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

== What is Perfection? ==

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

<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;"center>Perfection is not a summit, it is not an extreme. There is no extreme: whatsoever you do, there is always the possibility of something better and exactly this possibility of something better is the very meaning of progress.~</span><ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/15/perfection#p4</refcenter>

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

<span style="backgroundThe 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-color:transparentgoverned vital and physical being. Sometimes one element is stressed, almost to the exclusion of the rest;color:#000000;">Perfection 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 eternal; it the outward means adopted or an inner self-training and development is only preferred as the true instrumentation. Or the two aims may be clearly united, the resistance perfection of the world that makes it progressiveinner individual, the perfection of the outer living.</span><ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/1524/the-integral-perfection#p5p2</ref>

<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">Our very way of thinking It is wrong. The believers, the faithfulthen, all this spiritual fulfilment of them—particularly in the West—when they urge to individual perfection and an inner completeness of being that we mean first when we speak of God, think of Him as "something else," they think that He cannot be weak, ugly or imperfect—they think wrongly, they divide, they separatea divine life. It is subconsciousthe first essential condition of a perfected life on earth, unreflecting thought; they and we are therefore right in making the habit 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 thinking like this instinctively; they do not watch themselves thinkingsecond 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. For exampleBut there still remains the third desideratum, when they speak of "perfection" in a general waynew world, they see or feel or postulate precisely a change in the sum-total life of everything they consider to be virtuoushumanity or, divineat the least, beautiful, admirable—but it is not that at all! Perfection is something which lacks nothinga new perfected collective life in the earth-nature. The divine perfection is This calls for the Divine appearance not only of isolated evolved individuals acting in His entiretythe unevolved mass, which lacks nothingbut of many gnostic individuals forming a new kind of beings and a new common life superior to the present individual and common existence. The divine perfection is A collective life of this kind must obviously constitute itself on the Divine same principle as a whole, from whom nothing has been taken away—so it is just the opposite! For life of the moralists divine perfection means all the virtues that they representgnostic individual.</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/1022/aphorismthe-63-64divine-65life#p24</u>p19</ref></span>

<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">"To work for your perfection the first step is to become conscious of yourself</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;"><u>.</u></span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">" </span> <div style="color:#000000;">(The Mother 13 January 1951)</div><ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/04/13-january-1951#p16</ref><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"> &nbsp;</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">&nbsp;</span>  <span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">To work for your perfection, the first step is to become conscious of yourself, of the different parts of your being and their respective activities. You must learn to distinguish </span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">these different parts one from another, so that you may become clearly aware of the origin of the movements that occur in you, the many impulses, reactions and conflicting wills that drive you to action. It is an assiduous study which demands much perseverance and sincerity. For man's nature, especially his mental nature, has a spontaneous tendency to give a favourable explanation for everything he thinks, feels, says and does. It is only by observing these movements with great care, by bringing them, as it were, before the tribunal of our highest ideal, with a sincere will to submit to its judgment, that we can hope to form in ourselves a discernment that never errs. For if we truly want to progress and acquire the capacity of knowing the truth of our being, that is to say, what we are truly created for, what we can call our mission upon earth, then we must, in a very regular and constant manner, reject from us or eliminate in us whatever contradicts the truth of our existence, whatever is opposed to it. In this way, little by little, all the parts, all the elements of our being can be organised into a homogeneous whole around our psychic centre. This work of unification requires much time to be brought to some degree of perfection. Therefore, in order to accomplish it, we must arm ourselves with patience and endurance, with a determination to prolong our life as long as necessary for the success of our endeavour.</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/12/the-science-of-living#p5</u></ref></span> <span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">If in passing from one domain to another we renounce what has already been given us from eagerness for our new attainment, if in reaching the mental life we cast away or belittle the physical life which is our basis, or if we reject the mental and physical in our attraction to the spiritual, we do not fulfil God integrally, nor satisfy the conditions of His self-manifestation. We do not become perfect, but only shift the field of our imperfection or at most attain a limited altitude. However high we may climb, even though it be to the Non-Being itself, we climb ill if we forget our base. Not to abandon the lower to itself, but to transfigure it in the light of the higher to which we have attained, is true divinity of nature.</span><ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/21/the-destiny-of-the-individual#p9</ref>  <span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">It takes insufficient account of the human consciousness and the human view from which we have to start; it does not give us the vision of the harmony it alleges, and so it cannot meet our demand or convince, but only contradicts by a cold intellectual conception our acute human sense of the reality of evil and imperfection; it gives too no lead to the psychic element in our nature, the soul's aspiration towards light and truth and towards a spiritual conquest, a victory over imperfection and evil. By itself, this view of things amounts to little more than the facile dogma which tells us that all that is is right, because all is perfectly decreed by the divine Wisdom. It supplies us with nothing better than a complacent intellectual and philosophic optimism: no light is turned on the disconcerting facts of pain, suffering and discord to which our human consciousness bears constant and troubling witness; at most there is a suggestion that in the divine reason of things there is a key to these things to which we have no access. This is not a sufficient answer to our discontent and our aspiration which, however ignorant in their reactions, however mixed their mental motives, must correspond to a divine reality deeper down in our being. A Divine Whole that is perfect by reason of the imperfection of its parts, runs the risk of itself being only </span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">perfect in imperfection, because it fulfils entirely some stage in an unaccomplished purpose; it is then a present but not an ultimate Totality. To it we could apply the Greek saying, Theos ouk estin alla gignetai, the Divine is not yet in being, but is becoming. The true Divine would then be secret within us and perhaps supreme above us; to find the Divine within us and above us would be the real solution, to become perfect as That is perfect, to attain liberation by likeness to it or by attaining to the law of its nature, sādṛśya, sādharmya.</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/21/the-divine-and-the-undivine#p7</u></ref></span> == More Ways Towards Perfection ==   <span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">The Divine is the perfection towards which we move.</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/14/the-divine-and-man#p8</u></ref></span>  <div style="color:#000000;">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! </div> <span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">(The Mother 12 May 1954)</span><ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/06/12-may-1954#p34</ref><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"> </span>  <div style="color:#000000;">If you want to be peaceful, happy, always satisfied, to have perfect equality of soul, you must tell yourself, "Things are as they should be," and if you are religious you should tell yourself, "They are as they should be because they are the expression of the divine Will" </div> <div style="color:#000000;">(The Mother 22 February 1956) </div><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/08/22-february-1956#p17</u></ref></span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">If you said to yourself, my children, "We want to be as perfect instruments as possible to express the divine Will in the world", then for this instrument to be perfect, it must be cultivated, educated, trained. It must not be left like a shapeless piece of stone. When you want to build with a stone you chisel it; when you want to make a formless block into a beautiful diamond, you chisel it. Well, it 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. </span> <span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">(The Mother 13 May 1953)</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/05/13-may-1953#p18</u></ref></span> <div style="color:#000000;">To perfect oneself, one must first become conscious of oneself. I am sure, for instance, that the following situation has arisen many times in your life: someone asks you suddenly, "Why have you done that?" Well, the spontaneous reply is, "I don't know." If someone asks you, "What are you thinking of?" You reply, "I don't know." "Why are you tired?"—"I don't know.Why are you happy?"—"I don't know", and so on. I can take indeed fifty people and ask them suddenly, without preparation, "Why have you done that?" and if they are not inwardly "awake", they will all answer, "I don't know." (Of course I am not speaking here of those who have practised a discipline of self-knowledge and of following up their movements to the extreme limits; these people can, naturally, collect themselves, concentrate and give the right answer, but only after a little while.) You will see that it is like that if you look well at your whole day. You say something and you don't know why you say it—is only after the words are out of your mouth that you notice that this was not quite what you wanted to say. For instance, you go to see someone, you prepare beforehand the words you are going to speak, but once you are in front of the person in question, you say nothing or it is other words which come from your mouth. Are you able to say to what extent the atmosphere of the other person has influenced you and stopped you from saying what you had prepared? How many people can say that? They do not even observe that the person was in such or such a state and that it was because of this that they could not tell him what they had prepared. Of course, there are very obvious instances when you find people in such a bad mood that you can ask nothing of them. I am not speaking of these. I am speaking of the clear perception of reciprocal influences: what acts and reacts on your nature; it is this one does not have. For example, one becomes suddenly uneasy or happy, but how many people can say, "It is this"? And it is difficult to know, it is not at all easy. One must be quite "awake"; one must be constantly in a very attentive state of observation. </div> <span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">(The Mother 13 January 1951)</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/04/13-january-1951#p22</u></ref></span> <span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">Mastery over Perfection</span> <span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">But we can attain to the highest without blotting ourselves out from the cosmic extension. Brahman preserves always Its two terms of liberty within and of formation without, of expression and of freedom from the expression. We also, being That, can attain to the same divine self-possession. The harmony of the two tendencies is the condition of all life that aims at being really divine. Liberty pursued by exclusion of the thing exceeded leads along the path of negation to the refusal of that which God has accepted. Activity pursued by absorption in the act and the energy leads to an inferior affirmation and the denial of the Highest. But what God combines and synthetises, wherefore should man insist on divorcing? To be perfect as He is perfect is the condition of His integral attainment.</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/21/the-destiny-of-the-individual#p18</u></ref></span> <div style="color:#000000;">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.</div> <span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">(The Mother 20 May 1953)</span><ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/05/20-may-1953#p54</ref>  <div style="color:#000000;">….one may act with a perfect knowledge of what should be done, and without intervention—the least intervention—of the reasoning mind. The mind is silent: it simply looks on and listens in order to register things, it does not act. </div> <span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">(The Mother 23 December 1953)</span><ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/05/23-december-1953#p8</ref>  <div style="color:#000000;">It is only in the supreme Consciousness that you can attain the perfect expression of yourself. </div> <div style="color:#000000;">(The Mother 29 February 1956)</div> <div style="color:#0066cc;"><ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/08/29-february-1956#p24</u></ref></div> <div style="color:#000000;">… if you are perfect in your self-giving and absolutely sincere, you are sure to attain the spiritual goal.</div> <div style="color:#000000;">(The Mother, 1 August 1956)</div> <span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/08/1-august-1956#p4</u></ref></span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">… </span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">sincerity is progressive, and as the being progresses and develops, as the universe unfolds in the being, sincerity too must go on perfecting itself endlessly. </span> <div style="color:#000000;">(The Mother 19 December 1956) </div> <div style="color:#0066cc;"><ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/08/19-december-1956#p25</u></ref></div> = MORE ON PERFECTION =   == Aim of Integral Yoga & Perfection ==   <span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">An integral Yoga includes as a vital and indispensable element in its total and ultimate aim the conversion of the whole being into a higher spiritual consciousness and a larger divine existence. Our parts of will and action, our parts of knowledge, our thinking being, our emotional being, our being of life, all our self and nature must seek the Divine, enter into the Infinite, unite with the Eternal. But man's present nature is limited, divided, unequal,—it is easiest for him to concentrate in the strongest part of his being and follow a definite line of progress proper to his nature: only rare individuals have the strength to take a large immediate plunge straight into the sea of the Divine Infinity. Some therefore must choose as a starting-point a concentration in thought or contemplation or the mind's one-pointedness to find the eternal reality of the Self in them; others can more easily withdraw </span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">into the heart to meet there the Divine, the Eternal: yet others are predominantly dynamic and active; for these it is best to centre themselves in the will and enlarge their being through works. United with the Self and source of all by their surrender of their will into its infinity, guided in their works by the secret Divinity within or surrendered to the Lord of the cosmic action as the master and mover of all their energies of thought, feeling, act, becoming by this enlargement of being selfless and universal, they can reach by works some first fullness of a spiritual status. But the path, whatever its point of starting, must debouch into a vaster dominion; it must proceed in the end through a totality of integrated knowledge, emotion, will of dynamic action, perfection of the being and the entire nature. In the supramental consciousness, on the level of the supramental existence this integration becomes consummate; there knowledge, will, emotion, the perfection of the self and the dynamic nature rise each to its absolute of itself and all to their perfect harmony and fusion with each other, to a divine integrality, a divine perfection. For the supermind is a Truth-Consciousness in which the Divine Reality, fully manifested, no longer works with the instrumentation of the Ignorance; a truth of status of being which is absolute becomes dynamic in a truth of energy and activity of the being which is self-existent and perfect. Every movement there is a movement of the self-aware truth of Divine Being and every part is in entire harmony with the whole. Even the most limited and finite action is in the Truth-Consciousness a movement of the Eternal and Infinite and partakes of the inherent absoluteness and perfection of the Eternal and Infinite. An ascent into the supramental Truth not only raises our spiritual and essential consciousness to that height but brings about a descent of this Light and Truth into all our being and all our parts of nature. All then becomes part of the Divine Truth, an element and means of the supreme union and oneness; this ascent and descent must be therefore an ultimate aim of this Yoga.</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/23/the-supermind-and-the-yoga-of-works#p1</u></ref></span> <div style="color:#000000;">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. </div> <span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">(The Mother 30 December 1950)</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/04/30-december-1950#p5</u></ref></span> <div style="color:#000000;">Perfection is not a static state, it is an equilibrium. But a progressive, dynamic equilibrium. One may go from perfection to perfection. There can come a state from which it would not be necessary to descend to a lower rung in order to go farther; at the moment the march of Nature is like that, but in this new state, instead of being obliged to go back to be able to start again, one can walk always forward, without ever stopping. As things are, one comes to a certain point and, as human beings as they are at present cannot progress indefinitely, one must pass to a higher species or leave the present species and create another. The human being as he is at the moment cannot attain perfection unless he gets out of himself—man is a transitional being. In ordinary language it may be said: "Oh, this man is perfect", but that is a literary figure. The maximum a human being can attain just now is an equilibrium which is not progressive. He may attain perhaps a static equilibrium but all that is static can be broken for lack of progress. </div> <span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">(The Mother 30 December 1950)</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/04/30-december-1950#p19</u></ref></span> <div style="color:#000000;">The condition to be aimed at, the real achievement of Yoga, the final perfection and attainment, for which all else is only a preparation, is a consciousness in which it is impossible to do anything without the Divine; for then, if you are without the Divine, the very source of your action disappears; knowledge, power, all are gone. But so long as you feel that the powers you use are your own, you will not miss the Divine support.</div> <span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">(The Mother 28 April 1929)</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/28-april-1929#p14</u></ref></span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">"We are not aiming at success—our aim is perfection. </span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">(The Mother 30 December 1950)</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/04/30-december-1950#p1</u></ref></span> == Necessities on Perfection ==   <span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">The first necessity is some </span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">'''fundamental poise of the soul '''</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">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 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 divine 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, an equal bliss which can only come when the peace of equality is founded and which is the beatific flower of its fullness.</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/the-elements-of-perfection#p2</u></span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">The next necessity of perfection is </span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">'''to raise all the active parts of the human nature to that highest condition and working pitch of their power and capacity, śakti,'''</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;"> </span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">at which they become capable of being divinised into true instruments of the free, perfect, spiritual and divine action. For practical purposes we may take the understanding, the heart, 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.</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/the-elements-of-perfection#p3</u></ref></span> == Where to find perfection? == <span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">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</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;"> </span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">'''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 '''</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">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.</span>

