth-nature. This calls for the appearance not only of isolated evolved individuals acting in the unevolved mass, but of many gnostic individuals forming a new kind of beings door and a new common life superior to the present individual thing enters and common existenceall goes wrong. A collective life of this kind You must obviously constitute itself on be fully conscious, have the same principle as full knowledge, the life perfect mastery over everything, the clear vision of the gnostic individualTruth—and perfect peace. (The Mother, 20 May 1953) <ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/2205/the20-divinemay-life1953#p19</u>p54</ref>

<span style="backgroundThis power of the soul over its nature is of the utmost importance in the Yoga of self-color: transparentperfection; if it did not exist, we could never get by conscious endeavour and aspiration out of the fixed groove of our present imperfect human being; color: #000000if any greater perfection were intended, we should have to wait for Nature to effect it in her own slow or swift process of evolution. In the lower forms of being the soul accepts this complete subjection to Nature, but as it rises higher in the scale, it awakes to a sense of something in itself which can command Nature;">You but it is only when it arrives at self-knowledge that this free will become more and more perfect in your work as control becomes a complete reality. The change effects itself through process of nature, not therefore by any capricious magic, but an ordered development and intelligible process. When complete mastery is gained, then the process by its self-effective rapidity may seem a miracle to the consciousness growsintelligence, increasesbut it still proceeds by law of the truth of Spirit, widens —when the Divine within us by close union of our will and being with him takes up the Yoga and acts as the omnipotent master of the nature. For the Divine is enlightenedour highest Self and the self of all Nature, the eternal and universal Purusha. <ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/1424/progressthe-andpsychology-perfectionof-inself-workperfection#p1</u>p8</ref></span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">In all action, all work done, the degree of perfection depends upon the degree of consciousness. <ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/14/progress-and-perfection-in-work#p3</u></refcenter>~</spancenter>

<span style="backgroundAn integral Yoga includes as a vital and indispensable element in its total and ultimate aim the conversion of the whole being into a higher spiritual consciousness and a larger divine existence. Our parts of will and action, our parts of knowledge, our thinking being, our emotional being, our being of life, all our self and nature must seek the Divine, enter into the Infinite, unite with the Eternal. But man's present nature is limited, divided, unequal,—it is easiest for him to concentrate in the strongest part of his being and follow a definite line of progress proper to his nature: only rare individuals have the strength to take a large immediate plunge straight into the sea of the Divine Infinity. Some therefore must choose as a starting-point a concentration in thought or contemplation or the mind's one-color: transparentpointedness to find the eternal reality of the Self in them; colorothers can more easily withdraw into the heart to meet there the Divine, the Eternal: #000000yet others are predominantly dynamic and active;">Perfection for these it is best to centre themselves in the will and enlarge their being through works. United with the Self and source of all by their surrender of their will into its infinity, guided in their works by the secret Divinity within or surrendered to the Lord of the cosmic action as the master and mover of all their energies of thought, feeling, act, becoming by this enlargement of being selfless and universal, they can reach by works some first fullness of a spiritual status. But the work path, whatever its point of starting, must debouch into a vaster dominion; it must be proceed in the end through a totality of integrated knowledge, emotion, will of dynamic action, perfection of the being and the entire nature. In the supramental consciousness, on the level of the supramental existence this integration becomes consummate; there knowledge, will, emotion, the perfection of the self and the dynamic nature rise each to its absolute of itself and all to their perfect harmony and fusion with each other, to a divine integrality, a divine perfection. For the supermind is a Truth-Consciousness in which the aimDivine Reality, fully manifested, but it no longer works with the instrumentation of the Ignorance; a truth of status of being which is absolute becomes dynamic in a truth of energy and activity of the being which is self-existent and perfect. Every movement there is a movement of the self-aware truth of Divine Being and every part is in entire harmony with the whole. Even the most limited and finite action is in the Truth-Consciousness a movement of the Eternal and Infinite and partakes of the inherent absoluteness and perfection of the Eternal and Infinite. An ascent into the supramental Truth not only by raises our spiritual and essential consciousness to that height but brings about a very patient effort that descent of this Light and Truth into all our being and all our parts of nature. All then becomes part of the Divine Truth, an element and means of the supreme union and oneness; this can ascent and descent must be obtainedtherefore an ultimate aim of this Yoga. <ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/1423/progressthe-supermind-and-perfectionthe-yoga-inof-workworks#p19</u>p1</ref></span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">Open yourself more and more ==By Learning to the Divine's force and your work will progress steadily towards perfection. <ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/14/progress-and-perfection-in-work#p21</u></ref></span>be a Witness===

