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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>
The characteristic law mundane perfection is sometimes conceived of Spirit is selfas something outward, social, a thing of action, a more rational dealing with our fellow-existent perfection 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 immutable infinitymore harmonious associated enjoyment of the opportunities of existence. It possesses always By others again a more inner and in its own right the immortality which subjective ideal is cherished, a clarifying and raising of the aim intelligence, will and reason, a heightening and ordering of Life power and capacity in the perfection which 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 goal of Mind. The attainment exclusion of the eternal rest; sometimes, in wider and more well-balanced minds, the realisation whole harmony is envisaged as a total perfection. A change of that which education and social institutions is the same in all things outward means adopted or an inner self-training and beyond all thingsdevelopment is preferred as the true instrumentation. Or the two aims may be clearly united, equally blissful in universe and outside it, untouched by the imperfections and limitations perfection of the forms and activities in which it dwellsinner individual, are the glory perfection of the spiritual lifeouter living. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2324/the-threefoldintegral-lifeperfection#p7p2</ref>
As you pursue this labour '''Elements 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'''
It is, then, this spiritual fulfilment of the urge to 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>
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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 spiritThese three elements, a union with the inner Realitysupreme Divine, that has built up and uses unity with the minduniversal Self, vital being and body as its instrumentation; thought, feeling and a supramental life 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 from this inwardness, transcendent origin and through this spiritual originationuniversality, 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 still with the turn to individual as the spiritual life it is we who must create ourselves soul-channel and our world. In this new formula of creationnatural instrument, constitute the inner life becomes essence 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 integral divine perfection of the life of the race. For we are given a world which is obscure, ignorant, material, imperfect, and our external conscious human 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/2224/the-divineintegral-life#p6perfection?search=perfection</ref>
'''Where is the Power of Perfection?'''
==Perfection 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.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/21/the-problem-of-life#p12</ref>
Man, the mental being, has an imperfect life because mind is not the first and highest power of consciousness of the Being; even if mind were perfected, there would be still something yet to be realised, not yet manifested. For what is involved and emergent is not a Mind, but a Spirit, and mind is not the native dynamism of consciousness of the Spirit; supermind, the light of gnosis, is its native dynamism. If then life has to become a manifestation of the Spirit, it is the manifestation of a spiritual being in us and the divine life of a perfected consciousness in a supramental or gnostic power of spiritual being that must be the secret burden and intention of evolutionary Nature. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/22/the-divine-life#p3</ref>'''Divine Perfection'''
The Divine is the perfection towards which we move. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/14/the-divine-and-man#p8</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 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. <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/22/the-divine-life#p7~</refcenter>
= How A divine perfection of the human being is our aim. We must know then first what are the essential elements that constitute man's total perfection; secondly, what we mean by a divine as distinguished from a human perfection of our being. That man as a being is capable of self-development and of some approach at least to Achieve Perfection? =an ideal standard of perfection which his mind is able to conceive, fix before it and pursue, is common ground to all thinking humanity, though it may be only the minority who concern themselves with this possibility as providing the one most important aim of life.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/the-integral-perfection#p1</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>
==Prerequisites==The characteristic law of Spirit is self-existent perfection and immutable infinity. It possesses always and in its own right the immortality which is the aim of Life and the perfection which is the goal of Mind. The attainment of the eternal and the realisation of that which is the same in all things and beyond all things, equally blissful in universe and outside it, untouched by the imperfections and limitations of the forms and activities in which it dwells, are the glory of the spiritual life. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/23/the-threefold-life#p7</ref>
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The first necessity is some fundamental poise of Man, the soul both in its essential and its natural mental 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 Brahman has an imperfect life because mind is one in all not the first and therefore one to all; it is, as is said in the Gita which has developed fully this idea highest power of equality and indicated its experience on at least one side consciousness of equality, the equal Brahman, samaṁ brahmaBeing; the Gita even goes so far in one passage as if mind were perfected, there would be still something yet to identify equality and yogabe realised, samatvaṁ yoga ucyatenot yet manifested. That For what is to say, equality involved and emergent is the sign of unity with the Brahmannot a Mind, of becoming Brahmanbut a Spirit, of growing into an undisturbed spiritual poise of being in the Infinite. Its importance can hardly be exaggerated; for it and mind is not the sign native dynamism of our having passed beyond the egoistic determinations consciousness of our nature, of our having conquered our enslaved response to the dualitiesSpirit; supermind, of our having transcended the shifting turmoil light of the gunasgnosis, of our having entered into the calm and peace of liberationis its native dynamism. Equality is If then life has to become a term manifestation of consciousness which brings into the whole of our being and nature the eternal tranquillity of the Infinite. MoreoverSpirit, it is the condition manifestation of a securely spiritual being in us and perfectly the divine action; the security and largeness life of the cosmic action of the Infinite is based upon and never breaks down a perfected consciousness in a supramental or forfeits its eternal tranquillity. That too must be the character gnostic power of the perfect spiritual action; to be equal and one to all things in spirit, understanding, mind, heart and natural consciousness,—even in the most physical consciousness,—and to make all their workings, whatever their outward adaptation to the thing to be done, always and imminuably full of the divine equality and calm being that must be its inmost principle. That may be said to be the passive or basic, the fundamental secret burden and receptive side intention 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 fullnessevolutionary Nature. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2422/the-elements-ofdivine-perfectionlife#p2p3</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. <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/the-elements-of-perfection#p3~</refcenter>