The Divine is the perfection towards which we move. <div style="colorref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/14/the-divine-and-man#000000;">Perfection is so progressive that I believe nobody can say he is perfectly conscious; he is on the way to becoming perfectly conscious.p8</divref>

<div style="color:#000000;"center>(The Mother 28 November 1956)~</divcenter>

<div style="color:#0066ccA 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><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/0824/28the-novemberintegral-1956perfection#p20</u>p1</ref></div>

<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">The distinction between Man, the divine and the undivine life is in fact identical with the root distinction between a life of Knowledge lived in self-awareness and in the power of the Light and a life of Ignorancemental being,—at any rate it so presents itself in a world that is slowly and with difficulty evolving out of has an original Inconscience. All imperfect life that has still this Inconscience for its basis because mind is stamped with not the mark of a radical imperfection; for even if it is satisfied with its own type, it is a satisfaction with something incomplete first 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-highest power and self-knowledge. It is this bondage to a perpetual stamp of imperfection and disharmony that is the mark consciousness of the undivineBeing; a divine life, on the contrary, even if progressing from the little to the moremind were perfected, there 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 still something yet to be taken into view in our consideration of the difference between an undivine and a divine existence: but ordinarily, when we make the distinctionrealised, we do it as human beings struggling under the pressure of life and the difficulties of our conduct amidst its immediate problems and perplexities; most of all we are thinking of the distinction we are obliged to make between good and evil or of that along with its kindred problem of the duality, the blend in us of happiness and suffering. When we seek intellectually for a divine presence in things, a divine origin of the world, a divine government of its workings, the presence of evil, the insistence on suffering, 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 and government or in an all-seeing, all-determining and omnipresent Divine Immanence. Other difficulties we could solve more easily and happily and make some shift to be better satisfied with the ready conclusiveness of our solutions. But this standard of judgment is not sufficiently comprehensive and it is supported upon a too human point of view; for to a wider outlook evil and suffering appear only as a striking aspect, they are not the whole defect, not even the root of the matter. The sum of the world's imperfections is not made up only of these two deficiencies; there is more than the fall, if fall there was, of our spiritual or material being from good and from happiness or our nature's failure to overcome evil and suffering. Besides the deficiency of the ethical and hedonistic satisfactions demanded by our being, the paucity of Good and Delight in our world-experience, there is also the deficiency of other divine degrees: for Knowledge, Truth, Beauty, Power, Unity are, they too, the stuff and elements of a divine life, and these are given to us in a scanty and grudging measure; yet all are, in their absolute, powers of the Divine Naturemanifested.</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/21/the-divine-and-the-undivine#p2</u></ref></span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">Once we admit a divine government of the universe, we must conclude that the power to govern For what is complete involved and absolute; for otherwise we are obliged to suppose that a being and consciousness infinite and absolute has a knowledge and will limited in their control of things or hampered in their power of working. It emergent is not impossible to concede that the supreme and immanent Divinity may leave a certain freedom of working to something that has come into being in his perfection Mind, but is itself imperfect and the cause of imperfection, to an ignorant or inconscient Nature, to the action of the human mind and will, even to a conscious Power or Forces of darkness and evil that take their stand upon the reign of a basic Inconscience. But none of these things are independent of Its own existenceSpirit, nature and consciousness and none of them can act except in Its presence and by Its sanction or allowance. Man's freedom mind is relative and he cannot be held solely responsible for the imperfection of his nature. Ignorance and inconscience of Nature have arisen, not independently, but in the one Being; the imperfection native dynamism of her workings cannot be entirely foreign to some will consciousness of the Immanence. It may be conceded that forces set in motion are allowed to work themselves out according to the law of their movementSpirit; but what divine Omniscience and Omnipotence has allowed to arise and act in Its omnipresence, Its all-existence, we must consider It to have originated and decreedsupermind, since without the fiat light of the Being they could not have beengnosis, could not remain in existence. If the Divine is at all concerned with the world He has manifested, there is no other Lord than He and from that necessity of His original and universal being there can eventually be no escape or departure. It is on the foundation of this self-evident consequence of our first premiss, without any evasion of its implications, that we have to consider the problem of imperfection, suffering and evil.</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/21/the-divine-and-the-undivine#p13</u></ref></span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">It is only if our nature develops beyond itself, if it becomes a nature of self-knowledge, mutual understanding, unity, a nature of true being and true life that 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 lifenative dynamism. 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, become a veil of apparent Nescience in which that greater consciousness is concealed and from which it has to unfold itself, if an evolution manifestation 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 supernatureSpirit,—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 manifestation 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 </span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">existence, the joy of a satisfied spiritual being, the happiness of a fulfilled nature.</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/22/us and the-divine-life#p23</u></ref></span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">A subjective spirituality can be established which refuses or minimises commerce with the world or is content to witness its action and throw back or throw out its invading influences with out allowing any reaction to them or admitting their intrusion: but if the inner spirituality is to be objectivised in of a free world action, if the individual has to project himself into the world and in a sense take the world into himself, this cannot be dynamically done without receiving the world influences through one's own circumconscient or environmental being. The spiritual inner perfected consciousness has then to deal with these influences in such a way that, as soon as they approach supramental or enter, they become either obliterated and without result or transformed by their very entry into its own mode and substance. Or it may force them to receive the spiritual influence and return with a transforming gnostic power on the world they come from, for such a compulsion on the lower universal Nature is part of a perfect spiritual action. But for being that the circumconscient or environmental being must be so steeped in the spiritual light and spiritual substance that nothing can enter into it without undergoing this transformation: the invading external influences have not to bring in at all their lower awareness, their lower sight, their lower dynamism. But this is a difficult perfection, because ordinarily the circumconscient is not wholly our own formed secret burden and realised self but ourself plus the external world-nature. It is, for this reason, always easier to spiritualise the inner self-sufficient parts than to transform the outer action; a perfection intention of introspective, indwelling or subjective spirituality aloof from the world or self-protected against it is easier than a perfection of the whole nature in a dynamic, kinetic spirituality objectivised in the life, embracing the world, master of its environment, sovereign in its commerce with world-nature. But since the integral transformation must embrace fully the dynamic being and take up into it the life of action and the world-self outside us, this completer change is demanded of the evolving natureevolutionary Nature.</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/22/the-ascentdivine-towards-supermindlife#p44</u>p3</ref></span>