<span style="background...we find ourselves to be not the mind, but a mental being who stands behind the action of the embodied mind, not a mental and vital personality,—personality is a composition of Nature,—but a mental Person,manomaya puruṣa. We become aware of a being within who takes his stand upon mind for self-knowledge and world-knowledge and thinks of himself as an individual for self-experience and world-experience, for an inward action and an outward-color: transparentgoing action, but is yet different from mind, life and body. First, he has the intuition of himself as someone observing the action of the mind; color: #000000;">Let nothing short it is something which is going on in him and yet before him as an object of his regarding knowledge. This self-awareness is the intuitive sense of perfection the witness Purusha, sākṣī. Witness Purusha is a pure consciousness who watches Nature and sees it as an action reflected upon the consciousness and enlightened by that consciousness, but in itself other than it.To enter into identity with that Spirit must then be your ideal his way to control and lordship. He can do it passively by a sort of reflection and receiving in work and you are sure to become his mental consciousness, but then he is only a true mould, channel or instrument , not a possessor or participant in the power. He can arrive at identity by an absorption of his mentality in inner spiritual being, but then the conscious action ceases in a trance of identity. To be active master of the nature he must evidently rise to some higher supramental poise where there is possible not only a passive, but an active identity with the controlling spirit. To find the Divineway of rising to this greater poise and be self-ruler, Swarat, is a condition of his perfection. <ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/1424/progressthe-andperfection-of-perfectionthe-inmental-work#p25</u>being?search=perfection</ref></span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">There must be order and harmony in work. Even what is apparently the most insignificant thing must be done with perfect perfection, with a sense of cleanliness, beauty, harmony and order. <ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/14/progress-and-perfection-in-work#p26</u></ref></span>==By Developing Detachment===

<span style="background-color: transparentThe seeker of the integral state of knowledge must be free from attachment to action and equally free from attachment to inaction. Especially must any tendency to mere inertia of mind or vitality or body be surmounted, and if that habit is found growing on the nature, the will of the Purusha must be used to dismiss it. Eventually, a state arrives when the life and the body perform as mere instruments the will of the Purusha in the mind without any strain or attachment, without their putting themselves into the action with that inferior, eager and often feverish energy which is the nature of their ordinary working; color: #000000;">The they come to work as forces of Nature work without the fret and toil and reaction characteristic of life in the body when it is not yet master of the physical. When we attain to this perfection, then action and inaction become immaterial, since neither interferes with the freedom of the soul or draws it away from its urge towards the Self or its poise in the Self. But this state of perfection arrives later in the Yoga and till then the law of moderation laid down by the work done Gita is the best for us; too much more important than its bulk mental or physical action then is not good since excess draws away too much energy and reacts unfavourably upon the bigness spiritual condition; too little also is not good since defect leads to a habit of its scopeinaction and even to an incapacity which has afterwards to be surmounted with difficulty. Still, periods of absolute calm, solitude and cessation from works are highly desirable and should be secured as often as possible for that recession of the soul into itself which is indispensable to knowledge. <ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/1423/progressthe-andrelease-from-subjection-perfectionto-inthe-workbody#p38</u>p8</ref></span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">In works, aspiration towards Perfection is true spirituality. <ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/14/progress-and-perfection-in-work#p45</u></ref></span>==By Developing Equality===

