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Read Summary of '''[[Perfection Summary|Perfection]]'''
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= What is Perfection? =
 = What is '''Perfection? =in General'''
Perfection is all that we want to become in our highest aspiration. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/15/perfection#p10</ref>
The Divine is the perfection towards which we move. <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/14/the-divine-and-man#p8~</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>
Some people put perfection at the apex. It is generally thought that perfection is the maximum one can do. But I say that perfection is not the apex, it is not an extreme. There is no extreme—whatever you may do, there is always the possibility of something better, and it is exactly this possibility of something better which is the very meaning of progress. (The Mother, 30 December 1950) <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/04/30-december-1950#p5~</refcenter>
Where in the radically imperfect shall we find the principle 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 power discharge of perfection? Mind rooted in division duties, a better, richer, kindlier and limitation cannot provide it to ushappier way of living, nor can life with a more just and more harmonious associated enjoyment of the body which are the energy opportunities of existence. By others again a more inner and subjective ideal is cherished, a clarifying and raising of the frame of dividing intelligence, will and limiting mind. The principle reason, a heightening and ordering of power of perfection are there and capacity in the subconscient but wrapped up in nature, a nobler ethical, a richer aesthetic, a finer emotional, a much healthier and better-governed vital and physical being. Sometimes one element is stressed, almost to the tegument or veil exclusion of the lower Mayarest; sometimes, a mute premonition emerging as an unrealised ideal; in the superconscient they await, open, eternally realisedwider and more well-balanced minds, but still separated from us by the veil whole harmony is envisaged as a total perfection. A change of our education and social institutions is the outward means adopted or an inner self-ignorancetraining and development is preferred as the true instrumentation. It is aboveOr the two aims may be clearly united, thenthe perfection of the inner individual, and not either in our present poise nor below it that we must seek for the reconciling power and knowledgeperfection of the outer living.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2124/the-problemintegral-of-lifeperfection#p12p2</ref>
= How to Achieve '''Elements of Perfection? ='''
==Prerequisites==It is, then, this spiritual fulfilment of the urge to individual perfection and an inner completeness of being that we mean first when we speak of a divine life. It is the first essential condition of a perfected life on earth, and we are therefore right in making the utmost possible individual perfection our first supreme business. The perfection of the spiritual and pragmatic relation of the individual with all around him is our second preoccupation; the solution of this second desideratum lies in a complete universality and oneness with all life upon earth which is the other concomitant result of an evolution into the gnostic consciousness and nature. But there still remains the third desideratum, a new world, a change in the total life of humanity or, at the least, a new perfected collective life in the earth-nature. This calls for the appearance not only of isolated evolved individuals acting in the unevolved mass, but of many gnostic individuals forming a new kind of beings and a new common life superior to the present individual and common existence. A collective life of this kind must obviously constitute itself on the same principle as the life of the gnostic individual. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/22/the-divine-life#p19</ref>
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The first necessity is some fundamental poise of the soul both in its essential and its natural being regarding and meeting the thingsThese three elements, 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, union with the equal Brahmansupreme Divine, 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 Brahmanuniversal Self, 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 supramental life action from this transcendent origin and nature the eternal tranquillity of the Infinite. Moreoverthrough this universality, it is but still with the condition of a securely and perfectly divine action; individual as 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 soul-channel and natural consciousness,—even in the most physical consciousness,—and to make all their workingsinstrument, whatever their outward adaptation to constitute the thing to be done, always and imminuably full essence of the integral divine equality and calm must be its inmost principle. That may be said to be the passive or basic, the fundamental and receptive side perfection 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 fullnesshuman being. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/the-elements-ofintegral-perfection#p2?search=perfection</ref>
The next necessity of perfection is to raise all the active parts of the human nature to that highest condition and working pitch of their power and capacity, śakti, at which they become capable of being divinised into true instruments of the free, perfect, spiritual and divine action. For practical purposes we may take the understanding, the heart, the prana and the body as the four members of our nature which have thus to be prepared, and we have to find the constituent terms of their perfection. Also there '''Where is the dynamical force in us (vīrya) of the temperament, character and soul nature, svabhāva, which makes the power of our members effective in action and gives them their type and direction; this has to be freed from its limitations, enlarged, rounded so that the whole manhood in us may become the basis of a divine manhood, when the Purusha, the real Man in us, the divine Soul, shall act fully in this human instrument and shine fully through this human vessel. To divinise the perfected nature we have to call in the divine Power or Shakti to replace our limited human energy so that this may be shaped into the image of and filled with the force of a greater infinite energy, daivī prakṛti, bhāgavatī śakti. This perfection will grow in the measure in which we can surrender ourselves, first, to the guidance and then to the direct action of that Power and of the Master of our being and our works to whom it belongs, and for this purpose faith is the essential, faith is the great motor-power of our being in our aspirations to perfection,—here, a faith in God and the Shakti which shall begin in the heart and understanding, but shall take possession of all our nature, all its consciousness, all its dynamic motive-force. These four things are the essentials of this second element of perfection, the full powers of the members of the instrumental nature, the perfected dynamis of the soul nature, the assumption of them into the action of the divine Power, and a perfect faith in all our members to call and support that assumption, śakti, vīrya, daivī prakṛti, śraddhā. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/the-elements-of-perfection#p3</ref>Perfection?'''
==Process==Where in the radically imperfect shall we find the principle and power of perfection? Mind rooted in division and limitation cannot provide it to us, nor can life and the body which are the energy and the frame of dividing and limiting mind. The principle and power of perfection are there in the subconscient but wrapped up in the tegument or veil of the lower Maya, a mute premonition emerging as an unrealised ideal; in the superconscient they await, open, eternally realised, but still separated from us by the veil of our self-ignorance. It is above, then, and not either in our present poise nor below it that we must seek for the reconciling power and knowledge.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/21/the-problem-of-life#p12</ref>
"To work for your perfection the first step is to become conscious of yourself." (The Mother, 13 January 1951) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/04/13-january-1951#p16</ref>'''Divine Perfection'''
To work for your perfection, the first step The Divine is to become conscious 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 perfection towards which demands much perseverance and sincerity. For man's nature, especially his mental nature, has a spontaneous tendency to give a favourable explanation for everything he thinks, feels, says and does. It is only by observing these movements with great care, by bringing them, as it were, before the tribunal of our highest ideal, with a sincere will to submit to its judgment, that we can hope to form in ourselves a discernment that never errs. For if we truly want to progress and acquire the capacity of knowing the truth of our being, that is to say, what we are truly created for, what we can call our mission upon earth, then we must, in a very regular and constant manner, reject from us or eliminate in us whatever contradicts the truth of our existence, whatever is opposed to itmove. 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/1214/the-sciencedivine-ofand-livingman#p5p8</ref>
If in passing from one domain to another we renounce what has already been given us from eagerness for our new attainment, if in reaching the mental life we cast away or belittle the physical life which is our basis, or if we reject the mental and physical in our attraction to the spiritual, we do not fulfil God integrally, nor satisfy the conditions of His self-manifestation. We do not become perfect, but only shift the field of our imperfection or at most attain a limited altitude. However high we may climb, even though it be to the Non-Being itself, we climb ill if we forget our base. Not to abandon the lower to itself, but to transfigure it in the light of the higher to which we have attained, is true divinity of nature.<refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/21/the-destiny-of-the-individual#p9~</refcenter>
But 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 can attain to the highest without blotting ourselves out mean by a divine as distinguished from the cosmic extensiona human perfection of our being. Brahman preserves always Its two terms That man as a being is capable of liberty within self-development and of formation withoutsome approach at least to an ideal standard of perfection which his mind is able to conceive, of expression fix before it and of freedom from the expression. We alsopursue, being Thatis common ground to all thinking humanity, can attain to though it may be only the same divine self-possession. The harmony of the two tendencies is minority who concern themselves with this possibility as providing the condition one most important aim of all life that aims at being really divine. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2124/the-destiny-of-theintegral-individualperfection#p18p1</ref>