<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">If But always the human consciousness were bound to whole foundation of the sense of imperfection gnostic life must be by its very nature inward and not outward. In the acceptance 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 law of 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 and the very character of Nature, in our externalised surface existence,—a reasoned acceptance it is the world that could answer seems to create us; but in our human nature the turn to the blind animal acceptance spiritual life it is we who must create ourselves and our world. In this new formula of the animal naturecreation,—then we might say that what we are marks the limit inner life becomes of the divine self-expression in us; we might believe too that our imperfections first importance and sufferings worked for the general harmony rest can be only its expression and perfection of things and console ourselves with outcome. It is this philosophic balm offered for , indeed, that is indicated by our woundsown strivings towards perfection, satisfied to move among the pitfalls perfection of our own soul and mind and life with as much rational prudence or as much philosophic sagacity and resignation as our incomplete mental wisdom and our impatient vital parts permitted. Or else, taking refuge in the more consoling fervours perfection of religion, we might submit to all as the will life of God in the hope or the faith of recompense in a Paradise beyond where race. For we shall enter into are given a happier existence world which is obscure, ignorant, material, imperfect, and put on a more pure </span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">and perfect nature. But there our external conscious being is an essential factor in our human consciousness and its workings whichitself created by the energies, the pressure, no less than the reasonmoulding operations of this vast mute obscurity, by physical birth, by environment, distinguishes it entirely from by a training through the animalimpacts and shocks of life; and yet we are vaguely aware of something that is there is not only a mental part in us which recognises the imperfectionor seeking to be, something other than what has been thus made, there is a psychic part which rejects it. Our soul's dissatisfaction with imperfection as a law of life upon earthspirit self-existent, self-determining, its aspiration pushing the nature towards the elimination creation of an image of its own occult perfection or Idea of all imperfections from our nature, not only perfection. There is something that grows in us in a heaven beyond where it would be automatically impossible answer to be imperfectthis demand, but here and now in a life where perfection has that strives to be conquered by evolution and struggle, are as much a law become the image of our being as that against which they revolt; they too are divine,—a divine dissatisfaction, a divine aspiration. In them Somewhat, and is impelled also to labour at the inherent light of a power within which maintains them world outside that has been given to it and to remake that too in us so that the Divine may not only be there as a hidden Reality in our spiritual secrecies but unfold itself greater image, in the evolution image of Natureits 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.</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2122/the-divine-and-the-undivinelife#p8</u>p6</ref></span>

<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">When we say that all is a divine manifestationAs you pursue this labour of purification and unification, even that which we call undivine, we mean that in its essentiality all is divine even if you must at the same time take great care to perfect the form baffles or repels usexternal and instrumental part of your being. OrWhen the higher truth manifests, to put it must find in you a formula mind that is supple and rich enough to which it is easier for our psychological sense of things be able to give its assent, in all things there is the idea that seeks to express itself a presence, a primal Reality,—the Self, the Divine, Brahman,—which is for ever pure, perfect, blissful, infinite: its infinity is not affected by the limitations form of relative things; thought which preserves its purity is not stained by our sin force and evil; its bliss is not touched by our pain and suffering; its perfection is not impaired by our defects of consciousnessclarity. This thought, knowledgeagain, willwhen it seeks to clothe itself in words, unity. In certain images must find in you a sufficient power of expression so that the Upanishads the divine Purusha is described as the one Fire which has entered into all forms and shapes itself according to the form, as words reveal the one Sun which illumines all impartially thought and is do not affected by the faults of our seeingdeform it. But this affirmation is not enough; it leaves And the problem unsolved, why that formula in which is you embody the truth should be manifested in itself ever pureall your feelings, perfectall your acts of will, blissfulall your actions, infinitein all the movements of your being. Finally, these movements themselves should not only tolerate but seem to maintain and encourage in its manifestation imperfection and limitation, impurity and suffering and falsehood and evil: it states the duality that constitutes the problemby constant effort, but does not solve itattain their highest perfection.</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/2112/the-divinescience-andof-the-undivineliving#p4</u>p6</ref></span>

== Facing Perfection in the Imperfection Mind==

<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">But even when we thus regard The first need is the universe, we cannot clarity and ought not to dismiss as entirely and radically false and unreal the values that are given to it by our own limited human consciousnesspurity of the intelligence. For grief, pain, suffering, error, falsehood, ignorance, weakness, wickedness, incapacity, non-doing of what should It must be done and wrong-doing, deviation of will and denial of will, egoism, limitation, division freed from other beings with whom we should be one, all that makes up the effective figure of what we call evil, are facts claims of the world-consciousness, not fictions and unrealities, although they are facts whose complete sense or true value is not that vital being which we assign seeks to them impose the desire of the mind in our ignorance. Still our sense of them is part of a true sense, our values of them are necessary to their complete values. One side place of the truth of these things we discover when we get into a deeper and larger consciousness; for we find then that there is a cosmic and individual utility in what presents itself to us as adverse and evil. </span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">'''For without experience of pain we would not get all , from the infinite </span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">value claims of the divine delight of troubled emotional being which pain is in travail; all ignorance is a penumbra which environs an orb of knowledgestrives to colour, distort, every error is significant of the possibility limit and falsify the effort of a discovery of truth; every weakness with the hue and failure is a first sounding shape of gulfs the emotions. It must be free too from its own defect, inertia of the thought-power , obstructive narrowness and potentiality; all division is intended unwillingness to enrich by an experience of various sweetness of unification the joy of realised unity. All this imperfection is open to us evilknowledge, but all evil is intellectual unscrupulousness in travail of the eternal good;'''</span><span style="backgroundthinking, prepossession and preference, self-color:transparent;color:#000000;"> </span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">for all is an imperfection which is the first condition—in the law of life evolving out of Inconscience—of a greater perfection will in the manifesting of the hidden divinity. But at the same time our present feeling of this evil reason and imperfection, the revolt false determination of our consciousness against them is also a necessary valuation; for if we have first to face and endure them, the ultimate command on us is will to reject, to overcome, to transform the life and the natureknowledge. It is for that end that their insistence is not allowed Its sole will must be to slacken; the soul must learn the results make itself an unsullied mirror of the Ignorancetruth, must begin to feel their reactions as a spur to its endeavour of mastery essence and conquest its forms and finally to a greater endeavour of transformation measures and transcendence. It is possible, when we live inwardly in the depthsrelations, to arrive at a state of vast inner equality and peace which is untouched by the reactions of the outer natureclear mirror, and that is a great but incomplete liberationjust measure,—for the outer nature too has a right to deliverance. But even if our personal deliverance is complete, still there is the suffering fine and subtle instrument of othersharmony, the world travail, which the great of soul cannot regard with indifferencean integral intelligence. There is a unity with all beings which something within us feels and the deliverance of others must be felt as intimate to its own deliverance.</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2124/the-divinepower-andof-the-undivine#p19</u>instruments</ref></span>

<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;"center>For an age out of sympathy with the ascetic spirit—and throughout all the rest of the world the hour of the Anchorite may seem to have passed or to be passing—it is easy to attribute this great trend to the failing of vital energy in an ancient race tired out by its burden, its once vast share in the common advance, exhausted by its many-sided contribution to the sum of human effort and human knowledge. But we have seen that it corresponds to a truth of existence, a state of conscious realisation which stands at the very summit of our possibility. In practice also the ascetic spirit is an indispensable element in human perfection and even its separate affirmation cannot be avoided so long as the race has not at the other end liberated its intellect and its vital habits from subjection to an always insistent animalism.~</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/21/the-two-negations-the-refusal-of-the-ascetic#p23</u></ref></spancenter>

<span style="background-color:transparentBut our mind is obscure, partial in its notions, misled by opposite surface appearances, divided between various possibilities;color:#000000;">No man it is perfectled 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 vital is there 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 ego is there outer world itself, on making it better, more suited to our ideas and temperament or to prevent itour conception of what should be. It On one side there is the call of our spiritual being which is only when 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 total transformation 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 external world and yet, because its true creator is in ourselves and the internal being down world instrumentation that seems to make it is only the very subconscientmeans 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 is possible. Till then imperfection will remain as or spiritual liberation and our common heritagepreoccupation 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.</span><span style="background-color:transparentBut it is within us that the Reality must be found and the source and foundation of a perfected life;colorno outward formation can replace it:#0066cc;">there must be the true self realised within if there is to be the true life realised in world and Nature. <ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/3122/the-subconscientdivine-and-the-integral-yogalife#p2</u>p7</ref></span>

