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Read Summary of '''[[Perfection Summary|Perfection]]'''
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= What is Perfection in Brief ? =
== What is '''Perfection? ==in General'''
Perfection is all that we want to become in our highest aspiration. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/15/perfection#p10</ref>
The Divine is the perfection towards which we move. <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/14/the-divine-and-man#p8~</refcenter>
Perfection Some people put perfection at the apex. It is something which lacks nothinggenerally thought that perfection is the maximum one can do. The divine But I say that perfection is not the Divine in His entiretyapex, which lacks nothingit is not an extreme. The divine perfection There is no extreme—whatever you may do, there is always the Divine as a wholepossibility of something better, from whom nothing has been taken away—so and it is just the opposite! For the moralists divine perfection means all exactly this possibility of something better which is the virtues that they representvery meaning of progress. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/1004/aphorism-6330-64december-651950#p24p5</ref>
== How to Achieve Perfection? ==<center>~</center>
"To work for your 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 first step 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 become conscious 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 yourselfeducation and social institutions is the outward means adopted or an inner self-training and development is preferred as the true instrumentation." (The MotherOr the two aims may be clearly united, the perfection of the inner individual, 13 January 1951) the perfection of the outer living. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/0424/13the-januaryintegral-1951perfection#p16p2</ref>
To work for your perfection, the first step is to become conscious '''Elements of yourself, of the different parts of your being and their respective activities. You must learn to distinguish these different parts one from another, so that you may become clearly aware of the origin of the movements that occur in you, the many impulses, reactions and conflicting wills that drive you to action. It is an assiduous study which demands much perseverance and sincerity. For manPerfection'''s nature, especially his mental nature, has a spontaneous tendency to give a favourable explanation for everything he thinks, feels, says and does. It is only by observing these movements with great care, by bringing them, as it were, before the tribunal of our highest ideal, with a sincere will to submit to its judgment, that we can hope to form in ourselves a discernment that never errs. For if we truly want to progress and acquire the capacity of knowing the truth of our being, that is to say, what we are truly created for, what we can call our mission upon earth, then we must, in a very regular and constant manner, reject from us or eliminate in us whatever contradicts the truth of our existence, whatever is opposed to it. In this way, little by little, all the parts, all the elements of our being can be organised into a homogeneous whole around our psychic centre. This work of unification requires much time to be brought to some degree of perfection. Therefore, in order to accomplish it, we must arm ourselves with patience and endurance, with a determination to prolong our life as long as necessary for the success of our endeavour.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/12/the-science-of-living#p5</ref>
If in passing from one domain It is, then, this spiritual fulfilment of the urge to another individual perfection and an inner completeness of being that we mean first when we renounce what has already been given us from eagerness for our new attainment, if in reaching speak of a divine life. It is the mental first essential condition of a perfected life on earth, and we cast away or belittle are therefore right in making the physical life which is utmost possible individual perfection our basis, or if we reject first supreme business. The perfection of the mental spiritual and physical in pragmatic relation of the individual with all around him is our attraction to second preoccupation; the spiritual, we do not fulfil God integrally, nor satisfy solution of this second desideratum lies in a complete universality and oneness with all life upon earth which is the conditions other concomitant result of His self-manifestationan evolution into the gnostic consciousness and nature. We do not become perfectBut there still remains the third desideratum, a new world, but only shift a change in the field total life of our imperfection humanity or , at most attain the least, a limited altitude. However high we may climb, even though it be to new perfected collective life in the Nonearth-Being itself, we climb ill if we forget our basenature. Not to abandon This calls for the appearance not only of isolated evolved individuals acting in the lower to itselfunevolved mass, but of many gnostic individuals forming a new kind of beings and a new common life superior to transfigure it in the light present individual and common existence. A collective life of this kind must obviously constitute itself on the higher to which we have attained, is true divinity same principle as the life of naturethe gnostic individual.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2122/the-destinydivine-of-the-individuallife#p9p19</ref>
But we can attain to the highest without blotting ourselves out from the cosmic extension. Brahman preserves always Its two terms of liberty within and of formation without, of expression and of freedom from the expression. We also, being That, can attain to the same divine self-possession. The harmony of the two tendencies is the condition of all life that aims at being really divine. <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/21/the-destiny-of-the-individual#p18~</refcenter>
These three elements, a union with the supreme Divine, unity with the universal Self, and a supramental life action from this transcendent origin and through this universality, but still with the individual as the soul-channel and natural instrument, constitute the essence of the integral divine perfection of the human being.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/the-integral-perfection?search=perfection</ref>
Fundamentally, whatever be '''Where is 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 Power of only one: that is perfect sincerity, but perfect sincerity! (The Mother, 12 May 1954) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/06/12-may-1954#p34</ref>Perfection?'''
If you said Where in the radically imperfect shall we find the principle and power of perfection? Mind rooted in division and limitation cannot provide it to yourselfus, my childrennor can life and the body which are the energy and the frame of dividing and limiting mind. The principle and power of perfection are there in the subconscient but wrapped up in the tegument or veil of the lower Maya, "We want to be a mute premonition emerging as perfect instruments as possible to express the divine Will an unrealised ideal; in the world"superconscient they await, then for this instrument to be perfectopen, it must be cultivatedeternally realised, educated, trainedbut still separated from us by the veil of our self-ignorance. 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 diamondis above, you chisel it. Wellthen, and not either in our present poise nor below it is that we must seek for the same thing. When with your brain reconciling power 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 thereknowledge. (The Mother, 13 May 1953) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/0521/13the-mayproblem-of-1953life#p18p12</ref>
'''Divine Perfection'''
The Divine is the perfection towards which we move. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/14/the-divine-and-man#p8</ref>
<center>~</center>
== Why ==A divine perfection of the human being is our aim. We must know then first what are the essential elements that constitute man's total perfection; secondly, what we mean by a divine as distinguished from a human perfection of our being. That man as a being is capable of self-development and of some approach at least to an ideal standard of perfection which his mind is able to conceive, fix before it and pursue, is common ground to all thinking humanity, though it may be only the minority who concern themselves with this possibility as providing the one most important aim of life.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/the-integral-perfection#p1</ref>
<center>~</center>
But if you remain The characteristic law of Spirit is self-existent perfection and immutable infinity. It possesses always and in that consciousness and look from there, then you begin to understand something of its own right the truth. And this consciousness has to be so total, that even if things come directly against you, even immortality which is the physical movement aim 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 Life and have no personal reaction, well, I give you the guarantee perfection which is the other cannot kill yougoal of Mind. 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 attainment of the door eternal and the thing enters realisation of that which is the same in all things and beyond all goes wrong. You must be fully consciousthings, equally blissful in universe and outside it, have untouched by the full knowledge, imperfections and limitations of the perfect mastery over everythingforms and activities in which it dwells, are the clear vision glory of the Truth—and perfect peacespiritual life. (The Mother, 20 May 1953) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/0523/20the-maythreefold-1953life#p54p7</ref>
… one may act with a perfect knowledge of what should be done, and without intervention—the least intervention—of the reasoning mind. The mind is silent: it simply looks on and listens in order to register things, it does not act. (The Mother, 23 December 1953) <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/05/23-december-1953#p8~</refcenter>
== Aim Man, the mental being, has an imperfect life because mind is not the first and highest power of consciousness of Integral Yoga the Being; even if mind were perfected, there would be still something yet to be realised, not yet manifested. For what is involved and emergent is not a Mind, but a Spirit, and Perfection ==mind is not the native dynamism of consciousness of the Spirit; supermind, the light of gnosis, is its native dynamism. If then life has to become a manifestation of the Spirit, it is the manifestation of a spiritual being in us and the divine life of a perfected consciousness in a supramental or gnostic power of spiritual being that must be the secret burden and intention of evolutionary Nature. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/22/the-divine-life#p3</ref>