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An integral Yoga includes as a vital and indispensable element in its total and ultimate aim the conversion The characteristic law of the whole being into a higher spiritual consciousness Spirit is self-existent perfection and a larger divine existenceimmutable infinity. Our parts of will It possesses always and action, our parts of knowledge, our thinking being, our emotional being, our being of life, all our self and nature must seek in its own right the Divine, enter into the Infinite, unite with the Eternal. But man's present nature is limited, divided, unequal,—it immortality which is easiest for him to concentrate in the strongest part aim of his being Life 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 perfection which is the sea goal of the Divine InfinityMind. Some therefore must choose as a starting-point a concentration in thought or contemplation or The attainment of the mind's one-pointedness to find eternal and the eternal reality realisation of that which is the Self same in them; others can more easily withdraw into the heart to meet there the Divine, the Eternal: yet others are predominantly dynamic all things 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 beyond all by their surrender of their will into its infinitythings, guided equally blissful in their works by the secret Divinity within or surrendered to the Lord of the cosmic action as the master universe and mover of all their energies of thoughtoutside it, feeling, act, becoming untouched 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 imperfections and the entire nature. In the supramental consciousness, on the level limitations of the supramental existence this integration becomes consummate; there knowledge, will, emotion, the perfection of the self forms 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 activities in which the Divine Realityit dwells, fully manifested, no longer works with are the instrumentation glory 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 Yogalife.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/23/the-supermindthreefold-and-the-yoga-of-workslife#p1p7</ref>
Fundamentally, whatever be the path one follows—whether the path of surrender, consecration, knowledge—if one wants it to be perfect, it is always equally difficult, and there is but one way, one only, I know of only one: that is perfect sincerity, but perfect sincerity! (The Mother, 12 May 1954) <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/06/12-may-1954#p34~</refcenter>
If you said to yourselfMan, my childrenthe mental being, "We want to be as perfect instruments as possible to express has an imperfect life because mind is not the divine Will in first and highest power of consciousness of the world"Being; even if mind were perfected, then for this instrument there would be still something yet to be perfectrealised, it must be cultivatednot yet manifested. For what is involved and emergent is not a Mind, educatedbut a Spirit, trained. It must and mind is not be left like a shapeless piece the native dynamism of consciousness of stone. When you want to build with a stone you chisel itthe Spirit; when you want to make a formless block into a beautiful diamondsupermind, you chisel it. Wellthe light of gnosis, it is the same thingits native dynamism. When with your brain and body you want If then life has to make become a beautiful instrument for manifestation of the Divine, you must cultivate itSpirit, sharpen it, refine it, complete what is missing, perfect what is therethe 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. (The Mother, 13 May 1953) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/0522/13the-maydivine-1953life#p18p3</ref>
= Why =<center>~</center>
Perfection of all kinds is indeed good, as it is the sign of the pressure of the consciousness in the material world towards full self-expression in this or that limit, on this or that level. In a certain sense it is an urge of the Divine itself hidden in forms that tends in the lesser degrees of consciousness towards its own increasing self-revelation. Perfection of an object or a scene in inanimate Nature, animate perfection of strength, speed, physical beauty, courage or animal fidelity, affection, intelligence, perfection of art, music, poetry, literature,—perfection of the intellect in any kind of mental activity, the perfect statesman, warrior, artist, craftsman,—perfection in vital force and capacity, perfection in ethical qualities, character, temperament,—all have their high value, their place as rungs in the ladder of evolution, the seried steps of the spirit's emergence. If one likes to call that spiritual because of this hidden urge behind it one can do so; it can at least be regarded as a preparation for the secret spirit's emergence. But thought and knowledge can only proceed by making the necessary distinctions. Much confusion is created by neglecting them. This mental idealism, ethical development, religious piety and fervour, occult powers and feats have all been taken as spirituality and the spiritual evolution kept tied to the moorings of the planes of lesser consciousness which do indeed prepare the soul by experience for the spiritual consciousness but are not themselves that. For perfection can only become truly spiritual when it is founded on the awakened spiritual consciousness and takes on its peculiar essence.<ref> http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/28/idealism-and-spirituality#p1</ref>
But if you remain in that consciousness and look from there, then you begin to understand something of the truth. And this consciousness has to be so total, that even if things come directly against you, even the physical movement of someone coming to beat you (you must not allow him to kill you, no; you have perhaps to do what is necessary not to get killed), but if you are yourself in this perfect consciousness and have no personal reaction, well, I give you the guarantee the other cannot kill you. He will not be able to, even if he tries. He will not be able to beat you, even if he tries. Only, you must not have a single violent or wrong vibration, you understand? Even if there is just a little false vibration, that opens the door and the thing enters and all goes wrong. You must be fully conscious, have the full knowledge, the perfect mastery over everything, the clear vision of the Truth—and perfect peace. (The Mother, 20 May 1953) <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/05/20-may-1953#p54~</refcenter>
… one may act with a perfect knowledge But always the whole foundation of what should the gnostic life must be doneby its very nature inward and not outward. In the life of the spirit it is the spirit, the inner Reality, that has built up and uses the mind, vital being and body as its instrumentation; thought, feeling and action do not exist for themselves, they are not an object, but the means; they serve to express the manifested divine Reality within us: otherwise, without intervention—the least intervention—of this inwardness, this spiritual origination, in a too externalised consciousness or by only external means, no greater or divine life is possible. In our present life of Nature, in our externalised surface existence, it is the world that seems to create us; but in the turn to the spiritual life it is we who must create ourselves and our world. In this new formula of creation, the reasoning inner life becomes of the first importance and the rest can be only its expression and outcome. It is this, indeed, that is indicated by our own strivings towards perfection, the perfection of our own soul and mindand life and the perfection of the life of the race. For we are given a world which is obscure, ignorant, material, imperfect, and our external conscious being is itself created by the energies, the pressure, the moulding operations of this vast mute obscurity, by physical birth, by environment, by a training through the impacts and shocks of life; and yet we are vaguely aware of something that is there in us or seeking to be, something other than what has been thus made, a spirit self-existent, self-determining, pushing the nature towards the creation of an image of its own occult perfection or Idea of perfection. There is something that grows in us in answer to this demand, that strives to become the image of a divine. The mind Somewhat, and is silent: impelled also to labour at the world outside that has been given to it simply looks on and listens to remake that too in order a greater image, in the image of its own spiritual and mental and vital growth, to register thingsmake our world too something created according to our own mind and self-conceiving spirit, it does not actsomething new, harmonious, perfect. (The Mother, 23 December 1953) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/0522/23the-decemberdivine-1953life#p8p6</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>
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 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 ==Perfection in which it is impossible to do anything without the Divine; for then, if you are without the Divine, the very source of your action disappears; knowledge, power, all are gone. But so long as you feel that the powers you use are your own, you will not miss the Divine support. (The Mother, 28 April 1929) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/28-april-1929#p14</ref>Mind==
All life that has still this Inconscience for its basis is stamped with the mark of a radical imperfection; for even if The ethical mind becomes perfect in proportion as it is satisfied with its own typedetaches itself from desire, sense suggestion, impulse, it is a satisfaction with something incomplete customary dictated action and inharmonious, discovers a patchwork self of discords: on Right, Love, Strength and Purity in which it can live accomplished and make it the contrary, even a purely mental or vital life might be perfect within foundation of all its limits if actions. The aesthetic mind is perfected in proportion as it were based on detaches itself from all its cruder pleasures and from outward conventional canons of the aesthetic reason and discovers a restricted but harmonious self-power existent self and self-knowledge. It is this bondage to a perpetual stamp spirit of imperfection pure and disharmony that is infinite Beauty and Delight which gives its own light and joy to the mark material of the undivine; a divine life, on the contrary, even if progressing aesthesis. The mind of knowledge is perfected when it gets away from the little to the more, would be at each stage harmonious in its principle impression and dogma and opinion and detail: it would be discovers a secure ground upon light of self-knowledge and intuition which freedom and perfection could naturally flower or grow towards their highest stature, refine and expand into their most subtle opulence. All imperfections, illumines all perfections have to be taken into view in our consideration the workings of the difference between an undivine sense and a divine existence: but ordinarilyreason, all self-experience and world-experience. The will is perfected when we make the distinction, we do it as human beings struggling under the pressure of life gets away from and the difficulties of our conduct amidst behind its immediate problems impulses and perplexities; most of all we are thinking its customary ruts of the distinction we are obliged to make between good effectuation and evil or of that along with its kindred problem discovers an inner power of the duality, Spirit which is the blend in us source of happiness an intuitive and sufferingluminous action and an original harmonious creation. When we seek intellectually for a divine presence in things, a divine origin The movement of perfection is away from all domination by the world, lower nature and towards a divine government pure and powerful reflection of its workings, the presence of evilbeing, the insistence on sufferingpower, the large, the enormous part offered to pain, grief knowledge and affliction in the economy delight of Nature are the cruel phenomena which baffle our reason Spirit and overcome Self in the instinctive faith of mankind in such an origin and government or in an all-seeing, all-determining and omnipresent Divine Immanencebuddhi. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2124/thepurification-divineintelligence-and-the-undivine#p2will</ref>
