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Read Summary of '''[[Perfection Summary|Perfection]]'''
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= What is Perfection? =
 = What is '''Perfection? =in General'''
Perfection is all that we want to become in our highest aspiration. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/15/perfection#p10</ref>
The Divine is the perfection towards which we move. <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/14/the-divine-and-man#p8</ref> 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. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/10/aphorism-63-64-65#p24~</refcenter>
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 not the apex, it is not an extreme. There is no extreme—whatever you may do, there is always the possibility of something better, and it is exactly this possibility of something better which is the very meaning of progress. (The Mother, 30 December 1950) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/04/30-december-1950#p5</ref>
Where in the radically imperfect shall we find the principle and power of perfection? Mind rooted in division and limitation cannot provide it to us, nor can life and the body which are the energy and the frame of dividing and limiting mind. The principle and power of perfection are there in the subconscient but wrapped up in the tegument or veil of the lower Maya, a mute premonition emerging as an unrealised ideal; in the superconscient they await, open, eternally realised, but still separated from us by the veil of our self-ignorance. It is above, then, and not either in our present poise nor below it that we must seek for the reconciling power and knowledge.<refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/21/the-problem-of-life#p12~</refcenter>
==Perfection 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 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 Mind==-integral-perfection#p2</ref>
But our mind is obscure, partial in its notions, misled by opposite surface appearances, divided between various possibilities; it is led in three different directions to any '''Elements of which it may give an exclusive preference. Our mind, in its search for what must be, turns towards a concentration on our own inner spiritual growth and 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 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 a concentration on the outer world itself, on making it better, more suited to our ideas and temperament or to our conception of what should be. On one side there is the call of our spiritual being which is our true self, a transcendent reality, a being of the Divine Being, not created by the world, able to live in itself, to rise out of world to transcendence; on the other side there is the demand of the world around us which is a cosmic form, a formulation of the Divine Being, a power of the Reality in disguise. There is too the 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 world and yet, because its true creator is in ourselves and the world instrumentation that seems to make it is only the means first used, it is really a form, 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 our preoccupation with the outer world and its formation, insists on a happier relation between the two terms and creates the ideal of a better individual in a better world. But it is within us that the Reality must be found and the source and foundation 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 Nature. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/22/the-divine-life#p7</ref>Perfection'''
= How It is, then, this spiritual fulfilment of the urge to Achieve Perfection? =individual perfection and an inner completeness of being that we mean first when we speak of a divine life. It is the first essential condition of a perfected life on earth, and we are therefore right in making the utmost possible individual perfection our first supreme business. The perfection of the spiritual and pragmatic relation of the individual with all around him is our second preoccupation; the solution of this second desideratum lies in a complete universality and oneness with all life upon earth which is the other concomitant result of an evolution into the gnostic consciousness and nature. But there still remains the third desideratum, a new world, a change in the total life of humanity or, at the least, a new perfected collective life in 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 and a new common life superior to the present individual and common existence. A collective life of this kind must obviously constitute itself on the same principle as the life of the gnostic individual. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/22/the-divine-life#p19</ref>
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 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. <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/23/the-master-of-the-work#p6~</refcenter>
These three elements, a union with the supreme Divine, unity with the universal Self, and a supramental life action from this transcendent origin and through this universality, but still with the individual as the soul-channel and natural instrument, constitute the essence of the integral divine perfection of the human being.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/the-integral-perfection?search==Prerequisites==perfection</ref>
'''Where is the Power of Perfection?'''
The first necessity is some fundamental poise of the soul both Where in its essential and its natural being regarding and meeting the things, impacts and workings of Nature. This poise radically imperfect shall we shall arrive at by growing into a perfect equality, samatā. The self, spirit or Brahman is one in all and therefore one to all; it is, as is said in find the Gita which has developed fully this idea of equality principle and indicated its experience on at least one side power of equality, the equal Brahman, samaṁ brahma; the Gita even goes so far perfection? Mind rooted in one passage as to identify equality division and yoga, samatvaṁ yoga ucyate. That is limitation cannot provide it to say, equality is the sign of unity with the Brahman, of becoming Brahmanus, of growing into an undisturbed spiritual poise of being in the Infinite. Its importance nor can hardly be exaggerated; for it is life and the sign of our having passed beyond the egoistic determinations of our nature, of our having conquered our enslaved response to the dualities, of our having transcended the shifting turmoil of body which are the gunas, of our having entered into the calm energy and peace of liberation. Equality is a term of consciousness which brings into the whole frame of our being dividing and nature the eternal tranquillity of the Infinitelimiting mind. Moreover, it is the condition of a securely The principle and perfectly divine action; the security and largeness power of perfection are there in the cosmic action of subconscient but wrapped up in the Infinite is based upon and never breaks down tegument or forfeits its eternal tranquillity. That too must be the character veil of the perfect spiritual actionlower Maya, a mute premonition emerging as an unrealised ideal; to be equal and one to all things in spiritthe superconscient they await, understandingopen, mindeternally realised, heart and natural consciousness,—even in but still separated from us by the most physical consciousness,—and to make all their workings, whatever their outward adaptation to the thing to be done, always and imminuably full veil of the divine equality and calm must be its inmost principleour self-ignorance. That may be said to be the passive or basicIt is above, the fundamental and receptive side of equalitythen, but there is also an active and possessive side, an equal bliss which can only come when not either in our present poise nor below it that we must seek for the peace of equality is founded reconciling power and which is the beatific flower of its fullnessknowledge. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2421/the-elementsproblem-of-perfectionlife#p2p12</ref>
The next necessity of perfection is to raise all the active parts of the human nature to that highest condition and working pitch of their power and capacity, śakti, 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, the 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 perfection. Also there is the dynamical force in us (vīrya) of the temperament, character and soul nature, svabhāva, which makes the power of our members effective in action and gives them their type and direction; this has to be freed from its limitations, enlarged, rounded so that the whole manhood in us may become the basis of a divine manhood, when the Purusha, the real Man in us, the divine Soul, shall act fully in this human instrument 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 with the force of a greater infinite energy, daivī prakṛti, bhāgavatī śakti. This perfection will grow in the measure in which we can surrender ourselves, first, to the guidance and then to the direct action of that Power and of the 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 faith in God and the Shakti which shall begin in the heart and understanding, but shall take possession of all our nature, all its consciousness, all its dynamic motive-force. These four things are the essentials of this second element of perfection, the full powers of the members of the instrumental nature, the perfected dynamis of the soul nature, the assumption of them into the action of the divine Power, and a perfect faith in all our members to call and support that assumption, śakti, vīrya, daivī prakṛti, śraddhā. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/the-elements-of-perfection#p3</ref>'''Divine Perfection'''
==Process==The Divine is the perfection towards which we move. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/14/the-divine-and-man#p8</ref>
"To work for your perfection the first step is to become conscious of yourself." (The Mother, 13 January 1951) <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/04/13-january-1951#p16~</refcenter>
To work for your A divine perfection, the first step is to become conscious of yourself, of the different parts of your human being and their respective activitiesis our aim. You We must learn to distinguish these different parts one from another, so that you may become clearly aware of know then first what are the origin of the movements essential elements 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 constitute man's naturetotal perfection; secondly, especially his mental nature, has what we mean by a spontaneous tendency to give divine as distinguished from a favourable explanation for everything he thinks, feels, says and doeshuman perfection of our being. It That man as a being is only by observing these movements with great care, by bringing them, as it were, before the tribunal capable 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 self-development and acquire the capacity of knowing the truth some approach at least to an ideal standard of our being, that perfection which his mind is able to sayconceive, what we are truly created for, what we can call our mission upon earth, then we must, in a very regular fix before it and constant mannerpursue, reject from us or eliminate in us whatever contradicts the truth of our existence, whatever is opposed common ground 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. Thereforethinking humanity, in order to accomplish though it, we must arm ourselves may be only the minority who concern themselves with patience and endurance, with a determination to prolong our life this possibility as long as necessary for providing the success one most important aim of our endeavourlife.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/1224/the-scienceintegral-of-livingperfection#p5p1</ref>
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.<refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/21/the-destiny-of-the-individual#p9~</refcenter>