<center>~</center>
Some people put perfection at Perfection of all kinds is indeed good, as it is the sign of the pressure of the consciousness in the apexmaterial world towards full self-expression in this or that limit, on this or that level. It In a certain sense it is generally thought 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 is in ethical qualities, character, temperament,—all have their high value, their place as rungs in the ladder of evolution, the seried steps of the maximum spirit's emergence. If one likes to call that spiritual because of this hidden urge behind it one can doso; it can at least be regarded as a preparation for the secret spirit's emergence. But I say that perfection is not thought and knowledge can only proceed by making the apex, it necessary distinctions. Much confusion is not an extremecreated by neglecting them. There is no extreme—whatever you may doThis mental idealism, ethical development, religious piety and fervour, there is always occult powers and feats have all been taken as spirituality and the spiritual evolution kept tied to the possibility moorings of something better, and it is exactly this possibility the planes of something better 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 very meaning of progressawakened spiritual consciousness and takes on its peculiar essence. (The Mother, 30 December 1950) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/0428/30idealism-decemberand-1950spirituality#p5p1</ref>
Perfection is not a static state, it is an equilibrium. But a progressive, dynamic equilibrium. One may go from perfection to perfection. There can come a state from which it would not be necessary to descend to a lower rung in order to go farther; at the moment the march of Nature is like that, but in this new state, instead of being obliged to go back to be able to start again, one can walk always forward, without ever stopping. As things are, one comes to a certain point and, as human beings as they are at present cannot progress indefinitely, one must pass to a higher species or leave the present species and create another. The human being as he is at the moment cannot attain perfection unless he gets out of himself—man is a transitional being. In ordinary language it may be said: "Oh, this man is perfect", but that is a literary figure. The maximum a human being can attain just now is an equilibrium which is not progressive. He may attain perhaps a static equilibrium but all that is static can be broken for lack of progress. (The Mother, 30 December 1950) <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/04/30-december-1950#p19~</refcenter>
The condition to But always the whole foundation of the gnostic life must be aimed atby its very nature inward and not outward. In the life of the spirit it is the spirit, the real achievement of Yogainner Reality, that has built up and uses the final perfection mind, vital being and attainmentbody as its instrumentation; thought, feeling and action do not exist for which all else is 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 a preparationexternal means, no greater or divine life is a consciousness possible. In our present life of Nature, in which our externalised surface existence, it is impossible the world that seems to create us; but in the turn to do anything without the Divine; for thenspiritual 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, if you the perfection of our own soul and mind and life and the perfection of the life of the race. For we are without given a world which is obscure, ignorant, material, imperfect, and our external conscious being is itself created by the energies, the Divinepressure, the very source moulding operations of your action disappears; knowledgethis vast mute obscurity, by physical birth, powerby environment, all by a training through the impacts and shocks of life; and yet we are gone. But so long as you feel vaguely aware of something that is there in us or seeking to be, something other than what has been thus made, a spirit self-existent, self-determining, pushing the powers you use are your nature towards the creation of an image of its ownoccult perfection or Idea of perfection. There is something that grows in us in answer to this demand, you will not miss that strives to become the Divine supportimage of a divine. (The MotherSomewhat, 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, 28 April 1929) in the image of its own spiritual and mental and vital growth, to make our world too something created according to our own mind and self-conceiving spirit, something new, harmonious, perfect. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/0322/28the-aprildivine-1929life#p14p6</ref>
"We are not aiming at success—our aim is perfection." (The Mother, 30 December 1950) <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/04/30-december-1950#p1~</refcenter>
== Necessities 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>
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. <ref>http://incarnateword.==Perfection in/cwsa/24/the-elements-of-perfection#p2</ref>Mind==
The next necessity of perfection is to raise all the active parts of the human nature to that highest condition and working pitch of their power and capacityethical mind becomes perfect in proportion as it detaches itself from desire, śakti, at which they become capable of being divinised into true instruments of the freesense suggestion, perfectimpulse, spiritual customary dictated action and divine action. For practical purposes we may take the understandingdiscovers a self of Right, the heartLove, the prana Strength and the body as the four members of our nature Purity in which have thus to be prepared, it can live accomplished and we have to find make it the constituent terms foundation of their perfectionall its actions. Also there The aesthetic mind is the dynamical force perfected in us (vīrya) proportion as it detaches itself from all its cruder pleasures and from outward conventional canons of the temperament, character aesthetic reason and discovers a self existent self and soul nature, svabhāva, which makes the power spirit of our members effective in action pure and infinite Beauty and Delight which gives them their type its own light and direction; this has joy to be freed from its limitations, enlarged, rounded so that the whole manhood in us may become material of the basis aesthesis. The mind of a divine manhood, knowledge is perfected when the Purusha, the real Man in us, the divine Soul, shall act fully in this human instrument it gets away from impression and dogma and opinion and shine fully through this human vessel. To divinise the perfected nature we have to call in the divine Power or Shakti to replace our limited human energy so that this may be shaped into the image discovers a light of self-knowledge and filled with intuition which illumines all the force workings of a greater infinite energythe sense and reason, daivī prakṛti, bhāgavatī śaktiall self-experience and world-experience. This perfection The will grow in the measure in which we can surrender ourselves, first, to the guidance is perfected when it gets away from and behind its impulses and then to the direct action its customary ruts of that Power effectuation and discovers an inner power of the Master of our being and our works to whom it belongs, and for this purpose faith Spirit which is the essential, faith is the great motor-power source of our being in our aspirations to perfection,—here, a faith in God an intuitive and the Shakti which shall begin in the heart luminous action and understanding, but shall take possession of all our nature, all its consciousness, all its dynamic motive-forcean original harmonious creation. These four things are the essentials of this second element The movement of perfection, is away from all domination by the full powers lower nature and towards a pure and powerful reflection of the members of the instrumental naturebeing, the perfected dynamis of the soul naturepower, the assumption of them into the action knowledge and delight of the divine Power, Spirit and a perfect faith Self in all our members to call and support that assumption, śakti, vīrya, daivī prakṛti, śraddhāthe buddhi. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/thepurification-elementsintelligence-ofand-perfection#p3will</ref>
== Where to find Perfection? ==<center>~</center>
Where in The first need is the clarity and the purity of the radically imperfect shall we find intelligence. It must be freed from the principle and power claims of perfection? Mind rooted in division and limitation cannot provide it to us, nor can life and the body vital being which are seeks to impose the energy and desire of the frame of dividing and limiting mind. The principle and power in place of perfection are there in the subconscient but wrapped up in truth, from the tegument or veil claims of the lower Mayatroubled emotional being which strives to colour, a mute premonition emerging as an unrealised ideal; in distort, limit and falsify the superconscient they await, open, eternally realised, but still separated from us by truth with the veil hue and shape of our self-ignorancethe emotions. It is abovemust be free too from its own defect, inertia of the thought-power, obstructive narrowness and unwillingness to open to knowledge, thenintellectual unscrupulousness in thinking, prepossession and not either preference, self-will in our present poise nor below it that we the reason and false determination of the will to knowledge. Its sole will must seek for be to make itself an unsullied mirror of the reconciling power truth, its essence and its forms and measures and relations, a clear mirror, a just measure, a fine and knowledgesubtle instrument of harmony, an integral intelligence.<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 the way to becoming perfectly conscious. (The Mother, 28 November 1956) <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/08/28-november-1956#p20~</refcenter>