<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">The Master of our works respects our nature even when he =Perfection in the Vital==Then again there is transforming itthe psychic prana, pranic mind or desire soul; he works always through this too calls for its own perfection. Here too the nature and not by any arbitrary caprice. This imperfect nature first necessity is a fullness of ours contains the materials vital capacity in the mind, its power to do its full work, to take possession of all the impulsions and energies given to our perfection, but inchoate, distorted, misplaced, thrown together inner psychic life for fulfilment in disorder or a poor imperfect order. All this material has existence, to hold them and to be patiently perfecteda means for carrying them out with strength, purifiedfreedom, perfection. Many of the things we need for our perfection, reorganisedcourage, newwill-moulded and transformedpower effective in life, not hacked and hewn and slain or mutilated, not obliterated by simple coercion and denial. This world and all the elements of what we who </span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">live in it are his creation now call force of character and manifestationforce of personality, depend very largely for their completest strength 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 spring of energetic action on the substance fullness of a truth which labours to reveal its meaning to our groping intelligencethe psychic prana. The human intellect cuts out the error But along with this fullness there must be an established gladness, clearness and purity in the truth with it and replaces it by another half-truth halfpsychic life-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 coverbeing. Our sins are the misdirected steps of This dynamis must not be a seeking Power that aimstroubled, perfervid, stormy, not at sinfitfully or crudely passionate strength; energy there must be, rapture of its action it must have, but at perfectiona clear and glad and pure energy, at something that we might call a divine virtueseated and firmly supported pure rapture. Often they are the veils And as a third condition of a quality that has to its perfection it must be transformed and delivered out of this ugly disguise: otherwise, poised 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 virtuecomplete equality.</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2324/the-masterpower-of-the-work#p6</u>instruments</ref></span>

<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">In this light we can admit that all works perfectly towards a divine end by a divine wisdom and therefore each thing is in that sense perfectly fitted in its place; but we say that that is not the whole The other side of the divine purpose. For what perfection is is only justifiable, finds its perfect sense and satisfaction by what can and will be. There is, no doubt, a key in the divine reason that would justify things as they are by revealing their right significance self-contained and true secret as other, subtler, deeper than their outward meaning calm and phenomenal appearance which is all that can normally be caught by our present intelligence: but we cannot be content unegoistic Rudra-power armed with that beliefpsychic force, to search for and find the spiritual key of things is the law of our being. The sign of the finding is not a philosophic intellectual recognition and a resigned or sage acceptance of things as they are because energy of some divine sense and purpose in them which is beyond us; the real sign is an elevation towards the spiritual knowledge and power strong heart which will transform the law and phenomena and external forms of our life nearer to a true image of that divine sense and purpose. It is right and reasonable to endure with equanimity suffering and subjection to defect as the immediate will of God, a present law of imperfection laid on our members, but on condition that we recognise it also as the will of God in us to transcend evil and suffering, t</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">'''o transform imperfection into perfection, to rise into a higher law of Divine Nature'''</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">. In our human consciousness there is the image capable of supporting without shrinking an ideal truth of being, a divine natureinsistent, an incipient godhead: in relation to that higher truth our present state of imperfection can be relatively described as an undivine life and the conditions of the world from which we start as undivine conditions; the imperfections are the indication given to us that they are there as first disguisesoutwardly austere or even, not as the intended expression of the divine being and the divine nature. It where need is a Power within us, the concealed Divinity, that has lit the flame of aspiration, pictures the image of the ideal, keeps alive our discontent and pushes us to throw off the disguise and to reveal or, in the Vedic phrase, to form and disclose the Godhead in the manifest spirit, mind, life and body of this terrestrial creature. Our present nature can only be transitional, our imperfect status a starting-point and opportunity for the achievement of another higher, wider and </span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">greater that shall be divine and perfect not only by the secret spirit within it but in its manifest and most outward form of existenceviolent action.</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2124/the-divinepower-andof-the-undivine#p9</u>instruments</ref></span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">The more perfect the contact, the greater the power.</span>

<div style="color:#000000;">(The Mother 20 June 1956)</div>= 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/0816/2016-junejanuary-19561972#p11p1</ref>

<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;"center>There is nothing you cannot understand if you give your brain the time to widen and perfect itself. ~</spancenter>

As for the question about the illness, perfection in the physical plane is indeed part of the ideal of the Yoga, but it is the last item and, so long as the fundamental change has not been made in the material consciousness to which the body belongs, one may have a certain perfection on other planes without having immunity in the body. <div style="colorref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/31/illness-and-health#000000;">(The Mother 12 December 1956)p57</divref>

<refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/08/12-december-1956#p15~</refcenter>

<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;"center>For one who wants to grow in self-perfection, there are no great or small tasks, none that are important or unimportant; all are equally useful for one who aspires for progress and self-mastery. It is said that one only does well what one is interested in doing. This is true, but it is truer still that one can learn to find interest in everything one does, even in what appear to be the most insignificant chores. The secret of this attainment lies in the urge towards self-perfection. Whatever occupation or task falls to your lot, you must do it with a will to progress; whatever one does, one must not only do it as best one can but strive to do it better and better in a constant effort for perfection. In this way everything without exception becomes interesting, from the most material chore to the most artistic and intellectual work. The scope for progress is infinite and can be applied to the smallest thing.~</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/12/the-four-austerities-and-the-four-liberations#p17</u></ref></spancenter>

<span style="background-colorTransformation and the Body :transparent;color:#000000;">AndThe supramental perfection means that the body becomes conscious, finallyis filled with consciousness and that as this is the Truth consciousness all its actions, a word of advice: be more concerned with your own faults than with those of othersfunctionings etc. If each one worked seriously at his own self-perfection, become by the perfection power of the whole would follow automaticallyconsciousness within it harmonious, luminous, right and true—without ignorance or disorder.</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/1328/aimstransformation-and-principlesthe-body#p147</u>p3</ref></span>

<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;"center>It is all right to see the imperfections and deficiencies but only on condition it brings a greater courage for a new progress, an increase of energy in the determination and a stronger certitude of victory and future perfection.~</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/14/mistakes-no-torment-worry-or-sadness#p12</u></ref></spancenter>

<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">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 </span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">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 For Discovering the perfection Truth 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.</span><span styleLiving=="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/22/the-divine-life#p7</u></ref></span>

<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">The characteristic law For the awakened individual the realisation of his truth of Spirit is self-existent perfection being and immutable infinity. It possesses always his inner liberation and in its own right the immortality which perfection must be his primary seeking,—first, because that is the aim call of Life the Spirit within him, but also because it is only by liberation and the perfection which is and realisation of the goal truth of Mindbeing that man can arrive at truth of living. The attainment A perfected community also can exist only by the perfection of its individuals, and perfection can come only by the eternal discovery and the realisation affirmation in life by each of that which is his own spiritual being and the same in discovery by all things of their spiritual unity and beyond 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 things, equally blissful in universe truth of the instrumental existence into itself and outside giving to itoneness, untouched by integration, harmony. As our only real freedom is the imperfections discovery and limitations disengagement of the forms and activities in which it dwellsspiritual Reality within us, are so our only means of true perfection is the glory sovereignty and self-effectuation of the spiritual lifeReality in all the elements of our nature.</span><ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2322/the-threefolddivine-life#p7p37</ref>

<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">'''There is a world of ideas without form'''</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;"> </span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">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 wordsReality, you are likely to fall into much confusion about the true sense; but if in a silence truth of your mind you can rise into the world from all existence which ideas descend is greater and more abiding than all its formations and manifestations; to take formfind that truth and Reality and live in it, at once achieve the real understanding comes. If you are to be sure most perfect manifestation and formation possible of understanding one anotherit, 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 secret of the other without any necessity perfection whether of wordsindividual or communal being. But if there This Reality is not this attunement, there will always be some deformation within each thing and gives to each of your meaning, because to what you speak the other mind supplies its own significanceformations its power of being and value of being. I use a word in The universe is a certain sense or shade manifestation of its sense; you are accustomed to put into it another sense or shade. Thenthe Reality, evidently, you will understand, not my exact meaning in it, but what the word means to you. This and there is true not a truth of speech onlythe universal existence, but a Power of reading alsocosmic being, an all-self or world-spirit. If you want to understand Humanity is a book with a deep teaching formation or manifestation of the Reality in itthe universe, you must be able </span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">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 is a truth and its surface understanding. But if you let the words jump at your external mind and try to adapt and adjust the twoself of humanity, a human spirit, 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 a destiny of expressionhuman life. (The Mother 26 May 1929)</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/0322/26the-maydivine-1929life#p21</u>p36</ref></span>

== Mind’s Endeavour to Perfection For Self-perfection, Progress and Fulfillment==

<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">For here there is the same process of evolution as one who wants to grow in the rest of the movement of Nature; self-perfection, there is a heightening and widening of the consciousnessare no great or small tasks, an ascent to a new level and a taking up of the lower levels, an assumption and new integration of the existence by a superior power of Being which imposes its own way of action and its character and force of substance energy on as much as it can reach of the previously evolved parts of nature. The demand for integration becomes at this highest stage of Nature's workings a point of cardinal importance. In the lower grades of the ascension the new assumption, the integration into a higher principle of consciousness, remains incomplete: the mind cannot wholly mentalise life and matternone that are important or unimportant; there all are considerable parts of the life being equally useful for one who aspires for progress and the body which remain self-mastery. It is said that one only does well what one is interested in the realm of the submental and the subconscient or inconscientdoing. This is true, but it is truer still that one serious obstacle can learn to the mind's endeavour towards the perfection of the nature; for the continued share of the submental, the subconscient and inconscient find interest in the government of the activitieseverything one does, by bringing even in another law than that of the mental being, enables the conscious vital and the physical consciousness also what appear to reject be the law laid upon them by the mind and to follow their own impulses and instincts most insignificant chores. The secret of this attainment lies in defiance of the mental reason and the rational will of the developed intelligenceurge towards self-perfection. This makes it difficult for the mind Whatever occupation or task falls to go beyond itselfyour lot, you must do it with a will to exceed its own level and spiritualise the natureprogress; for what it cannot even make fully conscious, cannot securely mentalise and rationalisewhatever one does, one must not only do it cannot spiritualise, since spiritualisation is a greater and more difficult integration. No doubt, by calling in the spiritual force, as best one can but strive to do it can establish an influence better and a preliminary change in some parts of the nature, especially better in the thinking mind itself and in the heart which is nearest to its own province: but this change is not often a total constant effort for perfection even within limits and what it does achieve is rare and difficult. The spiritual consciousness using the mind is employing an inferior means andIn this way everything without exception becomes interesting, even though it brings in a divine light into from the mind, a divine purity, passion, ardour into the heart or imposes a spiritual law upon the life, this new consciousness has most material chore to work within restrictions; for the most part it can only regulate or check the lower action of the life artistic and rigorously control the body, but these members, even if refined or mastered, do not receive their spiritual fulfilment or undergo a perfection and transformationintellectual work. For that it The scope for progress is necessary to bring in a higher dynamic principle which is native to the spiritual consciousness infinite and by which, therefore, it can act in its own law and completer natural light and power and impose them upon be applied to the memberssmallest thing.</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/2212/the-ascentfour-towardsausterities-and-the-four-supermindliberations#p16</u>p17</ref></span>

