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Read Summary of '''[[Perfection Summary|Perfection]]'''
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= What is Perfection? =
'''Perfection in General'''
Perfection is all that we want to become in our highest aspiration. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/15/perfection#p10</ref>
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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>
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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>
A divine perfection of the human being is our aim. We must know then first what are the essential elements that constitute man's total perfection; secondly, what we mean by a divine as distinguished from a human perfection of our being. That man as a being is capable of self-development and of some approach at least to an ideal standard of perfection 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>
<center>~</center> The mundane 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 sometimes conceived the goal of as something outward, social, a thing Mind. The attainment of action, a more rational dealing with our fellow-men the eternal and our environment, a better the realisation of that which is the same in all things and more efficient citizenship and discharge of dutiesbeyond all things, a better, richer, kindlier equally blissful in universe and happier way of livingoutside it, with a more just untouched by the imperfections and more harmonious associated enjoyment limitations of the opportunities of existence. By others again a more inner forms and subjective ideal is cherishedactivities in which it dwells, a clarifying and raising are the glory of the intelligencespiritual life. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/23/the-threefold-life#p7</ref> <center>~</center> Man, will and reasonthe mental being, a heightening has an imperfect life because mind is not the first and ordering highest power of consciousness of power and capacity in the natureBeing; even if mind were perfected, a nobler ethicalthere would be still something yet to be realised, not yet manifested. For what is involved and emergent is not a richer aestheticMind, but a finer emotionalSpirit, a much healthier and better-governed vital and physical being. Sometimes one element mind is stressed, almost to not the exclusion native dynamism of consciousness of the restSpirit; sometimessupermind, in wider and more well-balanced mindsthe light of gnosis, the whole harmony is envisaged as its native dynamism. If then life has to become a total perfection. A change manifestation of education and social institutions the Spirit, it is the outward means adopted or an inner self-training manifestation of a spiritual being in us and development is preferred as the true instrumentation. Or the two aims may divine life of a perfected consciousness in a supramental or gnostic power of spiritual being that must be clearly united, the perfection of the inner individual, the perfection secret burden and intention of the outer livingevolutionary Nature. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2422/the-integraldivine-perfectionlife#p2p3</ref> <center>~</center>
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>
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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 spirit, the inner Reality, that has built up and uses the mind, vital being and body as its instrumentation; thought, feeling and action do not exist for themselves, they are not an object, but the means; they serve to express the manifested divine Reality within us: otherwise, without this inwardness, this spiritual origination, in a too externalised consciousness or by only external means, no greater or divine life is possible. In our present life of Nature, in our externalised surface existence, it is the world that seems to create us; but in the turn to the spiritual life it is we who must create ourselves and our world. In this new formula of creation, the inner life becomes of the first importance and the rest can be only its expression and outcome. It is this, indeed, that is indicated by our own strivings towards perfection, the perfection of our own soul and mind and life and the perfection of the life of the race. For we are given a world which is obscure, ignorant, material, imperfect, and our external conscious being is itself created by the energies, the pressure, the moulding operations of this vast mute obscurity, by physical birth, by environment, by a training through the impacts and shocks of life; and yet we are vaguely aware of something that is there in us or seeking to be, something other than what has been thus made, a spirit self-existent, self-determining, pushing the nature towards the creation of an image of its own occult perfection or Idea of perfection. There is something that grows in us in answer to this demand, that strives to become the image of a divine. Somewhat, and is impelled also to labour at the world outside that has been given to it and to remake that too in a greater image, in the image of its own spiritual and mental and vital growth, to make our world too something created according to our own mind and self-conceiving spirit, something new, harmonious, perfect. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/22/the-divine-life#p6</ref>
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As you pursue this labour of purification and unification, you must at the same time take great care to perfect the external and instrumental part of your being. When the higher truth manifests, it must find in you a mind that is supple and rich enough to be able to give the idea that seeks to express itself a form of thought which preserves its force and clarity. This thought, again, when it seeks to clothe itself in words, must find in you a sufficient power of expression so that the words reveal the thought and do not deform it. And the formula in which you embody the truth should be manifested in all your feelings, all your acts of will, all your actions, in all the movements of your being. Finally, these movements themselves should, by constant effort, attain their highest perfection. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/12/the-science-of-living#p6</ref>
==Perfection in the Mind==
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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. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/22/the-divine-life#p7</ref>
