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{|class= "wikitable" style= "background-color: #efefff; width: 100%;"|Read Summary of '''[[Perfection in Short =Summary|Perfection]]''' |}
== What is Perfection? == '''Perfection in General'''
Perfection is all that we want to become in our highest aspiration. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/15/perfection#p10</ref>
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. <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/15/perfection#p4~</refcenter>
Perfection Some people put perfection at the apex. It is generally thought that perfection is the maximum one can do. But I say that perfection is not the apex, it is not a maximum or an extreme. It There is no extreme—whatever you may do, there is an equilibrium always the possibility of something better, and a harmonisationit is exactly this possibility of something better which is the very meaning of progress. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/1504/perfection30-december-1950#p3p5</ref>
Perfection is eternal; it is only the resistance of the world that makes it progressive. <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/15/perfection#p5~</refcenter>
Our very 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 thinking 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 wrong. The believerscherished, a clarifying and raising of the faithfulintelligence, all will and reason, a heightening and ordering of them—particularly power and capacity in the West—when they speak of Godnature, think of Him as "something elsea nobler ethical," they think that He cannot be weaka richer aesthetic, ugly or imperfect—they think wronglya finer emotional, they divide, they separatea much healthier and better-governed vital and physical being. It Sometimes one element is subconsciousstressed, unreflecting thought; they are in almost to the habit exclusion of thinking like this instinctivelythe rest; they do not watch themselves thinking. For examplesometimes, when they speak of "perfection" in a general waywider and more well-balanced minds, they see or feel or postulate precisely the sum-whole harmony is envisaged as a total perfection. A change of everything they consider to be virtuous, divine, beautiful, admirable—but it education and social institutions is not that at all! Perfection the outward means adopted or an inner self-training and development is something which lacks nothingpreferred as the true instrumentation. The divine perfection is Or the Divine in His entiretytwo aims may be clearly united, which lacks nothing. The divine the perfection is of the Divine as a wholeinner individual, from whom nothing has been taken away—so it is just the opposite! For the moralists divine perfection means all of the virtues that they representouter living. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/1024/aphorismthe-63integral-64-65perfection#p24p2</ref>
== How to Achieve '''Elements of Perfection? =='''
"To work for your 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 step 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 become conscious the present individual and common existence. A collective life of yourselfthis kind must obviously constitute itself on the same principle as the life of the gnostic individual." (The Mother, 13 January 1951) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/0422/13the-januarydivine-1951life#p16p19</ref>
To work for your perfection<center>~</center> These three elements, a union with the first step is to become conscious of yourselfsupreme Divine, of unity with the different parts of your being universal Self, and their respective activities. You must learn to distinguish these different parts one a supramental life action from another, so that you may become clearly aware of the this transcendent 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, feelsthrough this universality, says and does. It is only by observing these movements but still with great care, by bringing them, the individual as it were, before the tribunal of our highest ideal, with a sincere will to submit to its judgmentsoul-channel and natural instrument, that we can hope to form in ourselves a discernment that never errs. For if we truly want to progress and acquire constitute the capacity essence 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 integral divine perfection of our existence, whatever is opposed to it. In this way, little by little, all the parts, all the elements of our human being can be organised into a homogeneous whole around our psychic centre. This work of unification requires much time to be brought to some degree of perfection. Therefore, in order to accomplish it, we must arm ourselves with patience and endurance, with a determination to prolong our life as long as necessary for the success of our endeavour.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/1224/the-scienceintegral-of-living#p5perfection?search=perfection</ref>
If in passing from one domain to another we renounce what has already been given us from eagerness for our new attainment, if in reaching the mental life we cast away or belittle the physical life which is our basis, or if we reject the mental and physical in our attraction to the spiritual, we do not fulfil God integrally, nor satisfy the conditions of His self-manifestation. We do not become perfect, but only shift the field of our imperfection or at most attain a limited altitude. However high we may climb, even though it be to the Non-Being itself, we climb ill if we forget our base. Not to abandon the lower to itself, but to transfigure it in the light of the higher to which we have attained, '''Where is true divinity of nature.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/21/the-destiny-Power of-the-individual#p9</ref>Perfection?'''
It takes insufficient account of the human consciousness and Where in the human view from which radically imperfect shall we have to start; it does not give us find the vision principle and power of the harmony it alleges, perfection? Mind rooted in division and so it limitation 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; provide it gives too no lead to the psychic element in our natureus, the soul's aspiration towards light and truth nor can life 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 body which tells us that all that is is right, because all is perfectly decreed by are the divine Wisdom. It supplies us with nothing better than a complacent intellectual energy and philosophic optimism: no light is turned on the disconcerting facts frame of pain, suffering dividing and discord to which our human consciousness bears constant limiting mind. The principle and troubling witness; at most power of perfection are 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 subconscient but wrapped up 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 tegument or veil of its parts, runs the risk of itself being only perfect in imperfectionlower Maya, because it fulfils entirely some stage in a mute premonition emerging as an unaccomplished purposeunrealised ideal; it is then a present but not an ultimate Totality. To it we could apply in the Greek sayingsuperconscient they await, Theos ouk estin alla gignetaiopen, the Divine is not yet in beingeternally realised, but is becoming. The true Divine would then be secret within still separated from us and perhaps supreme above us; to find by the Divine within us and veil of our self-ignorance. It is above us would be the real solution, to become perfect as That is perfectthen, to attain liberation by likeness to and not either in our present poise nor below it or by attaining to that we must seek for the law of its nature, sādṛśya, sādharmyareconciling power and knowledge.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/21/the-divineproblem-and-theof-undivinelife#p7p12</ref>
== More ways towards '''Divine Perfection =='''
The Divine is the perfection towards which we move. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/14/the-divine-and-man#p8</ref>
Fundamentally, whatever be the path one follows—whether the path of surrender, consecration, knowledge—if one wants it to be perfect, it is always equally difficult, and there is but one way, one only, I know of only one: that is perfect sincerity, but perfect sincerity! (The Mother, 12 May 1954) <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/06/12-may-1954#p34~</refcenter>
If you want to be peaceful, happy, always satisfied, to have perfect equality A divine perfection of soul, you the human being is our aim. We must tell yourselfknow then first what are the essential elements that constitute man's total perfection; secondly, "Things are what we mean by a divine as distinguished from a human perfection of our being. That man as they should bea 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 if you are religious you should tell yourselfpursue, is common ground to all thinking humanity, "They are though it may be only the minority who concern themselves with this possibility as they should be because they are providing the expression one most important aim of the divine Will" (The Mother, 22 February 1956 life.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/0824/22the-februaryintegral-1956perfection#p17p1</ref>
If you said to yourself, my children, "We want to be as perfect instruments as possible to express the divine Will in the world", then for this instrument to be perfect, it must be cultivated, educated, trained. It must not be left like a shapeless piece of stone. When you want to build with a stone you chisel it; when you want to make a formless block into a beautiful diamond, you chisel it. Well, it is the same thing. When with your brain and body you want to make a beautiful instrument for the Divine, you must cultivate it, sharpen it, refine it, complete what is missing, perfect what is there. (The Mother, 13 May 1953) <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/05/13-may-1953#p18~</refcenter>
To perfect oneself, one must first become conscious The characteristic law of oneselfSpirit is self-existent perfection and immutable infinity. I am sure, for instance, that the following situation has arisen many times It possesses always and in your life: someone asks you suddenly, "Why have you done that?" Well, its own right the spontaneous reply immortality which is, "I don't know." If someone asks you, "What are you thinking the aim of?" You reply, "I don't know." "Why are you tired?"—"I don't know.Why are you happy?"—"I don't know", Life and so onthe perfection which is the goal of Mind. 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 The attainment of following up their movements to the extreme limits; these people can, naturally, collect themselves, concentrate eternal and give the right answer, but only after a little while.) You will see realisation of that it which is like that if you look well at your whole day. You say something the same in all things 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 speakbeyond all things, but once you are equally blissful in front of the person in questionuniverse and outside it, you say nothing or it is other words which come from your mouth. Are you able to say to what extent untouched by the atmosphere imperfections and limitations of the other person has influenced you forms and stopped you from saying what you had prepared? How many people can say that? They do not even observe that the person was activities in such or such a state and that which it was because of this that they could not tell him what they had prepared. Of coursedwells, 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 the glory 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 observationspiritual life. (The Mother, 13 January 1951) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/0423/13the-januarythreefold-1951life#p22p7</ref>
== Mastery over Perfection ==<center>~</center>
But we can attain to Man, the highest without blotting ourselves out from mental being, has an imperfect life because mind is not the cosmic extension. Brahman preserves always Its two terms of liberty within first and highest power of formation without, of expression and consciousness of freedom from the expressionBeing; even if mind were perfected, there would be still something yet to be realised, not yet manifested. We alsoFor what is involved and emergent is not a Mind, being Thatbut a Spirit, can attain to and mind is not the same divine self-possession. The harmony native dynamism of consciousness of the two tendencies is Spirit; supermind, the condition light of all gnosis, is its native dynamism. If then life that aims at being really divine. Liberty pursued by exclusion has to become a manifestation of the thing exceeded leads along Spirit, it is the path manifestation of negation to a spiritual being in us and the refusal divine life of that which God has accepted. Activity pursued by absorption a perfected consciousness in the act and the energy leads to an inferior affirmation and the denial a supramental or gnostic power of spiritual being that must be the Highest. But what God combines secret burden and synthetises, wherefore should man insist on divorcing? To be perfect as He is perfect is the condition intention of His integral attainmentevolutionary Nature. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2122/the-destinydivine-of-the-individuallife#p18p3</ref>
But if you remain in that consciousness and look from there, then you begin to understand something of the truth. And this consciousness has to be so total, that even if things come directly against you, even the physical movement of someone coming to beat you (you must not allow him to kill you, no; you have perhaps to do what is necessary not to get killed), but if you are yourself in this perfect consciousness and have no personal reaction, well, I give you the guarantee the other cannot kill you. He will not be able to, even if he tries. He will not be able to beat you, even if he tries. Only, you must not have a single violent or wrong vibration, you understand? Even if there is just a little false vibration, that opens the door and the thing enters and all goes wrong. You must be fully conscious, have the full knowledge, the perfect mastery over everything, the clear vision of the Truth—and perfect peace. (The Mother, 20 May 1953) <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/05/20-may-1953#p54~</refcenter>
…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.one may act with 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 knowledge 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 what should this hidden urge behind it one can do so; it can at least be doneregarded 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 without intervention—the least intervention—of fervour, occult powers and feats have all been taken as spirituality and the spiritual evolution kept tied to the moorings of the planes of lesser consciousness which do indeed prepare the soul by experience for the reasoning mindspiritual consciousness but are not themselves that. The mind For perfection can only become truly spiritual when it is silent: it simply looks founded on the awakened spiritual consciousness and listens in order to register things, it does not acttakes on its peculiar essence. (The Mother, 23 December 1953) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/0528/23idealism-decemberand-1953spirituality#p8p1</ref>
It is only in the supreme Consciousness that you can attain the perfect expression of yourself. (The Mother, 29 February 1956) <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/08/29-february-1956#p24~</refcenter>
… if you But always the whole foundation of the gnostic life must be by its very nature inward and not outward. In the life of the spirit it is the spirit, the inner Reality, that has built up and uses the mind, vital being and body as its instrumentation; thought, feeling and action do not exist for themselves, they are not an object, but the means; they serve to express the manifested divine Reality within us: otherwise, without this inwardness, this spiritual origination, in a too externalised consciousness or by only external means, no greater or divine life is possible. In our present life of Nature, in our externalised surface existence, it is the world that seems to create us; but in the turn to the spiritual life it is we who must create ourselves and our world. In this new formula of creation, the inner life becomes of the first importance and the rest can be only its expression and outcome. It is this, indeed, that is indicated by our own strivings towards perfection, the perfection of our own soul and mind and life and the perfection of the life of the race. For we are perfect 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 your us or seeking to be, something other than what has been thus made, a spirit self-giving existent, self-determining, pushing the nature towards the creation of an image of its own occult perfection or Idea of perfection. There is something that grows in us in answer to this demand, that strives to become the image of a divine. Somewhat, and absolutely sincereis impelled also to labour at the world outside that has been given to it and to remake that too in a greater image, you are sure to attain in the image of its own spiritual goaland mental and vital growth, to make our world too something created according to our own mind and self-conceiving spirit, something new, harmonious, perfect. (The Mother, 1 August 1956) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/0822/1the-augustdivine-1956life#p4p6</ref>