It is only if our nature develops beyond itself, if it becomes a nature of self-knowledge, mutual understanding, unity, a nature of true being and true life that the result can be a perfection of ourselves and our existence, a life of true being, a life of unity, mutuality, harmony, a life of true happiness, a harmonious and beautiful life. If our nature is fixed in what it is, what it has already become, then no perfection, no real and enduring happiness is possible in earthly life; we must seek it not at all and do the best we can with our imperfections, or we must seek it elsewhere, in a supraterrestrial hereafter, or we must go beyond all such seeking and transcend life by an extinction of nature and ego in some Absolute from which this strange and unsatisfactory being of ours has come into existence. But if in us there is a spiritual being which is emerging and our present state is only an imperfection of half-emergence, if the Inconscient is a starting-point containing in itself the potency of a superconscience and supernature which has to evolve, a veil of apparent Nescience in which that greater consciousness is concealed and from which it has to unfold itself, if an evolution of being is the law, then what we are seeking for is not only possible but part of the eventual necessity of things. It is our spiritual destiny to manifest and become that supernature,—for it is the nature of our true self, our still occult, because unevolved, whole being. A nature of unity will then bring inevitably its life-result of unity, mutuality, harmony. An inner life awakened to a full consciousness and to a full power of consciousness will bear its inevitable fruit in all who have it, self-knowledge, a perfected existence, the joy of a satisfied being, the happiness of a fulfilled nature. <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/22/the-divine-life#p23~</refcenter>
Our soul's dissatisfaction with imperfection as a law The first need is the clarity and the purity of life upon earth, its aspiration towards the elimination intelligence. It must be freed from the claims of all imperfections from our nature, not only in a heaven beyond where it would be automatically impossible the vital being which seeks to be imperfect, but here and now impose the desire of the mind in a life where perfection has to be conquered by evolution and struggleplace of the truth, are as much a law from the claims of our the troubled emotional being as that against which they revolt; they too are divinestrives to colour,—a divine dissatisfactiondistort, a divine aspirationlimit and falsify the truth with the hue and shape of the emotions. In them is It must be free too from its own defect, inertia of the inherent light of a thought-power within which maintains them , obstructive narrowness and unwillingness to open to knowledge, intellectual unscrupulousness in thinking, prepossession and preference, self-will in us so that the Divine may not only reason and false determination of the will to knowledge. Its sole will must be there as a hidden Reality in our spiritual secrecies but unfold to make itself in an unsullied mirror of the evolution truth, its essence and its forms and measures and relations, a clear mirror, a just measure, a fine and subtle instrument of Natureharmony, an integral intelligence. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2124/the-divinepower-andof-the-undivine#p8instruments</ref>
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But our mind is obscure, partial in its notions, misled by opposite surface appearances, divided between various possibilities; it is led in three different directions to any of which it may give an exclusive preference. Our mind, in its search for what must be, turns towards a concentration on our own inner spiritual growth and perfection, on our own individual being and inner living; or it turns towards a concentration on an individual development of our surface nature, on the perfection of our thought and outer dynamic or practical action on the world, on some idealism of our personal relation with the world around us; or it turns rather towards a concentration on the outer world itself, on making it better, more suited to our ideas and temperament or to our conception of what should be. On one side there is the call of our spiritual being which is our true self, a transcendent reality, a being of the Divine Being, not created by the world, able to live in itself, to rise out of world to transcendence; on the other side there is the demand of the world around us which is a cosmic form, a formulation of the Divine Being, a power of the Reality in disguise. There is too the divided or double demand of our being of Nature which is poised between these two terms, depends on them and connects them; for it is apparently made by the world and yet, because its true creator is in ourselves and the world instrumentation that seems to make it is only the means first used, it is really a form, a disguised manifestation of a greater spiritual being within us. It is this demand that mediates between our preoccupation with an inward perfection or spiritual liberation and our preoccupation with the outer world and its formation, insists on a happier relation between the two terms and creates the ideal of a better individual in a better world. But it is within us that the Reality must be found and the source and foundation of a perfected life; no outward formation can replace it: there must be the true self realised within if there is to be the true life realised in world and Nature. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/22/the-divine-life#p7</ref>
==Perfection in the Vital==
Then again there is the psychic prana, pranic mind or desire soul; this too calls for its own perfection. Here too the first necessity is a fullness of the vital capacity in the mind, its power to do its full work, to take possession of all the impulsions and energies given to our inner psychic life for fulfilment in this existence, to hold them and to be a means for carrying them out with strength, freedom, perfection. Many of the things we need for our perfection, courage, will-power effective in life, all the elements of what we now call force of character and force of personality, depend very largely for their completest strength and spring of energetic action on the fullness of the psychic prana. But along with this fullness there must be an established gladness, clearness and purity in the psychic life-being. This dynamis must not be a troubled, perfervid, stormy, fitfully or crudely passionate strength; energy there must be, rapture of its action it must have, but a clear and glad and pure energy, a seated and firmly supported pure rapture. And as a third condition of its perfection it must be poised in a complete equality.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/the-power-of-the-instruments</ref>
<center>~</center>
This heart and psychic being of man shot through with the threads of the life instincts is a thing of mixed inconstant colours of emotion and soul vibrations, bad and good, happy and unhappy, satisfied and unsatisfied, troubled and calm, intense and dull. Thus agitated and invaded it is unacquainted with any real peace, incapable of a steady perfection of all its powers. By purification, by equality, by the light of knowledge, by a harmonising of the will it can be brought to a tranquil intensity and perfection.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/the-power-of-the-instruments</ref>
== Duality in Perfection ==<center>~</center>
The other side of perfection is a self-contained and calm and unegoistic Rudra-power armed with psychic force, the energy of the strong heart which is capable of supporting without shrinking an insistent, an outwardly austere or even, where need is, a violent action.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/the-power-of-the-instruments</ref>
== Perfection in the Body ==
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 body has learned the limitations art of relative things; its purity is not stained by our sin and evil; its bliss is not touched by our pain and suffering; its constantly progressing towards an increasing perfection is not impaired by our defects of consciousness, knowledge, will, unity. In certain images of we shall be well on the Upanishads the divine Purusha is described as the one Fire which has entered into all forms and shapes itself according way to overcoming the form, as the one Sun which illumines all impartially and is not affected by the faults inevitability 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 itdeath. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/2116/the16-divine-and-thejanuary-undivine1972#p4p1</ref>
== Facing the Imperfection ==<center>~</center>
But even when we thus regard As for the universe, we cannot and ought not to dismiss as entirely and radically false and unreal question about the values that are given to it by our own limited human consciousness. For griefillness, 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 perfection in 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 physical plane is indeed 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 ideal 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 evilYoga, but all evil it 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 last item and imperfection, so long as 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 fundamental change has 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 been made in the depths, material consciousness to arrive at a state of vast inner equality and peace which is untouched by the reactions of the outer naturebody belongs, and that is one may have a great but incomplete liberation,—for certain perfection on other planes without having immunity in 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 deliverancebody. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2131/the-divineillness-and-the-undivinehealth#p19p57</ref>
For an age out of sympathy with the ascetic spirit—and throughout all the rest of the world the hour of the Anchorite may seem to have passed or to be passing—it is easy to attribute this great trend to the failing of vital energy in an ancient race tired out by its burden, its once vast share in the common advance, exhausted by its many-sided contribution to the sum of human effort and human knowledge. But we have seen that it corresponds to a truth of existence, a state of conscious realisation which stands at the very summit of our possibility. In practice also the ascetic spirit is an indispensable element in human perfection and even its separate affirmation cannot be avoided so long as the race has not at the other end liberated its intellect and its vital habits from subjection to an always insistent animalism. <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/21/the-two-negations-the-refusal-of-the-ascetic#p23~</refcenter>