== Perfection in the Body Vital==Then again there is the psychic 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 the mind, its power to do its full work, to take possession of all the impulsions and energies given to our inner psychic life for fulfilment in this existence, to hold them and to be a means for carrying them out with strength, freedom, perfection. Many of the things we need for our perfection, courage, will-power effective in life, all the elements of what we now call force of character and force of personality, depend very largely for their completest strength and spring of energetic action on the fullness of the psychic prana. But along with this fullness there must be an established gladness, clearness and purity in the psychic life-being. This dynamis must not be a troubled, perfervid, stormy, fitfully or crudely passionate strength; energy there must be, rapture of its action it must have, but a clear and glad and pure energy, a seated and firmly supported pure rapture. And as a third condition of its perfection it must be poised in a complete equality. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/the-power-of-the-instruments</ref> <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>
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>
The Master physical being of our works respects our nature even when he is transforming it; he works man has always through the nature and not been felt by any arbitrary caprice. This imperfect nature of ours contains the materials seekers of our perfection, but inchoate, distorted, misplaced, thrown together in disorder or to be a poor imperfect order. All this material great impediment and it has been the habit to be patiently perfectedturn from it with contempt, purified, reorganised, new-moulded denial or aversion and transformed, not hacked and hewn and slain a desire to suppress altogether or mutilated, not obliterated by simple coercion as far as may be the body and denialthe physical life. 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 But this cannot understand unless it falls silent and opens to a divine knowledgebe the right method for the integral Yoga. In our errors The body is given us as one instrument necessary to the substance totality of a truth which labours to reveal its meaning to our groping intelligence. The human intellect cuts out the error works and the truth with it and replaces it by another half-truth half-error; but the Divine Wisdom suffers our mistakes is 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 aimsbe used, not at sinneglected, but at perfectionhurt, at something that we might call a divine virtuesuppressed or abolished. Often they If it is imperfect, recalcitrant, obstinate, so are also the veils of a quality that other members, the vital being, heart and mind and reason. It has like them to be transformed changed and perfected and delivered out of this ugly disguise: otherwiseto undergo a transformation. As we must get ourselves a new life, new heart, in the perfect providence of thingsnew mind, they would not so we have been suffered to exist or in a certain sense to continue. The Master of our works is neither build for ourselves 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 virtuenew body. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2324/the-masterpower-of-the-work#p6instruments</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. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/28/transformation-and-the-body#p3</ref>
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All life is a secret Yoga, an obscure growth of Nature towards the discovery and fulfilment of the divine principle hidden in her which becomes progressively less obscure, more self-conscient and luminous, more self-possessed in the human being by the opening of all his instruments of knowledge, will, action, life to the Spirit within him and in the 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/cwsa/24/the-integral-perfection?search==Difficulties==perfection</ref>
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= Why = To Grow in the Spiritual Oneness==
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 all beings. All the variety of cosmic existence will be changed to him in that unity and revealed in the secret of its spiritual significance. For in this spiritual bliss and being he will be one with That which is the origin and continent and inhabitant and spirit and constituting power of all existence. This will be the highest reach of self-perfection.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/the-elements-of-perfection</ref>
= How to Achieve 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) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/04/30-december-1950#p19</ref>? =
The Master of our works respects our nature even when he is transforming it; he works always through the nature and not by any arbitrary caprice. This imperfect nature of ours contains the materials of our perfection, but inchoate, distorted, misplaced, thrown together in disorder or a poor imperfect order. All this material has to be patiently perfected, purified, reorganised, new-moulded and transformed, not hacked and hewn and slain or mutilated, not obliterated by simple coercion and denial. This world and we who live in it are his creation and manifestation, and he deals with it and us in a way our narrow and ignorant mind cannot understand unless it falls silent and opens to a divine knowledge. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/23/the-master-of-the-work#p6</ref>
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The condition to be aimed at, the real achievement of Yoga, the final perfection and attainment, for which all else is only a preparation, is a consciousness in which it is impossible to do anything without the Divine; for then, if you are without the Divine, the very source of your action disappears; knowledge, power, all are gone. But so long as you feel that the powers you use are your own, you will not miss the Divine support. (The Mother, 28 April 1929) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/28-april-1929#p14</ref>
==Process==
===By Education and Training===
If you said to yourself, my children, "We want to be as perfect instruments as possible to express the divine Will in the world", then for this instrument to be perfect, it must be cultivated, educated, trained. It must not be left like a shapeless piece of stone. When you want to build with a stone you chisel it; when you want to make a formless block into a beautiful diamond, you chisel it. Well, it is the same thing. When with your brain and body you want to make a beautiful instrument for the Divine, you must cultivate it, sharpen it, refine it, complete what is missing, perfect what is there. (The Mother, 13 May 1953) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/05/13-may-1953#p18</ref>
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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>
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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) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/06/12-may-1954#p34</ref>
= Individual Perfection ==By Becoming Conscious of Oneself===
=== Practical Tips for Perfection in Work By Developing Detachment===
=== When Man Becomes Perfect… ==Difficulties on the Path to Perfection=
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==References==
= References =