… 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. (The Mother, 19 December 1956) <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/08/19-december-1956#p25~</refcenter>
= More on Perfection =As you pursue this labour of purification and unification, you must at the same time take great care to perfect the external and instrumental part of your being. When the higher truth manifests, it must find in you a mind that is supple and rich enough to be able to give the idea that seeks to express itself a form of thought which preserves its force and clarity. This thought, again, when it seeks to clothe itself in words, must find in you a sufficient power of expression so that the words reveal the thought and do not deform it. And the formula in which you embody the truth should be manifested in all your feelings, all your acts of will, all your actions, in all the movements of your being. Finally, these movements themselves should, by constant effort, attain their highest perfection. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/12/the-science-of-living#p6</ref>
== Aim of Integral Yoga and Perfection in the Mind==
An integral Yoga includes The ethical mind becomes perfect in proportion as a vital it detaches itself from desire, sense suggestion, impulse, customary dictated action and indispensable element in its total and ultimate aim the conversion of the whole being into discovers a higher spiritual consciousness and a larger divine existence. Our parts self of will and action, our parts of knowledgeRight, our thinking beingLove, our emotional being, our being of life, all our self Strength and nature must seek the Divine, enter into the Infinite, unite with the Eternal. But man's present nature is limited, divided, unequal,—it is easiest for him to concentrate Purity in the strongest part of his being which it can live accomplished and follow a definite line of progress proper to his nature: only rare individuals have the strength to take a large immediate plunge straight into make it the sea foundation of the Divine Infinityall its actions. Some therefore must choose as a starting-point a concentration in thought or contemplation or the The aesthetic mind's one-pointedness to find the eternal reality of the Self is perfected in them; others can more easily withdraw into the heart to meet there the Divine, the Eternal: yet others are predominantly dynamic and active; for these proportion as it is best to centre themselves in the will and enlarge their being through works. United with the Self and source of detaches itself from all by their surrender of their will into its infinity, guided in their works by the secret Divinity within or surrendered to the Lord cruder pleasures and from outward conventional canons of the cosmic action as the master aesthetic reason and discovers a self existent self and mover spirit of all their energies of thought, feeling, act, becoming by this enlargement of being selfless pure and infinite Beauty and universal, they can reach by works some first fullness of a spiritual status. But the path, whatever Delight which gives its point of starting, must debouch into a vaster dominion; it must proceed in own light and joy to the end through a totality of integrated knowledge, emotion, will of dynamic action, perfection material of the being and the entire natureaesthesis. In the supramental consciousness, on the level The mind of the supramental existence this integration becomes consummate; there knowledge, will, emotion, the perfection of the self is perfected when it gets away from impression and the dynamic nature rise each to its absolute of itself dogma and all to their perfect harmony opinion and fusion with each other, to discovers a divine integrality, a divine perfection. For the supermind is a Truthlight of self-Consciousness in knowledge and intuition which illumines all the Divine Reality, fully manifested, no longer works with the instrumentation workings of the Ignorance; a truth of status of being which is absolute becomes dynamic in a truth of energy sense and activity of the being which is reason, all self-existent experience and perfectworld-experience. Every movement there The will is a movement perfected when it gets away from and behind its impulses and its customary ruts of the self-aware truth effectuation and discovers an inner power of Divine Being and every part is in entire harmony with the whole. Even the most limited and finite action Spirit which is in the Truth-Consciousness a movement source of the Eternal an intuitive and Infinite luminous action and partakes an original harmonious creation. The movement of the inherent absoluteness and perfection of is away from all domination by the Eternal and Infinite. An ascent into the supramental Truth not only raises our spiritual lower nature and essential consciousness to that height but brings about towards a descent of this Light pure and Truth into all our being and all our parts of nature. All then becomes part powerful reflection of the Divine Truthbeing, an element power, knowledge and means delight of the supreme union Spirit and oneness; this ascent and descent must be therefore an ultimate aim of this YogaSelf in the buddhi.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2324/thepurification-supermindintelligence-and-the-yoga-of-works#p1will</ref>
Some people put perfection at the apex. It is generally thought that perfection is the maximum one can do. But I say that perfection is not the apex, it is not an extreme. There is no extreme—whatever you may do, there is always the possibility of something better, and it is exactly this possibility of something better which is the very meaning of progress. (The Mother, 30 December 1950) <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/04/30-december-1950#p5~</refcenter>
Perfection The first need is not a static state, it is an equilibriumthe clarity and the purity of the intelligence. But a progressive, dynamic equilibrium. One may go from perfection to perfection. There can come a state It must be freed from the claims of the vital being which it would not be necessary seeks to descend to a lower rung in order to go farther; at impose the moment desire of the march mind in place of Nature is like thatthe truth, but in this new state, instead from the claims of the troubled emotional being obliged which strives to go back to be able to start againcolour, one can walk always forwarddistort, without ever stoppinglimit and falsify the truth with the hue and shape of the emotions. As things areIt must be free too from its own defect, inertia of the thought-power, one comes obstructive narrowness and unwillingness to a certain point open to knowledge, intellectual unscrupulousness in thinking, prepossession andpreference, as human beings as they are at present cannot progress indefinitely, one must pass to a higher species or leave self-will in the present species reason and create another. The human being as he is at false determination of the moment cannot attain perfection unless he gets out of himself—man is a transitional beingwill to knowledge. In ordinary language it may Its sole will must be said: "Ohto make itself an unsullied mirror of the truth, this man is perfect"its essence and its forms and measures and relations, but that is a literary figure. The maximum clear mirror, a human being can attain just now is an equilibrium which is not progressive. He may attain perhaps measure, a static equilibrium but all that is static can be broken for lack fine and subtle instrument of progressharmony, an integral intelligence. (The Mother, 30 December 1950) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/0424/30the-power-of-decemberthe-1950#p19instruments</ref>
The condition to be aimed at, the real achievement of Yoga, the final perfection and attainment, for which all else is only a preparation, is a consciousness in which it is impossible to do anything without the Divine; for then, if you are without the Divine, the very source of your action disappears; knowledge, power, all are gone. But so long as you feel that the powers you use are your own, you will not miss the Divine support. (The Mother, 28 April 1929) <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/28-april-1929#p14~</refcenter>
"We are But our mind is obscure, partial in its notions, misled by opposite surface appearances, divided between various possibilities; it is led in three different directions to any of which it may give an exclusive preference. Our mind, in its search for what must be, turns towards a concentration on our own inner spiritual growth and perfection, on our own individual being and inner living; or it turns towards a concentration on an individual development of our surface nature, on the perfection of our thought and outer dynamic or practical action on the world, on some idealism of our personal relation with the world around us; or it turns rather towards a concentration on the outer world itself, on making it better, more suited to our ideas and temperament or to our conception of what should be. On one side there is the call of our spiritual being which is our true self, a transcendent reality, a being of the Divine Being, not aiming at success—our aim 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 perfectionor 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." (The Mother, 30 December 1950) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/0422/30the-decemberdivine-1950life#p1p7</ref>
== Necessities on Perfection in the Vital==Then again there is the psychic prana, pranic mind or desire soul; this too calls for its own perfection. Here too the first necessity is a fullness of the vital capacity in the mind, its power to do its full work, to take possession of all the impulsions and energies given to our inner psychic life for fulfilment in this existence, to hold them and to be a means for carrying them out with strength, freedom, perfection. Many of the things we need for our perfection, courage, will-power effective in life, all the elements of what we now call force of character and force of personality, depend very largely for their completest strength and spring of energetic action on the fullness of the psychic prana. But along with this fullness there must be an established gladness, clearness and purity in the psychic life-being. This dynamis must not be a troubled, perfervid, stormy, fitfully or crudely passionate strength; energy there must be, rapture of its action it must have, but a clear and glad and pure energy, a seated and firmly supported pure rapture. And as a third condition of its perfection it must be poised in a complete equality. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/the-power-of-the-instruments</ref>
The first necessity is some fundamental poise of the soul both in its essential and its natural being regarding and meeting the things, impacts and workings of Nature. This poise we shall arrive at by growing into a perfect equality, samatā. The self, spirit or Brahman is one in all and therefore one to all; it is, as is said in the Gita which has developed fully this idea of equality and indicated its experience on at least one side of equality, the equal Brahman, samaṁ brahma; the Gita even goes so far in one passage as to identify equality and yoga, samatvaṁ yoga ucyate. That is to say, equality is the sign of unity with the Brahman, of becoming Brahman, of growing into an undisturbed spiritual poise of being in the Infinite. Its importance can hardly be exaggerated; for it is the sign of our having passed beyond the egoistic determinations of our nature, of our having conquered our enslaved response to the dualities, of our having transcended the shifting turmoil of the gunas, of our having entered into the 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. <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/the-elements-of-perfection#p2~</refcenter>
The next necessity This heart and psychic being of perfection is to raise all man shot through with the active parts threads of the human nature to that highest condition and working pitch life instincts is a thing of their power and capacity, śakti, at which they become capable mixed inconstant colours of being divinised into true instruments of the free, perfect, spiritual emotion and divine action. For practical purposes we may take the understandingsoul vibrations, the heart, the prana bad and the body as the four members of our nature which have thus to be preparedgood, happy and we have to find the constituent terms of their perfection. Also there is the dynamical force in us (vīrya) of the temperamentunhappy, character satisfied and soul nature, svabhāvaunsatisfied, which makes the power of our members effective in action troubled 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 Soulcalm, shall act fully in this human instrument intense and shine fully through this human vesseldull. 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 Thus agitated 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 invaded it belongs, and for this purpose faith is the essentialunacquainted with any real peace, faith is the great motor-power incapable of our being in our aspirations to a steady 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-forcepowers. These four things are the essentials of this second element of perfectionBy purification, the full powers of the members of the instrumental natureby equality, by the perfected dynamis light of the soul natureknowledge, the assumption by a harmonising of them into the action of the divine Power, and will it can be brought to a perfect faith in all our members to call tranquil intensity and support that assumption, śakti, vīrya, daivī prakṛti, śraddhāperfection. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/the-elementspower-of-perfection#p3the-instruments</ref>
== Where to find Perfection? ==<center>~</center>
Where in the radically imperfect shall we find the principle and power The other side of perfection? Mind rooted in division is a self-contained and calm and limitation cannot provide it to usunegoistic Rudra-power armed with psychic force, nor can life and the body which are the energy and the frame of dividing and limiting mind. The principle and power of perfection are there in the subconscient but wrapped up in the tegument or veil strong heart which is capable of the lower Mayasupporting without shrinking an insistent, a mute premonition emerging as an unrealised ideal; in the superconscient they awaitoutwardly austere or even, open, eternally realised, but still separated from us by the veil of our self-ignorance. It where need is above, then, and not either in our present poise nor below it that we must seek for the reconciling power and knowledgea violent action.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2124/the-problempower-of-life#p12the-instruments</ref>
== Perfection is so progressive that I believe nobody can say he is perfectly conscious; he is on in the way to becoming perfectly conscious. (The Mother, 28 November 1956) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/08/28-november-1956#p20</ref>Body ==
= Imperfection and Perfection =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. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/16/16-january-1972#p1</ref>
== Standard of Judgement ==<center>~</center>
The distinction between the divine and As for the undivine life is in fact identical with question about the root distinction between a life of Knowledge lived in self-awareness and in the power of the Light and a life of Ignoranceillness,—at any rate it so presents itself perfection in a world that is slowly and with difficulty evolving out of an original Inconscience. All life that has still this Inconscience for its basis is stamped with the mark of a radical imperfection; for even if it is satisfied with its own type, it is a satisfaction with something incomplete and inharmonious, a patchwork of discords: on the contrary, even a purely mental or vital life might be perfect within its limits if it were based on a restricted but harmonious self-power and self-knowledge. It physical plane is this bondage to a perpetual stamp indeed part of imperfection and disharmony that is the mark ideal of the undivine; a divine life, on the contraryYoga, even if progressing from the little to the more, would be at each stage harmonious in its principle and detail: it would be a secure ground upon which freedom and perfection could naturally flower or grow towards their highest stature, refine and expand into their most subtle opulence. All imperfections, all perfections have to be taken into view in our consideration of the difference between an undivine and a divine existence: but ordinarily, when we make the distinction, we do it as human beings struggling under is the pressure of life last item 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 so long 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 fundamental change has not been made up only of these two deficiencies; there is more than in the fall, if fall there was, of our spiritual or material being from good and from happiness or our nature's failure consciousness to overcome evil and suffering. Besides the deficiency of which the ethical and hedonistic satisfactions demanded by our beingbody belongs, the paucity of Good and Delight in our world-experience, there is also the deficiency of one may have a certain perfection on 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, planes without having immunity in their absolute, powers of the Divine Naturebody. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2131/the-divineillness-and-the-undivinehealth#p2p57</ref>