=== Practical Tips for Perfection The calm established in Work ===the whole being must remain the same whatever happens, in health and disease, in pleasure and in pain, even in the strongest physical pain, in good fortune and misfortune, our own or that of those we love, in success and failure, honour and insult, praise and blame, justice done to us or injustice, everything that ordinarily affects the mind. If we see unity everywhere, if we recognise that all comes by the divine will, see God in all, in our enemies or rather our opponents in the game of life as well as our friends, in the powers that oppose and resist us as well as the powers that favour and assist, in all energies and forces and happenings, and if besides we can feel that all is undivided from our self, all the world one with us within our universal being, then this attitude becomes much easier to the heart and mind. But even before we can attain or are firmly seated in that universal vision, we have by all the means in our power to insist on this receptive and active equality and calm. Even something of it, alpam api asya dharmasya, is a great step towards perfection; a first firmness in it is the beginning of liberated perfection; its completeness is the perfect assurance of a rapid progress in all the other members of perfection. For without it we can have no solid basis; and by the pronounced lack of it we shall be constantly falling back to the lower status of desire, ego, duality, ignorance. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/the-action-of-equality#p5</ref>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">Do not worry about mistakes in work. Often you imagine that things are badly done by you when really you have done them very well; but even if there are mistakes, it is nothing to be sad about. Let the consciousness grow—only in the divine consciousness is there an entire perfection. The more you surrender to the Divine, the more will there be the possibility ==By Purification of perfection in you. <ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/29/practical-concerns-in-work#p39</u></ref></span>Nature===

<span style="background...purification is an essential means towards self-colorperfection. All these impurities and inadequacies result in various kinds of limitation and bondage: transparent; color: #000000but there are two or three primary knots of the bondage,—ego is the principal knot,—from which the others derive. These bonds must be got rid of;">Someone who purification is learning to paint or play music or write not complete till it brings about liberation. Besides, after a certain purification and does not like to have his mistakes pointed out by those who already know—how liberation has been effected, there is he still the conversion of the purified instruments to learn the law of a higher object and utility, a large, real and perfect order of action. By the conversion man can arrive at all or reach any a certain perfection of fullness of being, calm, power and knowledge, even a greater vital action and more perfect physical existence. One result of this perfection is a large and perfected delight of technique? being, Ananda.<ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2924/practicalthe-perfection-of-concernsthe-inmental-work#p45</u>being?search=perfection</ref></span>

== Perfection The divine existence is of the nature not only of freedom, but of purity, beatitude and Interperfection. An integral purity which shall enable on the one hand the perfect reflection of the divine Being in ourselves and on the other the perfect outpouring of its Truth and Law in us in the terms of life and through the right functioning of the complex instrument we are in our outer parts, is the condition of an integral liberty. Its result is an integral beatitude, in which there becomes possible at once the Ananda of all that is in the world seen as symbols of the Divine and the Ananda of that which is not-world. And it prepares the integral perfection of our humanity as a type of the Divine in the conditions of the human manifestation, a perfection founded on a certain free universality of being, of love and joy, of play of knowledge and of play of will in power and will in unegoistic action. This integrality also can be attained by the integral Yoga. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/23/the-synthesis-of-the-relation with Others ==systems#p19</ref>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">...man is separated in his mind, his life, his body from the universal and therefore, even as he does not know himself, is equally and even more incapable of knowing his fellow-creatures. He forms by inferences, theories, observations and a certain imperfect capacity </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">of sympathy a rough mental construction about them; but this is not knowledge. Knowledge can only come by conscious identity, for that is the only true knowledge,—existence aware of itself. We know what we are so far as we are consciously aware of ourself, the rest is hidden; so also we can come really to know that with which we become one in our consciousness, but only so far as we can become one with it. If the means of knowledge are indirect and imperfect, the knowledge attained will also be indirect and imperfect. It will enable us to work out with a certain precarious clumsiness but still perfectly enough from our mental standpoint certain limited practical aims, necessities, conveniences, a certain imperfect and insecure harmony of our relations with that which we know; but only by a conscious unity with it can we arrive at a perfect relation. Therefore we must arrive at a conscious unity with our fellow-beings and not merely at the sympathy created by love or the understanding created by mental knowledge, which will always be the knowledge of their superficial existence and therefore imperfect in itself and subject to denial and frustration by the uprush of the unknown and unmastered from the subconscient or the subliminal in them and us. But this conscious oneness can only be established by entering into that in which we are one with them, the universal and the fullness of the universal exists consciently only in that which is superconscient to us, in the Supermind: for here in our normal being the greater part of it is subconscient and therefore in this normal poise of mind, life and body it cannot be possessed. The lower conscious nature is bound down to ego in all its activities, chained triply to the stake of differentiated individuality. The Supermind alone commands unity in diversity. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/21/the-problem-of-life#p9</ref></span>=By Cultivating Faith===