No The physical being of man is perfect; has always been felt by the vital is there seekers of perfection to be a great impediment and it has been the ego is there habit to prevent turn from itwith contempt, denial or aversion and a desire to suppress altogether or as far as may be the body and the physical life. It is only when there But this cannot be the right method for the integral Yoga. The body is given us as one instrument necessary to the total transformation totality of our works and it is to be used, not neglected, hurt, suppressed or abolished. If it is imperfect, recalcitrant, obstinate, so are also the external and other members, the internal vital being down , heart and mind and reason. It has like them to be changed and perfected and to the very subconscientundergo a transformation. As we must get ourselves a new life, new heart, new mind, that perfection is possible. Till then imperfection will remain as our common heritageso we have in a certain sense to build for ourselves a new body. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/3124/the-subconscientpower-andof-the-integral-yoga#p2instruments</ref>
The Master of our works respects our nature even when he is transforming it; he works always through the nature and not by any arbitrary caprice. This imperfect nature of ours contains the materials of our perfection, but inchoate, distorted, misplaced, thrown together in disorder or a poor imperfect order. All this material has to be patiently perfected, purified, reorganised, new-moulded and transformed, not hacked and hewn and slain or mutilated, not obliterated by simple coercion and denial. This world and we who live in it are his creation and manifestation, and he deals with it and us in a way our narrow and ignorant mind cannot understand unless it falls silent and opens to a divine knowledge. In our errors is the substance of a truth which labours to reveal its meaning to our groping intelligence. The human intellect cuts out the error and the truth with it and replaces it by another half-truth half-error; but the Divine Wisdom suffers our mistakes to continue until we are able to arrive at the truth hidden and protected under every false cover. Our sins are the misdirected steps of a seeking Power that aims, not at sin, but at perfection, at something that we might call a divine virtue. Often they are the veils of a quality that has to be transformed and delivered out of this ugly disguise: otherwise, in the perfect providence of things, they would not have been suffered to exist or to continue. The Master of our works is neither a blunderer nor an indifferent witness nor a dallier with the luxury of unneeded evils. He is wiser than our reason and wiser than our virtue. <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/23/the-master-of-the-work#p6~</refcenter>
== Imperfection to Perfection ==Transformation and the Body : The supramental perfection means that the body becomes conscious, is filled with consciousness and that as this is the Truth consciousness all its actions, functionings etc. become by the power of the consciousness within it harmonious, luminous, right and true—without ignorance or disorder. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/28/transformation-and-the-body#p3</ref>
In this light we can admit that all works perfectly towards a divine end by a divine wisdom and therefore each thing is in that sense perfectly fitted in its place; but we say that that is not the whole of the divine purpose. For what is is only justifiable, finds its perfect sense and satisfaction by what can and will be. There is, no doubt, a key in the divine reason that would justify things as they are by revealing their right significance and true secret as other, subtler, deeper than their outward meaning and phenomenal appearance which is all that can normally be caught by our present intelligence: but we cannot be content with that belief, to search for and find the spiritual key of things is the law of our being. The sign of the finding is not a philosophic intellectual recognition and a resigned or sage acceptance of things as they are because of some divine sense and purpose in them which is beyond us; the real sign is an elevation towards the spiritual knowledge and power which will transform the law and phenomena and external forms of our life nearer to a true image of that divine sense and purpose. It is right and reasonable to endure with equanimity suffering and subjection to defect as the immediate will of God, a present law of imperfection laid on our members, but on condition that we recognise it also as the will of God in us to transcend evil and suffering, to transform imperfection into perfection, to rise into a higher law of Divine Nature. In our human consciousness there is the image of an ideal truth of being, a divine nature, an incipient godhead: in relation to that higher truth our present state of imperfection can be relatively described as an undivine life and the conditions of the world from which we start as undivine conditions; the imperfections are the indication given to us that they are there as first disguises, not as the intended expression of the divine being and the divine nature. It is a Power within us, the concealed Divinity, that has lit the flame of aspiration, pictures the image of the ideal, keeps alive our discontent and pushes us to throw off the disguise and to reveal or, in the Vedic phrase, to form and disclose the Godhead in the manifest spirit, mind, life and body of this terrestrial creature. Our present nature can only be transitional, our imperfect status a starting-point and opportunity for the achievement of another higher, wider and greater that shall be divine and perfect not only by the secret spirit within it but in its manifest and most outward form of existence. <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/21/the-divine-and-the-undivine#p9~</refcenter>
The This is one of the things one discovers gradually as the body becomes ready for transformations. It is quite a remarkable instrument in the see that it can experience two contraries at the same time. There is a certain state of body-consciousness which brings things together, totalises things that in other states of consciousness alternate or even in certain others oppose each other. But if one has reached up there, in the vital and the mind, a development sufficient for harmonising opposites (that of course, is quite indispensable), when one has succeeded in doing this, there are moments when it alternates, you see, one thing comes after the other, while what is remarkable in the consciousness of the body is that it can feel ("feel", can we say "feel"?—"experience"—the word "aware" expresses it best) all things simultaneously, as though you were hot and cold at once, as though you were active and passive at once, and everything becomes like that. Then you begin to grasp the totality of movements in the cells. It is something much more concrete naturally, but much more perfect in the contactbody than in any other part of the being. This means that if things continue in this way, it will be proved that the greater physical, material instrument is the most perfect of all. That is why perhaps it is the powermost difficult to transform, to perfect. (The MotherBut of all, 20 June 1956) it is the one most capable of perfection. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/0806/2021-juneapril-19561954#p11p31</ref>
There is nothing you cannot understand if you give your brain the time to widen and perfect itself. (The Mother, 12 December 1956) <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/08/12-december-1956#p15~</refcenter>
For one who wants to grow It is precisely because the body decays, declines and ends in self-a complete degradation that death becomes necessary. But if the body followed the progressive movement of the inner being, if it had the same sense of progress and perfectionas the psychic being, there are would be no great or small tasks, none that are important or unimportant; all are equally useful necessity for one who aspires for progress and self-masteryit to die. One year added to another need not bring a deterioration. It is only a habit of Nature. It is said that one only does well a habit of what one is interested in doinghappening at this moment. This And that is trueexactly the cause of death. One can foresee quite well, but it on the contrary, that the movement for perfection which is truer still at the beginning of life might continue under another form. I have already told you that one can learn to find interest in everything one doesnot foresee an uninterrupted growth, even in what appear to be for that would need changing the most insignificant chores. The secret height of the houses after some time! But this attainment lies growth in height may be changed into a growth in perfection: the urge towards self-perfectionof the form. Whatever occupation or task falls to your lotAll the imperfections of the form may be gradually corrected, all the weaknesses replaced by strength, you must do all the incapacities by skill. Why should it with a will to progress; whatever one does, one must not only be like this? You do it as best one can but strive to do it better and better not think in a constant effort for perfection. In this that way everything without exception becomes interesting, from because you have the most material chore to the most artistic and intellectual workhabit of seeing things otherwise. The scope for progress But there is infinite and can be applied to the smallest thingno reason why this should not happen. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/1205/the-four-austerities-and-the17-fourjune-liberations1953#p17p36</ref>
And, finally, a word of advice: be more concerned with your own faults than with those of others. If each one worked seriously at his own self-perfection, the perfection of the whole would follow automatically. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/13/aims-and-principles#p147</ref>= Why Do We Need Perfection? =
It is all right to see == For Discovering the imperfections and deficiencies but only on condition it brings a greater courage for a new progress, an increase Truth of energy in the determination and a stronger certitude of victory and future perfection. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/14/mistakes-no-torment-worry-or-sadness#p12</ref>Living==
= Mind For the awakened individual the realisation of his truth of being and Perfection =his inner liberation and perfection must be his primary seeking,—first, because that is the call of the Spirit within him, but also because it is only by liberation and perfection and realisation of the truth of being that man can arrive at truth of living. A perfected community also can exist only by the perfection of its individuals, and perfection can come only by the discovery and affirmation in life by each of his own spiritual being and the discovery by all of their spiritual unity and a resultant life unity. There can be no real perfection for us except by our inner self and truth of spiritual existence taking up all truth of the instrumental existence into itself and giving to it oneness, integration, harmony. As our only real freedom is the discovery and disengagement of the spiritual Reality within us, so our only means of true perfection is the sovereignty and self-effectuation of the spiritual Reality in all the elements of our nature. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/22/the-divine-life#p37</ref>
== Mind’s Way and Perfect Understanding ==<center>~</center>