But we can attain to The characteristic law of Spirit is self-existent perfection and immutable infinity. It possesses always and in its own right the highest without blotting ourselves out from immortality which is the cosmic extension. Brahman preserves always Its two terms aim of liberty within Life and the perfection which is the goal of formation without, Mind. The attainment of expression the eternal and the realisation of freedom from that which is the expression. We alsosame in all things and beyond all things, being Thatequally blissful in universe and outside it, can attain to untouched by the same divine self-possession. The harmony imperfections and limitations of the two tendencies is forms and activities in which it dwells, are the condition glory of all the spiritual life that aims at being really divine. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2123/the-destinythreefold-of-the-individuallife#p18p7</ref>
<center>~</center>
An integral Yoga includes as a vital and indispensable element in its total and ultimate aim the conversion of Man, the whole mental 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 has an imperfect life, all our self and nature must seek the Divine, enter into the Infinite, unite with the Eternal. But man's present nature because mind is limited, divided, unequal,—it is easiest for him to concentrate in not the strongest part of his being first and follow a definite line highest power of progress proper to his nature: only rare individuals have the strength to take a large immediate plunge straight into the sea consciousness of the Divine Infinity. Some therefore must choose as a starting-point a concentration in thought or contemplation or the Being; even if mind's one-pointedness were perfected, there would be still something yet to find the eternal reality of the Self in them; others can more easily withdraw into the heart to meet there the Divinebe realised, the Eternal: not yet others are predominantly dynamic manifested. For what is involved and active; for these it emergent 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 not a spiritual status. But the pathMind, whatever its point of starting, must debouch into a vaster dominion; it must proceed in the end through but a totality of integrated knowledge, emotionSpirit, will of dynamic action, perfection of the being and mind is not the entire nature. In the supramental native dynamism of consciousness, on the level of the supramental existence this integration becomes consummateSpirit; there knowledge, will, emotionsupermind, the perfection light of the self and the dynamic nature rise each to gnosis, is its absolute of itself and all to their perfect harmony and fusion with each other, native dynamism. If then life has to become a divine integralitymanifestation of the Spirit, a divine perfection. For the supermind it is a Truth-Consciousness in which the Divine Reality, fully manifested, no longer works with the instrumentation manifestation of the Ignorance; a truth of status of spiritual being which is absolute becomes dynamic in a truth of energy us and activity the divine life 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 perfected consciousness in entire harmony with the whole. Even the most limited and finite action is in the Truth-Consciousness a movement supramental or gnostic power 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 being 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 must be the Divine Truth, an element and means of the supreme union secret burden and oneness; this ascent and descent must be therefore an ultimate aim intention of this Yogaevolutionary Nature.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2322/the-superminddivine-and-the-yoga-of-workslife#p1p3</ref>
Fundamentally, whatever be the path one follows—whether the path of surrender, consecration, knowledge—if one wants it to be perfect, it is always equally difficult, and there is but one way, one only, I know of only one: that is perfect sincerity, but perfect sincerity! (The Mother, 12 May 1954) <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/06/12-may-1954#p34~</refcenter>
If you said to yourselfPerfection of all kinds is indeed good, my children, "We want to be as perfect instruments as possible to express it is the sign of the pressure of the divine Will consciousness in the material world"towards full self-expression in this or that limit, then for on this instrument to be 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-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 perfectstatesman, warrior, artist, craftsman,—perfection in vital force and capacity, perfection in ethical qualities, it must be cultivatedcharacter, temperament,—all have their high value, educatedtheir place as rungs in the ladder of evolution, trained. It must not be left like a shapeless piece the seried steps of stonethe spirit's emergence. When you want If one likes to build with a stone you chisel call that spiritual because of this hidden urge behind itone can do so; when you want to make it can at least be regarded as a formless block into a beautiful diamond, you chisel itpreparation for the secret spirit's emergence. But thought and knowledge can only proceed by making the necessary distinctions. Well, it Much confusion is the same thingcreated by neglecting them. When with your brain This mental idealism, ethical development, religious piety and fervour, occult powers and feats have all been taken as spirituality and body you want the spiritual evolution kept tied to make a beautiful instrument the moorings of the planes of lesser consciousness which do indeed prepare the soul by experience for the Divine, you must cultivate it, sharpen it, refine spiritual consciousness but are not themselves that. For perfection can only become truly spiritual when it, complete what is missing, perfect what is therefounded on the awakened spiritual consciousness and takes on its peculiar essence. (The Mother, 13 May 1953) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/0528/13idealism-mayand-1953spirituality#p18p1</ref>
==Difficulties==<center>~</center>
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 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>
No man is perfect; the vital is there and the ego is there to prevent it. It is only when there is the total transformation of the external and the internal being down to the very subconscient, that perfection is possible. Till then imperfection will remain as our common heritage. <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/31/the-subconscient-and-the-integral-yoga#p2~</refcenter>
= Why =As you pursue this labour of purification and unification, you must at the same time take great care to perfect the external and instrumental part of your being. When the higher truth manifests, it must find in you a mind that is 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 the words reveal the thought and do not deform it. And the formula in which you embody the truth should be manifested in all your feelings, all your acts of will, all your actions, in all the movements of your being. Finally, these movements themselves should, by constant effort, attain their highest perfection. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/12/the-science-of-living#p6</ref>
==Perfection in the Mind==
But if you remain The ethical mind becomes perfect in that consciousness and look proportion as it detaches itself from theredesire, then you begin to understand something sense suggestion, impulse, customary dictated action and discovers a self of the truth. And this consciousness has to be so totalRight, that even if things come directly against youLove, even Strength and Purity in which it can live accomplished and make it the physical movement foundation of someone coming to beat you (you must not allow him to kill you, no; you have perhaps to do what all its actions. The aesthetic mind is necessary not to get killed), but if you are yourself perfected in this perfect consciousness 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 have no personal reaction, well, I give you joy to the guarantee material of the other cannot kill youaesthesis. He will not be able toThe 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, even if he triesall self-experience and world-experience. He The will not be able to beat you, even if he triesis 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. Only, you must not have a single violent or wrong vibration, you understand? Even if there The movement of perfection is just a little false vibration, that opens away from all domination by the door lower nature and the thing enters towards a pure and all goes wrong. You must be fully conscious, have powerful reflection of the full knowledgebeing, the perfect mastery over everythingpower, knowledge and delight of the clear vision of Spirit and Self in the Truth—and perfect peacebuddhi. (The Mother, 20 May 1953) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/0524/20purification-mayintelligence-1953#p54and-will</ref>
… 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) <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/05/23-december-1953#p8~</refcenter>
Perfection The first need is not a static state, it is an equilibriumthe clarity and the purity of the intelligence. But a progressive, dynamic equilibrium. One may go from perfection to perfection. There can come a state It must be freed from the claims of the vital being which it would not be necessary seeks to descend to a lower rung in order to go farther; at impose the moment desire of the march mind in place of Nature is like thatthe truth, but in this new state, instead from the claims of the troubled emotional being obliged which strives to go back to be able to start againcolour, one can walk always forwarddistort, without ever stoppinglimit and falsify the truth with the hue and shape of the emotions. As things areIt must be free too from its own defect, inertia of the thought-power, one comes obstructive narrowness and unwillingness to a certain point open to knowledge, intellectual unscrupulousness in thinking, prepossession andpreference, as human beings as they are at present cannot progress indefinitely, one must pass to a higher species or leave self-will in the present species reason and create another. The human being as he is at false determination of the moment cannot attain perfection unless he gets out of himself—man is a transitional beingwill to knowledge. In ordinary language it may Its sole will must be said: "Ohto make itself an unsullied mirror of the truth, this man is perfect"its essence and its forms and measures and relations, but that is a literary figure. The maximum clear mirror, a human being can attain just now is an equilibrium which is not progressive. He may attain perhaps measure, a static equilibrium but all that is static can be broken for lack fine and subtle instrument of progressharmony, an integral intelligence. (The Mother, 30 December 1950) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/0424/30the-power-of-decemberthe-1950#p19instruments</ref>