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">To make There is one kind of faith demanded as indispensable by the effort for one's own perfection integral Yoga and not to that may be disturbed by any mistake described as faith in God and the Shakti, faith in the presence and power of the Divine in us and the world, a faith that all in others but reply the world is the working of one divine Shakti, that all the steps of the Yoga, its strivings and sufferings and failures as well as its successes and satisfactions and victories are utilities and necessities of her workings and that by a silent will for their firm and strong dependence on and a total self-surrender to the Divine and to his Shakti in us we can attain to oneness and freedom and victory and perfection also is always the right attitude. <ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/3124/problemsfaith-inand-human-relations#p9</u>shakti?search=perfection</ref></span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">You stop short at ==By Silencing the perfection that others should realise and you are seldom conscious of the goal you should be pursuing yourself. If you are conscious of it, well then, begin with the work which is given to you, that is to say, realise what you have to do and do not concern yourself with what others do, because, after all, it is not your business. And the best way to the true attitude is simply to say, "All those around me, all the circumstances of my life, all the people near me, are a mirror held up to me by the Divine Consciousness to show me the progress I must make. Everything that shocks me in others means a work I have to do in myself." <ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/10/aphorism-8#p15</u></ref></span>Mind===

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000There is a world of ideas without form and it is there that you must enter if you want to seize what is behind the words. So long as you have to draw your understanding from the forms of words, you are likely to fall into much confusion about the true sense;">And perhaps but if in a silence of your mind you can rise into the world from which ideas descend to take form, at once the real understanding comes. If you are to be sure of understanding one carried another, you must be able to understand in silence. There is a condition in which your minds are so well attuned and harmonised together that one perceives the thought of the other without any necessity of words. But if there is not this attunement, there will always be some deformation of your meaning, because to what you speak the other mind supplies its own significance. I use a word in a certain sense or shade of its sense; you are accustomed to put into it another sense or shade. Then, evidently, you will understand, not my exact meaning in it, but what the word means to you. This is true perfection not of speech only, but of reading also. If you want to understand a book with a deep teaching in oneselfit, one would discover you must be able to read it in the mind's silence; you must wait and let the expression go deep inside you into the region where words are no more often and from there come slowly back to your exterior consciousness and its surface understanding. But if you let the words jump at your external mind and try to adapt and adjust the two, you will have entirely missed their real sense and power. There can be no perfect understanding unless you are in othersunion with the unexpressed mind that is behind the centre of expression. (The Mother, 26 May 1929) <ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/1003/aphorism26-may-81929#p16</u>p21</ref></span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">For the awakened individual the realisation of his truth of being and his inner liberation and perfection must be his primary seekingMan,—firsttoo, because becomes perfect only when he has found within himself that is the call absolute calm and passivity of the Spirit within him, but also because Brahman and supports by it is only by liberation with the same divine tolerance and perfection the same divine bliss a free and realisation inexhaustible activity. Those who have thus possessed the Calm within can perceive always welling out from its silence the perennial supply of the energies that work in the universe. It is not, therefore, the truth of being the Silence to say that man can arrive at truth it is in its nature a rejection of livingthe cosmic activity. A perfected community also can exist only by The apparent incompatibility of the perfection two states is an error of its individualsthe limited Mind which, accustomed to trenchant oppositions of affirmation and perfection can come only by the discovery and </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">affirmation in life by each of his own spiritual being denial and passing suddenly from one pole to the discovery by all other, is unable to conceive of their spiritual unity a comprehensive consciousness vast and strong enough to include both in a resultant life unitysimultaneous embrace. There can be no real perfection for us except by our inner self and truth of spiritual existence taking up all truth of The Silence does not reject the instrumental existence into itself and giving to world; it sustains it oneness, integration, harmony. As our only real freedom is Or rather it supports with an equal impartiality the discovery activity and disengagement of the spiritual Reality within us, so our only means of true perfection is withdrawal from the sovereignty activity and self-effectuation of approves also the reconciliation by which the spiritual Reality in soul remains free and still even while it lends itself to all the elements of our natureaction. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2221/the-divinereality-lifeomnipresent#p37p5</ref></span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">We have to recognise once more that Difficulties on the individual exists not in himself alone but in the collectivity and that individual perfection and liberation are not the whole sense of God's intention in the world. The free use of our liberty includes also the liberation of others and of mankind; the perfect utility of our perfection is, having realised in ourselves the divine symbol, Path to reproduce, multiply and ultimately universalise it in others. <ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/23/the-threefold-life#p30</u></ref></span>Perfection=