==Process==Perfection of all kinds is indeed good, as it is the sign of the pressure of the consciousness in the material world towards full self-expression in this or that limit, on this or that level. In a certain sense it is an urge of the Divine itself hidden in forms that tends in the lesser degrees of consciousness towards its own increasing self-revelation. Perfection of an object or a scene in inanimate Nature, animate perfection of strength, speed, physical beauty, courage or animal fidelity, affection, intelligence, perfection of art, music, poetry, literature,—perfection of the intellect in any kind of mental activity, the perfect statesman, warrior, artist, craftsman,—perfection in vital force and capacity, perfection in ethical qualities, character, temperament,—all have their high value, their place as rungs in the ladder of evolution, the seried steps of the spirit's emergence. If one likes to call that spiritual because of this hidden urge behind it one can do so; it can at least be regarded as a preparation for the secret spirit's emergence. But thought and knowledge can only proceed by making the necessary distinctions. Much confusion is created by neglecting them. This mental idealism, ethical development, religious piety and fervour, occult powers and feats have all been taken as spirituality and the spiritual evolution kept tied to the moorings of the planes of lesser consciousness which do indeed prepare the soul by experience for the spiritual consciousness but are not themselves that. For perfection can only become truly spiritual when it is founded on the awakened spiritual consciousness and takes on its peculiar essence.<ref> http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/28/idealism-and-spirituality#p1</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 perfection, But always the first step is to become conscious of yourself, whole foundation of the different parts of your being gnostic life must be by its very nature inward and their respective activitiesnot outward. You must learn to distinguish these different parts one from another, so that you may become clearly aware In the life of the origin of spirit it is the spirit, the movements inner Reality, that occur in youhas built up and uses the mind, the many impulsesvital being and body as its instrumentation; thought, reactions feeling and conflicting wills that drive you to action. It is do not exist for themselves, they are not an assiduous study which demands much perseverance and sincerity. For man's natureobject, especially his mental nature, has a spontaneous tendency but the means; they serve to give a favourable explanation for everything he thinksexpress the manifested divine Reality within us: otherwise, feelswithout this inwardness, says and does. It is only by observing these movements with great carethis spiritual origination, in a too externalised consciousness or by bringing themonly external means, as it wereno greater or divine life is possible. In our present life of Nature, before the tribunal of in our highest idealexternalised surface existence, with a sincere will it is the world that seems to submit create us; but in the turn to its judgment, that the spiritual life it is we can hope to form in who must create ourselves a discernment that never errsand our world. For if we truly want to progress and acquire In this new formula of creation, the capacity inner life becomes of knowing the truth of our beingfirst importance and the rest can be only its expression and outcome. It is this, indeed, that is to sayindicated by our own strivings towards perfection, what the perfection of our own soul and mind and life and the perfection of the life of the race. For we are truly created forgiven a world which is obscure, ignorant, what we can call our mission upon earthmaterial, then we mustimperfect, in a very regular and constant mannerour external conscious being is itself created by the energies, the pressure, reject from us or eliminate in us whatever contradicts the truth moulding operations of our existence, whatever is opposed to it. In this wayvast mute obscurity, little by littlephysical birth, all the partsby environment, all by a training through the elements impacts and shocks of life; and yet we are vaguely aware of our being can something that is there in us or seeking to be organised into , something other than what has been thus made, a homogeneous whole around our psychic centrespirit self-existent, self-determining, pushing the nature towards the creation of an image of its own occult perfection or Idea of perfection. This work of unification requires much time There is something that grows in us in answer to be brought this demand, that strives to some degree become the image of perfectiona divine. ThereforeSomewhat, in order and is impelled also to labour at the world outside that has been given to accomplish itand to remake that too in a greater image, we must arm ourselves with patience in the image of its own spiritual and mental and endurancevital growth, with a determination to prolong make our life as long as necessary for the success of world too something created according to our endeavourown mind and self-conceiving spirit, something new, harmonious, perfect.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/1222/the-sciencedivine-of-livinglife#p5p6</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 As you pursue this labour of purification and unification, you must at the same time take great care to perfect the highest without blotting ourselves out from the cosmic extension. Brahman preserves always Its two terms of liberty within external and instrumental part of formation withoutyour 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 expression thought which preserves its force and of freedom from the expressionclarity. We alsoThis thought, being Thatagain, can attain when it seeks to clothe itself in words, must find in you a sufficient power of expression so that the words reveal the same divine self-possessionthought and do not deform it. The harmony of And the two tendencies is formula in which you embody the condition truth should be manifested in all your feelings, all your acts of will, all your actions, in all life that aims at the movements of your being really divine. Finally, these movements themselves should, by constant effort, attain their highest perfection. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/2112/the-destinyscience-of-the-individualliving#p18p6</ref>
==Perfection in the Mind==
An integral Yoga includes The ethical mind becomes perfect in proportion as a vital it detaches itself from desire, sense suggestion, impulse, customary dictated action and indispensable element in its total and ultimate aim the conversion of the whole being into discovers a higher spiritual consciousness and a larger divine existence. Our parts self of will and action, our parts of knowledgeRight, our thinking beingLove, our emotional being, our being of life, all our self Strength and nature must seek the Divine, enter into the Infinite, unite with the Eternal. But man's present nature is limited, divided, unequal,—it is easiest for him to concentrate Purity in the strongest part of his being which it can live accomplished 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 make it the sea foundation of the Divine Infinityall its actions. Some therefore must choose as a starting-point a concentration in thought or contemplation or the The aesthetic mind's one-pointedness to find the eternal reality of the Self is perfected 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 proportion as it is best to centre themselves in the will and enlarge their being through works. United with the Self and source of detaches itself from all