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The condition But our mind is obscure, partial in its notions, misled by opposite surface appearances, divided between various possibilities; it is led in three different directions to any of which it may give an exclusive preference. Our mind, in its search for what must be aimed at, the real achievement turns towards a concentration on our own inner spiritual growth and perfection, on our own individual being and inner living; or it turns towards a concentration on an individual development of Yogaour surface nature, on the final perfection of our thought and attainmentouter dynamic or practical action on the world, on some idealism of our personal relation with the world around us; or it turns rather towards a concentration on the outer world itself, on making it better, for more suited to our ideas and temperament or to our conception of what should be. On one side there is the call of our spiritual being which all else is only our true self, a transcendent reality, a preparationbeing of the Divine Being, not created by the world, able to live in itself, to rise out of world to transcendence; on the other side there is the demand of the world around us which is a consciousness cosmic form, a formulation of the Divine Being, a power of the Reality in disguise. There is too the 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 impossible apparently made by the world and yet, because its true creator is in ourselves and the world instrumentation that seems to do anything without make it is only the Divine; for thenmeans first used, it is really a form, if you are without 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 our preoccupation with the Divineouter world and its formation, insists on a happier relation between the two terms and creates the very source ideal of your action disappears; knowledge, power, all are gonea better individual in a better world. But so long as you feel it is within us that the powers you use are your own, you will not miss Reality must be found and the source and foundation of a perfected life; no outward formation can replace it: there must be the true self realised within if there is to be the Divine supporttrue life realised in world and Nature. (The Mother, 28 April 1929) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/0322/28the-aprildivine-1929life#p14p7</ref>
All life that has still this Inconscience for its basis ==Perfection in the Vital==Then again there is stamped with the mark of a radical imperfectionpsychic prana, pranic mind or desire soul; this too calls for even if it is satisfied with its own type, it perfection. Here too the first necessity is a satisfaction with something incomplete and inharmonious, a patchwork fullness of discords: on the contraryvital capacity in the mind, 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 do its full work, to take possession of imperfection all the impulsions and disharmony that is the mark of the undivine; a divine energies given to our inner psychic lifefor fulfilment in this existence, on the contrary, even if progressing from the little to the more, would be at each stage harmonious in its principle hold them and detail: it would to be a secure ground upon which means for carrying them out with strength, freedom and , perfection. Many of the things we need for our perfection could naturally flower or grow towards their highest stature, refine and expand into their most subtle opulence. All imperfectionscourage, all perfections have to be taken into view will-power effective in our consideration of the difference between an undivine and a divine existence: but ordinarilylife, when we make all the distinction, elements of what we do it as human beings struggling under the pressure now call force of life character and the difficulties force of our conduct amidst its immediate problems personality, depend very largely for their completest strength and perplexities; most spring of all we are thinking energetic action on the fullness of the distinction we are obliged to make between good and evil or of that psychic prana. But along with its kindred problem of the dualitythis fullness there must be an established gladness, the blend in us of happiness clearness and suffering. When we seek intellectually for a divine presence purity in things, a divine origin of the world, psychic life-being. This dynamis must not be a divine government of its workingstroubled, the presence of evilperfervid, the insistence on sufferingstormy, the largefitfully or crudely passionate strength; energy there must be, the enormous part offered to painrapture of its action it must have, grief but a clear and affliction in the economy of Nature are the cruel phenomena which baffle our reason glad and pure energy, a seated and overcome the instinctive faith firmly supported pure rapture. And as a third condition of mankind its perfection it must be poised in such an origin and government or in an all-seeing, all-determining and omnipresent Divine Immanencea complete equality. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2124/the-divinepower-andof-the-undivine#p2instruments</ref>
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 the result can be a perfection of ourselves and our existence, a life of true being, 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 is a spiritual being which is emerging and our present state is only an imperfection of half-emergence, if the Inconscient is a starting-point containing in itself the potency of a superconscience and supernature which has to evolve, a veil of apparent Nescience in which that greater consciousness is concealed and from which it has to unfold itself, if an evolution of being is the law, then what we are seeking for is not only possible but part of the eventual necessity of things. It is our spiritual destiny to manifest and become that supernature,—for it is 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. <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/22/the-divine-life#p23~</refcenter>
Our soul's dissatisfaction This heart and psychic being of man shot through with imperfection as the threads of the life instincts is a law thing of life upon earthmixed inconstant colours of emotion and soul vibrations, bad and good, happy and unhappy, its aspiration towards the elimination of all imperfections from our naturesatisfied and unsatisfied, not only in a heaven beyond where it would be automatically impossible to be imperfecttroubled and calm, but here intense and now in a life where perfection has to be conquered by evolution dull. Thus agitated and struggleinvaded it is unacquainted with any real peace, are as much incapable of a law steady perfection of our being as that against which they revolt; they too are divineall its powers. By purification,—a divine dissatisfactionby equality, a divine aspiration. In them is by the inherent light of knowledge, by a power within which maintains them in us so that harmonising of the Divine may not only will it can be there as brought to a hidden Reality in our spiritual secrecies but unfold itself in the evolution of Naturetranquil intensity and perfection. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2124/the-divinepower-andof-the-undivine#p8instruments</ref>
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For one who wants to grow in The other side of perfection is a 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 contained and calm and selfunegoistic Rudra-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 doespower armed with psychic force, even in what appear to be the most insignificant chores. The secret energy of this attainment lies in the urge towards self-perfection. Whatever occupation strong heart which is capable of supporting without shrinking an insistent, an outwardly austere or task falls to your loteven, you must do it with a will to progress; whatever one doeswhere need is, 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 thingviolent action. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/1224/the-fourpower-austerities-andof-the-four-liberations#p17instruments</ref>
= Mind and = Perfection in the Body ==
== Mind’s Way and Perfect Understanding ==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</ref>
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As for the question about the illness, perfection in the physical plane is indeed part of the ideal of the Yoga, but it is the last item and, so long as the fundamental change has not been made in the material consciousness to which the body belongs, one may have a certain perfection on other planes without having immunity in the body. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/31/illness-and-health#p57</ref>
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There is The physical being of man has always been felt by the seekers of perfection to be a world of ideas without form great impediment and it is there that you must enter if you want to seize what is behind has been the words. So long as you have habit to draw your understanding turn from the forms of wordsit with contempt, you are likely denial or aversion and a desire to fall into much confusion about suppress altogether or as far as may be the true sense; but if in a silence of your mind you can rise into the world from which ideas descend to take form, at once body and the real understanding comesphysical life. If you are to But this cannot be sure of understanding one another, you must be able to understand in silencethe right method for the integral Yoga. There The body is a condition in which your minds are so well attuned and harmonised together that given us as one perceives instrument necessary to the thought totality of the other without any necessity of words. But if there our works and it is to be used, not this attunementneglected, there will always be some deformation of your meaninghurt, because to what you speak the other mind supplies its own significancesuppressed or abolished. I use a word in a certain sense or shade of its sense; you are accustomed to put into If it another sense or shade. Thenis imperfect, evidentlyrecalcitrant, you will understandobstinate, not my exact meaning in itso are also the other members, but what the word means to you. This is true not of speech onlyvital being, but of reading alsoheart and mind and reason. If you want It has like them to understand a book with a deep teaching in it, you must be able to read it in the mind's silence; you must wait changed and let the expression go deep inside you into the region where words are no more perfected and from there come slowly back to your exterior consciousness and its surface understandingundergo a transformation. But if you let the words jump at your external As we must get ourselves a new life, new heart, new mind and try to adapt and adjust the two, you will so we have entirely missed their real in a certain sense and powerto build for ourselves a new body. There can be no perfect understanding unless you are in union with the unexpressed mind that is behind the centre of expression. (The Mother, 26 May 1929) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/0324/26the-power-mayof-the-1929#p21instruments</ref>
== Mind’s Endeavour to Perfection ==<center>~</center>
For here there is Transformation and the same process of evolution as in Body : The supramental perfection means that the rest of the movement of Nature; there body becomes conscious, is a heightening and widening of the filled with consciousness, 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 that as much as it can reach of the previously evolved parts of 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 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 Truth 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 all its own level and spiritualise the nature; for what it cannot even make fully conscious, cannot securely mentalise and rationaliseactions, it cannot spiritualise, since spiritualisation is a greater and more difficult integrationfunctionings etc. No doubt, become by calling in the spiritual force, it can establish an influence and a preliminary change in some parts power 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 consciousness within limits and what it does achieve is rare and difficult. The spiritual consciousness using the mind is employing an inferior means andharmonious, even though it brings in a divine light into the mind, a divine purityluminous, 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 right and rigorously control the body, but these members, even if refined or mastered, do not receive their spiritual fulfilment true—without ignorance 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 impose them upon the membersdisorder. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2228/thetransformation-ascentand-towardsthe-supermindbody#p16p3</ref>