= Imperfection 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 =perfection, on our own individual being and inner living; or it turns towards a concentration on an individual development of our surface nature, on the perfection of our thought and outer dynamic or practical action on the world, on some idealism of our personal relation with the world around us; or it turns rather towards a concentration on the outer world itself, on making it better, more suited to our ideas and temperament or to our conception of what should be. On one side there is the call of our spiritual being which is our true self, a transcendent reality, a being of the Divine Being, not created by the world, able to live in itself, to rise out of world to transcendence; on the other side there is the demand of the world around us which is a cosmic form, a formulation of the Divine Being, a power of the Reality in disguise. There is too the divided or double demand of our being of Nature which is poised between these two terms, depends on them and connects them; for it is apparently made by the world and yet, because its true creator is in ourselves and the world instrumentation that seems to make it is only the means first used, it is really a form, a disguised manifestation of a greater spiritual being within us. It is this demand that mediates between our preoccupation with an inward perfection or spiritual liberation and our preoccupation with the outer world and its formation, insists on a happier relation between the two terms and creates the ideal of a better individual in a better world. But it is within us that the Reality must be found and the source and foundation of a perfected life; no outward formation can replace it: there must be the true self realised within if there is to be the true life realised in world and Nature. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/22/the-divine-life#p7</ref>
== Standard of Judgement 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 distinction between the divine and the undivine life is in fact identical with the root distinction between a life of Knowledge lived in self-awareness and in the power of the Light and a life of Ignorance,—at any rate it so presents itself 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 is this bondage to a perpetual stamp of imperfection and disharmony that is the mark of the undivine; a divine life, on the contrary, even if progressing from the little to the more, would be at each stage harmonious in its principle and detail: it would be a secure ground upon which freedom and perfection could naturally flower or grow towards their highest stature, refine and expand into their most subtle opulence. All imperfections, all perfections have to be taken into view in our consideration of the difference between an undivine and a divine existence: but ordinarily, when we make the distinction, we do it as human beings struggling under the pressure of life and the difficulties of our conduct amidst its immediate problems and perplexities; most of all we are thinking of the distinction we are obliged to make between good and evil or of that along with its kindred problem of the duality, the blend in us of happiness and suffering. When we seek intellectually for a divine presence in things, a divine origin of the world, a divine government of its workings, the presence of evil, the insistence on suffering, the large, the enormous part offered to pain, grief and affliction in the economy of Nature are the cruel phenomena which baffle our reason and overcome the instinctive faith of mankind in such an origin and government or in an all-seeing, all-determining and omnipresent Divine Immanence. Other difficulties we could solve more easily and happily and make some shift to be better satisfied with the ready conclusiveness of our solutions. But this standard of judgment is not sufficiently comprehensive and it is supported upon a too human point of view; for to a wider outlook evil and suffering appear only as a striking aspect, they are not the whole defect, not even the root of the matter. The sum of the world's imperfections is not made up only of these two deficiencies; there is more than the fall, if fall there was, of our spiritual or material being from good and from happiness or our nature's failure to overcome evil and suffering. Besides the deficiency of the ethical and hedonistic satisfactions demanded by our being, the paucity of Good and Delight in our world-experience, there is also the deficiency of other divine degrees: for Knowledge, Truth, Beauty, Power, Unity are, they too, the stuff and elements of a divine life, and these are given to us in a scanty and grudging measure; yet all are, in their absolute, powers of the Divine Nature. <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/21/the-divine-and-the-undivine#p2~</refcenter>
Once we admit a divine government This heart and psychic being of man shot through with the universe, we must conclude that threads of the power to govern life instincts 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 thing of things or hampered in their power mixed inconstant colours of working. It is not impossible to concede that the supreme emotion and immanent Divinity may leave a certain freedom of working to something that has come into being in his perfection but is itself imperfect soul vibrations, bad and the cause of imperfectiongood, to an ignorant or inconscient Naturehappy and unhappy, to the action of the human mind satisfied and willunsatisfied, even to a conscious Power or Forces of darkness troubled and evil that take their stand upon the reign of a basic Inconscience. But none of these things are independent of Its own existencecalm, nature intense and consciousness and none of them can act except in Its presence dull. Thus agitated and by Its sanction or allowance. Man's freedom invaded it is relative and he cannot be held solely responsible for the imperfection of his nature. Ignorance and inconscience of Nature have arisen, not independentlyunacquainted with any real peace, but in the one Being; the imperfection incapable of her workings cannot be entirely foreign to some will a steady perfection of the Immanenceall its powers. 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 omnipresenceBy purification, Its all-existenceby equality, we must consider It to have originated and decreed, since without by the fiat light of the Being they could not have beenknowledge, could not remain in existence. If by a harmonising of 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 will it 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 brought to consider the problem of imperfection, suffering a tranquil intensity and evilperfection. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2124/the-divinepower-andof-the-undivine#p13instruments</ref>
It is only if our nature develops beyond itself, if it becomes a nature of self-knowledge, mutual understanding, unity, a nature of true being and true life that the result can be a perfection of ourselves and our existence, a life of true being, a life of unity, mutuality, harmony, a life of true happiness, a harmonious and beautiful life. If our nature is fixed in what it is, what it has already become, then no perfection, no real and enduring happiness is possible in earthly life; we must seek it not at all and do the best we can with our imperfections, or we must seek it elsewhere, in a supraterrestrial hereafter, or we must go beyond all such seeking and transcend life by an extinction of nature and ego in some Absolute from which this strange and unsatisfactory being of ours has come into existence. But if in us there is a spiritual being which is emerging and our present state is only an imperfection of half-emergence, if the Inconscient is a starting-point containing in itself the potency of a superconscience and supernature which has to evolve, a veil of apparent Nescience in which that greater consciousness is concealed and from which it has to unfold itself, if an evolution of being is the law, then what we are seeking for is not only possible but part of the eventual necessity of things. It is our spiritual destiny to manifest and become that supernature,—for it is the nature of our true self, our still occult, because unevolved, whole being. A nature of unity will then bring inevitably its life-result of unity, mutuality, harmony. An inner life awakened to a full consciousness and to a full power of consciousness will bear its inevitable fruit in all who have it, self-knowledge, a perfected existence, the joy of a satisfied being, the happiness of a fulfilled nature. <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/22/the-divine-life#p23~</refcenter>
A subjective spirituality can be established which refuses or minimises commerce with the world or The other side of perfection is content to witness its action a self-contained 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 calm 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 unegoistic Rudra-power armed with these influences in such a way that, as soon as they approach or enterpsychic force, 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 energy of the world they come from, for such a compulsion on the lower universal Nature strong heart which is part capable 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 supporting without undergoing this transformation: the invading external influences have not to bring in at all their lower awarenessshrinking an insistent, their lower sight, their lower dynamism. But this is a difficult perfectionan outwardly austere or even, because ordinarily the circumconscient is not wholly our own formed and realised self but ourself plus the external world-nature. It where need 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 violent action and the world-self outside us, this completer change is demanded of the evolving nature. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2224/the-ascentpower-of-towardsthe-supermind#p44instruments</ref>
== Duality Perfection in Perfection the Body ==
If When the human consciousness were bound to body has learned the sense art 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 constantly progressing towards an increasing 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 be well 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 way 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 overcoming the inherent light inevitability 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 Naturedeath. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/2116/the16-divine-and-thejanuary-undivine1972#p8p1</ref>
When we say that all is a divine manifestation, even that which we call undivine, we mean that in its essentiality all is divine even if the form baffles or repels us. Or, to put it in a formula to which it is easier for our psychological sense of things to give its assent, in all things there is a presence, a primal Reality,—the Self, the Divine, Brahman,—which is for ever pure, perfect, blissful, infinite: its infinity is not affected by the limitations of relative things; its purity is not stained by our sin and evil; its bliss is not touched by our pain and suffering; its perfection is not impaired by our defects of consciousness, knowledge, will, unity. In certain images of the Upanishads the divine Purusha is described as the one Fire which has entered into all forms and shapes itself according to the form, as the one Sun which illumines all impartially and is not affected by the faults of our seeing. But this affirmation is not enough; it leaves the problem unsolved, why that which is in itself ever pure, perfect, 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 the duality that constitutes the problem, but does not solve it. <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/21/the-divine-and-the-undivine#p4~</refcenter>