by their surrender of their will into its infinity, guided in their works by the secret Divinity within or surrendered to the Lord cruder pleasures and from outward conventional canons of the cosmic action as the master aesthetic reason and discovers a self existent self and mover spirit of all their energies of thought, feeling, act, becoming by this enlargement of being selfless pure and infinite Beauty and universal, they can reach by works some first fullness of a spiritual status. But the path, whatever Delight which gives its point of starting, must debouch into a vaster dominion; it must proceed in own light and joy to the end through a totality of integrated knowledge, emotion, will of dynamic action, perfection material of the being and the entire natureaesthesis. In the supramental consciousness, on the level The mind of the supramental existence this integration becomes consummate; there knowledge, will, emotion, the perfection of the self is perfected when it gets away from impression and the dynamic nature rise each to its absolute of itself dogma and all to their perfect harmony opinion and fusion with each other, to discovers a divine integrality, a divine perfection. For the supermind is a Truthlight of self-Consciousness in knowledge and intuition which illumines all the Divine Reality, fully manifested, no longer works with the instrumentation workings of the Ignorance; a truth of status of being which is absolute becomes dynamic in a truth of energy sense and activity of the being which is reason, all self-existent experience and perfectworld-experience. Every movement there The will is a movement perfected when it gets away from and behind its impulses and its customary ruts of the self-aware truth effectuation and discovers an inner power of Divine Being and every part is in entire harmony with the whole. Even the most limited and finite action Spirit which is in the Truth-Consciousness a movement source of the Eternal an intuitive and Infinite luminous action and partakes an original harmonious creation. The movement of the inherent absoluteness and perfection of is away from all domination by the Eternal and Infinite. An ascent into the supramental Truth not only raises our spiritual lower nature and essential consciousness to that height but brings about towards a descent of this Light pure and Truth into all our being and all our parts of nature. All then becomes part powerful reflection of the Divine Truthbeing, an element power, knowledge and means delight of the supreme union Spirit and oneness; this ascent and descent must be therefore an ultimate aim of this YogaSelf in the buddhi.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2324/thepurification-supermindintelligence-and-the-yoga-of-works#p1will</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 yourself, my children, "We want to The first need is the clarity and the purity of the intelligence. It must be as perfect instruments as possible freed from the claims of the vital being which seeks to express impose the divine Will desire of the mind in place of the world"truth, then for this instrument from the claims of the troubled emotional being which strives to be perfectcolour, it must be cultivateddistort, educated, trainedlimit and falsify the truth with the hue and shape of the emotions. It must not be left like a shapeless piece free too from its own defect, inertia of stone. When you want the thought-power, obstructive narrowness and unwillingness to build with a stone you chisel it; when you want open to make a formless block into a beautiful diamondknowledge, intellectual unscrupulousness in thinking, you chisel it. Wellprepossession and preference, it is self-will in the reason and false determination of the same thingwill to knowledge. When with your brain and body you want Its sole will must be to make a beautiful instrument for itself an unsullied mirror of the Divinetruth, you must cultivate itits essence and its forms and measures and relations, sharpen ita clear mirror, refine ita just measure, complete what is missinga fine and subtle instrument of harmony, perfect what is therean integral intelligence. (The Mother, 13 May 1953) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/0524/13the-power-mayof-1953#p18the-instruments</ref>
There is a world of ideas without form and it is there that you must enter if you want to seize what is behind the words. So long as you have to draw your understanding from the forms of words, you are likely to fall into much confusion about the true sense; but if in a silence of your mind you can rise into the world from which ideas descend to take form, at once the real understanding comes. If you are to be sure of understanding one another, you must be able to understand in silence. There is a condition in which your minds are so well attuned and harmonised together that one perceives the thought of the other without any necessity of words. But if there is not this attunement, there will always be some deformation of your meaning, because to what you speak the other mind supplies its own significance. I use a word in a certain sense or shade of its sense; you are accustomed to put into it another sense or shade. Then, evidently, you will understand, not my exact meaning in it, but what the word means to you. This is true 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 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 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 unexpressed mind that is behind the centre of expression. (The Mother, 26 May 1929) <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/26-may-1929#p21~</refcenter>
The seeker of the integral state of knowledge must be free from attachment 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 action and equally free from attachment to inaction. Especially must any tendency to mere inertia of which it may give an exclusive preference. Our mind or vitality or body , in its search for what must be surmounted, turns towards a concentration on our own inner spiritual growth and if that habit is found growing perfection, on our own individual being and inner living; or it turns towards a concentration on the an individual development of our surface nature, on the will 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 Purusha must outer world itself, on making it better, more suited to our ideas and temperament or to our conception of what should be used to dismiss it. EventuallyOn one side there is the call of our spiritual being which is our true self, a transcendent reality, a state arrives when being of the Divine Being, not created by the life and world, able to live in itself, to rise out of world to transcendence; on the body perform as mere instruments other side there is the will demand of the Purusha in world around us which is a cosmic form, a formulation of the mind without any strain or attachmentDivine Being, without their putting themselves into a power of the action with that inferior, eager and often feverish energy which Reality in disguise. There is too the nature divided or double demand of their ordinary working; they come to work as forces our being of Nature work without which is poised between these two terms, depends on them and connects them; for it is apparently made by the fret world and toil yet, because its true creator is in ourselves and reaction characteristic of life in the body when world instrumentation that seems to make it is only the means first used, it is not yet master really a form, a disguised manifestation of the physicala greater spiritual being within us. When we attain to It is this demand that mediates between our preoccupation with an inward perfection, then action or spiritual liberation and inaction become immaterial, since neither interferes our preoccupation with the freedom of outer world and its formation, insists on a happier relation between the soul or draws it away from its urge towards two terms and creates the Self or its poise ideal of a better individual in the Selfa better world. But this state of perfection arrives later in it is within us that the Yoga Reality must be found and till then the law source and foundation of moderation laid down by the Gita is the best for usa perfected life; too much mental or physical action then is not good since excess draws away too much energy and reacts unfavourably upon no outward formation can replace it: there must be the spiritual condition; too little also true self realised within if there 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 the true life realised in world 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 knowledgeNature. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2322/the-releasedivine-from-subjection-to-the-bodylife#p8p7</ref>