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) <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/23-june-1929#p23~</refcenter>
At This is one of the same time it must be added that things one discovers gradually as the power body becomes ready for transformations. It is enough; quite a remarkable instrument in the abstention from all physical action is not indispensable, see that it can experience two contraries at the aversion to action mental or corporeal same time. There is not desirable. The seeker of the integral a certain 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-consciousness which brings things together, and if totalises things that habit is found growing on the nature, the will in other states of the Purusha must be used to dismiss itconsciousness alternate or even in certain others oppose each other. EventuallyBut if one has reached up there, a state arrives when in the life vital and the body perform as mere instruments the will mind, a development sufficient for harmonising opposites (that of the Purusha course, is quite indispensable), when one has succeeded in the mind without any strain or attachmentdoing this, there are moments when it alternates, you see, without their putting themselves into one thing comes after the action with that inferiorother, eager and often feverish energy which while what is remarkable in the nature consciousness of their ordinary working; they come to work as forces of Nature work without the fret and toil and reaction characteristic of life in the body when is that it is not yet master of the physical. When can feel ("feel", can we attain to this perfectionsay "feel"?—"experience"—the word "aware" expresses it best) all things simultaneously, as though you were hot and cold at once, then action as though you were active and inaction become immaterialpassive at once, since neither interferes with and everything becomes like that. Then you begin to grasp the freedom totality of movements in the soul or draws it away from its urge towards cells. It is something much more concrete naturally, but much more perfect in the Self or its poise body than in any other part of the Selfbeing. But This means that if things continue in this state of perfection arrives later in way, it will be proved that the Yoga and till then physical, material instrument is the law most perfect of moderation laid down by the Gita all. That is the best for us; too much mental or physical action then why perhaps it is not good since excess draws away too much energy and reacts unfavourably upon the spiritual condition; too little also is not good since defect leads most difficult to a habit of inaction and even transform, to an incapacity which has afterwards to be surmounted with difficultyperfect. Still, periods But of absolute calmall, solitude and cessation from works are highly desirable and should be secured as often as possible for that recession it is the one most capable of the soul into itself which is indispensable to knowledgeperfection. (The Mother, 21 April 1954) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/2306/the21-releaseapril-from-subjection-to-the-body1954#p8p31</ref>
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 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. <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/23/the-threefold-life#p18~</refcenter>
== Highest Perfection ==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 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>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/05/17-june-1953#p36</ref>
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 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>= Why Do We Need Perfection? =
As you pursue this labour of purification and unification, you must at the same time take great care to perfect the external and instrumental part of your being. When the higher truth manifests, it must find in you a mind that is 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 the words reveal the thought and do not deform it. And the formula in which you embody the truth should be manifested in all your feelings, all your acts of will, all your actions, in all the movements of your being. Finally, these movements themselves should, by constant effort, attain their highest perfection. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/12/== For Discovering the-science-Truth of-living#p6</ref>Living==
=== SoulFor the awakened individual the realisation of his truth of being and his inner liberation and perfection must be his primary seeking,—first, because that is the call of the Spirit within him, but also because it is only by liberation and perfection and realisation of the truth of being that man can arrive at truth of living. A perfected community also can exist only by the perfection of its individuals, and perfection can come only by the discovery and affirmation in life by each of his own spiritual being and the discovery by all of their spiritual unity and a resultant life unity. There can be no real perfection for us except by our inner self and truth of spiritual existence taking up all truth of the instrumental existence into itself and giving to it oneness, integration, harmony. As our only real freedom is the discovery and disengagement of the spiritual Reality within us, Mind so our only means of true perfection is the sovereignty and Perfection ===self-effectuation of the spiritual Reality in all the elements of our nature. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/22/the-divine-life#p37</ref>
The character of these higher states of the soul and their greater worlds of spiritual Nature is necessarily difficult to seize. Even the Upanishads and the Veda only shadow them out by figures, hints and symbols. Yet it is necessary to attempt some account of their principles and practical effect so far as they can be grasped by the mind that stands on the border of the two hemispheres. The passage beyond that border would be the culmination, the completeness of the Yoga of self-transcendence by self-knowledge. The soul that aspires to perfection, draws back and upward, says the Upanishad, from the physical into the vital and from the vital into the mental Purusha, from the mental into the knowledge-soul and from that self of knowledge into the bliss Purusha. This self of bliss is the conscious foundation of perfect Sachchidananda and to pass into it completes the soul's ascension. The mind therefore must try to give to itself some account of this decisive transformation of the embodied consciousness, this radiant transfiguration and self-exceeding of our ever aspiring nature. The description mind can arrive at, can never be adequate to the thing itself, but it may point at least to some indicative shadow of it or perhaps some half-luminous image. <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/23/the-ladder-of-self-transcendence#p13~</refcenter>
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 There is the spirit, the inner a Reality, that has built up a truth of all existence which is greater and uses the mind, vital being and body as more abiding than all its instrumentation; thought, feeling formations and action do not exist for themselves, they are not an object, but the meansmanifestations; they serve to express the manifested divine find that truth and Reality within us: otherwise, without this inwardness, this spiritual origination, and live in a too externalised consciousness or by only external meansit, no greater or divine life is achieve the most perfect manifestation and formation possible. In our present life of Natureit, in our externalised surface existence, it is must be the world that seems to create us; but in the turn to the spiritual life it secret of perfection whether of individual or communal being. This Reality is we who must create ourselves there within each thing and our world. In this new formula gives to each of creation, the inner life becomes its formations its power of the first importance being and the rest can be only its expression and outcomevalue of being. It The universe 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 a manifestation of the life of the race. For we are given a world which is obscure, ignorant, material, imperfectReality, and our external conscious being there is itself created by a truth of the energies, the pressure, the moulding operations of this vast mute obscurity, by physical birth, by environmentuniversal existence, by a training through the impacts and shocks Power of life; and yet we are vaguely aware of something that is there in us or seeking to becosmic being, something other than what has been thus made, a spirit selfan all-existent, selfor world-determining, pushing the nature towards the creation of an image of its own occult perfection spirit. Humanity is a formation or Idea manifestation of perfection. There is something that grows the Reality in us in answer to this demand, that strives to become the image of a divine. Somewhatuniverse, and there is impelled also to labour at the world outside that has been given to it a truth and to remake that too in a greater image, in the image self of its own spiritual and mental and vital growthhumanity, to make our world too something created according to our own mind and self-conceiving a human spirit, something new, harmonious, perfecta destiny of human life. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/22/the-divine-life#p6p36</ref>
== Supermind For Self-perfection, Progress and Fulfillment==
If consciousness is In the central secret, life is the outward indication, the effective power of being in Matter; for it is that which liberates consciousness Dhammapada: a supreme disinterestedness and gives it its form or embodiment of force and its effectuation in material act. If some revelation or effectuation of itself in Matter a supreme liberation is to follow the ultimate aim discipline 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 self-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 march of consciousness of the Being; even if mind were perfected, there would be still something yet to be realisedprogress, not yet manifested. For what is involved and emergent is not with a Mind, precise end in view but a Spirit, and mind because this march of progress is not the native dynamism of consciousness of the Spirit; supermind, profound law and the light purpose of gnosis, is its native dynamism. If then earthly life has to become a manifestation of the Spirit, it is the manifestation truth of a spiritual being universal existence and because you put yourself in us and harmony with it, spontaneously, whatever the divine life of a perfected consciousness in a supramental or gnostic power of spiritual being that must result may be the secret burden and intention of evolutionary Nature. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/2203/the-divine-lifebrahmin#p3p43</ref>
These are the first major results of the spiritual transformation that follow as a necessary consequence of the nature of Supermind. But if there is to be not only a perfection of the inner existence, of the consciousness, of an inner delight of existence, but a perfection of the life and action, two other questions present themselves from our mental view-point which have to our human thought about our life and its dynamisms a considerable, even a premier importance. First, there is the place of personality in the gnostic being,—whether the status, the building of the being will be quite other than what we experience as the form and life of the person or similar. If there is a personality and it is in any way responsible for its actions, there intervenes, next, the question of the place of the ethical element and its perfection and fulfilment in the gnostic nature. <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/22/the-gnostic-being#p28~</refcenter>
= Body 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>
== Perfecting the Body ==<center>~</center>