<span style="background-color: transparentNo man is perfect; color: #000000;">The best way of helping others the vital is there and the ego is there to transform oneselfprevent it. Be perfect It is only when there is the total transformation of the external and you will be in a position the internal being down to bring the very subconscient, that perfection to the worldis possible. Till then imperfection will remain as our common heritage. <ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/1431/helpingthe-otherssubconscient-and-the-worldintegral-yoga#p12</u>p2</ref></span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">There is a Reality, a truth of all existence which is greater and more abiding than all its formations and manifestations; to find that truth and Reality and live in it, achieve the most perfect manifestation and formation possible of it, must be the secret of perfection whether of individual or communal being. This Reality is there within each thing and gives to each of its formations its power of being and value of being. The universe is a manifestation of the Reality, and there is a truth of the universal existence, a Power of cosmic being, an all-self or world-spirit. Humanity is a formation or manifestation of the Reality in the universe, and there is a truth and self of humanity, a human spirit, a destiny of human life. <ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/22/the-divine-life#p36</u></refcenter>~</spancenter>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"center>Man, too, becomes perfect only when he has found within himself that absolute calm and passivity of the Brahman and supports by it with the same divine tolerance and the same divine bliss a free and inexhaustible activity. Those who have thus possessed the Calm within can perceive always welling out from its silence the perennial supply of the energies that work in the universe. It is not, therefore, the truth of the Silence to say that it is in its nature a rejection of the cosmic activity. The apparent incompatibility of the two states is an error of the limited Mind which, accustomed to trenchant oppositions of affirmation and denial and passing suddenly from one pole to the other, is unable to conceive of a comprehensive consciousness vast and strong enough to include both in a simultaneous embrace. The Silence does not reject the world; it sustains it. Or rather it supports with an equal impartiality the activity and the withdrawal from the activity and approves also the ~</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">reconciliation by which the soul remains free and still even while it lends itself to all action. <ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/21/reality-omnipresent#p5</u></ref></spancenter>

= Final Perfection The thing to which he has given his assent and set his mind and heart and will to achieve, the divine perfection of the whole human being, is apparently an impossibility to the normal intelligence, since it is opposed to the actual facts of life and will for long be contradicted by immediate experience, as happens with all far-off and difficult ends, and it is denied too by many who have spiritual experience but believe that our present nature is the sole possible nature of man in the body and that it is only by throwing off the earthly life or even all individual existence that we can arrive at either a heavenly perfection or the release of extinction.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/faith-and More -shakti?search=perfection</ref>

=== EaseIn the lower grades of the ascension the new assumption, Difficulty the integration into a higher principle of consciousness, remains incomplete: the mind cannot wholly mentalise life and matter; there are considerable parts of the life being and the body which remain in the realm of the submental and the subconscient or inconscient. This is one serious obstacle to the mind's endeavour towards the perfection of the nature; for the continued share of the submental, the subconscient and inconscient in the government of the activities, by bringing in another law than that of the mental being, enables the conscious vital and the physical consciousness also to reject the law laid upon them by the mind and to follow their own impulses and instincts in defiance of the mental reason and the rational will of the developed intelligence. This makes it difficult for the mind to go beyond itself, to exceed its own level and spiritualise the nature; for what it cannot even make fully conscious, cannot securely mentalise and rationalise, it cannot spiritualise, since spiritualisation is a greater and more difficult integration. No doubt, by calling in the spiritual force, it can establish an influence and a preliminary change in some parts of the nature, especially in the thinking mind itself and in the heart which is nearest to its own province: but this change is not often a total perfection even within limits and what it does achieve is rare and difficult. The spiritual consciousness using the mind is employing an inferior means and, even though it brings in a divine light into the mind, a divine purity, passion, ardour into the heart or imposes a spiritual law upon the life, this new consciousness has to work within restrictions; for the most part it can only regulate or check the lower action of the life and rigorously control the body, but these members, even if refined or mastered, do not receive their spiritual fulfilment or undergo a perfection and transformation. For that it is necessary to bring in a higher dynamic principle which is native to the spiritual consciousness and by which, therefore, it can act in its own law and completer natural light and power and Perfection ===impose them upon the members. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/22/the-ascent-towards-supermind#p16</ref>