But our mind There is obscurea Reality, partial in a truth of all existence which is greater and more abiding than all its notions, misled by opposite surface appearances, divided between various possibilitiesformations and manifestations; to find that truth and Reality and live in it is led in three different directions to any , achieve the most perfect manifestation and formation possible 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 the secret of perfection, on our own whether of individual or communal being . This Reality is there within each thing and inner living; or it turns towards a concentration on an individual development gives to each of our surface nature, on the perfection its formations its power of our thought being and outer dynamic or practical action on the world, on some idealism value 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 bebeing. On one side there The universe is the call of our spiritual being which is our true self, a transcendent reality, a being manifestation of the Divine BeingReality, not created by the world, able to live in itself, to rise out of world to transcendence; on the other side and there is the demand a truth of the world around us which is a cosmic formuniversal existence, a formulation Power of the Divine Beingcosmic being, an all-self or world-spirit. Humanity is a power formation or manifestation 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 yetuniverse, because its true creator is in ourselves and the world instrumentation that seems to make it is only the means first used, it there is really a formtruth and self of humanity, 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 formationhuman spirit, 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 destiny 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 human life realised in world and Nature. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/22/the-divine-life#p7p36</ref>
The characteristic law of Spirit is self==For Self-existent perfection and immutable infinity. It possesses always and in its own right the immortality which is the aim of Life and the perfection which is the goal of Mind. The attainment of the eternal and the realisation of that which is the same in all things and beyond all things, equally blissful in universe and outside it, untouched by the imperfections and limitations of the forms Progress and activities in which it dwells, are the glory of the spiritual life. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/23/the-threefold-life#p7</ref>Fulfillment==
There is In the Dhammapada: a world of ideas without form supreme disinterestedness and it is there that you must enter if you want to seize what a supreme liberation is behind the words. So long as you have to draw your understanding from follow the forms discipline of wordsself-perfection, you are likely to fall into much confusion about the true sense; but if in a silence march of your mind you can rise into the world from which ideas descend to take formprogress, at once the real understanding comes. If you are to be sure not with a precise end in view but because this march of understanding one another, you must be able to understand in silence. There progress is a condition in which your minds are so well attuned the profound law and harmonised together that one perceives the thought purpose of earthly life, the other without any necessity truth of words. But if there is not this attunement, there will always be some deformation of your meaning, universal existence and 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 yourself in harmony with it, but what the word means to you. This is true not of speech onlyspontaneously, 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 whatever 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 result may 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) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/26-maythe-1929brahmin#p21p43</ref>
== Mind’s Endeavour to Perfection ==<center>~</center>
For here there is the same process of evolution as one who wants to grow in the rest of the movement of Nature; self-perfection, there is a heightening and widening of the consciousnessare no great or small tasks, an ascent to a new level and a taking up of the lower levels, an assumption and new integration of the existence by a superior power of Being which imposes its own way of action and its character and force of substance energy on as much as it can reach of the previously evolved parts of nature. The demand for integration becomes at this highest stage of Nature's workings a point of cardinal importance. In the lower grades of the ascension the new assumption, the integration into a higher principle of consciousness, remains incomplete: the mind cannot wholly mentalise life and matternone that are important or unimportant; there all are considerable parts of the life being equally useful for one who aspires for progress and the body which remain self-mastery. It is said that one only does well what one is interested in the realm of the submental and the subconscient or inconscientdoing. This is true, but it is truer still that one serious obstacle can learn to the mind's endeavour towards the perfection of the nature; for the continued share of the submental, the subconscient and inconscient find interest in the government of the activitieseverything one does, by bringing even in another law than that of the mental being, enables the conscious vital and the physical consciousness also what appear to reject be the law laid upon them by the mind and to follow their own impulses and instincts most insignificant chores. The secret of this attainment lies in defiance of the mental reason and the rational will of the developed intelligenceurge towards self-perfection. This makes it difficult for the mind Whatever occupation or task falls to go beyond itselfyour lot, you must do it with a will to exceed its own level and spiritualise the natureprogress; for what it cannot even make fully conscious, cannot securely mentalise and rationalisewhatever one does, one must not only do it cannot spiritualise, since spiritualisation is a greater and more difficult integration. No doubt, by calling in the spiritual force, as best one can but strive to do it can establish an influence better and a preliminary change better 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 constant effort for perfection even within limits and what it does achieve is rare and difficult. The spiritual consciousness using the mind is employing an inferior means and, even though it brings in a divine light into the mindIn this way everything without exception becomes interesting, a divine purity, passion, ardour into from the heart or imposes a spiritual law upon the life, this new consciousness has most material chore to work within restrictions; for the most part it can only regulate or check the lower action of the life artistic and rigorously control the body, but these members, even if refined or mastered, do not receive their spiritual fulfilment or undergo a perfection and transformationintellectual work. For that it The scope for progress is necessary to bring in a higher dynamic principle which is native to the spiritual consciousness infinite and by which, therefore, it can act in its own law and completer natural light and power and impose them upon be applied to the memberssmallest thing. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/2212/the-ascentfour-austerities-and-the-towardsfour-supermindliberations#p16p17</ref>
In your meditation the first imperative need is a state of perfect and absolute sincerity in all the consciousness. It is indispensable that you should not deceive yourself or deceive or be deceived by others. Often people have a wish, a mental preference or vital desire; they want the experience to happen in a particular way or to take a turn that satisfies their ideas or desires or preferences; they do not keep themselves blank and unprejudiced and simply and sincerely observe what happens. Then if you do not like what happens, it is easy to deceive yourself; you will see one thing, but give it a little twist and make it something else, or you will distort something simple and straightforward or magnify it into an extraordinary experience. When you sit in meditation you must be as candid and simple as a child, not interfering by your external mind, expecting nothing, insisting on nothing. Once this condition is there, all the rest depends upon the aspiration deep within you. If you ask from within for peace, it will come; if for strength, for power, for knowledge, they too will come, but all in the measure of your capacity to receive it. And if you call upon the Divine, then too—always admitting that the Divine is open to your call, and that means your call is pure enough and strong enough to reach him,—you will have the answer. (The Mother, 23 June 1929) <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/23-june-1929#p23~</refcenter>
At the same time Perfection is not a static state, it must be added that the power is enough; the abstention an equilibrium. But a progressive, dynamic equilibrium. One may go from all physical action is not indispensable, the aversion perfection to action mental or corporeal is not desirableperfection. The seeker of the integral There can come a state of knowledge must from which it would not be free from attachment necessary to action and equally free from attachment descend to inaction. Especially must any tendency a lower rung in order to mere inertia go farther; at the moment the march of mind or vitality or body be surmountedNature is like that, and if that habit is found growing on the naturebut in this new state, the will instead of the Purusha must being obliged to go back to be used able to dismiss itstart again, one can walk always forward, without ever stopping. EventuallyAs things are, one comes to a state arrives when the life certain point and the body perform , as human beings as mere instruments the will of the Purusha in the mind without any strain they are at present cannot progress indefinitely, one must pass to a higher species or attachment, without their putting themselves into leave the action with that inferior, eager present species and often feverish energy which is the nature of their ordinary working; they come to work create another. The human being as forces of Nature work without the fret and toil and reaction characteristic of life in the body when it he is not yet master of at the physical. When we moment cannot attain to this perfection, then action and inaction become immaterial, since neither interferes with the freedom unless he gets out of the soul or draws himself—man is a transitional being. In ordinary language it away from its urge towards the Self or its poise in the Self. But may be said: "Oh, this state of perfection arrives later in the Yoga and till then the law of moderation laid down by the Gita man is the best for us; too much mental or physical action then perfect", but that is not good since excess draws away too much energy and reacts unfavourably upon the spiritual condition; too little also a literary figure. The maximum a human being can attain just now is not good since defect leads to a habit of inaction and even to an incapacity equilibrium which has afterwards to be surmounted with difficultyis not progressive. Still, periods of absolute calm, solitude and cessation from works are highly desirable and should He may attain perhaps a static equilibrium but all that is static can be secured as often as possible broken for that recession lack of the soul into itself which is indispensable to knowledgeprogress. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/2304/the-release-from-subjection-to30-thedecember-body1950#p8p19</ref>