This Perfection is one of the things one discovers gradually as the body becomes ready for transformationsnot a static state, it is an equilibrium. It is quite But a remarkable instrument in the see that it can experience two contraries at the same timeprogressive, dynamic equilibrium. One may go from perfection to perfection. There is can come a certain state of body-consciousness from which brings things together, totalises things that in other states of consciousness alternate or even in certain others oppose each other. But if one has reached up there, it would not be necessary to descend to a lower rung in order to go farther; at the vital and moment the mind, a development sufficient for harmonising opposites (that march of course, Nature is quite indispensable)like that, when one has succeeded but in doing thisnew state, there are moments when it alternates, you seeinstead of being obliged to go back to be able to start again, one thing comes after the other, while what is remarkable in the consciousness of the body is that it can feel ("feel"walk always forward, can we say "feel"?—"experience"—the word "aware" expresses it best) all without ever stopping. As things simultaneouslyare, as though you were hot one comes to a certain point and cold at once, as though you were active and passive human beings as they are at oncepresent cannot progress indefinitely, and everything becomes like that. Then you begin one must pass to grasp a higher species or leave the totality of movements in the cellspresent species and create another. It The human being as he is something much more concrete naturally, but much more perfect in at the body than in any other part moment cannot attain perfection unless he gets out of the himself—man is a transitional being. This means that if things continue in this way, In ordinary language it will may be proved that the physicalsaid: "Oh, material instrument this man is the most perfect of all", but that is a literary figure. That The maximum a human being can attain just now is why perhaps it an equilibrium which is the most difficult to transform, to perfectnot progressive. But of He may attain perhaps a static equilibrium but all, it that is the one most capable static can be broken for lack of perfectionprogress. (The Mother, 21 April 195430 December 1950) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/0604/2130-aprildecember-19541950#p31p19</ref>
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. <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/anger#p10~</refcenter>
One who aspires All life is a secret Yoga, an obscure growth of Nature towards the discovery and fulfilment of the divine principle hidden in her which becomes progressively less obscure, more self-conscient and luminous, more self-possessed in the human being by the opening of all his instruments of knowledge, will, action, life to the ineffable PeaceSpirit within him and in the world. Mind, life, one whose mind is awakenedbody, all the forms of our nature are the means of this growth, but they find their last perfection only by opening out to something beyond them, first, whose thoughts because they are not entangled in the net whole of desirewhat man is, secondly, because that one other something which he is said , is the key of his completeness and brings a light which discovers to be "bound upstream" (towards perfection)him the whole high and large reality of his being. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/0324/pleasure#p10the-integral-perfection?search=perfection</ref>
As for the question about the illness, perfection in the physical plane is indeed part of the ideal of the Yoga, but it is the last item and, so long as the fundamental change has not been made in the material consciousness to which the body belongs, one may have a certain perfection on other planes without having immunity in the body. <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/31/illness-and-health#p57~</refcenter>
Transformation 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 the Body : The supramental now in a life where perfection means has to be conquered by evolution and struggle, are as much a law of our being as that the body becomes consciousagainst which they revolt; they too are divine,—a divine dissatisfaction, a divine aspiration. In them is filled with consciousness and the inherent light of a power within which maintains them in us so that the Divine may not only be there as this is a hidden Reality in our spiritual secrecies but unfold itself in the Truth consciousness all its actions, functionings etc. become by the power evolution of the consciousness within it harmonious, luminous, right and true—without ignorance or disorderNature. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2821/transformationthe-divine-and-the-bodyundivine#p3p8</ref>
== Body Perfection or Immortality ==<center>~</center>
When 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 the result can be a perfection of ourselves and our existence, a life of true being, 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 body 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 learned come into existence. But if in us there is a spiritual being which is emerging and our present state is only an imperfection of half-emergence, if the Inconscient is a starting-point containing in itself the art potency of constantly progressing towards a superconscience and supernature which has to evolve, a veil of apparent Nescience in which that greater consciousness is concealed and from which it has to unfold itself, if an increasing perfectionevolution of being is the law, then what we shall be well on are seeking for is not only possible but part of the way eventual necessity of things. It is our spiritual destiny to overcoming manifest and become that supernature,—for it is the inevitability nature of our true self, our still occult, because unevolved, whole being. A nature of deathunity will then bring inevitably its life-result of unity, mutuality, harmony. (The MotherAn 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, 16 January 1972) the joy of a satisfied being, the happiness of a fulfilled nature. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/1622/16the-januarydivine-1972life#p1p23</ref>
We are on earth in order to progress and to perfect ourselves == To Grow in the course of many successive lives. What we cannot do this time, we shall do next time; and every progress we make this time will help us then. (The Mother, 15 November 1971) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/17/15-november-1971#p1</ref>Spiritual Oneness==
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 dieHis physical being will be one with all material Nature, their body should not become useless. This is just his vital being with the contrary. It is precisely because life of the body decaysuniverse, declines and ends in a complete degradation that death becomes necessary. But if the body followed the progressive movement of his mind with the inner beingcosmic mind, if it had his spiritual knowledge and will with the same sense of progress divine knowledge and will both in itself 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 wellpours itself through these channels, on his spirit with the contrary, that the movement for perfection which is at the beginning of life might continue under another formone spirit in all beings. I have already told you that one does not foresee an uninterrupted growth, for that would need changing All the height variety of the houses after some time! But this growth in height may cosmic existence will be changed into a growth to him in that unity and revealed in perfection: the perfection secret of the formits spiritual significance. All For in this spiritual bliss and being he will be one with That which is the imperfections origin and continent and inhabitant and spirit and constituting power of the form may be gradually corrected, all the weaknesses replaced by strength, all the incapacities by skillexistence. Why should it not This will be like this? You do not think in that way because you have the habit highest reach of seeing things otherwiseself-perfection. But there is no reason why this should not happen. (The Mother, 17 June 1953) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/0524/17the-juneelements-1953#p36of-perfection</ref>
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 the three hundredth year 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 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 done." 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 1953) <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/05/20-may-1953#p44~</refcenter>
So long as he remains in the world-existence, this perfection must radiate out from him,—for that is the necessity of his oneness with the universe and its beings,—in an influence and action which help all around who are capable of it to rise to or advance towards the same perfection, and for the rest in an influence and action which help, as only the self-ruler and master man can help, in leading the human race forward spiritually towards this consummation and towards some image of a greater divine truth in their personal and communal existence. He becomes a light and power of the Truth to which he has climbed and a means for others’ ascension.<ref>ttp://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/the-perfection-of-the-mental-being?search= Integral Perfection =perfection</ref>
== Ego and How to Achieve Perfection =? =
Why do you say that sensitivity The Master of our works respects our nature even when he is transforming it; he works always through the sign of a strong ego? It does nature and not seem to be evident at allby any arbitrary caprice. Moreover, there are many different kinds This imperfect nature of sensitivity: some stem from weakness, others—the best—are ours contains the result materials of refinement. The ego generally governs the development of the individualour perfection, but the most developed individualities are not necessarily those inchoate, distorted, misplaced, thrown together in whom the ego is strongest—on the contrarydisorder or a poor imperfect order. As the individuality perfects itselfAll this material has to be patiently perfected, purified, reorganised, the power of the ego diminishesnew-moulded and transformed, not hacked and indeed it is hewn and slain or mutilated, not obliterated by perfecting himself that the individual arrives at that state of divinisation which liberates him from the egosimple coercion and denial. (The MotherThis world and we who live in it are his creation and manifestation, 2 September 1964) 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. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/1623/2the-master-of-septemberthe-1964work#p3p6</ref>
Never forget that here it is for the perfection of the work that we are striving, not for the satisfaction of the ego. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/13/organisation-and-work#p55</ref>==Prerequisites==