== Facing As for the Imperfection ==question about the illness, perfection in the physical plane is indeed part of the ideal of the Yoga, but it is the last item and, so long as the fundamental change has not been made in the material consciousness to which the body belongs, one may have a certain perfection on other planes without having immunity in the body. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/31/illness-and-health#p57</ref>
But even when we thus regard the universe, we cannot and ought not to dismiss as entirely and radically false and unreal the values that are given to it by our own limited human consciousness. 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 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 evil, are facts of 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 sense of them is part of a true sense, our values of them are necessary to their complete values. 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 a cosmic and individual utility in what presents itself to us as adverse and evil. 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 is a penumbra which environs an orb of knowledge, every error is significant of the possibility and the effort of a discovery of truth; every weakness and failure is a first sounding of gulfs of power and potentiality; all division is intended to enrich by an experience of various sweetness of unification the joy of realised unity. All this imperfection is to us evil, but all evil is in travail of the eternal good; for all is an imperfection which is the first condition—in the law of life evolving out of Inconscience—of a greater perfection in the manifesting of the hidden divinity. But at the same time our present feeling 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 them, the ultimate command on us is to reject, to overcome, to transform the life and the nature. It is for that end that their insistence is 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 in the depths, to arrive at a state 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 deliverance. 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 deliverance. <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/21/the-divine-and-the-undivine#p19~</refcenter>
For an age out The physical being of sympathy with the ascetic spirit—and throughout all man has always been felt by the rest of the world the hour seekers of perfection to be a great impediment and it has been the Anchorite may seem habit to have passed turn from it with contempt, denial or aversion and a desire to suppress altogether or as far as may be passing—it is easy to attribute the body and the physical life. But this great trend to cannot be the failing of vital energy in an ancient race tired out by its burden, its once vast share in right method for the common advance, exhausted by its many-sided contribution integral Yoga. The body is given us as one instrument necessary to the sum totality of human effort our works and human knowledge. But we have seen that it corresponds is to a truth of existencebe used, not neglected, hurt, a state of conscious realisation which stands at the very summit of our possibilitysuppressed or abolished. In practice If it is imperfect, recalcitrant, obstinate, so are also the ascetic spirit is an indispensable element in human perfection other members, the vital being, heart and mind and even its separate affirmation cannot reason. It has like them to be avoided changed and perfected and to undergo a transformation. As we must get ourselves a new life, new heart, new mind, so long as the race has not at the other end liberated its intellect and its vital habits from subjection we have in a certain sense to an always insistent animalismbuild for ourselves a new body. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2124/the-two-negations-the-refusalpower-of-the-ascetic#p23instruments</ref>
No man is perfect; the vital is there and the ego is there to prevent it. It is only when there is the total transformation of the external and the internal being down to the very subconscient, that perfection is possible. Till then imperfection will remain as our common heritage. <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/31/the-subconscient-and-the-integral-yoga#p2~</refcenter>
The Master of our works respects our nature even when he is transforming it; he works always through the nature Transformation and not by any arbitrary caprice. This imperfect nature of ours contains the materials of our Body : The supramental perfectionmeans that the body becomes conscious, 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 is filled with it consciousness 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 that as this is the substance of a truth which labours to reveal Truth consciousness all its meaning to our groping intelligenceactions, functionings etc. The human intellect cuts out become by the error and power of the truth with consciousness within 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 sinharmonious, but at perfectionluminous, at something that we might call a divine virtue. Often they are the veils of a quality that has to be transformed right and delivered out of this ugly disguise: otherwise, in the perfect providence of things, they would not have been suffered to exist true—without ignorance 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 virtuedisorder. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2328/thetransformation-master-ofand-the-workbody#p6p3</ref>
== Imperfection to Perfection ==<center>~</center>
In this light we can admit that all works perfectly towards a divine end by a divine wisdom and therefore each thing This is in that sense perfectly fitted in its place; but we say that that is not one of the whole of things one discovers gradually as the divine purposebody becomes ready for transformations. For what is is only justifiable, finds its perfect sense and satisfaction by what can and will be. There It is, no doubt, quite a key remarkable instrument 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 see that it can normally be caught by our present intelligence: but we cannot be content with that belief, to search for and find experience two contraries at the spiritual key of things is the law of our beingsame time. The sign of the finding There is not a philosophic intellectual recognition and a resigned or sage acceptance certain state of body-consciousness which brings things as they are because together, totalises things that in other states of some divine sense and purpose consciousness alternate or even in certain others oppose each other. But if one has reached up there, in them which is beyond us; the real sign is an elevation towards the spiritual knowledge vital and power which will transform the law and phenomena and external forms of our life nearer to mind, a true image development sufficient for harmonising opposites (that of that divine sense and purpose. It course, is right and reasonable to endure with equanimity suffering and subjection to defect as the immediate will of Godquite indispensable), a present law of imperfection laid on our memberswhen one has succeeded in doing this, but on condition that we recognise there are moments when it also as the will of God in us to transcend evil and sufferingalternates, to transform imperfection into perfectionyou see, to rise into a higher law of Divine Nature. In our human consciousness there is one thing comes after the image of an ideal truth of beingother, a divine nature, an incipient godhead: while what is remarkable in relation to that higher truth our present state of imperfection can be relatively described as an undivine life and the conditions consciousness of the world from which body is that it can feel ("feel", can we start say "feel"?—"experience"—the word "aware" expresses it best) all things simultaneously, as undivine conditions; the imperfections are the indication given to us that they are there though you were hot and cold at once, as first disguisesthough you were active and passive at once, not as and everything becomes like that. Then you begin to grasp the intended expression totality of movements in the divine being and the divine naturecells. It is a Power within ussomething much more concrete naturally, but much more perfect in the concealed Divinitybody than in any other part of the being. This means that if things continue in this way, it will be proved that has lit the flame of aspirationphysical, pictures material instrument is the image most perfect of all. That is why perhaps it is the ideal, keeps alive our discontent and pushes us most difficult to throw off the disguise and to reveal or, in the Vedic phrasetransform, to form and disclose the Godhead in the manifest spirit, mind, life and body of this terrestrial creatureperfect. Our present nature can only be transitional, our imperfect status a starting-point and opportunity for the achievement But of another higherall, wider and greater that shall be divine and perfect not only by it is the secret spirit within it but in its manifest and one most outward form capable of existenceperfection. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/06/21/the-divine-and-theapril-undivine1954#p9p31</ref>
The more perfect the contact, the greater the power. (The Mother, 20 June 1956) <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/08/20-june-1956#p11~</refcenter>
There It is nothing you cannot understand precisely because the body decays, declines and ends in a complete degradation that death becomes necessary. But if the body followed the progressive movement of the inner being, if it had the same sense of progress and perfection as the psychic being, there would be no necessity for it to die. One year added to another need not bring a deterioration. It is only a habit of Nature. It is only a habit of what is happening at this moment. And that is exactly the cause of death. One can foresee quite well, on the contrary, that the movement for perfection which is at the beginning of life might continue under another form. I have already told you give your brain that one does not foresee an uninterrupted growth, for that would need changing the height of the houses after some time to widen and perfect itself! But this growth in height may be changed into a growth in perfection: the perfection of the form. (The MotherAll the imperfections of the form may be gradually corrected, 12 December 1956) all the weaknesses replaced by strength, all the incapacities by skill. Why should it not be like this? You do not think in that way because you have the habit of seeing things otherwise. But there is no reason why this should not happen. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/0805/1217-decemberjune-19561953#p15p36</ref>