Mind finds fully its force and action only when it casts itself upon life and accepts equally its possibilities and its resistances as the means of a greater self-perfection. In the struggle with the difficulties of the material world the ethical development of the individual is firmly shaped and the great schools of conduct are formed; by contact with the facts of life Art attains to vitality, Thought assures its abstractions, the generalisations of the philosopher base themselves on a stable foundation of science and experience. <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/23/the-threefold-life#p18~</refcenter>
All life is a secret Yoga, an obscure growth of Nature towards the discovery and fulfilment of the divine principle hidden in her which becomes progressively less obscure, more self-conscient and luminous, more self-possessed in the human being by the opening of all his instruments of knowledge, will, action, life to the Spirit within him and in the world. Mind, life, body, all the forms of our nature are the means of this growth, but they find their last perfection only by opening out to something beyond them, first, because they are not the whole of what man is, secondly, because that other something which he is, is the key of his completeness and brings a light which discovers to him the whole high and large reality of his being.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/the-integral-perfection?search== Highest Perfection ==perfection</ref>
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, see God in all, in our enemies or rather our opponents in the game of life as well as our friends, in the powers that oppose and resist us as well as the powers that favour and assist, in all energies and forces and happenings, and if besides we can feel that all is undivided from our self, all the world one with us within our universal being, then this attitude becomes much easier to the heart and mind. But even before we can attain or are firmly seated in that universal vision, we have by all the means in our power to insist on this receptive and active equality and calm. Even something of it, alpam api asya dharmasya, is a great step towards perfection; a first firmness in it is the beginning of liberated perfection; its completeness is the perfect assurance of a rapid progress in all the other members of perfection. For without it we can have no solid basis; and by the pronounced lack of it we shall be constantly falling back to the lower status of desire, ego, duality, ignorance. <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/the-action-of-equality#p5~</refcenter>
As you pursue this labour Our soul's dissatisfaction with imperfection as a law of purification and unificationlife upon earth, you must at the same time take great care to perfect its aspiration towards the external and instrumental part elimination of your being. When the higher truth manifestsall imperfections from our nature, not only in a heaven beyond where it must find would be automatically impossible to be imperfect, but here and now in you a mind that is supple and rich enough life where perfection has to be able to give the idea that seeks to express itself conquered by evolution and struggle, are as much a form law of thought our being as that against which preserves its force and clarity. This thoughtthey revolt; they too are divine, again—a divine dissatisfaction, when it seeks to clothe itself in words, must find in you a sufficient divine aspiration. In them is the inherent light of a power of expression within which maintains them in us so that the words reveal the thought and do Divine may not deform it. And the formula in which you embody the truth should only be manifested there as a hidden Reality in all your feelings, all your acts of will, all your actions, our spiritual secrecies but unfold itself in all the movements evolution of your being. Finally, these movements themselves should, by constant effort, attain their highest perfectionNature. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/1221/the-sciencedivine-ofand-the-livingundivine#p6p8</ref>
=== Soul, Mind and Perfection ===<center>~</center>
The character of these higher states of the soul and their greater worlds of spiritual Nature It is necessarily difficult to seize. Even the Upanishads and the Veda only shadow them out by figuresif our nature develops beyond itself, hints and symbols. Yet if it is necessary to attempt some account becomes a nature of self-knowledge, mutual understanding, unity, a nature of their principles true being and practical effect so far as they true life that the result can be grasped by the mind that stands on the border a perfection of ourselves and our existence, a life of the two hemispheres. The passage beyond that border would be the culminationtrue being, the completeness a life of the Yoga unity, mutuality, harmony, a life of self-transcendence by self-knowledgetrue happiness, a harmonious and beautiful life. The soul that aspires to If our nature is fixed in what it is, what it has already become, then no perfection, draws back no real and enduring happiness is possible in earthly life; we must seek it not at all and upwarddo the best we can with our imperfections, says the Upanishador 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 the physical which this strange and unsatisfactory being of ours has come into the vital existence. But if in us there is a spiritual being which is emerging and from our present state is only an imperfection of half-emergence, if the vital into Inconscient is a starting-point containing in itself the mental Purushapotency of a superconscience and supernature which has to evolve, from the mental into the knowledge-soul a veil of apparent Nescience in which that greater consciousness is concealed and from that self which it has to unfold itself, if an evolution of knowledge into being is the bliss Purusha. This self law, then what we are seeking for is not only possible but part of bliss is the conscious foundation eventual necessity of perfect Sachchidananda things. It is our spiritual destiny to manifest and to pass into become that supernature,—for it completes is the soul's ascensionnature 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. The mind therefore must try An inner life awakened to give a full consciousness and to itself some account a full power of this decisive transformation of the embodied consciousnesswill bear its inevitable fruit in all who have it, this radiant transfiguration and self-exceeding knowledge, a perfected existence, the joy of our ever aspiring nature. The description mind can arrive ata satisfied being, can never be adequate to the thing itself, but it may point at least to some indicative shadow happiness of it or perhaps some half-luminous imagea fulfilled nature. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2322/the-ladder-of-selfdivine-transcendencelife#p13p23</ref>
But always the whole foundation of the gnostic life must be by its very nature inward and not outward. In the life of the spirit it is the spirit, the inner Reality, that has built up and uses the mind, vital being and body as its instrumentation; thought, feeling and action do not exist for themselves, they are not an object, but the means; they serve to express the manifested divine Reality within us: otherwise, without this inwardness, this spiritual origination, in a too externalised consciousness or by only external means, no greater or divine life is possible. In our present life of Nature, in our externalised surface existence, it is the world that seems to create us; but in the turn to the spiritual life it is we who must create ourselves and our world. In this new formula of creation, the inner life becomes of the first importance and the rest can be only its expression and outcome. It is this, indeed, that is indicated by our own strivings towards perfection, the perfection of our own soul and mind and life and the perfection of the life of the race. For we are given a world which is obscure, ignorant, material, imperfect, and our external conscious being is itself created by the energies, the pressure, the moulding operations of this vast mute obscurity, by physical birth, by environment, by a training through the impacts and shocks of life; and yet we are vaguely aware of something that is there in us or seeking to be, something other than what has been thus made, a spirit self-existent, self-determining, pushing the nature towards the creation of an image of its own occult perfection or Idea of perfection. There is something that grows in us in answer to this demand, that strives to become the image of a divine. Somewhat, and is impelled also to labour at the world outside that has been given to it and to remake that too in a greater image, in the image of its own spiritual and mental and vital growth, to make our world too something created according to our own mind and self-conceiving spirit, something new, harmonious, perfect. <ref>http://incarnateword.== To Grow in/cwsa/22/the-divine-life#p6</ref>Spiritual Oneness==
== Supermind ==His physical being will be one with all material Nature, his vital being with the life of the universe, his mind with the cosmic mind, his spiritual knowledge and will with the divine knowledge and will both in itself and as it pours itself through these channels, his spirit with the one spirit in all beings. All the variety of cosmic existence will be changed to him in that unity and revealed in the secret of its spiritual significance. For in this spiritual bliss and being he will be one with That which is the origin and continent and inhabitant and spirit and constituting power of all existence. This will be the highest reach of self-perfection.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/the-elements-of-perfection</ref>
If consciousness is the central secret, life is the outward indication, the effective power of being in Matter; for it is that which liberates consciousness and gives it its form or embodiment of force and its effectuation in material act. If some revelation or effectuation of itself in Matter is the ultimate aim of the evolving Being in its birth, life is the exterior and dynamic sign and index of that revelation and effectuation. But life also, as it is now, is imperfect and evolving; it evolves through growth of consciousness even as consciousness evolves through greater organisation and perfection of life: a greater consciousness means a greater life. Man, the mental being, has an imperfect life because mind is not the first and highest power of consciousness of the Being; even if mind were perfected, there would be still something yet to be realised, not yet manifested. For what is involved and emergent is not a Mind, but a Spirit, and mind is not the native dynamism of consciousness of the Spirit; supermind, the light of gnosis, is its native dynamism. If then life has to become a manifestation of the Spirit, it is the manifestation of a spiritual being in us and the divine life of a perfected consciousness in a supramental or gnostic power of spiritual being that must be the secret burden and intention of evolutionary Nature. <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/22/the-divine-life#p3~</refcenter>