Once we admit a divine government of the universe, we must conclude that the power to govern is complete and absolute; for otherwise we are obliged to suppose that a being and consciousness infinite and absolute has a knowledge and will limited in their control of things or hampered in their power of working. It is not impossible to concede that the supreme and immanent Divinity may leave a certain freedom of working to something that has come into being in his perfection but is itself imperfect and the cause of imperfection, to an ignorant or inconscient Nature, to the action of the human mind and will, even to a conscious Power or Forces of darkness and evil that take their stand upon the reign of a basic Inconscience. But none of these things are independent of Its own existence, nature and consciousness and none of them can act except in Its presence and by Its sanction or allowance. Man's freedom is relative and he cannot be held solely responsible for the imperfection of his nature. Ignorance and inconscience of Nature have arisen, not independently, but in the one Being; the imperfection of her workings cannot be entirely foreign to some will of the Immanence. It may be conceded that forces set in motion are allowed to work themselves out according to the law of their movement; but what divine Omniscience and Omnipotence has allowed to arise and act in Its omnipresence, Its all-existence, we must consider It to have originated and decreed, since without the fiat of the Being they could not have been, could not remain in existence. If the Divine is at all concerned with the world He has manifested, there is no other Lord than He and from that necessity of His original and universal being there can eventually be no escape or departure. It is on the foundation of this self-evident consequence of our first premiss, without any evasion of its implications, that we have to consider the problem of imperfection, suffering and evil. <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/21/the-divine-and-the-undivine#p13~</refcenter>
It is only if our nature develops beyond itself, if it becomes a nature The physical being of self-knowledge, mutual understanding, unity, a nature man has always been felt by the seekers of true being and true life that the result can perfection to 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 great impediment and beautiful life. If our nature is fixed in what it is, what it has already become, then no perfection, no real and enduring happiness is possible in earthly life; we must seek been the habit to turn from it not at all and do the best we can with our imperfectionscontempt, denial or we must seek it elsewhere, in aversion and a supraterrestrial hereafter, desire to suppress altogether or we must go beyond all such seeking as far as may be the body and transcend the physical 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 this cannot be the right method for the Inconscient integral Yoga. The body is a starting-point containing in itself given us as one instrument necessary to the potency totality of a superconscience our works and supernature which has it is to evolvebe used, a veil of apparent Nescience in which that greater consciousness is concealed and from which it has to unfold itselfnot neglected, if an evolution of being is the lawhurt, then what we are seeking for is not only possible but part of the eventual necessity of thingssuppressed or abolished. It If it is our spiritual destiny to manifest and become that supernatureimperfect,—for it is the nature of our true selfrecalcitrant, our still occultobstinate, because unevolvedso are also the other members, whole the vital being. A nature of unity will then bring inevitably its life-result of unity, mutuality, harmonyheart and mind and reason. An inner life awakened It has like them to a full consciousness be changed and perfected and to undergo a full power of consciousness will bear its inevitable fruit in all who have ittransformation. As we must get ourselves a new life, self-knowledgenew heart, a perfected existencenew mind, the joy of so we have in a satisfied being, the happiness of certain sense to build for ourselves a fulfilled naturenew body. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2224/the-divinepower-of-the-life#p23instruments</ref>
A subjective spirituality can be established which refuses or minimises commerce with the world or is content to witness its action and throw back or throw out its invading influences with out allowing any reaction to them or admitting their intrusion: but if the inner spirituality is to be objectivised in a free world action, if the individual has to project himself into the world and in a sense take the world into himself, this cannot be dynamically done without receiving the world influences through one's own circumconscient or environmental being. The spiritual inner consciousness has then to deal with these influences in such a way that, as soon as they approach or enter, they become either obliterated and without result or transformed by their very entry into its own mode and substance. Or it may force them to receive the spiritual influence and return with a transforming power on the world they come from, for such a compulsion on the lower universal Nature is part of a perfect spiritual action. But for that the circumconscient or environmental being must be so steeped in the spiritual light and spiritual substance that nothing can enter into it without undergoing this transformation: the invading external influences have not to bring in at all their lower awareness, their lower sight, their lower dynamism. But this is a difficult perfection, because ordinarily the circumconscient is not wholly our own formed and realised self but ourself plus the external world-nature. It is, for this reason, always easier to spiritualise the inner self-sufficient parts than to transform the outer action; a perfection of introspective, indwelling or subjective spirituality aloof from the world or self-protected against it is easier than a perfection of the whole nature in a dynamic, kinetic spirituality objectivised in the life, embracing the world, master of its environment, sovereign in its commerce with world-nature. But since the integral transformation must embrace fully the dynamic being and take up into it the life of action and the world-self outside us, this completer change is demanded of the evolving nature. <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/22/the-ascent-towards-supermind#p44~</refcenter>
== Duality Transformation and the Body : The supramental perfection means that the body becomes conscious, is filled with consciousness and that as this is the Truth consciousness all its actions, functionings etc. become by the power of the consciousness within it harmonious, luminous, right and true—without ignorance or disorder. <ref>http://incarnateword.in Perfection ==/cwsa/28/transformation-and-the-body#p3</ref>
If the human consciousness were bound to the sense of imperfection and the acceptance of it as the law of our life and the very character of our existence,—a reasoned acceptance that could answer in our human nature to the blind animal acceptance of the animal nature,—then we might say that what we are marks the limit of the divine self-expression in us; we might believe too that our imperfections and sufferings worked for the general harmony and perfection of things and console ourselves with this philosophic balm offered for our wounds, satisfied to move among the pitfalls of life with as much rational prudence or as much philosophic sagacity and resignation as our incomplete mental wisdom and our impatient vital parts permitted. Or else, taking refuge in the more consoling fervours of religion, we might submit to all as the will of God in the hope or the faith of recompense in a Paradise beyond where we shall enter into a happier existence and put on a more pure and perfect nature. But there is an essential factor in our human consciousness and its workings which, no less than the reason, distinguishes it entirely from the animal; there is not only a mental part in us which recognises the imperfection, there is a psychic part which rejects it. Our soul's dissatisfaction with imperfection as a law of life upon earth, its aspiration towards the elimination of all imperfections from our nature, not only in a heaven beyond where it would be automatically impossible to be imperfect, but here and now in a life where perfection has to be conquered by evolution and struggle, are as much a law of our being as that against which they revolt; they too are divine,—a divine dissatisfaction, a divine aspiration. In them is the inherent light of a power within which maintains them in us so that the Divine may not only be there as a hidden Reality in our spiritual secrecies but unfold itself in the evolution of Nature. <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/21/the-divine-and-the-undivine#p8~</refcenter>
When we say 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 all it can experience two contraries at the same time. There is a divine manifestation, even that certain state of body-consciousness which we call undivinebrings things together, we mean totalises things that in its essentiality all is divine 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 form baffles or repels us. Ormind, to put it in a formula to which it is easier development sufficient for our psychological sense harmonising opposites (that of things to give its assentcourse, is quite indispensable), when one has succeeded in all things doing this, there is a presence, a primal Realityare moments when it alternates,—the Selfyou see, one thing comes after the Divine, Brahmanother,—which while what is for ever pure, perfect, blissful, infinite: its infinity is not affected by remarkable in the limitations consciousness of relative the body is that it can feel ("feel", can we say "feel"?—"experience"—the word "aware" expresses it best) all things; its purity is not stained by our sin simultaneously, as though you were hot and evil; its bliss is not touched by our pain cold at once, as though you were active and suffering; its perfection is not impaired by our defects of consciousnesspassive at once, knowledge, will, unityand everything becomes like that. In certain images Then you begin to grasp the totality of movements in the Upanishads the divine Purusha cells. It is described as something much more concrete naturally, but much more perfect in the one Fire which has entered into all forms and shapes itself according to body than in any other part of the formbeing. This means that if things continue in this way, as it will be proved that the one Sun which illumines all impartially and physical, material instrument is not affected by the faults most perfect of our seeingall. But this affirmation That is not enough; why perhaps it leaves is the problem unsolved, why that which is in itself ever puremost difficult to transform, to perfect. But of all, blissful, infinite, 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 is the duality that constitutes the problem, but does not solve itone most capable of perfection. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/06/21/the-divine-and-theapril-undivine1954#p4p31</ref>
== Facing the Imperfection ==<center>~</center>
But even when we thus regard It is precisely because the universebody decays, we cannot declines and ought not to dismiss as entirely and radically false and unreal the values ends in a complete degradation that are given to it by our own limited human consciousnessdeath becomes necessary. For grief, pain, suffering, error, falsehood, ignorance, weakness, wickedness, incapacity, non-doing of what should be done and wrong-doing, deviation of will and denial But if the body followed the progressive movement of will, egoism, limitation, division from other beings with whom we should be one, all that makes up the effective figure of what we call evilinner being, are facts of if it had the world-consciousness, not fictions and unrealities, although they are facts whose complete sense or true value is not that which we assign to them in our ignorance. Still our same sense of them is part of a true senseprogress and perfection as the psychic being, our values of them are necessary there would be no necessity for it to their complete valuesdie. One side of the truth of these things we discover when we get into a deeper and larger consciousness; for we find then that there is year added to another need not bring a cosmic and individual utility in what presents itself to us as adverse and evildeterioration. For without experience of pain we would not get all the infinite value of the divine delight of which pain is in travail; all ignorance It is only a penumbra which environs an orb habit of knowledge, every error Nature. It is significant of the possibility and the effort of only a discovery habit of truth; every weakness and failure what is a first sounding of gulfs of power and potentiality; all division happening at this moment. And that is intended to enrich by an experience of various sweetness of unification exactly the joy cause of realised unitydeath. All this imperfection is to us evilOne can foresee quite well, on the contrary, but all evil is in travail of that the eternal good; movement for all is an imperfection perfection which is at the first condition—in the law beginning of life evolving out 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 Inconscience—of the houses after some time! But this growth in height may be changed into a greater growth in perfection in : the manifesting perfection of the hidden divinityform. But at All the same time our present feeling imperfections of this evil and imperfection, the revolt of our consciousness against them is also a necessary valuation; for if we have first to face and endure themform may be gradually corrected, all the ultimate command on us is to rejectweaknesses replaced by strength, to overcome, to transform all the life and the natureincapacities by skill. It is for that end that their insistence is Why should it not be like this? You do not allowed to slacken; the soul must learn the results of the Ignorance, must begin to feel their reactions as a spur to its endeavour of mastery and conquest and finally to a greater endeavour of transformation and transcendence. It is possible, when we live inwardly think in that way because you have the depths, to arrive at a state habit of vast inner equality and peace which is untouched by the reactions of the outer nature, and that is a great but incomplete liberation,—for the outer nature too has a right to deliveranceseeing things otherwise. But even if our personal deliverance is complete, still there is the suffering of others, the world travail, which the great of soul cannot regard with indifference. 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 deliveranceno reason why this should not happen. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/2105/the17-divine-and-thejune-undivine1953#p19p36</ref>
For an age out of sympathy with the ascetic spirit—and throughout all the rest of the world the hour of the Anchorite may seem to have passed or to be passing—it is easy to attribute this great trend to the failing of vital energy in an ancient race tired out by its burden, its once vast share in the common advance, exhausted by its many-sided contribution to the sum of human effort and human knowledge. But we have seen that it corresponds to a truth of existence, a state of conscious realisation which stands at the very summit of our possibility. In practice also the ascetic spirit is an indispensable element in human perfection and even its separate affirmation cannot be avoided so long as the race has not at the other end liberated its intellect and its vital habits from subjection to an always insistent animalism. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/21/the-two-negations-the-refusal-of-the-ascetic#p23</ref>= Why Do We Need Perfection? =