<span div style="backgroundtext-coloralign: transparent; color: #000000center;">You must not cherish the illusion that if you want to follow the straight path, if you are modest, if you seek purity, if you are disinterested, if you want to lead a solitary existence and have a clear judgment, things will become easy.... It is quite the contrary! When you begin to advance towards inner and outer perfection, the difficulties start at the same time. <ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/impurity#p29</u></ref></span>

<span style="color: #000000;">If you have understood this, you will be ready to understand the difference, the great difference between spirituality and morality, two things that are constantly confused with each other. The spiritual life, the life of Yoga, has for its object to grow into the divine consciousness and for its result to purify, intensify, glorify and perfect what is in you. It makes you a power for manifesting of the Divine; it raises the character of each personality to its full value and brings it to its maximum expression; for this is part of the Divine plan. Morality proceeds '''Content Curated by a mental construction and, with a few ideas of what is good and what is not, sets up an ideal type into which all must force themselves. This moral ideal differs in its constituents and its ensemble at different times and different places. And yet it proclaims itself as a unique type, a categoric absolute; it admits of none other outside itself; it does not even admit a variation within itself. All are to be moulded according to its single ideal pattern, everybody is to be made uniformly and faultlessly the same. It is because morality is of this rigid unreal nature that it is in its principle and its working the contrary of the spiritual life. The spiritual life reveals the one essence in all, but reveals too its infinite diversity; it works for diversity in oneness and for perfection in that diversity. (The Mother, 4 August 1929) <ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/4-august-1929#p6</u></ref></span>Prema Sankar'''

{|class="wikitable" style== Conflicts and "background-color: #efefff; width: 100%;"|Read Summary of '''[[Perfection Summary|Perfection ===]]'''

<span style="color: #000000;">If there were no such resistanceDear reader, there would be nothing whatever to conquer if you notice any error in the world, for the world would be harmonious, a constant passage from one perfection to another instead of the conflict which it is—a game of hazards and various possibilities paragraph numbers in which the Divine faces real oppositionhyperlinks, real difficulty and often real temporary defeat on the way to the final victoryplease let us know by dropping an email at integral. It is just this reality of the whole play that makes it no mere jestedu. The Divine Will actually suffers distortion the moment it touches the hostile forces in the Ignorance@gmail. Hence we must never slacken our efforts to change the world and bring about a different order. We must be vigilant to co-operate with the Divine and not placidly think that whatever happens is always the best. All depends upon the personal attitude. <ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/knowledge-by-unity-with-the-divine-the-divine-will-in-the-world#p5</u></ref></span>com|}

=== Perfection and Harmony =References==

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">It is possible to escape from the problem otherwise; for, admitting always the essential Presence, we can endeavour to justify the divinity of the manifestation by correcting the human view of perfection or putting it aside as a too limited mental standard. We may say that not only is the Spirit in things absolutely perfect and divine, but each thing also is relatively perfect and divine in itself, in its expression of what it has to express of the possibilities of existence, in its assumption of its proper place in the complete manifestation. Each thing is divine in itself because each is a fact and idea of the divine being, knowledge and will fulfilling itself infallibly in accordance with the law of that particular manifestation. Each being is possessed of the knowledge, the force, the measure and kind of delight of existence precisely proper to its own nature; each works in the gradations of experience decreed by a secret inherent will, a native law, an intrinsic power of the self, an occult significance. It is thus perfect in the relation of its phenomena to the law of its being; for all are in harmony with that, spring out of it, adapt themselves to its purpose according to the infallibility of the divine Will and Knowledge at work within the creature. It is perfect and divine also in relation to the whole, in its proper place in the whole; to that totality it is necessary and in it it fulfils a part by which the perfection actual and progressive of the universal harmony, the adaptation of all in it to its whole purpose and its whole sense is helped and completed. If to us things appear undivine, if we hasten to condemn this or that phenomenon as inconsistent with the nature of a divine being, it is because we are ignorant of the sense and purpose of the Divine in the world in its entirety. Because we see only parts and fragments, we judge of each by itself as if it were the whole, judge also the external phenomena without knowing their secret sense; but by doing so we vitiate our valuation of things, put on it the stamp of an initial and fundamental error. Perfection cannot reside in the thing in its separateness, for that separateness is an illusion; </span><span styleReferences ="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">perfection is the perfection of the total divine harmony. <ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/21/the-divine-and-the-undivine#p6</u></ref></span>