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>= Why Do We Need Perfection? =
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, == For Discovering the perfection Truth of the whole would follow automatically. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/13/aims-and-principles#p147</ref>Living==
It 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 all right to see the imperfections call of the Spirit within him, but also because it is only by liberation and perfection and deficiencies but realisation of the truth of being that man can arrive at truth of living. A perfected community also can exist only on condition it brings a greater courage for a new progressby the perfection of its individuals, an increase and perfection can come only by the discovery and affirmation in life by each of energy in his own spiritual being and the determination discovery by all of their spiritual unity and a stronger certitude 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 victory the instrumental existence into itself and giving to it oneness, integration, harmony. As our only real freedom is the discovery and future disengagement of the spiritual Reality within us, so our only means of true perfectionis the sovereignty and self-effectuation of the spiritual Reality in all the elements of our nature. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/1422/mistakes-no-torment-worrythe-ordivine-sadnesslife#p12p37</ref>
= Mind and Perfection =<center>~</center>
== Mind’s Way There is a Reality, a truth of all existence which is greater and Perfect Understanding ==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>
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 ==For Self-perfection or spiritual liberation and our preoccupation with the outer world and its formation, insists on a happier relation between the two terms Progress and creates the ideal of a better individual in a better world. But it is within us that the Reality must be found and the source and foundation of a perfected life; no outward formation can replace it: there must be the true self realised within if there is to be the true life realised in world and Nature. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/22/the-divine-life#p7</ref>Fulfillment==
The characteristic law of Spirit is self-existent perfection and immutable infinity. It possesses always In the Dhammapada: a supreme disinterestedness and in its own right the immortality which a supreme liberation is to follow the aim discipline of Life and the self-perfection which is , the goal march of Mind. The attainment progress, not with a precise end in view but because this march of progress is the eternal profound law and the realisation purpose of that which is the same in all things and beyond all things, equally blissful in universe and outside itearthly life, untouched by the imperfections and limitations truth of the forms universal existence and activities because you put yourself in which harmony with it dwells, are the glory of spontaneously, whatever the spiritual liferesult may be. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/2303/the-threefold-lifebrahmin#p7p43</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 For one who wants to Perfection ==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>
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. <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/22/the-ascent-towards-supermind#p16~</refcenter>
In your meditation the first imperative need Perfection is not a static state of perfect and absolute sincerity in all the consciousness. It , it is indispensable that you should not deceive yourself or deceive or be deceived by othersan equilibrium. Often people have But a wishprogressive, dynamic equilibrium. One may go from perfection to perfection. There can come a mental preference or vital desire; they want the experience state from which it would not be necessary to descend to happen a lower rung in a particular way or order to take a turn that satisfies their ideas or desires or preferencesgo farther; they do not keep themselves blank and unprejudiced and simply and sincerely observe what happens. Then if you do not at the moment the march of Nature is like what happensthat, but in this new state, it is easy instead of being obliged to go back to be able to deceive yourself; you will see start again, one thingcan walk always forward, but give it without ever stopping. As things are, one comes to a little twist certain point and make it something else, as human beings as they are at present cannot progress indefinitely, one must pass to a higher species or you will distort something simple leave the present species and straightforward or magnify it into an extraordinary experiencecreate another. When you sit in meditation you must be as candid and simple The human being as a child, not interfering by your external mind, expecting nothing, insisting on nothing. Once this condition he is there, all at the rest depends upon the aspiration deep within youmoment cannot attain perfection unless he gets out of himself—man is a transitional being. If you ask from within for peace, In ordinary language it will come; if for strengthmay be said: "Oh, for power, for knowledge, they too will comethis man is perfect", but all in the measure of your capacity to receive itthat is a literary figure. And if you call upon the Divine, then too—always admitting that the Divine The maximum a human being can attain just now is an equilibrium which is open to your call, and not progressive. He may attain perhaps a static equilibrium but all that means your call is pure enough and strong enough to reach him,—you will have the answerstatic can be broken for lack of progress. (The Mother, 23 June 1929) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/0304/2330-junedecember-19291950#p23p19</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 All life is a secret Yoga, an obscure growth of Nature towards the discovery and accepts equally its possibilities fulfilment of the divine principle hidden in her which becomes progressively less obscure, more self-conscient and its resistances as the means of a greater luminous, more self-perfection. In possessed in the struggle with human being by the difficulties opening of the material world the ethical development all his instruments of knowledge, will, action, life to the individual is firmly shaped Spirit within him and in the great schools world. Mind, life, body, all the forms of conduct our nature are formed; by contact with the facts means of life Art attains this growth, but they find their last perfection only by opening out to vitalitysomething beyond them, Thought assures its abstractionsfirst, because they are not the generalisations whole of what man is, secondly, because that other something which he is, is the philosopher base themselves on key of his completeness and brings a stable foundation light which discovers to him the whole high and large reality of science and experiencehis being. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2324/the-threefoldintegral-life#p18perfection?search=perfection</ref>
== Highest Perfection ==<center>~</center>
The calm established in the whole being must remain the same whatever happensOur soul's dissatisfaction with imperfection as a law of life upon earth, in health and disease, in pleasure and in pain, even in its aspiration towards the strongest physical pain, in good fortune and misfortune, elimination of all imperfections from our own or that of those we lovenature, not only in success and failurea heaven beyond where it would be automatically impossible to be imperfect, honour but here and insult, praise and blame, justice done now in a life where perfection has to us or injustice, everything that ordinarily affects the mind. If we see unity everywhere, if we recognise that all comes be conquered by the divine willevolution and struggle, see God in all, in our enemies or rather our opponents in the game are as much a law of life as well as our friends, in the powers that oppose and resist us being as well as the powers that favour and assistagainst which they revolt; they too are divine, in all energies and forces and happenings—a divine dissatisfaction, and if besides we can feel that all a divine aspiration. In them is undivided from our self, all the world one with us inherent light of a power within our universal being, then this attitude becomes much easier to the heart and mind. But even before we can attain or are firmly seated which maintains them in us so that universal vision, we have by all the means Divine may not only be there as a hidden Reality 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 spiritual secrecies but unfold itself in it is the beginning evolution of liberated perfection; its completeness is the perfect assurance of a rapid progress in all the other members of perfection. For without it we can have no solid basis; and by the pronounced lack of it we shall be constantly falling back to the lower status of desire, ego, duality, ignoranceNature. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2421/the-actiondivine-ofand-the-equalityundivine#p5p8</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. <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/12/the-science-of-living#p6~</refcenter>