No man == For Discovering the Truth of Living== For the awakened individual the realisation of his truth of being and his inner liberation and perfection must be his primary seeking,—first, because that is perfect; the vital call of the Spirit within him, but also because it is there only by liberation and perfection and realisation of the ego is there to prevent ittruth of being that man can arrive at truth of living. It is A perfected community also can exist only by the perfection of its individuals, and perfection can come only when there is by the total transformation discovery and affirmation in life by each of his own spiritual being and the external discovery by all of their spiritual unity and a resultant life unity. There can be no real perfection for us except by our inner self and truth of spiritual existence taking up all truth of the internal being down instrumental existence into itself and giving to it oneness, integration, harmony. As our only real freedom is the discovery and disengagement of the very subconscientspiritual Reality within us, that so our only means of true perfection is possible. Till then imperfection will remain as the sovereignty and self-effectuation of the spiritual Reality in all the elements of our common heritagenature. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/3122/the-subconscient-and-the-integraldivine-yogalife#p2p37</ref>
The Master of our works respects our nature even when he is transforming it; he works always through the nature and not by any arbitrary caprice. This imperfect nature of ours contains the materials of our perfection, but inchoate, distorted, misplaced, thrown together in disorder or a poor imperfect order. All this material has to be patiently perfected, purified, reorganised, new-moulded and transformed, not hacked and hewn and slain or mutilated, not obliterated by simple coercion and denial. This world and we who live in it are his creation and manifestation, and he deals with it and us in a way our narrow and ignorant mind cannot understand unless it falls silent and opens to a divine knowledge. In our errors is the substance of a truth which labours to reveal its meaning to our groping intelligence. The human intellect cuts out the error and the truth with it and replaces it by another half-truth half-error; but the Divine Wisdom suffers our mistakes to continue until we are able to arrive at the truth hidden and protected under every false cover. Our sins are the misdirected steps of a seeking Power that aims, not at sin, but at perfection, at something that we might call a divine virtue. Often they are the veils of a quality that has to be transformed and delivered out of this ugly disguise: otherwise, in the perfect providence of things, they would not have been suffered to exist or to continue. The Master of our works is neither a blunderer nor an indifferent witness nor a dallier with the luxury of unneeded evils. He is wiser than our reason and wiser than our virtue. <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/23/the-master-of-the-work#p6~</refcenter>
== Imperfection There is a Reality, a truth of all existence which is greater and more abiding than all its formations and manifestations; to Perfection ==find that truth and Reality and live in it, achieve the most perfect manifestation and formation possible of it, must be the secret of perfection whether of individual or communal being. This Reality is there within each thing and gives to each of its formations its power of being and value of being. The universe is a manifestation of the Reality, and there is a truth of the universal existence, a Power of cosmic being, an all-self or world-spirit. Humanity is a formation or manifestation of the Reality in the universe, and there is a truth and self of humanity, a human spirit, a destiny of human life. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/22/the-divine-life#p36</ref>
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 of the divine purpose. ==For what 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 and true secret as other, subtler, deeper than their outward meaning and phenomenal appearance which is all that can normally be caught by our present intelligence: but we cannot be content with that belief, to search for and find the spiritual key of things is the law of our being. The sign of the finding is not a philosophic intellectual recognition and a resigned or sage acceptance of things as they are because of some divine sense and purpose in them which is beyond us; the real sign is an elevation towards the spiritual knowledge and power which will transform the law and phenomena and external forms of our life nearer to a true image of that divine sense and purpose. It is right and reasonable to endure with equanimity suffering and subjection to defect as the immediate will of God, a present law of imperfection laid on our members, but on condition that we recognise it also as the will of God in us to transcend evil and suffering, to transform imperfection into Self-perfection, to rise into a higher law of Divine Nature. In our human consciousness there is the image of an ideal truth of being, a divine nature, an incipient godhead: in relation to that higher truth our present state of imperfection can be relatively described as an undivine life Progress 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 disguises, not as the intended expression of the divine being and the divine nature. It 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 greater that shall be divine and perfect not only by the secret spirit within it but in its manifest and most outward form of existence. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/21/the-divine-and-the-undivine#p9</ref> Fulfillment==
The more perfect In the contactDhammapada: 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 greater purpose of earthly life, the powertruth of universal existence and because you put yourself in harmony with it, spontaneously, whatever the result may be. (The Mother, 20 June 1956) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/0803/20-junethe-1956brahmin#p11p43</ref>
There is nothing you cannot understand if you give your brain the time to widen and perfect itself. (The Mother, 12 December 1956) <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/08/12-december-1956#p15~</refcenter>
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. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/12/the-four-austerities-and-the-four-liberations#p17</ref>
And, finally, a word of advice: be more concerned with your own faults than with those of others. If each one worked seriously at his own self-perfection, the perfection of the whole would follow automatically. <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/13/aims-and-principles#p147~</refcenter>
It Perfection is all right 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 see go farther; at the imperfections and deficiencies moment the march of Nature is like that, but only on condition it brings 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 greater courage for a new certain point and, as human beings as they are at present cannot progressindefinitely, an increase of energy in one must pass to a higher species or leave the determination 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 stronger certitude 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 victory and future perfectionprogress. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/1404/mistakes30-no-torment-worry-ordecember-sadness1950#p12p19</ref>
= Mind and Perfection =<center>~</center>
== Mind’s Way All life is a secret Yoga, an obscure growth of Nature towards the discovery and fulfilment of the divine principle hidden in her which becomes progressively less obscure, more self-conscient and luminous, more self-possessed in the human being by the opening of all his instruments of knowledge, will, action, life to the Spirit within him and in the world. Mind, life, body, all the forms of our nature are the means of this growth, but they find their last perfection only by opening out to something beyond them, first, because they are not the whole of what man is, secondly, because that other something which he is, is the key of his completeness and brings a light which discovers to him the whole high and Perfect Understanding =large reality of his being.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/the-integral-perfection?search=perfection</ref>
But our mind is obscure, partial in its notions, misled by opposite surface appearances, divided between various possibilities; it is led in three different directions to any of which it may give an exclusive preference. Our mind, in its search for what must be, turns towards a concentration on our own inner spiritual growth and perfection, on our own individual being and inner living; or it turns towards a concentration on an individual development of our surface nature, on the perfection of our thought and outer dynamic or practical action on the world, on some idealism of our personal relation with the world around us; or it turns rather towards a concentration on the outer world itself, on making it better, more suited to our ideas and temperament or to our conception of what should be. On one side there is the call of our spiritual being which is our true self, a transcendent reality, a being of the Divine Being, not created by the world, able to live in itself, to rise out of world to transcendence; on the other side there is the demand of the world around us which is a cosmic form, a formulation of the Divine Being, a power of the Reality in disguise. There is too the divided or double demand of our being of Nature which is poised between these two terms, depends on them and connects them; for it is apparently made by the world and yet, because its true creator is in ourselves and the world instrumentation that seems to make it is only the means first used, it is really a form, a disguised manifestation of a greater spiritual being within us. It is this demand that mediates between our preoccupation with an inward perfection or spiritual liberation and our preoccupation with the outer world and its formation, insists on a happier relation between the two terms and creates the ideal of a better individual in a better world. But it is within us that the Reality must be found and the source and foundation of a perfected life; no outward formation can replace it: there must be the true self realised within if there is to be the true life realised in world and Nature. <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/22/the-divine-life#p7~</refcenter>
The characteristic Our soul's dissatisfaction with imperfection as a law of Spirit is self-existent perfection and immutable infinity. It possesses always and in life upon earth, its own right aspiration towards the immortality which is the aim elimination of Life all imperfections from our nature, not only in a heaven beyond where it would be automatically impossible to be imperfect, but here and the now in a life where perfection which is the goal of Mind. The attainment of the eternal has to be conquered by evolution and the realisation struggle, are as much a law of our being as that against which is the same in all things and beyond all thingsthey revolt; they too are divine, equally blissful in universe and outside it—a divine dissatisfaction, untouched by a divine aspiration. In them is the imperfections and limitations inherent light of a power within which maintains them in us so that the forms and activities Divine may not only be there as a hidden Reality in our spiritual secrecies but unfold itself in which it dwells, are the glory evolution of the spiritual lifeNature. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2321/the-threefolddivine-and-the-lifeundivine#p7p8</ref>
There is a world of ideas without form and it is there that you must enter if you want to seize what is behind the words. So long as you have to draw your understanding from the forms of words, you are likely to fall into much confusion about the true sense; but if in a silence of your mind you can rise into the world from which ideas descend to take form, at once the real understanding comes. If you are to be sure of understanding one another, you must be able to understand in silence. There is a condition in which your minds are so well attuned and harmonised together that one perceives the thought of the other without any necessity of words. But if there is not this attunement, there will always be some deformation of your meaning, because to what you speak the other mind supplies its own significance. I use a word in a certain sense or shade of its sense; you are accustomed to put into it another sense or shade. Then, evidently, you will understand, not my exact meaning in it, but what the word means to you. This is true not of speech only, but of reading also. If you want to understand a book with a deep teaching in it, you must be able to read it in the mind's silence; you must wait and let the expression go deep inside you into the region where words are no more and from there come slowly back to your exterior consciousness and its surface understanding. But if you let the words jump at your external mind and try to adapt and adjust the two, you will have entirely missed their real sense and power. There can be no perfect understanding unless you are in union with the unexpressed mind that is behind the centre of expression. (The Mother, 26 May 1929) <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/26-may-1929#p21~</refcenter>
== Mind’s Endeavour It is only if our nature develops beyond itself, if it becomes a nature of self-knowledge, mutual understanding, unity, a nature of true being and true life that the result can be a perfection of ourselves and our existence, a life of true being, a life of unity, mutuality, harmony, a life of true happiness, a harmonious and beautiful life. If our nature is fixed in what it is, what it has already become, then no perfection, no real and enduring happiness is possible in earthly life; we must seek it not at all and do the best we can with our imperfections, or we must seek it elsewhere, in a supraterrestrial hereafter, or we must go beyond all such seeking and transcend life by an extinction of nature and ego in some Absolute from which this strange and unsatisfactory being of ours has come into existence. But if in us there is a spiritual being which is emerging and our present state is only an imperfection of half-emergence, if the Inconscient is a starting-point containing in itself the potency of a superconscience and supernature which has to Perfection ==evolve, a veil of apparent Nescience in which that greater consciousness is concealed and from which it has to unfold itself, if an evolution of being is the law, then what we are seeking for is not only possible but part of the eventual necessity of things. It is our spiritual destiny to manifest and become that supernature,—for it is the nature of our true self, our still occult, because unevolved, whole being. A nature of unity will then bring inevitably its life-result of unity, mutuality, harmony. An inner life awakened to a full consciousness and to a full power of consciousness will bear its inevitable fruit in all who have it, self-knowledge, a perfected existence, the joy of a satisfied being, the happiness of a fulfilled nature. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/22/the-divine-life#p23</ref>
For here there is the same process of evolution as in the rest of the movement of Nature; there is a heightening and widening of the consciousness, an ascent to a new level and a taking up of the lower levels, an assumption and new integration of the existence by a superior power of Being which imposes its own way of action and its character and force of substance energy on as much as it can reach of the previously evolved parts of nature. The demand for integration becomes at this highest stage of Nature's workings a point of cardinal importance. In the lower grades of the ascension the new assumption, the integration into a higher principle of consciousness, remains incomplete: the mind cannot wholly mentalise life and matter; there are considerable parts of the life being and the body which remain in the realm of the submental and the subconscient or inconscient. This is one serious obstacle to the mind's endeavour towards the perfection of the nature; for the continued share of the submental, the subconscient and inconscient in the government of the activities, by bringing in another law than that of the mental being, enables the conscious vital and the physical consciousness also to reject the law laid upon them by the mind and to follow their own impulses and instincts in defiance of the mental reason and the rational will of the developed intelligence. This makes it difficult for the mind to go beyond itself, to exceed its own level and spiritualise the nature; for what it cannot even make fully conscious, cannot securely mentalise and rationalise, it cannot spiritualise, since spiritualisation is a greater and more difficult integration. No doubt, by calling in the spiritual force, it can establish an influence and a preliminary change in some parts of the nature, especially in the thinking mind itself and in the heart which is nearest to its own province: but this change is not often a total perfection even within limits and what it does achieve is rare and difficult. The spiritual consciousness using the mind is employing an inferior means and, even though it brings in a divine light into the mind, a divine purity, passion, ardour into the heart or imposes a spiritual law upon the life, this new consciousness has to work within restrictions; for the most part it can only regulate or check the lower action of the life and rigorously control the body, but these members, even if refined or mastered, do not receive their spiritual fulfilment or undergo a perfection and transformation. For that it is necessary to bring in a higher dynamic principle which is native to the spiritual consciousness and by which, therefore, it can act in its own law and completer natural light and power and impose them upon the members. <ref>http://incarnateword.== To Grow in/cwsa/22/the-ascent-towards-supermind#p16</ref>Spiritual Oneness==