These are So long as he remains in the first major results of the spiritual transformation world-existence, this perfection must radiate out from him,—for that follow as a necessary consequence of the nature of Supermind. But if there is to be not only a perfection of the inner existence, necessity of his oneness with the consciousnessuniverse and its beings, of —in an inner delight influence and action which help all around who are capable of existenceit to rise to or advance towards the same perfection, but a perfection of and for the life rest in an influence and actionwhich help, two other questions present themselves from our mental viewas only the self-point which have to our human thought about our life ruler and its dynamisms a considerablemaster man can help, even a premier importance. First, there is in leading the place human race forward spiritually towards this consummation and towards some image of personality a greater divine truth in the gnostic being,—whether the status, the building of the being will be quite other than what we experience as the form their personal and life of the person or similarcommunal existence. If there is He becomes a personality light and it is in any way responsible for its actions, there intervenes, next, the question power of the place of the ethical element Truth to which he has climbed and its perfection and fulfilment in the gnostic naturea means for others’ ascension. <ref>httpttp://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2224/the-gnosticperfection-of-the-mental-being#p28?search=perfection</ref>
= Body and How to Achieve Perfection ? =
== Perfecting The Master of our works respects our nature even when he is transforming it; he works always through the Body ==nature and not by any arbitrary caprice. This imperfect nature of ours contains the materials of our perfection, but inchoate, distorted, misplaced, thrown together in disorder or a poor imperfect order. All this material has to be patiently perfected, purified, reorganised, new-moulded and transformed, not hacked and hewn and slain or mutilated, not obliterated by simple coercion and denial. This world and we who live in it are his creation and manifestation, and he deals with it and us in a way our narrow and ignorant mind cannot understand unless it falls silent and opens to a divine knowledge. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/23/the-master-of-the-work#p6</ref>
This is one of the things one discovers gradually as the body becomes ready for transformations. It is quite a remarkable instrument in the see that it can experience two contraries at the same time. There is a certain state of body-consciousness which brings things together, totalises things that in other states of consciousness alternate or even in certain others oppose each other. But if one has reached up there, in the vital and the mind, a development sufficient for harmonising opposites (that of course, is quite indispensable), when one has succeeded in doing this, there are moments when it alternates, you see, one thing comes after the other, while what is remarkable in the consciousness of the body is that it can feel ("feel", can we say "feel"?—"experience"—the word "aware" expresses it best) all things simultaneously, as though you were hot and cold at once, as though you were active and passive at once, and everything becomes like that. Then you begin to grasp the totality of movements in the cells. It is something much more concrete naturally, but much more perfect in the body than in any other part of the being. This means that if things continue in this way, it will be proved that the physical, material instrument is the most perfect of all. That is why perhaps it is the most difficult to transform, to perfect. But of all, it is the one most capable of perfection. (The Mother, 21 April 1954) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/06/21-april-1954#p31</ref>==Prerequisites==
Be 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 your guard against 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 wrath sign of unity with the Brahman, of becoming Brahman, of growing into an undisturbed spiritual poise of being in the bodyInfinite. Control your actionsIts 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 leaving behind wrong ways peace of actingliberation. Equality is a term of consciousness which brings into the whole of our being and nature the eternal tranquillity of the Infinite. Moreover, practise 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 conduct spiritual action; to be equal and one to all things in actionspirit, 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.in/cwmcwsa/0324/angerthe-elements-of-perfection#p10p2</ref>
One who aspires to the ineffable Peace, one whose mind is awakened, whose thoughts are not entangled in the net of desire, that one is said to be "bound upstream" (towards perfection). <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/pleasure#p10~</refcenter>
As for The next necessity of perfection is to raise all the active parts of the human nature to that highest condition and working pitch of their power and capacity, ''śakti'', at which they become capable of being divinised into true instruments of the free, perfect, spiritual and divine action. For practical purposes we may take the understanding, the heart, the prana and the question about body as the illnessfour members of our nature which have thus to be prepared, and we have to find the constituent terms of their perfection . Also there is the dynamical force in us (vīrya) of the temperament, character and soul nature, ''svabhāva'', which makes the physical plane is indeed part power of our members effective in action and gives them their type and direction; this has to be freed from its limitations, enlarged, rounded so that the ideal whole manhood in us may become the basis of a divine manhood, when the Purusha, the real Man in us, the Yogadivine Soul, but it is shall act fully in this human instrument and shine fully through this human vessel. To divinise the perfected nature we have to call in the divine Power or Shakti to replace our limited human energy so that this may be shaped into the last item image of andfilled with the force of a greater infinite energy, ''daivī prakṛti, so long as bhāgavatī śakti''. This perfection will grow in the fundamental change has not been made measure in which we can surrender ourselves, first, to the material consciousness guidance and then to which the body direct action of that Power and of the Master of our being and our works to whom it belongs, one may have and for this purpose faith is the essential, faith is the great motor-power of our being in our aspirations to perfection,—here, a certain 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 on other planes without having immunity , 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 the bodyall our members to call and support that assumption, ''śakti, vīrya, daivī prakṛti, śraddhā''. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/3124/illnessthe-andelements-of-healthperfection#p57p3</ref>
Transformation and the Body : The supramental perfection means that the body becomes conscious, is filled with consciousness and that as this is the Truth consciousness all its actions, functionings etc. become by the power of the consciousness within it harmonious, luminous, right and true—without ignorance or disorder. <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/28/transformation-and-the-body#p3~</refcenter>
== Body Perfection ...perfection of our instrumental nature... the perfection of the intelligence, heart, vital consciousness and body, the perfection of the fundamental soul powers, the perfection of the surrender of our instruments and action to the divine Shakti, depend at every moment of their progression on a... power that is covertly and overtly the pivot of all endeavour and action, faith, ''śraddhā''. The perfect faith is an assent of the whole being to the truth seen by it or Immortality =offered to its acceptance, and its central working is a faith of the soul in its own will to be and attain and become and its idea of self and things and its knowledge, of which the belief of the intellect, the heart’s consent and the desire of the life mind to possess and realise are the outward figures.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/faith-and-shakti?search=perfection</ref>
When The condition to be aimed at, the body has learned real achievement of Yoga, the art of constantly progressing towards an increasing final perfectionand attainment, we shall be well on 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 way to overcoming Divine, the inevitability very source of deathyour action disappears; knowledge, power, all are gone. (The MotherBut so long as you feel that the powers you use are your own, 16 January 1972) you will not miss the Divine support. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/1603/1628-januaryapril-19721929#p1p14</ref>
We are on earth in order to progress and to perfect ourselves in the course of many successive lives. What we cannot do this time, we shall do next time; and every progress we make this time will help us then. (The Mother, 15 November 1971) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/17/15-november-1971#p1</ref>==Process==
Ah! No. You are looking from the wrong side. They could escape dying only if their body did not decay. It is just because their body decays that they die. It is because their body becomes useless that they die. If they are not to die, their body should not become useless. This is just the contrary. It is precisely because the body decays, declines ===By Education and ends in a complete degradation that death becomes necessary. But if the body followed the progressive movement of the inner being, if it had the same sense of progress and perfection as the psychic being, there would be no necessity for it to die. One year added to another need not bring a deterioration. It is only a habit of Nature. It is only a habit of what is happening at this moment. And that is exactly the cause of death. One can foresee quite well, on the contrary, that the movement for perfection which is at the beginning of life might continue under another form. I have already told you that one does not foresee an uninterrupted growth, for that would need changing the height of the houses after some time! But this growth in height may be changed into a growth in perfection: the perfection of the form. All the imperfections of the form may be gradually corrected, all the weaknesses replaced by strength, all the incapacities by skill. Why should it not be like this? You do not think in that way because you have the habit of seeing things otherwise. But there is no reason why this should not happen. (The Mother, 17 June 1953) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/05/17-june-1953#p36</ref>Training===
But, If you seesaid to yourself, when our little humanity says three hundred years with the same bodymy children, you say: "Why! when I am fifty it already begins We want 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 as perfect instruments as possible to year, perhaps when express the divine Will in the three hundredth year is reached one will say: world"Oh! I still need three or four hundred more , then for this instrument to be what I want to perfect, it must be." If each year that passes represents a progresscultivated, a transformationeducated, one would trained. It must not be left like to have more and more years in order to be able to transform oneself more and morea shapeless piece of stone. When something is not exactly as you want to build with a stone you chisel it ; when you want to be—takemake a formless block into a beautiful diamond, for exampleyou chisel it. Well, simply one of it is the things I have just described, say, plasticity or lightness or elasticity or luminosity, same thing. When with your brain and none of them is exactly as body you want itto make a beautiful instrument for the Divine, then you will still need at least two hundred years more so that must cultivate it may be accomplished, but you never think: "How is sharpen 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 refine it may be truly done." And then, when all complete what is donemissing, when all perfect what is perfect, then there is no longer any question of years, for you are immortal. (The Mother, 20 May 1953) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/05/2013-may-1953#p44p18</ref>