The calm established ==Perfection in the whole being must remain Vital==Then again there is the same whatever happenspsychic prana, pranic mind or desire soul; this too calls for its own perfection. Here too the first necessity is a fullness of the vital capacity in health and diseasethe mind, in pleasure and in painits power to do its full work, even in to take possession of all the strongest physical pain, in good fortune impulsions and misfortune, energies given to our own or that of those we love, inner psychic life for fulfilment in success and failurethis existence, honour to hold them and insultto be a means for carrying them out with strength, praise and blamefreedom, justice done to us or injustice, everything that ordinarily affects perfection. Many of the mind. If things we see unity everywhereneed for our perfection, courage, if we recognise that all comes by the divine will-power effective in life, see God in all, in our enemies or rather our opponents in the game elements of what we now call force of character and force of life as well as our friendspersonality, in depend very largely for their completest strength and spring of energetic action on the powers that oppose and resist us as well as fullness of the powers that favour psychic prana. But along with this fullness there must be an established gladness, clearness and assist, purity in all energies and forces and happeningsthe psychic life-being. This dynamis must not be a troubled, and if besides we can feel that all is undivided from our selfperfervid, all the world one with us within our universal beingstormy, then this attitude becomes much easier to the heart and mind. But even before we can attain fitfully or are firmly seated in that universal visioncrudely passionate strength; energy there must be, we rapture of its action it must have by all the means in our power to insist on this receptive , but a clear and active equality glad and calm. Even something of itpure energy, alpam api asya dharmasya, is a great step towards perfection; seated and firmly supported pure rapture. And as a first firmness in it is the beginning third condition 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 must be constantly falling back to the lower status of desire, ego, duality, ignorancepoised in a complete equality. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/the-actionpower-of-equality#p5the-instruments</ref>
==Difficulties==<center>~</center>
This heart and psychic being of man shot through with the threads of the life instincts is a thing of mixed inconstant colours of emotion and soul vibrations, bad and good, happy and unhappy, satisfied and unsatisfied, troubled and calm, intense and dull. Thus agitated and invaded it is unacquainted with any real peace, incapable of a steady perfection of all its powers. By purification, by equality, by the light of knowledge, by a harmonising of the will it can be brought to a tranquil intensity and perfection.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/the-power-of-the-instruments</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>
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 The other side 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 self-contained and more difficult integration. No doubtcalm and unegoistic Rudra-power armed with psychic force, by calling in the spiritual force, it can establish an influence and a preliminary change in some parts energy of the nature, especially in the thinking mind itself and in the strong 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 capable of supporting without shrinking an inferior means andinsistent, an outwardly austere or even though it brings in a divine light into the mind, a divine puritywhere need is, 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 violent 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/2224/the-ascentpower-of-towardsthe-supermind#p16instruments</ref>
= Why = Perfection in the Body ==
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>
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 goes wrong. You must be fully conscious, have the full knowledge, the perfect mastery over everything, the clear vision of the Truth—and perfect peace. (The Mother, 20 May 1953) <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/05/20-may-1953#p54~</refcenter>
… one may act with a perfect knowledge of what should be doneAs for the question about the illness, and without intervention—the least intervention—of perfection in the reasoning mind. The mind physical plane is silent: indeed part of the ideal of the Yoga, but it simply looks on is the last item and listens , so long as the fundamental change has not been made in order the material consciousness to register thingswhich the body belongs, it does not actone may have a certain perfection on other planes without having immunity in the body. (The Mother, 23 December 1953) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/0531/23illness-decemberand-1953health#p8p57</ref>
Perfection is not a static state, it is an equilibrium. But a progressive, dynamic equilibrium. One may go from perfection to perfection. There can come a state from which it would not be necessary to descend to a lower rung in order to go farther; at the moment the march of Nature is like that, but in this new state, instead of being obliged to go back to be able to start again, one can walk always forward, without ever stopping. As things are, one comes to a certain point and, as human beings as they are at present cannot progress indefinitely, one must pass to a higher species or leave the present species and create another. The human being as he is at the moment cannot attain perfection unless he gets out of himself—man is a transitional being. In ordinary language it may be said: "Oh, this man is perfect", but that is a literary figure. The maximum a human being can attain just now is an equilibrium which is not progressive. He may attain perhaps a static equilibrium but all that is static can be broken for lack of progress. (The Mother, 30 December 1950) <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/04/30-december-1950#p19~</refcenter>
The physical being of man has always been felt by the seekers of perfection to be a great impediment and it has been the habit to turn from it with contempt, denial or aversion and a desire to suppress altogether or as far as may be the body and the physical life. But this cannot be the right method for the integral Yoga. The body is given us as one instrument necessary to the totality of our works and it is to be used, not neglected, hurt, suppressed or abolished. If it is imperfect, recalcitrant, obstinate, so are also the other members, the vital being, heart and mind and reason. It has like them to be changed and perfected and to undergo a transformation. As we must get ourselves a new life, new heart, new mind, so we have in a certain sense to build for ourselves a new body.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/the-power-of-the-instruments</ref>