=== SoulIt is only if our nature develops beyond itself, Mind 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 Perfection ===our existence, a life of true being, a life of unity, mutuality, harmony, a life of true happiness, a harmonious and beautiful life. If our nature is fixed in what it is, what it has already become, then no perfection, no real and enduring happiness is possible in earthly life; we must seek it not at all and do the best we can with our imperfections, or we must seek it elsewhere, in a supraterrestrial hereafter, or we must go beyond all such seeking and transcend life by an extinction of nature and ego in some Absolute from which this strange and unsatisfactory being of ours has come into existence. But if in us there is a spiritual being which is emerging and our present state is only an imperfection of half-emergence, if the Inconscient is a starting-point containing in itself the potency of a superconscience and supernature which has to evolve, a veil of apparent Nescience in which that greater consciousness is concealed and from which it has to unfold itself, if an evolution of being is the law, then what we are seeking for is not only possible but part of the eventual necessity of things. It is our spiritual destiny to manifest and become that supernature,—for it is the nature of our true self, our still occult, because unevolved, whole being. A nature of unity will then bring inevitably its life-result of unity, mutuality, harmony. An inner life awakened to a full consciousness and to a full power of consciousness will bear its inevitable fruit in all who have it, self-knowledge, a perfected existence, the joy of a satisfied being, the happiness of a fulfilled nature. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/22/the-divine-life#p23</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. <ref>http://incarnateword.== To Grow in/cwsa/23/the-ladder-of-self-transcendence#p13</ref>Spiritual Oneness==
But always the whole foundation of the gnostic life must His physical being will be by its very nature inward and not outward. In one with all material Nature, his vital being with the life of the spirit it is the spirituniverse, his mind with the inner Realitycosmic mind, that has built up his spiritual knowledge and uses will with the mind, vital being divine knowledge and will both in itself and body as its instrumentation; thoughtit pours itself through these channels, feeling and action do not exist for themselves, they are not an object, but his spirit with the means; they serve to express the manifested divine Reality within us: otherwise, without this inwardness, this spiritual origination, one spirit in a too externalised consciousness or by only external means, no greater or divine life is possibleall beings. In our present life All the variety of Nature, in our externalised surface cosmic existence, it is the world that seems will be changed to create us; but him in the turn to the spiritual life it is we who must create ourselves that unity and our world. In this new formula of creation, revealed in the inner life becomes secret of the first importance and the rest can be only its expression and outcomespiritual significance. It is For in this, indeed, that is indicated by our own strivings towards perfection, the perfection of our own soul spiritual bliss and mind and life and the perfection of the life of the race. For we are given a world being he will be one with That which is obscure, ignorant, material, imperfect, the origin 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 continent and shocks of life; inhabitant and yet we are vaguely aware of something that is there in us or seeking to be, something other than what has been thus made, a spirit self-existent, self-determining, pushing the nature towards the creation and constituting power of an image of its own occult perfection or Idea of perfectionall existence. There is something that grows in us in answer to this demand, that strives to become the image of a divine. Somewhat, and is impelled also to labour at the world outside that has been given to it and to remake that too in a greater image, in This will be the image highest reach of its own spiritual and mental and vital growth, to make our world too something created according to our own mind and self-conceiving spirit, something new, harmonious, perfectperfection. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2224/the-divineelements-of-life#p6perfection</ref>
== Supermind ==<center>~</center>
If consciousness is So long as he remains in the central secretworld-existence, life is the outward indicationthis perfection must radiate out from him, the effective power of being in Matter; for it is —for that which liberates consciousness and gives it its form or embodiment of force and its effectuation in material act. If some revelation or effectuation of itself in Matter is the ultimate aim necessity of his oneness with the evolving Being in universe and its birthbeings, life is the exterior —in an influence and dynamic sign and index action which help all around who are capable of that revelation and effectuation. But life also, as it is nowto rise to or advance towards the same perfection, is imperfect and evolving; it evolves through growth of consciousness even as consciousness evolves through greater organisation for the rest in an influence and perfection of life: a greater consciousness means a greater life. Manaction which help, as only the mental beingself-ruler and master man can help, has an imperfect life because mind is not in leading the first human race forward spiritually towards this consummation and highest power towards some image of consciousness of the Being; even if mind were perfected, there would be still something yet to be realised, not yet manifested. For what is involved and emergent is not a Mind, but a Spirit, greater divine truth in their personal and mind is not the native dynamism of consciousness of the Spirit; supermind, the light of gnosis, is its native dynamismcommunal existence. If then life has to become He becomes a manifestation of the Spirit, it is the manifestation of a spiritual being in us light and the divine life of a perfected consciousness in a supramental or gnostic power of spiritual being that must be the secret burden Truth to which he has climbed and intention of evolutionary Naturea means for others’ ascension. <ref>httpttp://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2224/the-divineperfection-of-the-mental-life#p3being?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 = How to be not only a perfection of the inner existence, of the consciousness, of an inner delight of existence, but a perfection of the life and action, two other questions present themselves from our mental view-point which have to our human thought about our life and its dynamisms a considerable, even a premier importance. First, there is the place of personality in the gnostic being,—whether the status, the building of the being will be quite other than what we experience as the form and life of the person or similar. If there is a personality and it is in any way responsible for its actions, there intervenes, next, the question of the place of the ethical element and its perfection and fulfilment in the gnostic nature. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/22/the-gnostic-being#p28</ref>Achieve Perfection? =
= Body The Master of our works respects our nature even when he is transforming it; he works always through the nature and Perfection =not by any arbitrary caprice. This imperfect nature of ours contains the materials of our perfection, but inchoate, distorted, misplaced, thrown together in disorder or a poor imperfect order. All this material has to be patiently perfected, purified, reorganised, new-moulded and transformed, not hacked and hewn and slain or mutilated, not obliterated by simple coercion and denial. This world and we who live in it are his creation and manifestation, and he deals with it and us in a way our narrow and ignorant mind cannot understand unless it falls silent and opens to a divine knowledge. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/23/the-master-of-the-work#p6</ref>
== Perfecting the Body Prerequisites==
This The first necessity is one 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 discovers gradually in all and therefore one to all; it is, as the body becomes ready for transformations. It is quite a remarkable instrument said in the see that it can Gita which has developed fully this idea of equality and indicated its experience two contraries on at least one side of equality, the same time. There is a certain state of body-consciousness which brings things togetherequal Brahman, totalises things that in other states of consciousness alternate or samaṁ brahma; the Gita even goes so far in certain others oppose each otherone passage as to identify equality and yoga, samatvaṁ yoga ucyate. But if one has reached up thereThat is to say, in equality is the vital and sign of unity with the mindBrahman, a development sufficient for harmonising opposites (that of coursebecoming Brahman, is quite indispensable), when one has succeeded of growing into an undisturbed spiritual poise of being in doing this, there are moments when the Infinite. Its importance can hardly be exaggerated; for it alternatesis the sign of our having passed beyond the egoistic determinations of our nature, you seeof our having conquered our enslaved response to the dualities, one thing comes after of our having transcended the shifting turmoil of the othergunas, while what of our having entered into the calm and peace of liberation. Equality is remarkable in a term of consciousness which brings into the whole of our being and nature the consciousness eternal tranquillity of the body is that it can feel ("feel"Infinite. Moreover, can we say "feel"?—"experience"—the word "aware" expresses it best) all things simultaneously, as though you were hot is the condition of a securely and cold at once, as though you were active perfectly divine action; the security and passive at once, and everything becomes like that. Then you begin to grasp largeness of the totality cosmic action of movements in the cellsInfinite is based upon and never breaks down or forfeits its eternal tranquillity. It is something much more concrete naturally, but much more perfect in That too must be the body than in any other part character of the being. This means that if perfect spiritual action; to be equal and one to all things continue in this wayspirit, understanding, mind, heart and natural consciousness, it will be proved that —even in the most physicalconsciousness,—and to make all their workings, material instrument is whatever their outward adaptation to the most perfect thing to be done, always and imminuably full of allthe divine equality and calm must be its inmost principle. That is why perhaps it is may be said to be the most difficult to transformpassive or basic, to perfect. But the fundamental and receptive side of allequality, but there is also an active and possessive side, it an equal bliss which can only come when the peace of equality is founded and which is the one most capable beatific flower of perfectionits fullness. (The Mother, 21 April 1954) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/0624/21the-aprilelements-1954of-perfection#p31p2</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 next necessity of perfection is to raise all the active parts of the human nature to that highest condition and working pitch of their power and capacity, ''śakti'', at which they become capable of being divinised into true instruments of the ineffable Peacefree, one whose mind perfect, spiritual and divine action. For