In your meditation His physical being will be one with all material Nature, his vital being with the first imperative need is a state life of perfect and absolute sincerity in all the consciousness. It is indispensable that you should not deceive yourself or deceive or be deceived by others. Often people have a wishuniverse, a mental preference or vital desire; they want his mind with the experience to happen in a particular way or to take a turn that satisfies their ideas or desires or preferences; they do not keep themselves blank cosmic mind, his spiritual knowledge and unprejudiced and simply and sincerely observe what happens. Then if you do not like what happens, it is easy to deceive yourself; you will see one thing, but give it a little twist with the divine knowledge and make it something else, or you will distort something simple and straightforward or magnify it into an extraordinary experience. When you sit both in meditation you must be as candid itself and simple as a childit pours itself through these channels, not interfering by your external mind, expecting nothing, insisting on nothinghis spirit with the one spirit in all beings. Once this condition is there, all All the rest depends upon the aspiration deep within you. If you ask from within for peace, it variety of cosmic existence will come; if for strength, for power, for knowledge, they too will come, but all be changed to him in that unity and revealed in the measure secret of your capacity to receive itits spiritual significance. And if you call upon For in this spiritual bliss and being he will be one with That which is the Divine, then too—always admitting that the Divine is open to your call, origin and continent and inhabitant and that means your call is pure enough spirit and strong enough to reach him,—you constituting power of all existence. This will have be the answerhighest reach of self-perfection. (The Mother, 23 June 1929) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/0324/23the-juneelements-of-1929#p23perfection</ref>
At the same time it must be added that the power is enough; the abstention from all physical action is not indispensable, the aversion to action mental or corporeal is not desirable. 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 mere inertia of mind or vitality or body be surmounted, and if that habit is found growing on the nature, the will of the Purusha must be used to dismiss it. Eventually, a state arrives when the life and the body perform as mere instruments the will of the Purusha in the mind without any strain or attachment, without their putting themselves into the action with that inferior, eager and often feverish energy which is the nature of their ordinary working; they come to work as forces of Nature work without the fret and toil and reaction characteristic of life in the body when it is not yet master of the physical. When we attain to this perfection, then action and inaction become immaterial, since neither interferes with the freedom of the soul or draws it away from its urge towards the Self or its poise in the Self. But this state of perfection arrives later in the Yoga and till then the law of moderation laid down by the Gita is the best for us; too much mental or physical action then is not good since excess draws away too much energy and reacts unfavourably upon the spiritual condition; too little also is not good since defect leads to a habit of inaction and even to an incapacity which has afterwards to be surmounted with difficulty. Still, periods of absolute calm, solitude and cessation from works are highly desirable and should be secured as often as possible for that recession of the soul into itself which is indispensable to knowledge. <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/23/the-release-from-subjection-to-the-body#p8~</refcenter>
Mind finds fully its force and action only when it casts itself upon life and accepts equally its possibilities and its resistances So long as he remains in the means of a greater selfworld-existence, this perfection. In must radiate out from him,—for that is the struggle necessity of his oneness with the difficulties universe and its beings,—in an influence and action which help all around who are capable of it to rise to or advance towards the material world same perfection, and for the ethical development of rest in an influence and action which help, as only the individual is firmly shaped self-ruler and the great schools of conduct are formed; by contact with the facts of life Art attains to vitality, Thought assures its abstractionsmaster man can help, in leading the generalisations human race forward spiritually towards this consummation and towards some image of the philosopher base themselves on a stable foundation greater divine truth in their personal and communal existence. He becomes a light and power of science the Truth to which he has climbed and experiencea means for others’ ascension. <ref>httpttp://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2324/the-threefoldperfection-life#p18of-the-mental-being?search=perfection</ref>
== Highest How to Achieve Perfection =? =
The calm established in the whole being must remain Master of our works respects our nature even when he is transforming it; he works always through the same whatever happens, in health nature and disease, in pleasure and in pain, even in not by any arbitrary caprice. This imperfect nature of ours contains the strongest physical pain, in good fortune and misfortune, materials of our own or that of those we loveperfection, in success and failurebut inchoate, honour and insultdistorted, praise and blamemisplaced, justice done to us thrown together in disorder or injustice, everything that ordinarily affects the minda poor imperfect order. If we see unity everywhereAll this material has to be patiently perfected, if we recognise that all comes by the divine willpurified, see God in allreorganised, in our enemies or rather our opponents in the game of life as well as our friends, in the powers that oppose and resist us as well as the powers that favour new-moulded and assisttransformed, in all energies not hacked and forces hewn and happeningsslain or mutilated, not obliterated by simple coercion and if besides we can feel that all is undivided from our self, all the denial. This world one with us within our universal being, then this attitude becomes much easier to the heart and mind. But even before we can attain or who live in it are firmly seated in that universal visionhis creation and manifestation, we have by all the means in our power to insist on this receptive and active equality he deals with it and calm. Even something of it, alpam api asya dharmasya, is a great step towards perfection; a first firmness us in it is the beginning of liberated perfection; its completeness is the perfect assurance of a rapid progress in all the other members of perfection. For without way our narrow and ignorant mind cannot understand unless it we can have no solid basis; falls silent and by the pronounced lack of it we shall be constantly falling back opens to the lower status of desire, ego, duality, ignorancea divine knowledge. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2423/the-actionmaster-of-equalitythe-work#p5p6</ref>
As you pursue this labour of purification and unification, you must at the same time take great care to perfect the external and instrumental part of your being. When the higher truth manifests, it must find in you a mind that is supple and rich enough to be able to give the idea that seeks to express itself a form of thought which preserves its force and clarity. This thought, again, when it seeks to clothe itself in words, must find in you a sufficient power of expression so that the words reveal the thought and do not deform it. And the formula in which you embody the truth should be manifested in all your feelings, all your acts of will, all your actions, in all the movements of your being. Finally, these movements themselves should, by constant effort, attain their highest perfection. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/12/the-science-of-living#p6</ref>==Prerequisites==
=== SoulThe first necessity is some fundamental poise of the soul both in its essential and its natural being regarding and meeting the things, impacts and workings of Nature. This poise we shall arrive at by growing into a perfect equality, samatā. The self, spirit or Brahman is one in all and therefore one to all; it is, as is said in the Gita which has developed fully this idea of equality and indicated its experience on at least one side of equality, the equal Brahman, samaṁ brahma; the Gita even goes so far in one passage as to identify equality and yoga, samatvaṁ yoga ucyate. That is to say, equality is the sign of unity with the Brahman, of becoming Brahman, of growing into an undisturbed spiritual poise of being in the Infinite. Its importance can hardly be exaggerated; for it is the sign of our having passed beyond the egoistic determinations of our nature, of our having conquered our enslaved response to the dualities, of our having transcended the shifting turmoil of the gunas, of our having entered into the 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, Mind an equal bliss which can only come when the peace of equality is founded and Perfection ===which is the beatific flower of its fullness. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/the-elements-of-perfection#p2</ref>
The character of these higher states of the soul and their greater worlds of spiritual Nature is necessarily difficult to seize. Even the Upanishads and the Veda only shadow them out by figures, hints and symbols. Yet it is necessary to attempt some account of their principles and practical effect so far as they can be grasped by the mind that stands on the border of the two hemispheres. The passage beyond that border would be the culmination, the completeness of the Yoga of self-transcendence by self-knowledge. The soul that aspires to perfection, draws back and upward, says the Upanishad, from the physical into the vital and from the vital into the mental Purusha, from the mental into the knowledge-soul and from that self of knowledge into the bliss Purusha. This self of bliss is the conscious foundation of perfect Sachchidananda and to pass into it completes the soul's ascension. The mind therefore must try to give to itself some account of this decisive transformation of the embodied consciousness, this radiant transfiguration and self-exceeding of our ever aspiring nature. The description mind can arrive at, can never be adequate to the thing itself, but it may point at least to some indicative shadow of it or perhaps some half-luminous image. <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/23/the-ladder-of-self-transcendence#p13~</refcenter>
But always The next necessity of perfection is to raise all the whole foundation active parts of the gnostic life must be by its very human nature inward to that highest condition and working pitch of their power and not outward. In the life capacity, ''śakti'', at which they become capable of being divinised into true instruments of the spirit it is free, perfect, spiritual and divine action. For practical purposes we may take the spiritunderstanding, the inner Realityheart, that has built up the prana and uses the mindbody as the four members of our nature which have thus to be prepared, vital being and body as its instrumentation; thoughtwe have to find the constituent terms of their perfection. Also there is the dynamical force in us (vīrya) of the temperament, feeling character and action do not exist for themselvessoul nature, they are not an object''svabhāva'', but which makes the meanspower of our members effective in action and gives them their type and direction; they serve this has to express be freed from its limitations, enlarged, rounded so that the whole manhood in us may become the manifested basis of a divine Reality within us: otherwisemanhood, without this inwardness, this spiritual originationwhen the Purusha, the real Man in a too externalised consciousness or by only external meansus, no greater or the divine life is possible. In our present life of NatureSoul, shall act fully in our externalised surface existence, it is this human instrument and shine fully through this human vessel. To divinise the world that seems perfected nature we have to create us; but call in the turn divine Power or Shakti to the spiritual life it is we who must create ourselves and replace our world. In limited human energy so that this new formula of creation, may be shaped into the inner life becomes image of the first importance and filled with the rest can be only its expression and outcome. It is thisforce of a greater infinite energy, indeed''daivī prakṛti, that is indicated by our own strivings towards bhāgavatī śakti''. This perfectionwill grow in the measure in which we can surrender ourselves, first, to the guidance and then to the perfection direct action of our own soul that Power and mind and life and the perfection of the life Master of the race. For we are given a world which is obscure, ignorant, material, imperfectour being and our works to whom it belongs, and our external conscious being for this purpose faith is itself created by the energiesessential, faith is the pressure, the moulding operations great motor-power of this vast mute obscurityour being in our aspirations to perfection, by physical birth—here, by environment, by a training through faith in God and the Shakti which shall begin in the impacts heart and shocks understanding, but shall take possession of life; and yet we are vaguely aware of something that is there in us or seeking to beall our nature, something other than what has been thus madeall its consciousness, a spirit selfall its dynamic motive-existentforce. These four things are the essentials of this second element of perfection, self-determiningthe full powers of the members of the instrumental nature, pushing the perfected dynamis of the soul nature towards , the creation assumption of an image of its own occult perfection or Idea them into the action of perfection. There is something that grows in us in answer to this demand, that strives to become the image of a divine. SomewhatPower, 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, perfect faith in the image of its own spiritual and mental and vital growth, to make all our world too something created according members to our own mind call and self-conceiving spiritsupport that assumption, ''śakti, something newvīrya, harmoniousdaivī prakṛti, perfectśraddhā''. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2224/the-divineelements-of-lifeperfection#p6p3</ref>
== Supermind ==<center>~</center>
If consciousness is ...perfection of our instrumental nature... the perfection of the central secretintelligence, life is the outward indicationheart, the effective power of being in Matter; for it is that which liberates vital consciousness and gives it its form or embodiment body, the perfection of force and its effectuation in material act. If some revelation or effectuation the fundamental soul powers, the perfection of itself in Matter is the ultimate aim surrender of our instruments and action to the evolving Being in its birthdivine Shakti, life depend at every moment of their progression on a... power that is covertly and overtly the exterior and dynamic sign and index pivot of that revelation all endeavour and effectuation. But life alsoaction, as it is nowfaith, ''śraddhā''. The perfect faith is imperfect and evolving; it evolves through growth of consciousness even as consciousness evolves through greater organisation and perfection an assent of life: a greater consciousness means a greater life. Man, the mental whole beingto the truth seen by it or offered to its acceptance, has an imperfect life because mind and its central working is not the first and highest power of consciousness a faith of the Being; even if mind were perfected, there would be still something yet soul in its own will to be realised, not yet manifested. For what is involved and emergent is not a Mind, but a Spirit, attain and become and mind is not the native dynamism its idea of consciousness self and things and its knowledge, of which the Spirit; supermind, the light of gnosis, is its native dynamism. If then life has to become a manifestation belief of the Spiritintellect, it is the manifestation of a spiritual being in us heart’s consent and the divine life desire of a perfected consciousness in a supramental or gnostic power of spiritual being that must be the secret burden life mind to possess and intention of evolutionary Naturerealise are the outward figures. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2224/thefaith-divineand-life#p3shakti?search=perfection</ref>