The condition to be aimed at, the real achievement of Yoga, the final perfection and attainment, for which all else is only a preparation, is a consciousness in which it is impossible to do anything without the Divine; for then, if you are without the Divine, the very source of your action disappears; knowledge, power, all are gone. But so long as you feel that the powers you use are your own, you will not miss the Divine support. (The Mother, 28 April 1929) <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/28-april-1929#p14~</refcenter>
All life Transformation and the Body : The supramental perfection means that has still this Inconscience for its basis is stamped with the mark of a radical imperfection; for even if it is satisfied with its own typebody becomes conscious, it is a satisfaction filled with something incomplete consciousness and inharmonious, a patchwork of discords: on the contrary, even a purely mental or vital life might be perfect within its limits if it were based on a restricted but harmonious self-power and self-knowledge. It is that as this bondage to a perpetual stamp of imperfection and disharmony that is the mark of the undivine; a divine life, on the contrary, even if progressing from the little to the more, would be at each stage harmonious in its principle and detail: it would be a secure ground upon which freedom and perfection could naturally flower or grow towards their highest stature, refine and expand into their most subtle opulence. All imperfections, all perfections have to be taken into view in our consideration of the difference between an undivine and a divine existence: but ordinarily, when we make the distinction, we do it as human beings struggling under the pressure of life and the difficulties of our conduct amidst its immediate problems and perplexities; most of Truth consciousness all we are thinking of the distinction we are obliged to make between good and evil or of that along with its kindred problem of the dualityactions, the blend in us of happiness and sufferingfunctionings etc. When we seek intellectually for a divine presence in things, a divine origin of become by the world, a divine government power of its workings, the presence of evilconsciousness within it harmonious, the insistence on sufferingluminous, the large, the enormous part offered to pain, grief and affliction in the economy of Nature are the cruel phenomena which baffle our reason and overcome the instinctive faith of mankind in such an origin right and government true—without ignorance or in an all-seeing, all-determining and omnipresent Divine Immanencedisorder. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2128/the-divinetransformation-and-the-undivinebody#p2p3</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 with imperfection This is one of the things one discovers gradually as the body becomes ready for transformations. It is quite a law remarkable instrument in the see that it can experience two contraries at the same time. There is a certain state of life upon earthbody-consciousness which brings things together, its aspiration towards totalises things that in other states of consciousness alternate or even in certain others oppose each other. But if one has reached up there, in the vital and the elimination mind, a development sufficient for harmonising opposites (that of all imperfections from our naturecourse, is quite indispensable), not only when one has succeeded in a heaven beyond where doing this, there are moments when it would be automatically impossible to be imperfectalternates, you see, one thing comes after the other, but here and now while what is remarkable in a life where perfection has to be conquered by evolution the consciousness of the body is that it can feel ("feel", can we say "feel"?—"experience"—the word "aware" expresses it best) all things simultaneously, as though you were hot and strugglecold at once, are as though you were active and passive at once, and everything becomes like that. Then you begin to grasp the totality of movements in the cells. It is something much more concrete naturally, but much a law more perfect in the body than in any other part of our the being as . This means that against which they revolt; they too are divineif things continue in this way,—a divine dissatisfactionit will be proved that the physical, a divine aspirationmaterial instrument is the most perfect of all. In them That is why perhaps it is the inherent light most difficult to transform, to perfect. But of a power within which maintains them in us so that the Divine may not only be there as a hidden Reality in our spiritual secrecies but unfold itself in all, it is the evolution one most capable of Natureperfection. (The Mother, 21 April 1954) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/06/21/the-divine-and-theapril-undivine1954#p8p31</ref>
<center>~</center>
For one who wants to grow It is precisely because the body decays, declines and ends in self-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 perfectionas the psychic being, there are would be no great or small tasks, none that are important or unimportant; all are equally useful necessity for one who aspires for progress and self-masteryit to die. One year added to another need not bring a deterioration. It is only a habit of Nature. It is said that one only does well a habit of what one is interested in doinghappening at this moment. This And that is trueexactly the cause of death. One can foresee quite well, on the contrary, but it that the movement for perfection which is truer still at the beginning of life might continue under another form. I have already told you that one can learn to find interest in everything one doesnot foresee an uninterrupted growth, even in what appear to be for that would need changing the most insignificant chores. The secret height of the houses after some time! But this attainment lies growth in height may be changed into a growth in perfection: the urge towards self-perfectionof the form. Whatever occupation or task falls to your lotAll the imperfections of the form may be gradually corrected, all the weaknesses replaced by strength, you must do all the incapacities by skill. Why should it with a will to progress; whatever one does, one must not only be like this? You do it as best one can but strive to do it better and better not think in a constant effort for perfection. In this that way everything without exception becomes interesting, from because you have the most material chore to the most artistic and intellectual workhabit of seeing things otherwise. The scope for progress But there is infinite and can be applied to the smallest thingno reason why this should not happen. (The Mother, 17 June 1953) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/1205/the-four-austerities-and-the17-fourjune-liberations1953#p17p36</ref>
= Why Do We Need Perfection? =
== For Discovering the Truth of Living==
For 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, so our only means of true perfection is the sovereignty and self-effectuation of the spiritual Reality in all the elements of our nature. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/22/the-divine-life#p37</ref>
<center>~</center>
There is a Reality, a truth of all existence which is greater and more abiding than all its formations and manifestations; to find that truth and Reality and live in it, achieve the most perfect manifestation and formation possible of it, must be the secret of perfection whether of individual or communal being. This Reality is there within each thing and gives to each of its formations its power of being and value of being. The universe is a manifestation of the Reality, and there is a truth of the universal existence, a Power of cosmic being, an all-self or world-spirit. Humanity is a formation or manifestation of the Reality in the universe, and there is a truth and self of humanity, a human spirit, a destiny of human life. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/22/the-divine-life#p36</ref>