practical purposes we may take the understanding, the heart, the prana and the body as the four members of our nature which have thus to be prepared, and we have to find the constituent terms of their perfection. Also there is awakenedthe dynamical force in us (vīrya) of the temperament, character and soul nature, ''svabhāva'', which makes the power of our members effective in action and gives them their type and direction; this has to be freed from its limitations, whose thoughts are not entangled enlarged, rounded so that the whole manhood in us may become the basis of a divine manhood, when the Purusha, the real Man in us, the divine Soul, shall act fully in this human instrument and shine fully through this human vessel. To divinise the perfected nature we have to call in the net divine Power or Shakti to replace our limited human energy so that this may be shaped into the image of and filled with the force of desirea 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 one Power and of the Master of our being and our works to whom it belongs, and for this purpose faith is said the essential, faith is the great motor-power of our being in our aspirations to be "bound upstream" (towards perfection),—here, a faith in God and the Shakti which shall begin in the heart and understanding, but shall take possession of all our nature, all its consciousness, all its dynamic motive-force. These four things are the essentials of this second element of perfection, the full powers of the members of the instrumental nature, the perfected dynamis of the soul nature, the assumption of them into the action of the divine Power, and a perfect faith in all our members to call and support that assumption, ''śakti, vīrya, daivī prakṛti, śraddhā''. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/0324/pleasurethe-elements-of-perfection#p10p3</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 ...perfection of our instrumental nature... the perfection of the intelligence, heart, vital consciousness and body, the Body : The supramental perfection means that of the body becomes consciousfundamental soul powers, is filled with consciousness the perfection of the surrender of our instruments and action to the divine Shakti, depend at every moment of their progression on a... power that as this is covertly and overtly the Truth consciousness pivot of all endeavour and action, faith, ''śraddhā''. The perfect faith is an assent of the whole being to the truth seen by it or offered to its actionsacceptance, functionings etc. and its central working is a faith of the soul in its own will to be and attain and become by and its idea of self and things and its knowledge, of which the power belief of the consciousness within it harmoniousintellect, luminous, right the heart’s consent and the desire of the life mind to possess and true—without ignorance or disorderrealise are the outward figures. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2824/transformationfaith-and-the-body#p3shakti?search=perfection</ref>
== Body Perfection or Immortality ==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. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/28-april-1929#p14</ref>
When the body has learned the art of constantly progressing towards an increasing perfection, we shall be well on the way to overcoming the inevitability of death. (The Mother, 16 January 1972) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/16/16-january-1972#p1</ref>==Process==
We are on earth in order to progress ===By Education 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) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/17/15-november-1971#p1</ref>Training===
Ah! No. You are looking from the wrong side. They could escape dying only if their body did not decay. It is just because their body decays that they die. It is because their body becomes useless that they die. If they are not you said to dieyourself, my children, their body should not become useless. This is just "We want to be as perfect instruments as possible to express the contrary. It is precisely because divine Will in the body decaysworld", declines and ends in a complete degradation that death becomes necessary. But if the body followed the progressive movement of the inner beingthen for this instrument to be perfect, if it had the same sense of progress and perfection as the psychic beingmust be cultivated, educated, there would trained. It must not be no necessity for it to dieleft like a shapeless piece of stone. One year added When you want to another need not bring build with a deterioration. It is only stone you chisel it; when you want to make a habit of Nature. It is only formless block into a habit of what is happening at this momentbeautiful diamond, you chisel it. And that is exactly the cause of death. One can foresee quite wellWell, on the contrary, that the movement for perfection which it is at the beginning of life might continue under another formsame thing. I have already told When with your brain and body you that one does not foresee an uninterrupted growth, want to make a beautiful instrument for that would need changing the height of the houses after some time! But this growth in height may be changed into a growth in perfection: the perfection of the form. All the imperfections of the form may be gradually correctedDivine, you must cultivate it, all the weaknesses replaced by strengthsharpen it, all the incapacities by skill. Why should refine it not be like this? You do not think in that way because you have the habit of seeing things otherwise. But , complete what is missing, perfect what is there is no reason why this should not happen. (The Mother, 17 June 1953) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/05/1713-junemay-1953#p36p18</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 =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. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/30-june-1929#p8</ref>
== Ego and Perfection ==<center>~</center>
Why do you say that sensitivity is Fundamentally, whatever be the path one follows—whether the sign path of a strong ego? It does not seem surrender, consecration, knowledge—if one wants it to be evident at all. Moreoverperfect, it is always equally difficult, and there are many different kinds of sensitivity: some stem from weakness, others—the best—are the result of refinement. The ego generally governs the development of the individualis but one way, but the most developed individualities are not necessarily those in whom the ego is strongest—on the contrary. As the individuality perfects itselfone only, the power I know of the ego diminishes, and indeed it only one: that is by perfecting himself that the individual arrives at that state of divinisation which liberates him from the ego. (The Motherperfect sincerity, 2 September 1964) but perfect sincerity! <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/1606/212-septembermay-19641954#p3p34</ref>
Never forget that here it is for the perfection ===By Becoming Conscious of the work that we are striving, not for the satisfaction of the ego. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/13/organisation-and-work#p55</ref>Oneself===
The egoism of the instrument can be as dangerous or more dangerous to spiritual progress than the egoism of "To work for your perfection the doer. The ego-sense first step is contrary to spiritual realisation, so how can any kind become conscious of ego be a thing to be encouraged? As for the magnified ego, it is one of the most perilous obstacles to release and perfection. There should be no big I, not even a small oneyourself. " <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/3104/ego-and13-itsjanuary-forms1951#p54p16</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 vairagyaTo work for your perfection, or loss the first step is to become conscious of zest, as you have yourself said, began before you came here. I have indeed laid some stress on of the conquest different parts of sex, for obvious reasons; but I have hardly laid a compulsory stress on anything elseyour being and their respective activities. CertainlyYou must learn to distinguish these different parts one from another, I have not encouraged so that you to lose joy in vital creativeness; I have only held up may become clearly aware of the ideal origin of turning it towards the Divine movements that occur in you, the many impulses, reactions and away from the egoconflicting wills that drive you to action. To keep the vital full of life and energy It is an assiduous study which demands much perseverance and sincerity. For man's nature, especially his mental nature, has a spontaneous tendency to trust mainly to the inner growth and the descent of give a higher consciousness favourable explanation for a changeeverything he thinks, feels, says and does. It is only by observing these movements with great care, using the will too but for self-masteryby bringing them, not for suppressionas it were, but for subordination before the tribunal of the lower our highest ideal, with a sincere will to the higher, has been my teaching. The turn submit to vairagyaits judgment, that we can hope to tapasya of an ascetic kind was the impulse of something form in your own nature; it insisted on its necessity just as ourselves a part discernment that never errs. For if we truly want to progress and acquire the capacity of knowing the vital insisted on its opposite: even it condemned my suggestion truth of something less grim and strenuous as an easy-going absence of aspiration etc. I do not say our being, that vairagya and tapasya are not ways is to reach the Divinesay, but done like that they what we are painful ways and long; if one takes themtruly created for, what we can call our mission upon earth, one then we must be determined , in a very regular and go through. For one part to push all zest out constant manner, reject from us or eliminate in us whatever contradicts the truth of the vital and for the other our existence, whatever is opposed to regret and say, why did I ever do it, will never do. And it is in In this kind way, little by little, all the parts, all the elements of tapasya that perfection or at least perfect purification is demanded before there our being can be any realisationorganised into a homogeneous whole around our psychic centre. I have never said that for my Yoga; the only thing I insist upon is This work of unification requires much time to be brought to some faithdegree of perfection. Therefore, inner surrender and opening of oneself in order to receiveaccomplish it,—not absolutewe must arm ourselves with patience and endurance, but just sufficient. Experience has with a determination to begin prolong our life as 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 as necessary for the end. But there is something in you that is impatient of gradualness, success of small mercies; its motto seems to be all or nothingour endeavour. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/2912/asceticismthe-andscience-the-integralof-yogaliving#p9p5</ref>