These are the first major results of the spiritual transformation that follow as a necessary consequence of the nature of Supermind. But if there is The condition to be not only a perfection of the inner existenceaimed at, of the consciousness, real achievement of an inner delight of existenceYoga, but a the final perfection of the life and actionattainment, two other questions present themselves from our mental view-point for which have to our human thought about our life and its dynamisms all else is only a considerablepreparation, even is a premier importance. First, there consciousness in which it is impossible to do anything without the place of personality in the gnostic beingDivine; for then,—whether if you are without the statusDivine, the building very source of the being will be quite other than what we experience your action disappears; knowledge, power, all are gone. But so long as you feel that the form and life of the person or similar. If there is a personality and it is in any way responsible for its actions, there intervenes, nextpowers you use are your own, you will not miss the question of the place of the ethical element and its perfection and fulfilment in the gnostic natureDivine support. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/2203/the28-gnosticapril-being1929#p28p14</ref>
= Body and Perfection =Process==
== Perfecting the Body =By Education and Training===
This is one of the things one discovers gradually If you said to yourself, my children, "We want to be as perfect instruments as possible to express the body becomes ready for transformations. It is quite a remarkable instrument divine Will in the see that it can experience two contraries at the same time. There is a certain state of body-consciousness which brings things togetherworld", 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 then for harmonising opposites (that of course, is quite indispensable), when one has succeeded in doing thisinstrument to be perfect, there are moments when it alternatesmust be cultivated, you seeeducated, one thing comes after the other, while what is remarkable in the consciousness trained. It must not be left like a shapeless piece of the body is that stone. When you want to build with a stone you chisel it can feel ("feel", can we say "feel"?—"experience"—the word "aware" expresses it best) all things simultaneously, as though ; when you were hot and cold at oncewant to make a formless block into a beautiful diamond, as though you were active and passive at oncechisel it. Well, it is the same thing. When with your brain and everything becomes like that. Then body you begin want to grasp make a beautiful instrument for the totality of movements in the cells. It is something much more concrete naturallyDivine, but much more perfect in the body than in any other part of the being. This means that if things continue in this wayyou must cultivate it, sharpen it will be proved that the physical, material instrument is the most perfect of all. That is why perhaps refine it , complete what is the most difficult to transformmissing, to perfect. But of all, it what is the one most capable of perfectionthere. (The Mother, 21 April 1954) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/0605/2113-aprilmay-19541953#p31p18</ref>
Be on your guard against the wrath of the body. Control your actions, and leaving behind wrong ways of acting, practise perfect conduct in action. <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/anger#p10~</refcenter>
One who aspires The way to the ineffable Peaceattain to this perfect consciousness is to increase your actual consciousness beyond its present grooves and limits, one whose mind is awakenedto educate it, whose thoughts are not entangled to open it to the Divine Light and to let the Divine Light work in it fully and freely. But the net Light can do its full and unhindered work only when you have got rid of desireall craving and fear, that one is said when you have no mental prejudices, no vital preferences, no physical apprehensions or attractions to be "bound upstream" (towards perfection)obscure or bind you. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/pleasure30-june-1929#p10p8</ref>
As for the question about the illness, perfection in the physical plane is indeed part of the ideal of the Yoga, but it is the last item and, so long as the fundamental change has not been made in the material consciousness to which the body belongs, one may have a certain perfection on other planes without having immunity in the body. <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/31/illness-and-health#p57~</refcenter>
Transformation and Fundamentally, whatever be the Body : The supramental perfection means that path one follows—whether the body becomes consciouspath of surrender, consecration, knowledge—if one wants it to be perfect, it is filled with consciousness always equally difficult, and that as this there is the Truth consciousness all its actionsbut one way, one only, functionings etc. become by the power I know of the consciousness within it harmoniousonly one: that is perfect sincerity, luminous, right and true—without ignorance or disorder. but perfect sincerity! <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/2806/transformation-and12-themay-body1954#p3p34</ref>
== Body Perfection or Immortality =By Becoming Conscious of Oneself===
When the body has learned the art of constantly progressing towards an increasing "To work for your perfection, we shall be well on the way first step is to overcoming the inevitability become conscious of deathyourself. (The Mother, 16 January 1972) " <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/1604/1613-january-19721951#p1p16</ref>
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. (The Mother, 15 November 1971) <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/17/15-november-1971#p1~</refcenter>
Ah! No. You are looking from To work for your perfection, 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 first step is because their body becomes useless that they die. If they are not to diebecome conscious of yourself, of the different parts of your being and their body should not become uselessrespective activities. This is just the contrary. It is precisely because the body decaysYou must learn to distinguish these different parts one from another, declines and ends in a complete degradation so that death becomes necessary. But if you may become clearly aware of the body followed the progressive movement origin of the inner beingmovements that occur in you, if it had the same sense of progress many impulses, reactions and perfection as the psychic being, there would be no necessity for it conflicting wills that drive you to die. One year added to another need not bring a deteriorationaction. It is only an assiduous study which demands much perseverance and sincerity. For man's nature, especially his mental nature, has a spontaneous tendency to give a habit of Naturefavourable explanation for everything he thinks, feels, says and does. It is only a habit of what is happening at this moment. And that is exactly by observing these movements with great care, by bringing them, as it were, before the cause tribunal of death. One can foresee quite wellour highest ideal, on the contrarywith 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 movement for perfection which is at capacity of knowing the beginning truth of life might continue under another form. I have already told you our being, that one does not foresee an uninterrupted growthis to say, what we are truly created for that would need changing the height of the houses after some time! But this growth , what we can call our mission upon earth, then we must, in height may be changed into a growth very regular and constant manner, reject from us or eliminate in perfection: us whatever contradicts the perfection truth of the formour existence, whatever is opposed to it. All the imperfections of the form may be gradually correctedIn this way, little by little, all the weaknesses replaced by strengthparts, all the incapacities by skillelements of our being can be organised into a homogeneous whole around our psychic centre. Why should it not This work of unification requires much time to be like this? You do not think brought to some degree of perfection. Therefore, in that way because you have 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 habit success of seeing things otherwise. But there is no reason why this should not happenour endeavour. (The Mother, 17 June 1953) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/0512/17the-junescience-of-1953living#p36p5</ref>
But, you see, when our little humanity says three hundred years with the same body, you say: "Why! when I am fifty it already begins to decompose, so at three hundred it will be a horrible thing!" But it is not like that. If it is three hundred years with a body that goes on perfecting itself from year to year, perhaps when the three hundredth year is reached one will say: "Oh! I still need three or four hundred more to be what I want to be." If each year that passes represents a progress, a transformation, one would like to have more and more years in order to be able to transform oneself more and more. When something is not exactly as you want it to be—take, for example, simply one of the things I have just described, say, plasticity or lightness or elasticity or luminosity, and none of them is exactly as you want it, then you will still need at least two hundred years more so that it may be accomplished, but you never think: "How is it? It is still going to last two hundred years more!" On the contrary, you say: "Two hundred years more are absolutely necessary so that it may be truly done." And then, when all is done, when all is perfect, then there is no longer any question of years, for you are immortal. (The Mother, 20 May 1953) <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/05/20-may-1953#p44~</refcenter>
= Integral Perfection = == Ego and Perfection == Why do you say that sensitivity is the sign of a strong ego? It does not seem If in passing from one domain to be evident at all. Moreover, there are many different kinds of sensitivity: some stem another we renounce what has already been given us from weaknesseagerness for our new attainment, others—the best—are if in reaching the result of refinement. The ego generally governs mental life we cast away or belittle the development of the individualphysical life which is our basis, but or if we reject the most developed individualities are not necessarily those mental and physical in whom our attraction to the ego is strongest—on the contrary. As the individuality perfects itselfspiritual, the power of the ego diminisheswe do not fulfil God integrally, and indeed it is by perfecting himself that nor satisfy the individual arrives at that state conditions of divinisation which liberates him from the egoHis self-manifestation. (The MotherWe do not become perfect, 2 September 1964) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/16/2-september-1964#p3</ref> Never forget that here it is for but only shift the perfection field of the work that our imperfection or at most attain a limited altitude. However high we are strivingmay climb, not for the satisfaction of the ego. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/13/organisation-and-work#p55</ref> The egoism of the instrument can even though it be as dangerous or more dangerous to spiritual progress than the egoism of the doer. The egoNon-sense is contrary to spiritual realisationBeing itself, so how can any kind of ego be a thing we climb ill if we forget our base. Not to be encouraged? As for abandon the magnified egolower to itself, but to transfigure it is one in the light of the most perilous obstacles higher to release and perfection. There should be no big Iwhich we have attained, not even a small oneis true divinity of nature. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/3121/egothe-anddestiny-itsof-formsthe-individual#p54p9</ref>
If you think there is no ego or desire in you, only pure devotion, that shows a great unconsciousness. To be free from ego and desire is a condition which needs a high siddhi in Yoga—even many Yogis of a great spiritual attainment are not free from it. For a sadhak at your stage of development to think he is free from ego and desire is to blind himself and prevent the clear perception of one's own nature movements which is necessary for progress towards spiritual perfection. <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/31/ego-and-its-forms#p74~</refcenter>
This vairagya, or loss In the process of this change there must be by the very necessity of zest, as you have yourself said, began before you came here. I have indeed laid some stress on the conquest effort two stages of sex, for obvious reasons; but I have hardly laid a compulsory stress on anything elseits working. CertainlyFirst, I have not encouraged you to lose joy in vital creativeness; I have only held up there will be the ideal personal endeavour of turning it towards the Divine human being, as soon as he becomes aware by his soul, mind, heart of this divine possibility and away from the ego. To keep turns towards it as the vital full true object of life and energy , to prepare himself for it and to trust mainly get rid of all in him that belongs to the inner growth and the descent of a higher consciousness for a changelower working, using of all that stands in the will too but for self-mastery, not for suppression, but for subordination way of the lower his opening to the higherspiritual truth and its power, has been my teaching. The so as to possess by this liberation his spiritual being and turn to vairagya, to tapasya all his natural movements into free means of an ascetic kind was the impulse its self-expression… The second stage of something in your own nature; it insisted on its necessity just as this Yoga will therefore be a part persistent giving up of all the vital insisted on its opposite: even it condemned my suggestion action of something less grim and strenuous as an easy-going absence the nature into the hands of aspiration etc. I do not say that vairagya and tapasya are not ways to reach the Divinethis greater Power, but done like that they are painful ways and long; if one takes thema substitution of its influence, one must be determined possession and go through. For one part to push all zest out of working for the vital and for personal effort, until the other Divine to regret and say, why did I ever do it, will never do. And it is in this kind whom we aspire becomes the direct master of tapasya that perfection or at least perfect purification is demanded before there can be any realisation. I have never said that for my the Yoga; and effects the only thing I insist upon is some faith, inner surrender entire spiritual and opening ideal conversion 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 nothingbeing. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2924/asceticism-and-the-integral-yoga#p9perfection?search=perfection</ref>
== The Mundane But if you remain in that consciousness and Divine Perfection ==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. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/05/20-may-1953#p54</ref>