<div style="color:#000000;">In your meditation the first imperative need Perfection is not a static state of perfect and absolute sincerity in all the consciousness. It , it is indispensable that you should not deceive yourself or deceive or be deceived by othersan equilibrium. Often people have But a wishprogressive, dynamic equilibrium. One may go from perfection to perfection. There can come a mental preference or vital desire; they want the experience state from which it would not be necessary to descend to happen a lower rung in a particular way or order to take a turn that satisfies their ideas or desires or preferencesgo farther; they do not keep themselves blank and unprejudiced and simply and sincerely observe what happens. Then if you do not at the moment the march of Nature is like what happensthat, but in this new state, it is easy instead of being obliged to go back to be able to deceive yourself; you will see start again, one thingcan walk always forward, but give it without ever stopping. As things are, one comes to a little twist certain point and make it something else, as human beings as they are at present cannot progress indefinitely, one must pass to a higher species or you will distort something simple leave the present species and straightforward or magnify it into an extraordinary experiencecreate another. When you sit in meditation you must be as candid and simple The human being as a child, not interfering by your external mind, expecting nothing, insisting on nothing. Once this condition he is there, all at the rest depends upon the aspiration deep within youmoment cannot attain perfection unless he gets out of himself—man is a transitional being. If you ask from within for peace, In ordinary language it will come; if for strengthmay be said: "Oh, for power, for knowledge, they too will comethis man is perfect", but all in the measure of your capacity to receive itthat is a literary figure. And if you call upon the Divine, then too—always admitting that the Divine The maximum a human being can attain just now is an equilibrium which is open to your call, and not progressive. He may attain perhaps a static equilibrium but all that means your call is pure enough and strong enough to reach himstatic can be broken for lack of progress. (The Mother,—you will have the answer30 December 1950) <ref>http://incarnateword. in/cwm/04/30-december-1950#p19</divref>

<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;"center>(The Mother 23 June 1929)~</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/23-june-1929#p23</u></ref></spancenter>

<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">At the same time it must be added that the power All life is enough; the abstention from all physical action is not indispensablea secret Yoga, the aversion to action mental or corporeal is not desirable. The seeker an obscure growth of Nature towards the integral state of knowledge must be free from attachment to action discovery and equally free from attachment to inaction. Especially must any tendency to mere inertia fulfilment of mind or vitality or body be surmountedthe divine principle hidden in her which becomes progressively less obscure, more self-conscient and if that habit is found growing on luminous, more self-possessed in the nature, human being by the will opening of all his instruments of the Purusha must be used to dismiss it. Eventuallyknowledge, a state arrives when the life and the body perform as mere instruments the will of the Purusha in the mind without any strain or attachment, without their putting themselves into the action with that inferior, eager and often feverish energy which is the nature of their ordinary working; they come life to work as forces of Nature work without the fret Spirit within him and toil and reaction characteristic of life in the body when it is not yet master of the physicalworld. When we attain to this perfectionMind, life, then action and inaction become immaterialbody, since neither interferes with all the freedom forms of our nature are the soul or draws it away from its urge towards the Self or its poise in the Self. But means of this state of growth, but they find their last perfection arrives later in the Yoga and till then the law of moderation laid down only by the Gita is the best for us; too much mental or physical action then is opening out to something beyond them, first, because they are not good since excess draws away too much energy and reacts unfavourably upon the spiritual condition; too little also whole of what man 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 calmsecondly, solitude and cessation from works are highly desirable and should be secured as often as possible for because that recession of the soul into itself other something which he is, is indispensable to knowledge.</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/23/the-release-from-subjection-to-the-body#p8</u></ref></span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">Mind finds fully its force key of his completeness and action only when it casts itself upon life and accepts equally its possibilities and its resistances as the means of brings a greater self-perfection. In the struggle with the difficulties of light which discovers to him the material world the ethical development of the individual is </span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">firmly shaped whole high and the great schools large reality of conduct are formed; by contact with the facts of life Art attains to vitality, Thought assures its abstractions, the generalisations of the philosopher base themselves on a stable foundation of science and experiencehis being.</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2324/the-threefoldintegral-life#p18</u>perfection?search=perfection</ref></span>

<span style="backgroundIt is only if our nature develops beyond itself, if it becomes a nature of self-color:transparent;color:#000000;">The calm established in the whole being must remain the same whatever happensknowledge, mutual understanding, in health and diseaseunity, in pleasure a nature of true being and in pain, even in true life that the strongest physical pain, in good fortune result can be a perfection of ourselves and misfortuneour existence, our own or that a life of those we lovetrue being, in success and failurea life of unity, honour and insultmutuality, praise and blameharmony, justice done to us or injusticea life of true happiness, everything that ordinarily affects the minda harmonious and beautiful life. If we</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;"> </span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">'''see unity everywhere'''</span><span style="background-color:transparentour 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;color:#000000;">, if we recognise that must seek it not at all comes by and do the divine willbest we can with our imperfections, or we must seek it elsewhere, see God in alla supraterrestrial hereafter, in our enemies or rather our opponents we must go beyond all such seeking and transcend life by an extinction of nature and ego in the game some Absolute from which this strange and unsatisfactory being of life as well as our friends, ours has come into existence. But if in the powers that oppose and resist us as well as the powers that favour there is a spiritual being which is emerging and assistour present state is only an imperfection of half-emergence, </span><span style="backgroundif the Inconscient is a starting-color:transparent;color:#000000;">'''point containing in all energies itself the potency of a superconscience and forces and happenings'''</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">supernature which has to evolve, and if besides we can feel a veil of apparent Nescience in which that all greater consciousness is undivided concealed and from our selfwhich it has to unfold itself, all if an evolution of being is the world one with us within our universal beinglaw, then this attitude becomes much easier what we are seeking for is not only possible but part of the eventual necessity of things. It is our spiritual destiny to the heart manifest and mind. But even before we can attain or are firmly seated in become that universal visionsupernature, we have by all —for it is the means in nature of our true self, our power to insist on this receptive and active equality and calmstill occult, because unevolved, whole being. Even something A nature of unity will then bring inevitably its life-result of itunity, alpam api asya dharmasyamutuality, is harmony. An inner life awakened to a great step towards perfection; full consciousness and to a first firmness in it is the beginning full power of liberated perfection; consciousness will bear its completeness is the perfect assurance of a rapid progress inevitable fruit in all the other members of perfection. For without who have it we can have no solid basis; and by , self-knowledge, a perfected existence, the pronounced lack joy of it we shall be constantly falling back to a satisfied being, the lower status happiness of desire, ego, duality, ignorancea fulfilled nature.</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2422/the-actiondivine-of-equalitylife#p5</u>p23</ref></span>

<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">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 = To Grow 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.</span><span styleSpiritual Oneness=="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/12/the-science-of-living#p6</u></ref></span>

<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">The character Master of these higher states of the soul and their greater worlds of spiritual Nature our works respects our nature even when he is necessarily difficult to seize. Even transforming it; he works always through the Upanishads nature and the Veda only shadow them out not by figures, hints and symbolsany arbitrary caprice. Yet it is necessary to attempt some account This imperfect nature of their </span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">principles and practical effect so far as they can be grasped by the mind that stands on ours contains the border materials of the two hemispheresour perfection, but inchoate, distorted, misplaced, thrown together in disorder or a poor imperfect order. The passage beyond that border would All this material has to be the culminationpatiently perfected, purified, reorganised, the completeness of the Yoga of selfnew-transcendence by self-knowledge. The soul that aspires to perfectionmoulded and transformed, draws back not hacked and upward, says the Upanishad, from the physical into the vital hewn and from the vital into the mental Purushaslain or mutilated, from the mental into the knowledge-soul not obliterated by simple coercion and from that self of knowledge into the bliss Purushadenial. This self of bliss is the conscious foundation of perfect Sachchidananda world and to pass into we who live in it completes the soul's ascension. The mind therefore must try to give to itself some account of this decisive transformation of the embodied consciousnessare his creation and manifestation, this radiant transfiguration and self-exceeding of he deals with it and us in a way our ever aspiring nature. The description narrow and ignorant mind can arrive at, can never be adequate to the thing itself, but cannot understand unless it may point at least falls silent and opens to some indicative shadow of it or perhaps some half-luminous imagea divine knowledge.</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"> <ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/23/the-laddermaster-of-selfthe-transcendencework#p13</u>p6</ref></span>

<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">But always the whole foundation of the gnostic life must be by its very nature inward and not outward. In the life of the spirit it is the spirit, the inner Reality, that has built up and uses the mind, vital being and body as its instrumentation; thought, feeling and action do not exist for themselves, they are not an object, but the means; they serve to express the manifested divine Reality within us: otherwise, without this inwardness, this spiritual origination, in a too externalised consciousness or by only external means, no greater or divine life is possible. In our present life of Nature, in our externalised surface existence, it is the world that seems to create us; but in the turn to the spiritual life it is </span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">'''we who must create ourselves and our world'''</span><span stylePrerequisites="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">. In this new formula of creation, the</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;"> </span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">'''inner life becomes of the first importance and the rest can be only its expression and outcome.'''</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;"> </span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">It is this, indeed, that is indicated by our own strivings towards perfection, the perfection of our own soul and mind and life and the perfection of the life of the race. For we are given a world which is obscure, ignorant, material, imperfect, and our external conscious being is itself created by the energies, the pressure, the moulding operations of this vast mute obscurity, by physical birth, by environment, by a training through the impacts and shocks of life; and yet we are vaguely aware of something that is there in us or seeking to be, something other than what has been thus made, a spirit self-existent, self-determining, pushing the nature towards the creation of an image of its own occult perfection or Idea of perfection. There is </span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">'''something that grows in us in answer to this demand, that strives to become the image of a divine.'''</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;"> </span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">Somewhat, and is impelled also to labour at the world outside that has been given to it and to remake that too in a greater image, in the image of its own spiritual and mental and vital growth, to make our world too something created according to our own mind and self-conceiving spirit, something new, harmonious, perfect.</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/22/the-divine-life#p6</u></ref></span>