== The Mundane and Divine Perfection ==<center>~</center>
A divine perfection of the human being is our aim. We must know then first If in passing from one domain to another we renounce what are the essential elements that constitute man's total perfection; secondly, what we mean by a divine as distinguished has already been given us from a human perfection of eagerness for 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 conceivenew attainment, fix before it and pursue, is common ground to all thinking humanity, though it may be only if in reaching the minority who concern themselves with this possibility as providing mental life we cast away or belittle the one most important aim of physical life. But by some the ideal which is conceived as a mundane change, by others as a religious conversion. <ref>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 environmentbasis, 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 or if we reject the intelligence, will mental and reason, a heightening and ordering of power and capacity physical 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 our attraction to the exclusion of the rest; sometimesspiritual, in wider and more well-balanced mindswe do not fulfil God integrally, nor satisfy the whole harmony is envisaged as a total perfection. A change conditions of education and social institutions is the outward means adopted or an inner His self-training and development is preferred as the true instrumentationmanifestation. 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 do 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 thatbecome perfect, but it must also be said that it is only a very small part shift the field of our activity.imperfection or at most attain a limited altitude.. that However high we are trying much more than thismay climb, that even though 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 be to the accomplishment which the laws of human perfection demand, infinitely more timeNon-Being itself, infinitely more work and infinitely more means would have been necessary. But we are not seeking an exclusive perfection in one thing or another, climb ill if we are trying forget our base. Not to make everything go forward together abandon the lower to a common, integral perfection. And these things have their place and importanceitself, 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 transfigure it is not that, in 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 light of the nature not only of freedom, but of purity, beatitude and perfection. An integral purity higher to 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 partshave attained, is the condition true divinity 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 Yoganature. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2321/the-synthesisdestiny-of-the-systemsindividual#p19p9</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. <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/28/idealism-and-spirituality#p1~</refcenter>
"The supramental world has to In the process of this change there must be formed or created in us by the Divine Will very necessity of the effort two stages of its working. First, there will be the personal endeavour of the human being, as soon as he becomes aware by his soul, mind, heart of this divine possibility and turns towards it as the result true object of life, to prepare himself for it and to get rid of all in him that belongs to a constant expansion lower working, of all that stands in the way of his opening to the spiritual truth and its power, so as to possess by this liberation his spiritual being and turn all his natural movements into free means of its self-perfecting." (expression… The Mothersecond stage of this Yoga will therefore be a persistent giving up of all the action of the nature into the hands of this greater Power, a substitution of its influence, 27 June 1956) possession and working for the personal effort, until the Divine to whom we aspire becomes the direct master of the Yoga and effects the entire spiritual and ideal conversion of the being.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/0824/27the-juneintegral-1956#p31perfection?search=perfection</ref>
Moral perfection is But if you remain in that consciousness and look from there, then you begin to have all understand something of the qualities 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 considered moral: to yourself in this perfect consciousness and have no defectspersonal reaction, never to make a mistakewell, never I give you the guarantee the other cannot kill you. He will not be able to err, to even if he tries. He will not be always what one conceives 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 bestperfect mastery over everything, to have all the virtuesclear vision of the Truth—and perfect peace. (The Mother, 1 October 1958) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/0905/120-octobermay-19581953#p3p54</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) <refcenter>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~</refcenter>
You stop short at In the perfection that others should realise 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 you matter; there are seldom conscious considerable parts of the life being and the body which remain in the realm of the goal you should be pursuing yourselfsubmental and the subconscient or inconscient. If you are conscious This is one serious obstacle to the mind's endeavour towards the perfection of the nature; for the continued share of itthe submental, well thenthe subconscient and inconscient in the government of the activities, begin with 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 work which is given mind and to you, that is 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 saygo beyond itself, realise what you have to do exceed its own level and do not concern yourself with spiritualise the nature; for what others doit cannot even make fully conscious, cannot securely mentalise and rationalise, it cannot spiritualise, becausesince spiritualisation is a greater and more difficult integration. No doubt, after allby 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 your businessoften a total perfection even within limits and what it does achieve is rare and difficult. And The spiritual consciousness using the best way to mind is employing an inferior means and, even though it brings in a divine light into the true attitude is simply to saymind, a divine purity, "All those around mepassion, all ardour into the circumstances 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 my the lifeand rigorously control the body, all the people near mebut these members, even if refined or mastered, are do not receive their spiritual fulfilment or undergo a mirror held up to me by the Divine Consciousness to show me the progress I must makeperfection and transformation. Everything For that shocks me it is necessary to bring in others means a work I have higher dynamic principle which is native to do the spiritual consciousness and by which, therefore, it can act in myselfits own law and completer natural light and power and impose them upon the members." <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/1022/aphorismthe-ascent-towards-8supermind#p15p16</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<div style="text-effectuation of the spiritual Reality in all the elements of our nature. <ref>httpalign://incarnateword.in/cwsa/22/the-divine-life#p37</refcenter;">
We have to recognise once more that the individual exists not in himself alone but in the collectivity and that individual One man’s perfection and liberation are not the whole sense of God's intention in still can save 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/2334/the-threefoldfinding-of-the-life#p30soul</ref></div>
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 '''Content Curated by it with the same divine tolerance and the same divine bliss a free and inexhaustible activity. Those who have thus possessed the Calm within can perceive always welling out from its silence the perennial supply of the energies that work in the universe. It is not, therefore, the truth of the Silence to say that it is in its nature a rejection of the cosmic activity. The apparent incompatibility of the two states is an error of the limited Mind which, accustomed to trenchant oppositions of affirmation and denial and passing suddenly from one pole to the other, is unable to conceive of a comprehensive consciousness vast and strong enough to include both in a simultaneous embrace. The Silence does not reject the world; it sustains it. Or rather it supports with an equal impartiality the activity and the withdrawal from the activity and approves also the reconciliation by which the soul remains free and still even while it lends itself to all action. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/21/reality-omnipresent#p5</ref> = More on Perfection... = === Ease, Difficulty and Perfection === You must not cherish the illusion that if you want to follow the straight path, if you are modest, if you seek purity, if you are disinterested, if you want to lead a solitary existence and have a clear judgment, things will become easy.... It is quite the contrary! When you begin to advance towards inner and outer perfection, the difficulties start at the same time. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/impurity#p29</ref> === 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 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> === Conflicts and Perfection === If there were no such resistance, there would be nothing whatever to conquer in the world, for the world would be harmonious, a constant passage from one perfection to another instead of the conflict which it is—a game of hazards and various possibilities in which the Divine faces real opposition, real difficulty and often real temporary defeat on the way to the final victory. It is just this reality of the whole play that makes it no mere jest. The Divine Will actually suffers distortion the moment it touches the hostile forces in the Ignorance. Hence we must never slacken our efforts to change the world and bring about a different order. We must be vigilant to co-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> === Perfection and Harmony === 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>Prema Sankar'''
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==References==
= References =
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