A divine perfection of the human being is our aim. We must know then first what are the essential elements that constitute man's total perfection; secondly, what we mean by a divine as distinguished from a human perfection of our being. That man as a being is capable of self-development and of some approach at least to an ideal standard of perfection which his mind is able to conceive, fix before it and pursue, is common ground to all thinking humanity, though it may be only the minority who concern themselves with this possibility as providing the one most important aim of life. But by some the ideal is conceived as a mundane change, by others as a religious conversion. <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/the-integral-perfection#p1</ref> The mundane perfection is sometimes conceived of as something outward, social, a thing of action, a more rational dealing with our fellow-men and our environment, a better and more efficient citizenship and discharge of duties, a better, richer, kindlier and happier way of living, with a more just and more harmonious associated enjoyment of the opportunities of existence. By others again a more inner and subjective ideal is cherished, a clarifying and raising of the intelligence, will and reason, a heightening and ordering of power and capacity in the nature, a nobler ethical, a richer aesthetic, a finer emotional, a much healthier and better-governed vital and physical being. Sometimes one element is stressed, almost to the exclusion of the rest; sometimes, in wider and more well-balanced minds, the whole harmony is envisaged as a total perfection. A change of education and social institutions is the outward means adopted or an inner self-training and development is preferred as the true instrumentation. Or the two aims may be clearly united, the perfection of the inner individual, the perfection of the outer living. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/the-integral-perfection#p2</ref> We know, we have said this many a time, that all work is a prayer made with the body and that the true attitude in work is an offering to the Divine. Well, this was satisfied with the way the thing was done. For I was looking on, to see, as I said, if there were things which were not as they should have been. But in any case, to the eye of this consciousness which was looking on, it was satisfying. Materially, you see, I said, "In the outer human consciousness this can be done much better." That of course is understood, we haven't reached the height of perfection, far from that, but it must also be said that it is only a very small part of our activity... that we are trying much more than this, that it is only one of the movements of our sadhana, you see. We are busy with many other things besides this... one thing among many others... and to put up something like this according to the accomplishment which the laws of human perfection demand, infinitely more time, infinitely more work and infinitely more means would have been necessary. But we are not seeking an exclusive perfection in one thing or another, we are trying to make everything go forward together to a common, integral perfection. And these things have their place and importance, but they don't have an exclusive place and importance. Therefore, from the external point of view, one may criticise and find something to say and all that; but it is not that, the true point of view. Inwardly, it is well. (The Mother, 30 November 1955) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/07/30-november-1955#p28</ref> 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. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/23/the-synthesis-of-the-systems#p19</ref> == Perfection of All Kinds == Perfection of all kinds is indeed good, as it is the sign of the pressure of the consciousness in the material world towards full self-expression in this or that limit, on this or that level. In a certain sense it is an urge of the Divine itself hidden in forms that tends in the lesser degrees of consciousness towards its own increasing self-revelation. Perfection of an object or a scene in inanimate Nature, animate perfection of strength, speed, physical beauty, courage or animal fidelity, affection, intelligence, perfection of art, music, poetry, literature,—perfection of the intellect in any kind of mental activity, the perfect statesman, warrior, artist, craftsman,—perfection in vital force and capacity, perfection in ethical qualities, character, temperament,—all have their high value, their place as rungs in the ladder of evolution, the seried steps of the spirit's emergence. If one likes to call that spiritual because of this hidden urge behind it one can do so; it can at least be regarded as a preparation for the secret spirit's emergence. But thought and knowledge can only proceed by making the necessary distinctions. Much confusion is created by neglecting them. This mental idealism, ethical development, religious piety and fervour, occult powers and feats have all been taken as spirituality and the spiritual evolution kept tied to the moorings of the planes of lesser consciousness which do indeed prepare the soul by experience for the spiritual consciousness but are not themselves that. For perfection can only become truly spiritual when it is founded on the awakened spiritual consciousness and takes on its peculiar essence. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/28/idealism-and-spirituality#p1</ref> "The supramental world has to be formed or created in us by the Divine Will as the result of a constant expansion and self-perfecting." (The Mother, 27 June 1956) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/08/27-june-1956#p31</ref> Moral perfection is to have all the qualities that are considered moral: to have no defects, never to make a mistake, never to err, to be always what one conceives to be the best, to have all the virtues. (The Mother, 1 October 1958) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/09/1-october-1958#p3</ref> == Consciousness and Perfection == The way to attain to this perfect consciousness is to increase your actual consciousness beyond its present grooves and limits, to educate it, to open it to the Divine Light and to let the Divine Light work in it fully and freely. But the Light can do its full and unhindered work only when you have got rid of all craving and fear, when you have no mental prejudices, no vital preferences, no physical apprehensions or attractions to obscure or bind you. (The Mother, 30 June 1929) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/30-june-1929#p8</ref> Ignorance is dispelled by a growing consciousness; what you need is consciousness and always more consciousness, a consciousness pure, simple and luminous. In the light of this perfected consciousness, things appear as they are and not as they want to appear. It is like a screen faithfully recording all things as they pass. You see there what is luminous and what is dark, what is straight and what is crooked. Your consciousness becomes a screen or mirror; but this is when you are in a state of contemplation, a mere observer; when you are active, it is like a searchlight. You have only to turn it on, if you want to see luminously and examine penetratingly anything in any place. (The Mother, 30 June 1929) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/30-june-1929#p7~</refcenter>
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/24/the-psychology-of-self-perfection#p8</ref>
= Individual Perfection =<center>~</center>
== Perfect Individual ==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 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.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/23/the-supermind-and-the-yoga-of-works#p1</ref>
A child should never ===By Learning to be scolded. I am accused of speaking ill of parents! But I have seen them at work, you see, and I know that ninety per cent of parents snub a child who comes spontaneously to confess a mistake: "You are very naughty. Go away, I am busy"—instead of listening to the child with patience and explaining to him where his fault lies, how he ought to have acted. And the child, who had come with good intentions, goes away quite hurt, with the feeling: "Why am I treated thus?" Then the child sees his parents are not perfect—which is obviously true of them today—he sees that they are wrong and says to himself: "Why does he scold me, he is like me!" (The Mother, 8 January 1951) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/04/8-january-1951#p31</ref>Witness===
In ...we find ourselves to be not the Dhammapada: mind, but a mental being who stands behind the action of the embodied mind, not a supreme disinterestedness mental and vital personality,—personality is a supreme liberation composition of Nature,—but a mental Person,manomaya puruṣa. We become aware of a being within who takes his stand upon mind for self-knowledge and world-knowledge and thinks of himself as an individual for self-experience and world-experience, for an inward action and an outward-going action, but is to follow yet different from mind, life and body. First, he has the intuition of himself as someone observing the discipline action of the mind; it is something which is going on in him and yet before him as an object of his regarding knowledge. This self-perfectionawareness is the intuitive sense of the witness Purusha, ''sākṣī''. Witness Purusha is a pure consciousness who watches Nature and sees it as an action reflected upon the march of progressconsciousness and enlightened by that consciousness, not but in itself other than it.To enter into identity with that Spirit must then be his way to control and lordship. He can do it passively by a precise end sort of reflection and receiving in view his mental consciousness, but because this march of progress then he is only a mould, channel or instrument, not a possessor or participant in the profound law and power. He can arrive at identity by an absorption of his mentality in inner spiritual being, but then the purpose conscious action ceases in a trance of identity. To be active master of earthly lifethe nature he must evidently rise to some higher supramental poise where there is possible not only a passive, but an active identity with the controlling spirit. To find the truth way of universal existence rising to this greater poise and because you put yourself in harmony with itbe self-ruler, spontaneouslySwarat, whatever the result may beis a condition of his perfection. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/0324/the-brahmin#p43perfection-of-the-mental-being?search=perfection</ref>
If this is our evolutionary destiny, it remains for us to see where we stand at this juncture in the evolutionary progression,—a progression which has been cyclic or spiral rather than in a straight line or has at least journeyed in a very zigzag swinging curve of advance,—and what prospect there is of any turn towards a decisive step in the near or measurable future. In our human aspiration towards a personal perfection and the perfection of the life of the race the elements of the future evolution are foreshadowed and striven after, but in a confusion of half-enlightened knowledge; there is a discord between the necessary elements, an opposing emphasis, a profusion of rudimentary unsatisfying and ill-accorded solutions. These sway between the three principal preoccupations of our idealism,—the complete single development of the human being in himself, the perfectibility of the individual, a full development of the collective being, the perfectibility of society, and, more pragmatically restricted, the perfect or best possible relations of individual with individual and society and of community with community. An exclusive or dominant emphasis is laid sometimes on the individual, sometimes on the collectivity or society, sometimes on a right and balanced relation between the individual and the collective human whole. One idea holds up the growing life, freedom or perfection of the human individual as the true object of our existence,—whether the ideal be merely a free self-expression of the personal being or a self-governed whole of complete mind, fine and ample life and perfect body, or a spiritual perfection and liberation. In this view society is there only as a field of activity and growth for the individual man and serves best its function when it gives as far as possible a wide room, ample means, a sufficient freedom or guidance of development to his thought, his action, his growth, his possibility of fullness of being. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/22/the-divine-life#p34</ref>===By Developing Detachment===
It is, then, this spiritual fulfilment The seeker of the urge integral state of knowledge must be free from attachment to individual perfection action and an inner completeness equally free from attachment to inaction. Especially must any tendency to mere inertia of being mind or vitality or body be surmounted, and if that we mean first when we speak of a divine life. It habit is found growing on the first essential condition nature, the will of the Purusha must be used to dismiss it. Eventually, a perfected state arrives when the life on earth, and we are therefore right in making the utmost possible individual perfection our first supreme business. The perfection body perform as mere instruments the will of the spiritual and pragmatic relation of Purusha in the mind without any strain or attachment, without their putting themselves into the individual action with all around him that inferior, eager and often feverish energy which is our second preoccupationthe nature of their ordinary working; they come to work as forces of Nature work without the solution fret and toil and reaction characteristic of this second desideratum lies life in a complete universality and oneness with all life upon earth which the body when it is the other concomitant result not yet master of an evolution into the gnostic consciousness and naturephysical. But there still remains the third desideratumWhen we attain to this perfection, a new worldthen action and inaction become immaterial, a change in since neither interferes with the total life freedom of humanity the soul or, at draws it away from its urge towards the least, a new perfected collective life Self or its poise in the earth-natureSelf. This calls for the appearance not only But this state of isolated evolved individuals acting perfection arrives later in the unevolved mass, but Yoga and till then the law of many gnostic individuals forming moderation laid down by the Gita is the best for us; too much mental or physical action then is not good since excess draws away too much energy and reacts unfavourably upon the spiritual condition; too little also is not good since defect leads to a new kind habit of beings inaction and a new common life superior even to an incapacity which has afterwards to the present individual and common existencebe surmounted with difficulty. A collective life Still, periods of this kind must obviously constitute itself on the same principle absolute calm, solitude and cessation from works are highly desirable and should be secured as often as the life possible for that recession of the gnostic individualsoul into itself which is indispensable to knowledge. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2223/the-divinerelease-from-subjection-to-lifethe-body#p19p8</ref>
== Perfection in Work =By Developing Equality===
You The calm established in the whole being must remain the same whatever happens, in health and disease, in pleasure and in pain, even in the strongest physical pain, in good fortune and misfortune, our own or that of those we love, in success and failure, honour and insult, praise and blame, justice done to us or injustice, everything that ordinarily affects the mind. If we see unity everywhere, if we recognise that all comes by the divine will become more , see God in all, in our enemies or rather our opponents in the game of life as well as our friends, in the powers that oppose and more perfect resist us as well as the powers that favour and assist, in your work as all energies and forces and happenings, and if besides we can feel that all is undivided from our self, all the consciousness growsworld one with us within our universal being, increasesthen this attitude becomes much easier to the heart and mind. But even before we can attain or are firmly seated in that universal vision, widens we have by all the means in our power to insist on this receptive and active equality and calm. Even something of it, alpam api asya dharmasya, is a great step towards perfection; a first firmness in it is the beginning of liberated perfection; its completeness is enlightenedthe perfect assurance of a rapid progress in all the other members of perfection. For without it we can have no solid basis; and by the pronounced lack of it we shall be constantly falling back to the lower status of desire, ego, duality, ignorance. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/1424/progressthe-andaction-perfection-inof-workequality#p1p5</ref>
In all action, all work done, the degree ===By Purification of perfection depends upon the degree of consciousness. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/14/progress-and-perfection-in-work#p3</ref>Nature===
Perfection ...purification is an essential means towards self-perfection. All these impurities and inadequacies result in various kinds of limitation and bondage: but there are two or three primary knots of the bondage,—ego is the principal knot,—from which the work others derive. These bonds must be got rid of; purification is not complete till it brings about liberation. Besides, after a certain purification and liberation has been effected, there is still the conversion of the purified instruments to the law of a higher object and utility, a large, real and perfect order of action. By the conversion man can arrive at a certain perfection of fullness of being, calm, power and knowledge, even a greater vital action and more perfect physical existence. One result of this perfection is a large and perfected delight of being, Ananda.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/the-perfection-of-the-mental-being?search=perfection</ref><center>~</center>The divine existence is of the aimnature 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 is only by 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 very patient effort that this 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 obtainedattained by the integral Yoga. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/1423/progressthe-andsynthesis-perfectionof-inthe-worksystems#p19</ref>
Open yourself more and more to the Divine's force and your work will progress steadily towards perfection. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/14/progress-and-perfection-in-work#p21</ref>===By Cultivating Faith===