The egoism first necessity is some fundamental poise of the instrument can be as dangerous soul both in its essential and its natural being regarding and meeting the things, impacts and workings of Nature. This poise we shall arrive at by growing into a perfect equality, samatā. The self, spirit or more dangerous Brahman is one in all and therefore one to spiritual progress than all; it is, as is said in the egoism Gita which has developed fully this idea of equality and indicated its experience on at least one side of equality, the equal Brahman, samaṁ brahma; the doerGita even goes so far in one passage as to identify equality and yoga, samatvaṁ yoga ucyate. The ego-sense That is contrary to say, equality is the sign of unity with the Brahman, of becoming Brahman, of growing into an undisturbed spiritual realisationpoise of being in the Infinite. Its importance can hardly be exaggerated; for it is the sign of our having passed beyond the egoistic determinations of our nature, so how can any kind of ego be our having conquered our enslaved response to the dualities, of our having transcended the shifting turmoil of the gunas, of our having entered into the calm and peace of liberation. Equality is a thing to be encouraged? As for term of consciousness which brings into the whole of our being and nature the eternal tranquillity of the magnified egoInfinite. Moreover, it is the condition of a securely and perfectly divine action; the security and largeness of the cosmic action of the Infinite is based upon and never breaks down or forfeits its eternal tranquillity. That too must be the character of the perfect spiritual action; to be equal and one of to all things in spirit, understanding, mind, heart and natural consciousness,—even in the most perilous obstacles physical consciousness,—and to make all their workings, whatever their outward adaptation to release the thing to be done, always and imminuably full of the divine equality and perfectioncalm must be its inmost principle. There should That may be no big Isaid to be the passive or basic, not even a small onethe fundamental and receptive side of equality, but there is also an active and possessive side, an equal bliss which can only come when the peace of equality is founded and which is the beatific flower of its fullness. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/3124/egothe-andelements-itsof-formsperfection#p54p2</ref>
If you think there is no ego or desire in you, only pure devotion, that shows a great unconsciousness. To be free 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. <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/31/ego-and-its-forms#p74~</refcenter>
This vairagyaThe next necessity of perfection is to raise all the active parts of the human nature to that highest condition and working pitch of their power and capacity, śakti, or loss at which they become capable of being divinised into true instruments of zestthe free, as you have yourself saidperfect, began before you came herespiritual and divine action. I have indeed laid some stress on For practical purposes we may take the understanding, the heart, the prana and the body as the conquest four members of sex, for obvious reasons; but I our nature which have hardly laid a compulsory stress on anything else. Certainlythus to be prepared, I and we have not encouraged you to lose joy find the constituent terms of their perfection. Also there is the dynamical force in vital creativeness; I have only held up the ideal us (vīrya) of turning it towards the Divine temperament, character and away from the ego. To keep soul nature, svabhāva, which makes the vital full power of life our members effective in action and energy gives them their type and direction; this has to trust mainly to be freed from its limitations, enlarged, rounded so that the inner growth and whole manhood in us may become the descent basis of a higher consciousness for a changedivine manhood, when the Purusha, using the will too but for self-masteryreal Man in us, not for suppressionthe divine Soul, but for subordination of shall act fully in this human instrument and shine fully through this human vessel. To divinise the perfected nature we have to call in the lower divine Power or Shakti to replace our limited human energy so that this may be shaped into the image of and filled with the higherforce of a greater infinite energy, has been my teachingdaivī prakṛti, bhāgavatī śakti. The turn This perfection will grow in the measure in which we can surrender ourselves, first, to vairagya, the guidance and then to tapasya of an ascetic kind was the impulse direct action of something in your own nature; it insisted on its necessity just as a part that Power and of the vital insisted on its opposite: even Master of our being and our works to whom it condemned my suggestion of something less grim belongs, and strenuous as an easyfor this purpose faith is the essential, faith is the great motor-going absence power of aspiration etc. I do not say that vairagya and tapasya are not ways our being in our aspirations to reach the Divineperfection, but done like that they are painful ways and long; if one takes them—here, one must be determined a faith in God and go through. For one part to push all zest out of the vital and for Shakti which shall begin in the other to regret heart and sayunderstanding, why did I ever do itbut shall take possession of all our nature, all its consciousness, will never doall its dynamic motive-force. And it is in These four things are the essentials of this kind second element 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; , the full powers of the members of the only thing I insist upon is some faithinstrumental nature, inner surrender and opening the perfected dynamis of oneself to receivethe soul nature,—not absolutethe assumption of them into the action of the divine Power, but just sufficient. Experience has to begin long before and a perfect purification and from experience faith in all our members to experience one comes to realisation call and through realisation to more and more perfection; anything support that can be called real perfection can only come at the end. But there is something in you that is impatient of gradualnessassumption, śakti, vīrya, daivī prakṛti, of small mercies; its motto seems to be all or nothingśraddhā. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2924/asceticismthe-andelements-theof-integral-yogaperfection#p9p3</ref>
== The Mundane and Divine Perfection ==<center>~</center>
A divine ...perfection of the human being is our aiminstrumental nature. We must know then first what are .. the perfection of the intelligence, heart, vital consciousness and body, the essential elements that constitute man's total perfection; secondlyof the fundamental soul powers, what we mean by a divine as distinguished from a human the perfection of the surrender of our beinginstruments and action to the divine Shakti, depend at every moment of their progression on a... That man as a being power that is capable covertly and overtly the pivot of self-development all endeavour and action, faith, śraddhā. The perfect faith is an assent of some approach at least the whole being to an ideal standard of perfection which his mind is able the truth seen by it or offered to conceiveits acceptance, fix before it and pursue, its central working is common ground a faith of the soul in its own will to all thinking humanitybe and attain and become and its idea of self and things and its knowledge, of which the belief of the intellect, though it may be only the minority who concern themselves with this possibility as providing heart’s consent and the one most important aim desire of the life. But by some mind to possess and realise are the ideal is conceived as a mundane change, by others as a religious conversionoutward figures. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/thefaith-integraland-shakti?search=perfection#p1</ref>
The mundane perfection is sometimes conceived of as something outwardcondition to be aimed at, social, a thing the real achievement of actionYoga, a more rational dealing with our fellow-men the final perfection and our environmentattainment, for which all else is only a better and more efficient citizenship and discharge of dutiespreparation, is 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 consciousness in which it is cherished, a clarifying and raising of impossible to do anything without the intelligence, will and reasonDivine; for then, a heightening and ordering of power and capacity in if you are without the natureDivine, 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 the exclusion very source of the restyour action disappears; sometimesknowledge, in wider and more well-balanced mindspower, the whole harmony is envisaged as a total perfectionall are gone. A change of education and social institutions is the outward means adopted or an inner self-training and development is preferred But so long as you feel that the true instrumentation. Or the two aims may be clearly unitedpowers you use are your own, you will not miss the perfection of the inner individualDivine support. (The Mother, the perfection of the outer living. 28 April 1929) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/2403/the28-integralapril-perfection1929#p2p14</ref>
We know, we have said this many a time, that all work is a prayer made with the body and that the true attitude 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 to the accomplishment which the laws of human perfection demand, 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>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/07/30-november-1955#p28</ref>==Process==
The divine existence is of the nature not only of freedom, but of purity, beatitude ===By Education 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 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-systems#p19</ref>Training===
== Perfection of All Kinds == Perfection of all kinds is indeed goodIf you said to yourself, my children, "We want to be as it is perfect instruments as possible to express the sign of the pressure of the consciousness divine Will in the material world towards full self-expression in this or that limit", on then for 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-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 instrument to be perfect statesman, warriorit must be cultivated, artisteducated, 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 trained. It must not be left like a shapeless piece of evolution, the seried steps of the spirit's emergencestone. If one likes When you want to call that spiritual because of this hidden urge behind build with a stone you chisel it one can do so; when you want to make a formless block into a beautiful diamond, you chisel 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 fervourWell, occult 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 essencesame thing. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/28/idealism-When with your brain and-spirituality#p1</ref> "The supramental world has body you want to be formed or created in us by make a beautiful instrument for the Divine Will as the result of a constant expansion and self-perfecting, you must cultivate it, sharpen it, refine it, complete what is missing, perfect what is there." (The Mother, 27 June 195613 May 1953) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/0805/2713-junemay-19561953#p31p18</ref>
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) <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/09/1-october-1958#p3~</refcenter> == Consciousness and 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 attractions to obscure or bind you. (The Mother, 30 June 1929) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/30-june-1929#p8</ref>
Ignorance is dispelled by a growing consciousness; what you need is consciousness and always more consciousness, a consciousness pure, simple and luminous. 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 active, it is like a searchlight. You have only to turn it on, if you want to see luminously and examine penetratingly anything in any place. (The Mother, 30 June 1929) <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/30-june-1929#p7~</refcenter>
This power of the soul over its nature is of Fundamentally, whatever be the utmost importance in path one follows—whether the Yoga path of self-perfection; if it did not existsurrender, we could never get by conscious endeavour and aspiration out of the fixed groove of our present imperfect human being; if any greater perfection were intendedconsecration, we should have to wait for Nature to effect knowledge—if one wants 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 scalebe perfect, it awakes 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 naturealways equally difficult, not therefore by any capricious magic, but an ordered development and intelligible process. When complete mastery there is gainedbut one way, then the process by its self-effective rapidity may seem a miracle to the intelligenceone only, but it still proceeds by law I know of the truth of Spiritonly one: that is perfect sincerity,—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 Naturebut perfect sincerity! (The Mother, the eternal and universal Purusha. 12 May 1954) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/2406/the12-psychology-of-selfmay-perfection1954#p8p34</ref>