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

<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">These are the first major results ...perfection of the spiritual transformation that follow as a necessary consequence of the our instrumental nature of Supermind. But if there is to be not only a .. the perfection of the inner existenceintelligence, heart, of the vital consciousnessand body, the perfection of an inner delight of existencethe fundamental soul powers, but a the perfection of the life surrender of our instruments and action, two other questions present themselves from our mental view-point which have to our human thought about our life and its dynamisms a considerablethe divine Shakti, even depend at every moment of their progression on a premier importance. First.. power that is covertly and overtly the pivot of all endeavour and action, there faith, śraddhā. The perfect faith is the place an assent of personality in the gnostic whole being,—whether to the statustruth seen by it or offered to its acceptance, the building and its central working is a faith of the being soul in its own will to be quite other than what we experience as the form and life attain and become and its idea of the person or similar. If there is a personality self and things and it is in any way responsible for its actionsknowledge, there intervenes, nextof which the belief of the intellect, the question of heart’s consent and the place desire of the ethical element life mind to possess and its perfection and fulfilment in realise are the gnostic natureoutward figures.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/faith-and-shakti?search=perfection</spanref>

<div style="color:#0066ccThe condition to be aimed at, the real achievement of Yoga, the final perfection and attainment, for which all else is only a preparation, is a consciousness in which it is impossible to do anything without the Divine; for then, if you are without the Divine, the very source of your action disappears;">knowledge, power, all are gone. But so long as you feel that the powers you use are your own, you will not miss the Divine support. (The Mother, 28 April 1929) <ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/2203/the28-gnosticapril-being1929#p28</u>p14</ref></div>

= BODY & PERFECTION ==By Education and Training===

== Perfecting If you said to yourself, my children, "We want to be as perfect instruments as possible to express the Body ==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>

<div style="color:#000000;"center>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. ~</divcenter>

<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">The way to attain to this perfect consciousness is to increase your actual consciousness beyond its present grooves and limits, to educate it, to open it to 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 21 April 1954, 30 June 1929)</span><ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/0603/2130-apriljune-19541929#p31p8</ref>

<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">Be on your guard against Fundamentally, whatever be the path one follows—whether the wrath path of the body. Control your actionssurrender, consecration, knowledge—if one wants it to be perfect, it is always equally difficult, and leaving behind wrong ways there is but one way, one only, I know of actingonly one: that is perfect sincerity, practise but perfect conduct in action.</span>sincerity! (The Mother, 12 May 1954) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/0306/anger12-may-1954#p10p34</ref>

<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">One who aspires to To work for your perfection the ineffable Peace, one whose mind first step is awakened, whose thoughts are not entangled in the net to become conscious of desire, that one is said to be "bound upstreamyourself." (towards perfectionThe Mother, 13 January 1951).</span><ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/0304/pleasure13-january-1951#p10p16</ref>

<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">As To work for your perfection, the question about first step is to become conscious of yourself, of the illnessdifferent parts of your being and their respective activities. You must learn to distinguish these different parts one from another, perfection so that you may become clearly aware of the origin of the movements that occur in you, the physical plane 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 indeed part only by observing these movements with great care, by bringing them, as it were, before the tribunal of our highest ideal, with a sincere will to submit to its judgment, that we can hope to form in ourselves a discernment that never errs. For if we truly want to progress and acquire the ideal capacity of knowing the Yogatruth of our being, but it that is the last item to say, what we are truly created for, what we can call our mission upon earth, then we must, in a very regular andconstant manner, so long as the fundamental change has not been made reject from us or eliminate in us whatever contradicts the material consciousness truth of our existence, whatever is opposed to which it. In this way, little by little, all the body belongsparts, one may have all the elements of our being can be organised into a certain homogeneous whole around our psychic centre. This work of unification requires much time to be brought to some degree of perfection on other planes without having immunity . Therefore, in order to accomplish it, we must arm ourselves with patience and endurance, with a determination to prolong our life as long as necessary for the bodysuccess of our endeavour.</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/3112/illnessthe-science-andof-healthliving#p57</u>p5</ref></span>