Let nothing short There is one kind of perfection faith demanded as indispensable by the integral Yoga and that may be your ideal described as faith in God and the Shakti, faith in the presence and power of the Divine in work us and the world, a faith that all in the world is the working of one divine Shakti, that all the steps of the Yoga, its strivings and sufferings and failures as well as its successes and you satisfactions and victories are sure utilities and necessities of her workings and that by a firm and strong dependence on and a total self-surrender to become a true instrument of the Divineand to his Shakti in us we can attain to oneness and freedom and victory and perfection. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/1424/progressfaith-and-shakti?search=perfection-in-work#p25</ref>
There must be order and harmony in work. Even what is apparently ===By Silencing the most insignificant thing must be done with perfect perfection, with a sense of cleanliness, beauty, harmony and order. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/14/progress-and-perfection-in-work#p26</ref>Mind===
The perfection There is a world of ideas without form and it is there that you must enter if you want to seize what is behind the words. So long as you have to draw your understanding from the forms of words, you are likely to fall into much confusion about the true sense; but if in a silence of your mind you can rise into the world from which ideas descend to take form, at once the real understanding comes. If you are to be sure of understanding one another, you must be able to understand in silence. There is a condition in which your minds are so well attuned and harmonised together that one perceives the thought of the work done other without any necessity of words. But if there is much more important than not this attunement, there will always be some deformation of your meaning, because to what you speak the other mind supplies its own significance. I use a word in a certain sense or shade of its bulk sense; you are accustomed to put into it another sense or shade. Then, evidently, you will understand, not my exact meaning in it, but what the bigness word means to you. This is true not of speech only, but of reading also. If you want to understand a book with a deep teaching in it, you must be able to read it in the mind's silence; you must wait and let the expression go deep inside you into the region where words are no more and from there come slowly back to your exterior consciousness and its scopesurface understanding. But if you let the words jump at your external mind and try to adapt and adjust the two, you will have entirely missed their real sense and power. There can be no perfect understanding unless you are in union with the unexpressed mind that is behind the centre of expression. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/1403/progress26-may-1929#p21</ref><center>~</center>Man, too, becomes perfect only when he has found within himself that absolute calm and passivity of the Brahman and supports by it with the same divine tolerance and the same divine bliss a free and-perfection-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-workomnipresent#p38p5</ref>
In works, aspiration towards =Difficulties on the Path to Perfection is true spirituality. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/14/progress-and-perfection-in-work#p45</ref>=
=== Practical Tips for Perfection No man is perfect; the vital is there and the ego is there to prevent it. It is only when there is the total transformation of the external and the internal being down to the very subconscient, that perfection is possible. Till then imperfection will remain as our common heritage. <ref>http://incarnateword.in Work ===/cwsa/31/the-subconscient-and-the-integral-yoga#p2</ref>
Do not worry about mistakes in work. Often you imagine that things are badly done by you when really you have done them very well; but even if there are mistakes, it is nothing to be sad about. Let the consciousness grow—only in the divine consciousness is there an entire perfection. The more you surrender to the Divine, the more will there be the possibility of perfection in you. <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/29/practical-concerns-in-work#p39~</refcenter>
Someone who is learning to paint or play music The egoism of the instrument can be as dangerous or write and does not like more dangerous to have his mistakes pointed out by those who already know—how spiritual progress than the egoism of the doer. The ego-sense is he contrary to learn at all or reach spiritual realisation, so how can any perfection kind of techniqueego be a thing to be encouraged? As for the magnified ego, it is one of the most perilous obstacles to release and perfection. There should be no big I, not even a small one. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2931/practicalego-concernsand-inits-workforms#p45p54</ref>
== Perfection and Inter-relation with Others ==<center>~</center>
...man is separated in The thing to which he has given his assent and set his mind, his life, his body from the universal and therefore, even as he does not know himself, is equally heart and even more incapable of knowing his fellow-creatures. He forms by inferenceswill to achieve, theories, observations and a certain imperfect capacity the divine perfection of sympathy a rough mental construction about them; but this is not knowledge. Knowledge can only come by conscious identitythe whole human being, for that is apparently an impossibility to the only true knowledgenormal intelligence,—existence aware of itself. We know what we are so far as we are consciously aware of ourself, the rest since it is hidden; so also we can come really opposed 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 actual facts of knowledge are indirect life and imperfect, the knowledge attained will also for long 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 aimscontradicted by immediate experience, necessities, conveniences, a certain imperfect and insecure harmony of our relations as happens 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 fellowall far-beings off and not merely at the sympathy created by love or the understanding created by mental knowledgedifficult ends, which will always be the knowledge of their superficial existence and therefore imperfect in itself and subject to denial and frustration it is denied too by many who have spiritual experience but believe that our present nature is the uprush sole possible nature of the unknown and unmastered from the subconscient or the subliminal in them and us. But this conscious oneness can only be established by entering into that man in which we are one with them, the universal body and the fullness of the universal exists consciently only in that which it is superconscient to us, in the Supermind: for here in our normal being only by throwing off the greater part of it is subconscient and therefore in this normal poise of mind, earthly life and body it cannot be possessed. The lower conscious nature is bound down to ego in or even all its activities, chained triply to individual existence that we can arrive at either a heavenly perfection or the stake release of differentiated individuality. The Supermind alone commands unity in diversityextinction. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2124/thefaith-problem-ofand-life#p9shakti?search=perfection</ref>
To make the effort for one's own perfection and not to be disturbed by any mistake in others but reply by a silent will for their perfection also is always the right attitude. <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/31/problems-in-human-relations#p9</ref> You stop short at the perfection that others should realise and you are seldom conscious of the goal you should be pursuing yourself. If you are conscious of it, well then, begin with the work which is given to you, that is to say, realise what you have to do and do not concern yourself with what others do, because, after all, it is not your business. And the best way to the true attitude is simply to say, "All those around me, all the circumstances of my life, all the people near me, are a mirror held up to me by the Divine Consciousness to show me the progress I must make. Everything that shocks me in others means a work I have to do in myself." <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/10/aphorism-8#p15</ref> And perhaps if one carried true perfection in oneself, one would discover it more often in others. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/10/aphorism-8#p16</ref> For the awakened individual the realisation of his truth of being and his inner liberation and perfection must be his primary seeking,—first, because that is the call of the Spirit within him, but also because it is only by liberation and perfection and realisation of the truth of being that man can arrive at truth of living. A perfected community also can exist only by the perfection of its individuals, and perfection can come only by the discovery and affirmation in life by each of his own spiritual being and the discovery by all of their spiritual unity and a resultant life unity. There can be no real perfection for us except by our inner self and truth of spiritual existence taking up all truth of the instrumental existence into itself and giving to it oneness, integration, harmony. As our only real freedom is the discovery and disengagement of the spiritual Reality within us, so our only means of true perfection is the sovereignty and self-effectuation of the spiritual Reality in all the elements of our nature. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/22/the-divine-life#p37</ref> We have to recognise once more that the individual exists not in himself alone but in the collectivity and that individual perfection and liberation are not the whole sense of God's intention in the world. The free use of our liberty includes also the liberation of others and of mankind; the perfect utility of our perfection is, having realised in ourselves the divine symbol, to reproduce, multiply and ultimately universalise it in others. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/23/the-threefold-life#p30</ref> 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. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/14/helping-others-and-the-world#p12</ref> There is a Reality, a truth of all existence which is greater and more abiding than all its formations and manifestations; to find that truth and Reality and live in it, achieve the most perfect manifestation and formation possible of it, must be the secret of perfection whether of individual or communal being. This Reality is there within each thing and gives to each of its formations its power of being and value of being. The universe is a manifestation of the Reality, and there is a truth of the universal existence, a Power of cosmic being, an all-self or world-spirit. Humanity is a formation or manifestation of the Reality in the universe, and there is a truth and self of humanity, a human spirit, a destiny of human life. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/22/the-divine-life#p36</ref> === When Man Becomes Perfect… === 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 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~</refcenter>
= Final Perfection 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 More =matter; there are considerable parts of the life being and the body which remain in the realm of the submental and the subconscient or inconscient. This is one serious obstacle to the mind's endeavour towards the perfection of the nature; for the continued share of the submental, the subconscient and inconscient in the government of the activities, by bringing in another law than that of the mental being, enables the conscious vital and the physical consciousness also to reject the law laid upon them by the mind and to follow their own impulses and instincts in defiance of the mental reason and the rational will of the developed intelligence. This makes it difficult for the mind to go beyond itself, to exceed its own level and spiritualise the nature; for what it cannot even make fully conscious, cannot securely mentalise and rationalise, it cannot spiritualise, since spiritualisation is a greater and more difficult integration. No doubt, by calling in the spiritual force, it can establish an influence and a preliminary change in some parts of the nature, especially in the thinking mind itself and in the heart which is nearest to its own province: but this change is not often a total perfection even within limits and what it does achieve is rare and difficult. The spiritual consciousness using the mind is employing an inferior means and, even though it brings in a divine light into the mind, a divine purity, passion, ardour into the heart or imposes a spiritual law upon the life, this new consciousness has to work within restrictions; for the most part it can only regulate or check the lower action of the life and rigorously control the body, but these members, even if refined or mastered, do not receive their spiritual fulfilment or undergo a perfection and transformation. For that it is necessary to bring in a higher dynamic principle which is native to the spiritual consciousness and by which, therefore, it can act in its own law and completer natural light and power and impose them upon the members. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/22/the-ascent-towards-supermind#p16</ref>
== Some Topics on Perfection ==
<div style=== Ease, Difficulty and Perfection ==="text-align: center;">
You must not cherish the illusion that if you want to follow the straight path, if you are modest, if you seek purity, if you are disinterested, if you want to lead a solitary existence and have a clear judgment, things will become easy.... It is quite the contrary! When you begin to advance towards inner and outer One man’s perfection, still can save the difficulties start at the same timeworld. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/0334/impurity#p29the-finding-of-the-soul</ref></div>
=== Morality, Diversity and Perfection ===
If you have understood this, you will be ready to understand the difference, the great difference between spirituality and morality, two things that are constantly confused with each other. The spiritual life, the life of Yoga, has for its object to grow into the divine consciousness and for its result to purify, intensify, glorify and perfect what is in you. It makes you a power for manifesting of the Divine; it raises the character of each personality to its full value and brings it to its maximum expression; for this is part of the Divine plan. Morality proceeds '''Content Curated by a mental construction and, with a few ideas of what is good and what is not, sets up an ideal type into which all must force themselves. This moral ideal differs in its constituents and its ensemble at different times and different places. And yet it proclaims itself as a unique type, a categoric absolute; it admits of none other outside itself; it does not even admit a variation within itself. All are to be moulded according to its single ideal pattern, everybody is to be made uniformly and faultlessly the same. It is because morality is of this rigid unreal nature that it is in its principle and its working the contrary of the spiritual life. The spiritual life reveals the one essence in all, but reveals too its infinite diversity; it works for diversity in oneness and for perfection in that diversity. (The Mother, 4 August 1929) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/4-august-1929#p6</ref>Prema Sankar'''
{|class="wikitable" style== Conflicts and "background-color: #efefff; width: 100%;"|Read Summary of '''[[Perfection Summary|Perfection ===]]'''
If there were no such resistanceDear reader, there would be nothing whatever to conquer if you notice any error in the world, for the world would be harmonious, a constant passage from one perfection to another instead of the conflict which it is—a game of hazards and various possibilities paragraph numbers in which the Divine faces real oppositionhyperlinks, real difficulty and often real temporary defeat on the way to the final victoryplease let us know by dropping an email at integral. It is just this reality of the whole play that makes it no mere jestedu. The Divine Will actually suffers distortion the moment it touches the hostile forces in the Ignorance@gmail. Hence we must never slacken our efforts to change the world and bring about a different order. We must be vigilant to co-operate with the Divine and not placidly think that whatever happens is always the best. All depends upon the personal attitude. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/knowledge-by-unity-with-the-divine-the-divine-will-in-the-world#p5</ref>com|}
=== Perfection and Harmony =References==
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; perfection is the perfection of the total divine harmony. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/21/the-divine-and-the-undivine#p6</ref>= References =
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