= Individual Perfection ==By Becoming Conscious of Oneself===
== Perfect Individual =="To work for your perfection the first step is to become conscious of yourself." (The Mother, 13 January 1951) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/04/13-january-1951#p16</ref>
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) <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/04/8-january-1951#p31~</refcenter>
In To work for your perfection, the first step is to become conscious of yourself, of the Dhammapada: a supreme disinterestedness different parts of your being and a supreme liberation is their respective activities. You must learn to follow distinguish these different parts one from another, so that you may become clearly aware of the discipline origin of self-perfectionthe 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 march tribunal of progressour highest ideal, not with a precise end sincere will to submit to its judgment, that we can hope to form in view but because this march of ourselves a discernment that never errs. For if we truly want to progress is and acquire the profound law and capacity of knowing the purpose truth of earthly lifeour 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 universal our existence and because you put yourself , 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 harmony with order to accomplish it, spontaneouslywe must arm ourselves with patience and endurance, whatever with a determination to prolong our life as long as necessary for the result may besuccess of our endeavour. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/0312/the-brahminscience-of-living#p43p5</ref>
If this is our evolutionary destiny, it remains for us to see where we stand at this juncture in 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 of advance,—and what prospect there is of any turn towards a decisive step in the near or measurable future. In our human aspiration towards a personal perfection and the perfection of the life of the race the elements of the future evolution are foreshadowed and striven after, but in a confusion of half-enlightened knowledge; there is a discord between the necessary elements, an opposing emphasis, a profusion of rudimentary unsatisfying and ill-accorded solutions. These sway between the three principal preoccupations of our idealism,—the complete single development of the human being in himself, the perfectibility of the individual, a full development of the collective being, the perfectibility of society, and, more pragmatically restricted, the perfect or best possible relations of individual with individual and society and of community with community. An exclusive or dominant emphasis is laid sometimes on the individual, sometimes on the collectivity or society, sometimes on a right and balanced relation between the individual and the collective human whole. One idea holds up the growing life, freedom or perfection of the human individual as the true object of our existence,—whether the ideal be merely a free self-expression of the personal being or a self-governed whole of complete mind, fine and ample life and perfect body, or a spiritual perfection and liberation. In this view society is there only as a field of activity and growth for the individual man 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. <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/22/the-divine-life#p34~</refcenter>
It isIf in passing from one domain to another we renounce what has already been given us from eagerness for our new attainment, then, this spiritual fulfilment of if in reaching the urge to individual perfection and an inner completeness of being that mental life we mean first when we speak of a divine cast away or belittle the physical life. It which is our basis, or if we reject the first essential condition of a perfected life on earth, mental and we are therefore right physical in making the utmost possible individual perfection our first supreme business. The perfection of attraction to the spiritual and pragmatic relation of the individual with all around him is our second preoccupation; , we do not fulfil God integrally, nor satisfy the solution conditions of this second desideratum lies in a complete universality and oneness with all life upon earth which is the other concomitant result of an evolution into the gnostic consciousness and natureHis self-manifestation. But there still remains the third desideratumWe do not become perfect, a new world, a change in but only shift the total life field of humanity our imperfection or, at the leastmost attain a limited altitude. However high we may climb, a new perfected collective life in even though it be to the earthNon-natureBeing itself, we climb ill if we forget our base. This calls for Not to abandon the appearance not only of isolated evolved individuals acting in the unevolved masslower to itself, but of many gnostic individuals forming a new kind of beings and a new common life superior to transfigure it in the present individual and common existence. A collective life light of this kind must obviously constitute itself on the same principle as the life higher to which we have attained, is true divinity of the gnostic individualnature. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2221/the-divinedestiny-of-lifethe-individual#p19p9</ref>
== Perfection in Work ==<center>~</center>
You In the process of this change there must be by the very necessity of the effort two stages of its working. First, there will become more be the personal endeavour of the human being, as soon as he becomes aware by his soul, mind, heart of this divine possibility and turns towards it as the true object of life, to prepare himself for it and more perfect to get rid of all in him that belongs to a lower working, of all that stands in your work the way of his opening to the spiritual truth and its power, so as to possess by this liberation his spiritual being and turn all his natural movements into free means of its self-expression… The second stage of this Yoga will therefore be a persistent giving up of all the consciousness growsaction of the nature into the hands of this greater Power, increasesa substitution of its influence, widens possession and is enlightenedworking for the personal effort, until the Divine to whom we aspire becomes the direct master of the Yoga and effects the entire spiritual and ideal conversion of the being. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/1424/progressthe-andintegral-perfection-in-work#p1?search=perfection</ref>
In But if you remain in that consciousness and look from there, then you begin to understand something of the truth. And this consciousness has to be so total, that even if things come directly against you, even the physical movement 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 and have no personal reaction, well, I give you the guarantee the other cannot kill you. 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 door and the thing enters and all actiongoes wrong. You must be fully conscious, have the full knowledge, all work donethe perfect mastery over everything, the degree clear vision of perfection depends upon the degree of consciousnessTruth—and perfect peace. (The Mother, 20 May 1953) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/1405/progress20-and-perfection-inmay-work1953#p3p54</ref>
Perfection in the work must be the aim, but it is only by a very patient effort that this can be obtained. <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/14/progress-and-perfection-in-work#p19~</refcenter>
Open yourself more This power of the soul over its nature is of the utmost importance in the Yoga of self-perfection; 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; if 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; 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 nature, not therefore by any capricious magic, but an ordered development and more 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 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's force is our highest Self and the self of all Nature, the eternal and your work will progress steadily towards perfectionuniversal Purusha. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/1424/progressthe-andpsychology-perfectionof-inself-workperfection#p21p8</ref>
Let nothing short of perfection be your ideal in work and you are sure to become a true instrument of the Divine. <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/14/progress-and-perfection-in-work#p25~</refcenter>
There must be order An integral Yoga includes as a vital and harmony indispensable element in workits 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. Even what But man's present nature is limited, divided, unequal,—it is apparently 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 most insignificant thing Divine Infinity. Some therefore must be done 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 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 sense movement of cleanlinessthe 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, beauty, harmony an element and means of the supreme union and oneness; this ascent and orderdescent must be therefore an ultimate aim of this Yoga. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/1423/progressthe-supermind-and-perfectionthe-yoga-inof-workworks#p26p1</ref>
The perfection of the work done is much more important than its bulk or the bigness of its scope. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/14/progress-and-perfection-in-work#p38</ref>===By Learning to be a Witness===
In works...we find ourselves to be not the mind, aspiration towards Perfection but a mental being who stands behind the action of the embodied mind, not a mental and vital personality,—personality is true spiritualitya 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-going 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; 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 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 his way to control and lordship. He can do it passively by a sort of reflection and receiving in his mental consciousness, but then he is only a 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 way of rising to this greater poise and be self-ruler, Swarat, is a condition of his perfection.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/1424/progressthe-perfection-andof-perfectionthe-inmental-work#p45being?search=perfection</ref>
=== Practical Tips for Perfection in Work By Developing Detachment===
Do not worry about mistakes in workThe seeker of the integral state of knowledge must be free from attachment to action and equally free from attachment to inaction. Often you imagine Especially must any tendency to mere inertia of mind or vitality or body be surmounted, and if that things are badly done by you habit is found growing on the nature, the will of the Purusha must be used to dismiss it. Eventually, a state arrives when really you have done them very well; but even if there are mistakesthe 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, it eager and often feverish energy which is nothing the nature of their ordinary working; they come to be sad about. Let work as forces of Nature work without the consciousness grow—only fret and toil and reaction characteristic of life in the divine consciousness body when it is there an entire perfectionnot yet master of the physical. The more you surrender When we attain to this perfection, then action and inaction become immaterial, since neither interferes with the freedom of the Divine, soul or draws it away from its urge towards the more will there be Self or its poise in the possibility Self. But this state of perfection arrives later in youthe Yoga and till then the law of moderation laid down by the Gita is the best for us; too much mental or physical action then is not good since excess draws away too much energy and reacts unfavourably upon the spiritual condition; too little also is not good since defect leads to a habit of inaction 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>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2923/practicalthe-release-from-subjection-concernsto-inthe-workbody#p39p8</ref>