<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;"center>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.~</spancenter><ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/28/transformation-and-the-body#p3</ref>  == Body Perfection or Immortality == <span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">When the body has learned the art of constantly progressing towards an increasing perfection, we shall be well on the way to overcoming the inevitability of death.</span> <span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">(The Mother 16 January 1972)</span><ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/16/16-january-1972#p1</ref>  <div style="color:#000000;">We are on earth in order to progress and to perfect ourselves in the course of many successive lives. What we cannot do this time, we shall do next time; and every progress we make this time will help us then. </div> <span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">(The Mother 15 November 1971)</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/17/15-november-1971#p1</u></ref></span>  <div style="color:#000000;">Ah! No. You are looking from the wrong side. They could escape dying only if their body did not decay. It is just because their body decays that they die. It is because their body becomes useless that they die. If they are not to die, their body should not become useless. This is just the contrary. It is precisely because the body decays, declines and ends in a complete degradation that death becomes necessary. But if the body followed the progressive movement 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.</div> <span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">(The Mother, 17 June 1953)</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/05/17-june-1953#p36</u></ref></span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">But, you see, when our little humanity says three hundred years with the same body, you say: "Why! when I am fifty it already begins to decompose, so at three hundred it will be a horrible thing!" But it is not like that. If it is three hundred years with a body that goes on perfecting itself from year to year, perhaps when the three hundredth year is reached one will say: "Oh! I still need three or four hundred more to be what I want to be." If each year that passes represents a progress, a transformation, one would like to have more and more years in order to be able to transform oneself more and more. When something is not exactly as you want it to be—take, for example, simply one of the things I have just described, say, plasticity or lightness or elasticity or luminosity, and none of them is exactly as you want it, then you will still need at least two hundred years more so that it may be accomplished, but you never think: "How is it? It is still going to last two hundred years more!" On the contrary, you say: "Two hundred years more are absolutely necessary so that it may be truly done." And then, when all is done, when all is perfect, then there is no longer any question of years, for you are immortal. (The Mother 20 May 1953)</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/05/20-may-1953#p44</u></ref></span> = INTEGRAL PERFECTION = == Ego & Perfection ==   <div style="color:#000000;">Why do you say that sensitivity is the sign of a strong ego? It does not seem to be evident at all. Moreover, there are many different kinds of sensitivity: some stem from weakness, others—the best—are the result of refinement. The ego generally governs the development of the individual, but the most developed individualities are not necessarily those in whom the ego is strongest—on the contrary. As the individuality perfects itself, the power of the ego diminishes, and indeed it is by perfecting himself that the individual arrives at that state of divinisation which liberates him from the ego. </div> <span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">(The Mother 2 September 1964)</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/16/2-september-1964#p3</u></ref></span> <span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">Never forget that here it is for the perfection of the work that we are striving, not for the satisfaction of the ego.</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/13/organisation-and-work#p55</u></ref></span> <span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">The egoism of the instrument can be as dangerous or more dangerous to spiritual progress than the egoism of the doer. The ego-sense is contrary to spiritual realisation, so how can any kind of ego be a thing to be encouraged? As for the magnified ego, it is one of the most perilous obstacles to release and perfection. There should be no big I, not even a small one.</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/31/ego-and-its-forms#p54</u></span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">If you think there is no ego or desire in you, only pure devotion, that shows a great unconsciousness. To be free from ego and desire is a condition which needs a high siddhi in Yoga—even many Yogis of a great spiritual attainment are not free from it. For a sadhak at your stage of development to think he is free from ego and desire is to blind himself and prevent the clear perception of one's own nature movements which is necessary for progress towards spiritual perfection.</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/31/ego-and-its-forms#p74</u></ref></span> <span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">This vairagya, or loss of zest, as you have yourself said, began before you came here. I have indeed laid some stress on the conquest of sex, for obvious reasons; but I have hardly laid a compulsory stress on anything else. Certainly, I have not encouraged you 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 </span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">to regret and say, why did I ever do it, will never do. And it is in this kind of tapasya that perfection or at least perfect purification is demanded before there can be any realisation. I have never said that for my Yoga; 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.</span><ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/29/asceticism-and-the-integral-yoga#p9</ref> == The Mundane & Divine Perfection ==   <span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">A divine perfection of the human being is our aim. We must know then first what are the essential elements that constitute man's total perfection; secondly, what we mean by a divine as distinguished from a human perfection of our being. That man as a being is capable of self-development and of some approach at least to an ideal standard of perfection which his mind is able to conceive, fix before it and pursue, is common ground to all thinking humanity, though it may be only the minority who concern themselves with this possibility as providing the one most important aim of life. But by some the ideal is conceived as a mundane change, by others as a religious conversion.</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/the-integral-perfection#p1</u></ref></span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">The mundane perfection is sometimes conceived of as something outward, social, a thing of action, a more rational dealing with our fellow-men and our environment, a better and more efficient citizenship and discharge of duties, a better, richer, kindlier and happier way of living, with a more just and more harmonious associated enjoyment of the opportunities of existence. By others again a more inner and subjective ideal is cherished, a clarifying and raising of the intelligence, will and reason, a heightening and ordering of power and capacity in the nature, a nobler ethical, a richer 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.</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/the-integral-perfection#p2</u></ref></span> <div style="color:#000000;">We know, we have said this many a time, that all work is a prayer made with the body and that the true attitude in work is an offering to the Divine. Well, this was satisfied with the way the thing was done. For I was looking on, to see, as I said, if there were things which were not as they should have been. But in any case, to the eye of this consciousness which was looking on, it was satisfying. Materially, you see, I said, "In the outer human consciousness this can be done much better." That of course is understood, we haven't reached the height of perfection, far from that, but it must also be said that it is only a very small part of our activity... that we are trying much more than this, that it is only one of the movements of our sadhana, you see. We are busy with many other things besides this... one thing among many others... and to put up something like this according to the accomplishment which the laws of human perfection demand, infinitely more time, infinitely more work and infinitely more means would have been necessary. But we are not seeking an exclusive perfection in one thing or another, we are trying to make everything go forward together to a common, integral perfection. And these things have their place and importance, but they don't have an exclusive place and importance. Therefore, from the external point of view, one may criticise and find something to say and all that; but it is not that, the true point of view. Inwardly, it is well. </div> <span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">(The Mother 30 November 1955)</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/07/30-november-1955#p28</u></ref></span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">The divine existence is of the nature not only of freedom, but of purity, beatitude and perfection. An integral purity which shall enable on the one hand the perfect reflection of the divine Being in ourselves and on the other the perfect outpouring of its Truth and Law in us in the terms of life and through the right functioning of the complex instrument we are in our outer parts, is the condition of an integral liberty. Its result is an integral beatitude, in which there becomes possible at once the Ananda of all that is in the world seen as symbols of the Divine and the Ananda of that which is not-world. And it prepares the integral perfection of our humanity as a type of the Divine in the conditions of the human manifestation, a perfection founded on a certain free universality of being, of love and joy, of play of knowledge and of play of will in power and will in unegoistic action. This integrality also can be attained by the integral Yoga.</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/23/the-synthesis-of-the-systems#p19</u></ref></span> == Perfection of All Kinds ==   <span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">Perfection of all kinds is indeed good, as it is the sign of the pressure of the consciousness in the material world towards full 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 </span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">powers and feats have all been taken as spirituality and the spiritual evolution kept tied to the moorings of the planes of lesser consciousness which do indeed prepare the soul by experience for the spiritual consciousness but are not themselves that. For perfection can only become truly spiritual when it is founded on the awakened spiritual consciousness and takes on its peculiar essence. </span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/28/idealism-and-spirituality#p1</u></ref></span> <div style="color:#000000;">"The supramental world has to be formed or created in us by the Divine Will as the result of a constant expansion and self-perfecting."</div><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">(The Mother 27 June 1956)</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/08/27-june-1956#p31</u></ref></span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">Moral perfection is to have all the qualities that are considered moral: to have no defects, never to make a mistake, never to err, to be always what one conceives to be the best, to have all the virtues.</span><div style="color:#000000;">(The Mother 1 October 1958)</div> <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/09/1-october-1958#p3</ref> == Consciousness & Perfection == <div style="color:#000000;">The way to attain to this perfect consciousness is to increase your actual consciousness beyond its present grooves and limits, to educate it, to open it to 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. </div> <div style="color:#000000;">(The Mother 30 June 1929)</div> <span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/30-june-1929#p8</u></ref></span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">Ignorance is dispelled by a growing consciousness; what you need is consciousness and always more consciousness, 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)</span><ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/30-june-1929#p7</ref> <span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">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 </span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">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 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 is our highest Self and the self of all Nature, the eternal and universal Purusha.</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/the-psychology-of-self-perfection#p8</u></ref></span> = INDIVIDUAL PERFECTION = == Perfect Individual ==   <div style="color:#000000;">A child should never be scolded. I am accused of speaking ill of parents! But I have seen them at work, you see, and I know that ninety per cent of parents snub a child who comes spontaneously to confess a mistake: "You are very naughty. Go away, I am busy"—instead of listening to the child with patience and explaining to him where his fault lies, how he ought to have acted. And the child, who had come with good intentions, goes away quite hurt, with the feeling: "Why am I treated thus?" Then the child sees his parents are not perfect—which is obviously true of them today—he sees that they are wrong and says to himself: "Why does he scold me, he is like me!"</div> <span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">(The Mother 8 January 1951)</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/04/8-january-1951#p31</u></ref></span> <span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">In the Dhammapada: a supreme disinterestedness and a supreme liberation is to follow the discipline of self-perfection, the march of progress, not with a precise end in view but because this march of progress is the profound law and the purpose of earthly life, the truth of universal existence and because you put yourself in harmony with it, spontaneously, whatever the result may be.</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/the-brahmin#p43</u></ref></span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">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 </span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">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 </span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">'''society is there only as a field of activity and growth for the individual man'''</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;"> </span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">and serves best its function when it gives as far as possible a wide room, ample means, a sufficient freedom or guidance of development to his thought, his action, his growth, his possibility of fullness of being. </span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/22/the-divine-life#p34</u></ref></span>  <div style="color:#000000;">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. </div> <div style="color:#0066cc;"><ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/22/the-divine-life#p19</u></ref></div> == Perfection in Work ==   <span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">You will become more and more perfect in your work as the consciousness grows, increases, widens and is enlightened.</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/14/progress-and-perfection-in-work#p1</u></ref></span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">In all action, all work done, the degree of perfection depends upon the degree of consciousness.</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/14/progress-and-perfection-in-work#p3</u></ref></span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">Perfection in the work must be the aim, but it is only by a very patient effort that this can be obtained.</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/14/progress-and-perfection-in-work#p19</u></ref></span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">Open yourself more and more to the Divine's force and your work will progress steadily towards perfection.</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/14/progress-and-perfection-in-work#p21</u></ref></span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">Let nothing short of perfection be your ideal in work and you are sure to become a true instrument of the Divine.</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/14/progress-and-perfection-in-work#p25</u></ref></span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">There must be order and harmony in work. Even what is apparently the most insignificant thing must be done with perfect perfection, with a sense of cleanliness, beauty, harmony and order.</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/14/progress-and-perfection-in-work#p26</u></ref></span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">The perfection of the work done is much more important than its bulk or the bigness of its scope.</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/14/progress-and-perfection-in-work#p38</u></ref></span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">In works, aspiration towards Perfection is true spirituality.</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/14/progress-and-perfection-in-work#p45</u></ref></span> === Practical Tips for Perfection in Work ===

<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">Do not worry about mistakes in work. Often you imagine that things are badly done In the process of this change there must be by you when really you have done them the very well; but even if necessity of the effort two stages of its working. First, there are mistakeswill 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 is nothing and to get rid of all in him that belongs to be sad about. Let the consciousness grow—only a lower working, of all that stands in the divine consciousness is there an entire perfection. The more you surrender way of his opening to the Divinespiritual truth and its power, the more 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 there therefore be a persistent giving up of all the action of the nature into the possibility hands of this greater Power, a substitution of its influence, possession and working 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 perfection in youthe being.</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2924/practical-concerns-inthe-work#p39</u></ref></span><span style="backgroundintegral-color:transparent;color:#000000;">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?</span><span stylesearch="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/29/practical-concerns-in-work#p45</u>perfection</ref></span>

== Perfection But if you remain in that consciousness and Interlook 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) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/05/20-may-relation with Others ==1953#p54</ref>

<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;"center>...~</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;"> </span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">man is separated in his mind, his life, his body from the universal and therefore, even as he does not know himself, is equally and even more incapable of knowing his fellow-creatures. He forms by inferences, theories, observations and a certain imperfect capacity </span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">of sympathy a rough mental construction about them; but this is not knowledge. Knowledge can only come by conscious identity, for that is the only true knowledge,—existence aware of itself. We know what we are so far as we are consciously aware of ourself, the rest is hidden; so also we can come really to know that with which we become one in our consciousness, but only so far as we can become one with it. If the means of knowledge are indirect and imperfect, the knowledge attained will also be indirect and imperfect. It will enable us to work out with a certain precarious clumsiness but still perfectly enough from our mental standpoint certain limited practical aims, necessities, conveniences, a certain imperfect and insecure harmony of our relations with that which we know; but only by a conscious unity with it can we arrive at a perfect relation. Therefore we must arrive at a conscious unity with our fellow-beings and not merely at the sympathy created by love or the understanding created by mental knowledge, which will always be the knowledge of their superficial existence and therefore imperfect in itself and subject to denial and frustration by the uprush of the unknown and unmastered from the subconscient or the subliminal in them and us. But this </span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">'''conscious oneness can only be established by entering into that in which we are one with them, the universal'''</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;"><nowiki>; 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.</nowiki></spancenter>

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 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 is our highest Self and the self of all Nature, the eternal and universal Purusha. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2124/the-problempsychology-of-lifeself-perfection#p9p8</ref><span style="background-color:#eeeeee;color:#333333;"> </span>

<span style="backgroundAn integral Yoga includes as a vital and indispensable element in its total and ultimate aim the conversion of the whole being into a higher spiritual consciousness and a larger divine existence. Our parts of will and action, our parts of knowledge, our thinking being, our emotional being, our being of life, all our self and nature must seek the Divine, enter into the Infinite, unite with the Eternal. But man's present nature is limited, divided, unequal,—it is easiest for him to concentrate in the strongest part of his being and follow a definite line of progress proper to his nature: only rare individuals have the strength to take a large immediate plunge straight into the sea of the Divine Infinity. Some therefore must choose as a starting-point a concentration in thought or contemplation or the mind's one-color:transparentpointedness to find the eternal reality of the Self in them;colorothers can more easily withdraw into the heart to meet there the Divine, the Eternal:#000000yet others are predominantly dynamic and active;">To make for these it is best to centre themselves in the will and enlarge their being through works. United with the effort for one's own perfection Self and not source of all by their surrender of their will into its infinity, guided in their works by the secret Divinity within or surrendered to be disturbed 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 any mistake 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 others but reply by the end through a silent 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 for , 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 also . For the supermind is always a Truth-Consciousness in which the right attitudeDivine 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.</span><span style="backgroundEvery movement there is a movement of the self-aware truth of Divine Being and every part is in entire harmony with the whole. Even the most limited and finite action is in the Truth-color:transparentConsciousness a movement of the Eternal and Infinite and partakes of the inherent absoluteness and perfection of the Eternal and Infinite. An ascent into the supramental Truth not only raises our spiritual and essential consciousness to that height but brings about a descent of this Light and Truth into all our being and all our parts of nature. All then becomes part of the Divine Truth, an element and means of the supreme union and oneness;color:#0066cc;">this ascent and descent must be therefore an ultimate aim of this Yoga.<ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/3123/problemsthe-insupermind-and-the-yoga-humanof-relationsworks#p9</u>p1</ref></span>