==For Self-perfection, Progress and Fulfillment==
== Supermind ==In the Dhammapada: a supreme disinterestedness and a supreme liberation is to follow the discipline of self-perfection, the march of progress, not with a precise end in view but because this march of progress is the profound law and the purpose of earthly life, the truth of universal existence and because you put yourself in harmony with it, spontaneously, whatever the result may be. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/the-brahmin#p43</ref>
If consciousness is the central secret, life is the outward indication, the effective power of being in Matter; for it is that which liberates consciousness and gives it its form or embodiment of force and its effectuation in material act. If some revelation or effectuation of itself in Matter is the ultimate aim of the evolving Being in its birth, life is the exterior and dynamic sign and index of that revelation and effectuation. But life also, as it is now, is imperfect and evolving; it evolves through growth of consciousness even as consciousness evolves through greater organisation and perfection of life: a greater consciousness means a greater life. <center>~</center>
These For one who wants to grow in self-perfection, there are the first major results of the spiritual transformation no great or small tasks, none that follow as a necessary consequence of the nature of Supermindare important or unimportant; all are equally useful for one who aspires for progress and self-mastery. But if there It is to be not said that one only a perfection of the inner existence, of the consciousness, of an inner delight of existencedoes well what one is interested in doing. This is true, but a perfection of the life and action, two other questions present themselves from our mental view-point which have it is truer still that one can learn to our human thought about our life and its dynamisms a considerablefind interest in everything one does, even a premier importancein what appear to be the most insignificant chores. First, there is the place The secret of personality this attainment lies in the gnostic beingurge towards self-perfection. Whatever occupation or task falls to your lot,—whether the statusyou must do it with a will to progress; whatever one does, the building of the being will be quite other than what we experience one must not only do it as the form best one can but strive to do it better and life of the person or similarbetter in a constant effort for perfection. If there is a personality and it is in any In this way responsible for its actions, there intervenes, nexteverything without exception becomes interesting, from the question of most material chore to the place of the ethical element most artistic and its perfection intellectual work. The scope for progress is infinite and fulfilment in can be applied to the gnostic naturesmallest thing. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/2212/the-gnosticfour-austerities-and-the-four-beingliberations#p28p17</ref>
= Body and Perfection =<center>~</center>
== Perfecting Perfection is not a static state, it is an equilibrium. But a progressive, dynamic equilibrium. One may go from perfection to perfection. There can come a state from which it would not be necessary to descend to a lower rung in order to go farther; at the Body ==moment the march of Nature is like that, but in this new state, instead of being obliged to go back to be able to start again, one can walk always forward, without ever stopping. As things are, one comes to a certain point and, as human beings as they are at present cannot progress indefinitely, one must pass to a higher species or leave the present species and create another. The human being as he is at the moment cannot attain perfection unless he gets out of himself—man is a transitional being. In ordinary language it may be said: "Oh, this man is perfect", but that is a literary figure. The maximum a human being can attain just now is an equilibrium which is not progressive. He may attain perhaps a static equilibrium but all that is static can be broken for lack of progress. (The Mother, 30 December 1950) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/04/30-december-1950#p19</ref>
This is one of the things one discovers gradually as the body becomes ready for transformations. It is quite a remarkable instrument in the see that it can experience two contraries at the same time. There is a certain state of body-consciousness 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, in the vital and the mind, a development sufficient for harmonising opposites (that of course, is quite indispensable), when one has succeeded in doing this, there are moments when it alternates, you see, one thing comes after the other, while what is remarkable in the consciousness of the body is that it can feel ("feel", can we say "feel"?—"experience"—the word "aware" expresses it best) all things simultaneously, as though you were hot and cold at once, as though you were active and passive at once, and everything becomes like that. Then you begin to grasp the totality of movements in the cells. It is something much more concrete naturally, but much more perfect in the body than in any other part of the being. This means that if things continue in this way, it will be proved that the physical, material instrument is the most perfect of all. That is why perhaps it is the most difficult to transform, to perfect. But of all, it is the one most capable of perfection. (The Mother, 21 April 1954) <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/06/21-april-1954#p31~</refcenter>
Be on your guard against All life is a secret Yoga, an obscure growth of Nature towards the wrath discovery and fulfilment of the body. Control your actionsdivine principle hidden in her which becomes progressively less obscure, more self-conscient and leaving behind wrong ways luminous, more self-possessed in the human being by the opening of actingall his instruments of knowledge, practise perfect conduct will, action, life to the Spirit within him and in actionthe world. Mind, life, body, 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, because they are not the whole of what man is, secondly, because that other something which he is, is the key of his completeness and brings a light which discovers to him the whole high and large reality of his being. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/0324/anger#p10the-integral-perfection?search=perfection</ref>
One who aspires to the ineffable Peace, one whose mind is awakened, whose thoughts are not entangled in the net of desire, that one is said to be "bound upstream" (towards perfection). <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/pleasure#p10~</refcenter>
As for Our soul's dissatisfaction with imperfection as a law of life upon earth, its aspiration towards the question about the illnesselimination of all imperfections from our nature, perfection not only in the physical plane is indeed part of the ideal of the Yogaa heaven beyond where it would be automatically impossible to be imperfect, but it is the last item here and now in a life where perfection has to be conquered by evolution andstruggle, so long are as much a law of our being as that against which they revolt; they too are divine,—a divine dissatisfaction, a divine aspiration. In them is the fundamental change has not been made inherent light of a power within which maintains them in us so that the material consciousness to which the body belongs, one Divine may have not only be there as a certain perfection on other planes without having immunity hidden Reality in our spiritual secrecies but unfold itself in the bodyevolution of Nature. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/3121/illnessthe-divine-and-healththe-undivine#p57p8</ref>