Someone who is learning to paint or play music or write and does not like to have his mistakes pointed out by those who already know—how is he to learn at all or reach any perfection of technique? <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/29/practical-concerns-in-work#p45</ref>===By Developing Equality===
== Perfection The calm established in the whole being must remain the same whatever happens, in health and Interdisease, 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-relation with Others ==equality#p5</ref>
...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 ===By Purification of knowing his fellow-creatures. He forms by inferences, theories, observations and a certain imperfect capacity 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>Nature===
To make the effort for one's own ...purification is an essential means towards self-perfection . All these impurities and inadequacies result in various kinds of limitation and bondage: but 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; purification is not complete till it brings about liberation. Besides, after a certain purification and liberation has been effected, there is still the conversion of the purified instruments to be disturbed by any mistake in others but reply by the law of a higher object and utility, a large, real and perfect order of action. By the conversion man can arrive at a silent will for their 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 also is always the right attitudea large and perfected delight of being, Ananda. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/3124/problemsthe-perfection-of-inthe-humanmental-relations#p9being?search=perfection</ref>
You stop short at The divine existence is of the nature not only of freedom, but of purity, beatitude and perfection that others should realise . 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 you are seldom conscious through the right functioning of the goal you should be pursuing yourself. If you complex instrument we are conscious of itin our outer parts, well then, begin with is the work which condition of an integral liberty. Its result is given to youan integral beatitude, in which there becomes possible at once the Ananda of all that is to say, realise what you have to do in the world seen as symbols of the Divine and do not concern yourself with what others do, because, after all, it the Ananda of that which is not your business-world. And it prepares the best way to integral perfection of our humanity as a type of the true attitude is simply to say, "All those around me, all Divine in the circumstances conditions of my life, all the people near mehuman manifestation, are a mirror held up to me 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 Divine Consciousness to show me the progress I must makeintegral Yoga. Everything that shocks me in others means a work I have to do in myself." <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/1023/aphorismthe-synthesis-of-the-8systems#p15p19</ref>
And perhaps if one carried true perfection in oneself, one would discover it more often in others. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/10/aphorism-8#p16</ref>===By Cultivating Faith===
For There is one kind of faith demanded as indispensable by the awakened individual the realisation of his truth of being integral Yoga and his inner liberation that may be described as faith in God and perfection must be his primary seekingthe Shakti,—first, because that is faith in the call presence and power of the Spirit within himDivine in us and the world, but also because it a faith that all in the world is only by liberation and perfection and realisation of the truth working of being one divine Shakti, that man can arrive at truth all the steps of living. A perfected community also can exist only by the perfection of Yoga, its strivings and sufferings and failures as well as its individuals, successes and satisfactions and perfection can come only by the discovery victories are utilities and affirmation in life by each necessities of his own spiritual being her workings and the discovery that by all of their spiritual unity a firm and strong dependence on and a resultant life unity. There can be no real perfection for us except by our inner total self and truth of spiritual existence taking up all truth of -surrender to the instrumental existence into itself Divine and giving to it his Shakti in us we can attain to oneness, integration, harmony. As our only real and freedom is the discovery and disengagement of the spiritual Reality within us, so our only means of true victory and perfection is the sovereignty and self-effectuation of the spiritual Reality in all the elements of our nature. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2224/thefaith-divineand-life#p37shakti?search=perfection</ref>
We have to recognise once more that ===By Silencing 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, to reproduce, multiply and ultimately universalise it in others. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/23/the-threefold-life#p30</ref>Mind===
The best way There is a world of helping others 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; 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 transform oneselfbe sure of understanding one another, you must be able to understand in silence. Be perfect 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 not of speech only, but of reading also. If you want to understand a book with a deep teaching in it, you must be able to read it in a position the mind's silence; you must wait and let the expression go deep inside you into the region where words are no more and from there come slowly back to bring perfection 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 union with the worldunexpressed mind that is behind the centre of expression. (The Mother, 26 May 1929) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/1403/helping-others-and26-themay-world1929#p12p21</ref>
There is a RealityMan, too, a truth of all existence which is greater and more abiding than all its formations and manifestations; to find becomes perfect only when he has found within himself that truth absolute calm and Reality passivity of the Brahman and live in supports by it, achieve with the most perfect manifestation same divine tolerance and formation possible of it, must be the secret of perfection whether of individual or communal beingsame divine bliss a free and inexhaustible activity. This Reality is there Those who have thus possessed the Calm within each thing and gives to each of can perceive always welling out from its formations its power silence the perennial supply of being and value of beingthe energies that work in the universe. The universe It is a manifestation not, therefore, the truth of the Reality, and there Silence to say that it is in its nature a truth rejection of the universal existence, a Power of cosmic being, an all-self or world-spiritactivity. Humanity The apparent incompatibility of the two states is a formation or manifestation an error of the Reality in limited Mind which, accustomed to trenchant oppositions of affirmation and denial and passing suddenly from one pole to the universeother, and there is unable to conceive of a truth comprehensive consciousness vast and self of humanity, strong enough to include both in a human spirit, a destiny of human lifesimultaneous 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 reconciliation by which the soul remains free and still even while it lends itself to all action. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2221/the-divinereality-lifeomnipresent#p36p5</ref>
=== When Man Becomes Perfect… ==Difficulties on the Path to Perfection=
Man, too, becomes No man is perfect only when he has found within himself that absolute calm ; the vital is there and passivity of the Brahman and supports by ego is there to prevent 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 only when there is in its nature a rejection of the cosmic activity. The apparent incompatibility total transformation of the two states is an error of external and the limited Mind which, accustomed to trenchant oppositions of affirmation and denial and passing suddenly from one pole internal being down to the othervery subconscient, that perfection is unable to conceive of a comprehensive consciousness vast and strong enough to include both in a simultaneous embracepossible. 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 reconciliation by which the soul remains free and still even while it lends itself to all actionTill then imperfection will remain as our common heritage. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2131/realitythe-subconscient-and-the-integral-omnipresentyoga#p5p2</ref>
= More on Perfection... =<center>~</center>
=== EaseThe 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, Difficulty 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>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/31/ego-and Perfection ===-its-forms#p54</ref>
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. <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/impurity#p29~</refcenter>
=== MoralityThe 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, Diversity and Perfection ==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-shakti?search=perfection</ref>
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 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) <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/4-august-1929#p6~</refcenter>
=== Conflicts In the lower grades of the ascension the new assumption, the integration into a higher principle of consciousness, remains incomplete: the mind cannot wholly mentalise life and Perfection ===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 impose them upon the members. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/22/the-ascent-towards-supermind#p16</ref>
If there were no such resistance, there would be nothing whatever to conquer 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 in which the Divine faces real opposition, real difficulty and often real temporary defeat on the way to the final victory. It is just this reality of the whole play that makes it no mere jest. The Divine Will actually suffers distortion the moment it touches the hostile forces in the Ignorance. Hence we must never slacken our efforts to change the world and bring about a different order. We must be vigilant to co<div style="text-operate with the Divine and not placidly think that whatever happens is always the best. All depends upon the personal attitude. <ref>httpalign://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/knowledge-by-unity-with-the-divine-the-divine-will-in-the-world#p5</refcenter;">
=== Perfection and Harmony ===One man’s perfection still can save the world.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/34/the-finding-of-the-soul</ref></div>
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 '''Content Curated 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; perfection is the perfection of the total divine harmony. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/21/the-divine-and-the-undivine#p6</ref>Prema Sankar'''
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==References==
= References =
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