<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">You stop short at the perfection that others should realise and you are seldom conscious of the goal you should ==By Learning to be pursuing yourself. If you are conscious of it, well then, begin with the work which is given to you, that is to say, realise what you have to do and do not concern yourself with what others do, because, after all, it is not your business. And the best way to the true attitude is simply to say, "All those around me, all the circumstances of my life, all the people near me, are a mirror held up to me by the Divine Consciousness to show me the progress I must make. Everything that shocks me in others means a work I have to do in myself."</span><span styleWitness="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/10/aphorism-8#p15</u></ref></span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">And perhaps if one carried true perfection in oneself, one would discover it more often in others.</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/10/aphorism-8#p16</u></ref></span>

<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">For ...we find ourselves to be not the mind, but a mental being who stands behind the awakened individual action of the realisation embodied mind, not a mental and vital personality,—personality is a composition of his truth 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 his inner liberation thinks of himself as an individual for self-experience and perfection must be his primary seekingworld-experience,—firstfor an inward action and an outward-going action, because that but is yet different from mind, life and body. First, he has the intuition of himself as someone observing the call action of the Spirit within him, but also because mind; it is only by liberation something which is going on in him and perfection and realisation yet before him as an object of his regarding knowledge. This self-awareness is the truth intuitive sense of being 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 man can arrive at truth of livingSpirit must then be his way to control and lordship. A perfected community also He can exist only do it passively by the perfection a sort of its individualsreflection and receiving in his mental consciousness, and perfection can come but then he is only by a mould, channel or instrument, not a possessor or participant in the discovery and </span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">affirmation in life power. He can arrive at identity by each an absorption of his own mentality in inner spiritual being and , but then the discovery by all conscious action ceases in a trance of their spiritual unity and a resultant life unityidentity. There can To be no real perfection for us except by our inner self and truth of spiritual existence taking up all truth active master of the instrumental existence into itself and giving nature he must evidently rise to it onenesssome higher supramental poise where there is possible not only a passive, integration, harmonybut an active identity with the controlling spirit. As our only real freedom is To find the discovery and disengagement way of the spiritual Reality within us, so our only means of true perfection is the sovereignty rising to this greater poise and be self-effectuation ruler, Swarat, is a condition of the spiritual Reality in all the elements of our naturehis perfection.</span><ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2224/the-divineperfection-life#p37of-the-mental-being?search=perfection</ref>

<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">We have The seeker of the integral state of knowledge must be free from attachment to action and equally free from attachment to inaction. Especially must any tendency to recognise once more mere inertia of mind or vitality or body be surmounted, and if that habit is found growing on the individual exists not in himself alone but in nature, the will of the Purusha must be used to dismiss it. Eventually, a state arrives when the collectivity life and that individual perfection and liberation are not the whole sense body perform as mere instruments the will of God's intention the Purusha in the world. The free use of our liberty includes also mind without any strain or attachment, without their putting themselves into the liberation of others action with that inferior, eager and often feverish energy which is the nature of mankindtheir ordinary working; they come to work as forces of Nature work without the perfect utility fret and toil and reaction characteristic of our perfection life in the body when it is, having realised in ourselves not yet master of the divine symbol, physical. When we attain to reproducethis perfection, multiply then action and ultimately universalise inaction become immaterial, since neither interferes with the freedom of the soul or draws it away from its urge towards the Self or its poise in othersthe Self.</span><span style="background-color:transparentBut this state of perfection arrives later in the Yoga and till then the law of moderation laid down by the Gita is the best for us;color:#0066cctoo 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><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/23/the-threefoldrelease-from-subjection-to-the-lifebody#p30</u>p8</ref></span>

<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">The best way of helping others is to transform oneself. Be perfect and you will be in a position to bring perfection to the world.</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/14/helping-others-and-the-world#p12</u></ref></span>=By Developing Equality===

<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">There is a RealityThe calm established in the whole being must remain the same whatever happens, in health and disease, in pleasure and in pain, even in the strongest physical pain, in good fortune and misfortune, a truth our own or that of all existence which is greater those we love, in success and failure, honour and more abiding than all its formations insult, praise and manifestations; blame, justice done to find us or injustice, everything that ordinarily affects the mind. If we see unity everywhere, if we recognise that truth and Reality and live all comes by the divine will, see God in itall, achieve in our enemies or rather our opponents in the most perfect manifestation and formation possible game of itlife as well as our friends, must be in the powers that oppose and resist us as well as the secret of perfection whether of individual or communal being. This Reality is there within each thing powers that favour and assist, in all energies and gives to each of its formations its power of being forces and value of being. The universe is a manifestation of the Realityhappenings, and there if besides we can feel that all is a truth of undivided from our self, all the world one with us within our universal existencebeing, a Power of cosmic beingthen this attitude becomes much easier to the heart and mind. But even before we can attain or are firmly seated in that universal vision, an we have by all-self or world-spiritthe means in our power to insist on this receptive and active equality and calm. Humanity Even something of it, alpam api asya dharmasya, is a formation or manifestation great step towards perfection; a first firmness in it is the beginning of liberated perfection; its completeness is the Reality perfect assurance of a rapid progress in all the universe, other members of perfection. For without it we can have no solid basis; and there is a truth and self by the pronounced lack of it we shall be constantly falling back to the lower status of humanitydesire, ego, a human spiritduality, a destiny of human lifeignorance. </span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2224/the-divineaction-of-lifeequality#p36</u>p5</ref></span>

=== When Man Becomes Perfect… By Purification of Nature===

<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">Man, too, becomes perfect only when he has found within himself that absolute calm and passivity of the Brahman and supports by it with the same divine tolerance and the same divine bliss a free and inexhaustible activity. Those who have thus possessed the Calm within can perceive always welling out from its silence the perennial supply of the energies that work in the universe. It is not, therefore, the truth of the Silence to say that it is in its nature a rejection of the cosmic activity. The apparent incompatibility of the two states is an error of the limited Mind which, accustomed to trenchant oppositions of affirmation and denial and passing suddenly from one pole to the other, is unable to conceive of a comprehensive consciousness vast and strong enough to include both in a simultaneous embrace. The Silence does not reject the world; it sustains it. Or rather it supports with an equal impartiality the activity and the withdrawal from the activity and approves also the </span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">reconciliation by which the soul remains free and still even while it lends itself to all action.</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/21/reality-omnipresent#p5</u></ref></span>By Cultivating Faith===

= FINAL PERFECTION & MORE ==By Silencing the Mind===

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

<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">You must not cherish Difficulties on the illusion that if you want Path 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.</span><span stylePerfection="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/impurity#p29</u></ref></span>

=== MoralityNo 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, Diversity & Perfection ===that perfection is possible. Till then imperfection will remain as our common heritage. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/31/the-subconscient-and-the-integral-yoga#p2</ref>

<div style="color:#000000;"center>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. ~</divcenter>

<span style="backgroundThe 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-color:transparent;color:#000000;">(The Mother 4 August 1929)</span>off and difficult ends, and it is denied too by many who have spiritual experience but believe that our present nature is the sole possible nature of man in the body and that it is only by throwing off the earthly life or even all individual existence that we can arrive at either a heavenly perfection or the release of extinction.<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/0324/4faith-augustand-1929#p6</u>shakti?search=perfection</ref></span>

<div style="color:#000000;">If there were no such resistance, there would be nothing whatever to conquer in One man’s perfection still can save 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<ref>http://incarnateword. The Divine Will actually suffers distortion the moment it touches the hostile forces in /cwsa/34/the Ignorance. Hence we must never slacken our efforts to change -finding-of-the world and bring about a different order. We must be vigilant to co-operate with the Divine and not placidly think that whatever happens is always the best. All depends upon the personal attitude. &nbsp;soul</ref></div>

<div style="color:#0066cc;"><ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/knowledge-'''Content Curated by-unity-with-the-divine-the-divine-will-in-the-world#p5</u></ref></div>Prema Sankar'''

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

<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">It is possible to escape from the problem otherwise; for, admitting always the essential Presence, we can endeavour to justify the divinity of the manifestation by correcting the human view of perfection or putting it aside as a too limited mental standard. We may say that not only is the Spirit in things absolutely perfect and divine, but each thing also is relatively perfect and divine in itself, in its expression of what it has to express of the possibilities of existence, in its assumption of its proper place in the complete manifestation. Each thing is divine in itself because each is a fact and idea of the divine being, knowledge and will fulfilling itself infallibly in accordance with the law of that particular manifestation. Each being is possessed of the knowledge, the force, the measure and kind of delight of existence precisely proper to its own nature; each works in the gradations of experience decreed by a secret inherent will, a native law, an intrinsic power of the self, an occult significance. It is thus perfect in the relation of its phenomena to the law of its being; for all are in harmony with that, spring out of it, adapt themselves to its purpose according to the infallibility of the divine Will and Knowledge at work within the creature. It is perfect and divine also in relation to the whole, in its proper place in the whole; to that totality it is necessary and in it it fulfils a part by which the perfection actual and progressive of the universal harmony, the adaptation of all in it to its whole purpose and its whole sense is helped and completed. If to us things appear undivine, if we hasten to condemn this or that phenomenon as inconsistent with the nature of a divine being, it is because we are ignorant of the sense and purpose of the Divine in the world in its entirety. Because we see only parts and fragments, we judge of each by itself as if it were the whole, judge also the external phenomena without knowing their secret sense; but by doing so we vitiate our valuation of things, put on it the stamp of an initial and fundamental error. Perfection cannot reside in the thing in its separateness, for that separateness is an illusion; </span><span styleReferences ="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">'''perfection is the perfection of the total divine harmony.'''</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><ref><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/21/the-divine-and-the-undivine#p6</u></ref></span>