Transformation and the Body : The supramental perfection means that the body becomes conscious, is filled with consciousness and that as this is the Truth consciousness all its actions, functionings etc. become by the power of the consciousness within it harmonious, luminous, right and true—without ignorance or disorder. <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/28/transformation-and-the-body#p3~</refcenter>
== Body Perfection 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 Immortality ==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. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/22/the-divine-life#p23</ref>
When == To Grow in 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>Spiritual Oneness==
We are on earth His physical being will be one with all material Nature, his vital being with the life of the universe, his mind with the cosmic mind, his spiritual knowledge and will with the divine knowledge and will both in itself and as it pours itself through these channels, his spirit with the one spirit in order all beings. All the variety of cosmic existence will be changed to progress him in that unity and to perfect ourselves revealed in the course secret of many successive livesits spiritual significance. What we cannot do For in this time, we shall do next time; spiritual bliss and being he will be one with That which is the origin and continent and inhabitant and spirit and every progress we make this time constituting power of all existence. This will help us thenbe the highest reach of self-perfection. (The Mother, 15 November 1971) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/1724/15the-novemberelements-of-1971#p1perfection</ref>
Ah! No. You are looking from the wrong side. They could escape dying only if their body did not decay. It is just because their body decays that they die. It is because their body becomes useless that they die. If they are not to die, their body should not become useless. This is just the contrary. It is precisely because the body decays, declines and ends in a complete degradation that death becomes necessary. But if the body followed the progressive movement 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) <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/05/17-june-1953#p36~</refcenter>
ButSo long as he remains in the world-existence, you seethis perfection must radiate out from him, when our little humanity says three hundred years —for that is the necessity of his oneness with the same bodyuniverse and its beings, you say: "Why! when I am fifty —in an influence and action which help all around who are capable of 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 rise to year, perhaps when or advance towards 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 transformationsame perfection, one would like to have more and more years for the rest in order to be able to transform oneself more an influence and more. When something is not exactly action which help, as you want it to be—takeonly the self-ruler and master man can help, for example, simply one of in leading the things I have just described, say, plasticity or lightness or elasticity or luminosity, human race forward spiritually towards this consummation and none towards some image 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 donea greater divine truth in their personal and communal existence." And then, when all is done, when all is perfect, then there is no longer any question He becomes a light and power of years, the Truth to which he has climbed and a means for you are immortalothers’ ascension. (The Mother, 20 May 1953) <ref>httpttp://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/0524/20the-mayperfection-1953#p44of-the-mental-being?search=perfection</ref>
= Integral How to Achieve Perfection ? =
== Ego The Master of our works respects our nature even when he is transforming it; he works always through the nature and Perfection ==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. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/23/the-master-of-the-work#p6</ref>
Why do you say that sensitivity is the sign of a strong ego? It does not seem to be evident at all. Moreover, there are many different kinds of sensitivity: some stem from weakness, others—the best—are the result of refinement. The ego generally governs the development of the individual, but the most developed individualities are not necessarily those in whom the ego is strongest—on the contrary. As the individuality perfects itself, the power of the ego diminishes, and indeed it is by perfecting himself that the individual arrives at that state of divinisation which liberates him from the ego. (The Mother, 2 September 1964) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/16/2-september-1964#p3</ref>==Prerequisites==
Never forget that here The first necessity is some fundamental poise of the 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 Brahman is one in all and therefore one to all; it is , as is said in the 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 Gita even goes so far in one passage as to identify equality and yoga, samatvaṁ yoga ucyate. That is to say, equality is the sign of unity with the Brahman, of becoming Brahman, of growing into an undisturbed spiritual poise of 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, of 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 perfection calm and peace of liberation. Equality is a term of consciousness which brings into the whole of our being and nature the eternal tranquillity of the Infinite. 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 to all things in spirit, understanding, mind, heart and natural consciousness,—even in the most physical consciousness,—and to make all their workings, whatever their outward adaptation to the thing to be done, always and imminuably full of the work that we are strivingdivine equality and calm must be its inmost principle. That may be said to be the passive or basic, the fundamental and receptive side of equality, but there is also an active and possessive side, not for an equal bliss which can only come when the satisfaction peace of equality is founded and which is the egobeatific flower of its fullness. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/1324/organisationthe-elements-andof-workperfection#p55p2</ref>
The egoism of the instrument can be as dangerous or more dangerous to spiritual progress than the egoism of the doer. The ego-sense is contrary to spiritual realisation, so how can any kind of ego be a thing to be encouraged? As for the magnified ego, it is one of the most perilous obstacles to release and perfection. There should be no big I, not even a small one. <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/31/ego-and-its-forms#p54~</refcenter>
If you think 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 no ego or desire the dynamical force in us (vīrya) of the temperament, character and soul nature, svabhāva, which makes the power of our members effective in youaction and gives them their type and direction; this has to be freed from its limitations, only pure devotionenlarged, rounded so that shows the whole manhood in us may become the basis of a great unconsciousnessdivine 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 free from ego shaped into the image of and desire is filled with the force of a condition greater infinite energy, daivī prakṛti, bhāgavatī śakti. This perfection will grow in the measure in which needs a high siddhi in Yoga—even many Yogis we can surrender ourselves, first, to the guidance and then to the direct action of that Power and of a great spiritual attainment are not free from it. For a sadhak at your stage the Master of development our being and our works to think he whom it belongs, and for this purpose faith is free from ego and desire the essential, faith is the great motor-power of our being in our aspirations to blind himself perfection,—here, a faith in God and prevent the clear perception Shakti which shall begin in the heart and understanding, but shall take possession of one's own all our nature movements which is necessary for progress towards spiritual , 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/3124/egothe-andelements-itsof-formsperfection#p74p3</ref>
This vairagya, or loss of zest, as you have yourself said, began before you came here. I have indeed laid some stress on the conquest of sex, for obvious reasons; but I have hardly laid a compulsory stress on anything else. Certainly, I have not encouraged you to lose joy in vital creativeness; I have only held up the ideal of turning it towards the Divine and away from the ego. To keep the vital full of life and energy and to trust mainly to the inner growth and the descent of a higher consciousness for a change, using the will too but for self-mastery, not for suppression, but for subordination of the lower to the higher, has been my teaching. The turn to vairagya, to tapasya of an ascetic kind was the impulse of something in your own nature; it insisted on its necessity just as a part of the vital insisted on its opposite: even it condemned my suggestion of something less grim and strenuous as an easy-going absence of aspiration etc. I do not say that vairagya and tapasya are not ways to reach the Divine, but done like that they are painful ways and long; if one takes them, one must be determined and go through. For one part to push all zest out of the vital and for the other to regret and say, why did I ever do it, will never do. And it is in this kind of tapasya that perfection or at least perfect purification is demanded before there can be any realisation. I have never said that for my Yoga; the only thing I insist upon is some faith, inner surrender and opening of oneself to receive,—not absolute, but just sufficient. Experience has to begin long before perfect purification and from experience to experience one comes to realisation and through realisation to more and more perfection; anything that can be called real perfection can only come at the end. But there is something in you that is impatient of gradualness, of small mercies; its motto seems to be all or nothing. <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/29/asceticism-and-the-integral-yoga#p9~</refcenter>
== ...perfection of our instrumental nature... the perfection of the intelligence, heart, vital consciousness and body, the perfection of the fundamental soul powers, the perfection of the surrender of our instruments and action to the divine Shakti, depend at every moment of their progression on a... power that is covertly and overtly the pivot of all endeavour and action, faith, śraddhā. The Mundane perfect faith is an assent of the whole being to the truth seen by it or offered to its acceptance, and its central working is a faith of the soul in its own will to be and Divine Perfection =attain and become and its idea of self and things and its knowledge, of which the belief of the intellect, the heart’s consent and the desire of the life mind to possess and realise are the outward figures.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/faith-and-shakti?search=perfection</ref>
A divine perfection The condition to be aimed at, the real achievement of Yoga, the human being is our aim. We must know then first what are the essential elements that constitute man's total final perfection; secondlyand attainment, what we mean by for which all else is only a divine as distinguished from preparation, is a human perfection of our being. That man as a being is capable of self-development and of some approach at least to an ideal standard of perfection consciousness in which his mind is able to conceive, fix before it and pursue, is common ground impossible to all thinking humanitydo anything without the Divine; for then, though it may be only if you are without the minority who concern themselves with this possibility as providing Divine, the one most important aim very source of lifeyour action disappears; knowledge, power, all are gone. But by some so long as you feel that the ideal is conceived as a mundane changepowers you use are your own, by others as a religious conversionyou will not miss the Divine support. (The Mother, 28 April 1929) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/2403/the28-integralapril-perfection1929#p1p14</ref>
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-integral-perfection#p2</ref>==Process==
We know, we have said this many a time, that all work is a prayer made with the body ===By Education 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>Training===
The divine existence is of the nature not only of freedomIf you said to yourself, but of puritymy children, beatitude and perfection. An integral purity which shall enable on the one hand the "We want to be as perfect reflection of instruments as possible to express the divine Being Will in ourselves and on the other the world", then for this instrument to be 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 manifestationmust be cultivated, a perfection founded on a certain free universality of beingeducated, of love and joy, of play of knowledge and of play of will in power and will in unegoistic actiontrained. This integrality also can It must not be attained by the integral Yoga. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/23/the-synthesis-left like a shapeless piece of-the-systems#p19</ref> == Perfection of All Kinds == Perfection of all kinds is indeed good, as it is the sign of the pressure of the consciousness in the material world towards full self-expression in this or that limit, on this or that levelstone. In When you want to build with a certain sense stone you chisel 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 ; when you want to make a formless block into a scene in inanimate Nature, animate perfection of strength, speedbeautiful diamond, physical beauty, courage or animal fidelity, affection, intelligence, perfection of art, music, poetry, literature,—perfection of the intellect in any kind of mental activity, the perfect statesman, warrior, artist, craftsman,—perfection in vital force and capacity, perfection in ethical qualities, character, temperament,—all have their high value, their place as rungs in the ladder of evolution, the seried steps of the spirit's emergence. If one likes to call that spiritual because of this hidden urge behind you chisel it one can do so; it can at least be regarded as a preparation for the secret spirit's emergence. But thought and knowledge can only proceed by making the necessary distinctions. Much confusion is created by neglecting them. This mental idealism, ethical developmentWell, religious piety and fervour, 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." (The Mother, 27 June 1956) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/08/27-june-1956#p31</ref> Moral perfection is to have all the qualities that are considered moral: to have no defectsyou must cultivate it, never to make a mistakesharpen it, never to errrefine it, to be always complete what one conceives to be the bestis missing, to have all the virtuesperfect what is there. (The Mother, 1 October 195813 May 1953) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/0905/113-octobermay-19581953#p3p18</ref>
== Consciousness and Perfection ==<center>~</center>
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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Read Summary of '''[[Perfection Summary|Perfection]]'''  Dear reader, if you notice any error in the paragraph numbers in the hyperlinks, please let us know by dropping an email at integral.edu.in@gmail.com
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==References==
= References =
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