= Integral Perfection =<center>~</center>
== Ego The way to attain to this perfect consciousness is to increase your actual consciousness beyond its present grooves and Perfection ==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>
Why do you say that sensitivity is the sign of a strong ego? It does not seem to be evident at all. Moreover, there are many different kinds of sensitivity: some stem from weakness, others—the best—are the result of refinement. The ego generally governs the development of the individual, but the most developed individualities are not necessarily those in whom the ego is strongest—on the contrary. As the individuality perfects itself, the power of the ego diminishes, and indeed it is by perfecting himself that the individual arrives at that state of divinisation which liberates him from the ego. (The Mother, 2 September 1964) <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/16/2-september-1964#p3~</refcenter>
Never forget that here Fundamentally, whatever be the path one follows—whether the path of surrender, consecration, knowledge—if one wants it to be perfect, it is for the perfection always equally difficult, and there is but one way, one only, I know of the work only one: that we are strivingis perfect sincerity, not for the satisfaction of the ego. but perfect sincerity! <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/1306/organisation12-andmay-work1954#p55p34</ref>
The egoism ===By Becoming Conscious of the instrument can be as dangerous or more dangerous to spiritual progress than the egoism of the doer. The ego-sense is contrary to spiritual realisation, so how can any kind of ego be a thing to be encouraged? As for the magnified ego, it is one of the most perilous obstacles to release and perfection. There should be no big I, not even a small one. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/31/ego-and-its-forms#p54</ref>Oneself===
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 work for your stage of development to think he is free from ego and desire perfection the first step is to blind himself and prevent the clear perception become conscious of one's own nature movements which is necessary for progress towards spiritual perfectionyourself. " <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/3104/ego-and13-itsjanuary-forms1951#p74p16</ref>
This vairagya, or loss of zest, as you have yourself said, began before you came here. I have indeed laid some stress on the conquest of sex, for obvious reasons; but I have hardly laid a compulsory stress on anything else. Certainly, I have not encouraged you to lose joy in vital creativeness; I have only held up the ideal of turning it towards the Divine and away from the ego. To keep the vital full of life and energy and to trust mainly to the inner growth and the descent of a higher consciousness for a change, using the will too but for self-mastery, not for suppression, but for subordination of the lower to the higher, has been my teaching. The turn to vairagya, to tapasya of an ascetic kind was the impulse of something in your own nature; it insisted on its necessity just as a part of the vital insisted on its opposite: even it condemned my suggestion of something less grim and strenuous as an easy-going absence of aspiration etc. I do not say that vairagya and tapasya are not ways to reach the Divine, but done like that they are painful ways and long; if one takes them, one must be determined and go through. For one part to push all zest out of the vital and for the other to regret and say, why did I ever do it, will never do. And it is in this kind of tapasya that perfection or at least perfect purification is demanded before there can be any realisation. I have never said that for my Yoga; the only thing I insist upon is some faith, inner surrender and opening of oneself to receive,—not absolute, but just sufficient. Experience has to begin long before perfect purification and from experience to experience one comes to realisation and through realisation to more and more perfection; anything that can be called real perfection can only come at the end. But there is something in you that is impatient of gradualness, of small mercies; its motto seems to be all or nothing. <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/29/asceticism-and-the-integral-yoga#p9~</refcenter>
== The Mundane To work for your perfection, the first step is to become conscious of yourself, of the different parts of your being and Divine Perfection ==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 man's nature, especially his mental nature, has a spontaneous tendency to give a favourable explanation for everything he thinks, feels, says and does. It is only by observing these movements with great care, by bringing them, as it were, before the tribunal of our highest ideal, with a sincere will to submit to its judgment, that we can hope to form in ourselves a discernment that never errs. For if we truly want to progress and acquire the capacity of knowing the truth of our being, that is to say, what we are truly created for, what we can call our mission upon earth, then we must, in a very regular and constant manner, reject from us or eliminate in us whatever contradicts the truth of our existence, whatever is opposed to it. In this way, little by little, all the parts, all the elements of our being can be organised into a homogeneous whole around our psychic centre. This work of unification requires much time to be brought to some degree of perfection. Therefore, in order to accomplish it, we must arm ourselves with patience and endurance, with a determination to prolong our life as long as necessary for the success of our endeavour.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/12/the-science-of-living#p5</ref>
A divine perfection of the human being is our aim. We must know then first what are the essential elements that constitute man's total perfection; secondly, what we mean by a divine as distinguished from a human perfection of our being. That man as a being is capable of self-development and of some approach at least to an ideal standard of perfection which his mind is able to conceive, fix before it and pursue, is common ground to all thinking humanity, though it may be only the minority who concern themselves with this possibility as providing the one most important aim of life. But by some the ideal is conceived as a mundane change, by others as a religious conversion. <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/the-integral-perfection#p1~</refcenter>
The mundane perfection is sometimes conceived of as something outward, social, a thing of action, a more rational dealing with our fellow-men and If in passing from one domain to another we renounce what has already been given us from eagerness for our environmentnew attainment, 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 if in reaching the mental life we cast away or belittle the opportunities of existence. By others again a more inner and subjective ideal physical life which is cherishedour basis, 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 our attraction to the naturespiritual, a nobler ethicalwe do not fulfil God integrally, a richer aesthetic, a finer emotional, a much healthier and betternor satisfy the conditions of His self-governed vital and physical beingmanifestation. Sometimes one element is stressedWe do not become perfect, almost to but only shift the exclusion field of the rest; sometimes, in wider and more well-balanced minds, the whole harmony is envisaged as our imperfection or at most attain a total perfectionlimited altitude. A change of education and social institutions is However high we may climb, even though it be to the outward means adopted or an inner selfNon-training and development is preferred as the true instrumentationBeing itself, we climb ill if we forget our base. Or Not to abandon the two aims may be clearly unitedlower to itself, but to transfigure it in the perfection light of the inner individualhigher to which we have attained, the perfection is true divinity of the outer livingnature. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2421/the-integraldestiny-of-the-perfectionindividual#p2p9</ref>
We know, we have said this many a time, that all work is a prayer made with the body and that the true attitude in work is an offering to the Divine. Well, this was satisfied with the way the thing was done. For I was looking on, to see, as I said, if there were things which were not as they should have been. But in any case, to the eye of this consciousness which was looking on, it was satisfying. Materially, you see, I said, "In the outer human consciousness this can be done much better." That of course is understood, we haven't reached the height of perfection, far from that, but it must also be said that it is only a very small part of our activity... that we are trying much more than this, that it is only one of the movements of our sadhana, you see. We are busy with many other things besides this... one thing among many others... and to put up something like this according to the accomplishment which the laws of human perfection demand, infinitely more time, infinitely more work and infinitely more means would have been necessary. But we are not seeking an exclusive perfection in one thing or another, we are trying to make everything go forward together to a common, integral perfection. And these things have their place and importance, but they don't have an exclusive place and importance. Therefore, from the external point of view, one may criticise and find something to say and all that; but it is not that, the true point of view. Inwardly, it is well. (The Mother, 30 November 1955) <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/07/30-november-1955#p28~</refcenter>
The divine existence is In the process of this change there must be by the nature not only very necessity of freedom, but the effort two stages of purityits working. First, beatitude and perfection. An integral purity which shall enable on there will be the one hand personal endeavour of the perfect reflection human being, as soon as he becomes aware by his soul, mind, heart of the this divine Being in ourselves possibility and on the other the perfect outpouring of its Truth and Law in us in turns towards it as the terms true object of life , to prepare himself for it and through the right functioning to get rid of the complex instrument we are all in our outer parts, is the condition of an integral liberty. Its result is an integral beatitudehim that belongs to a lower working, in which there becomes possible at once the Ananda of all that is stands in the world seen as symbols way of his opening to the Divine spiritual truth and its power, so as to possess by this liberation his spiritual being and the Ananda turn all his natural movements into free means of that which is notits self-world. And it prepares the integral perfection expression… The second stage of our humanity as this Yoga will therefore be a type persistent giving up of all the action of the Divine in nature into the conditions hands of the human manifestationthis greater Power, a perfection founded on a certain free universality substitution of beingits influence, of love possession and joyworking for the personal effort, until the Divine to whom we aspire becomes the direct master of play of knowledge the Yoga and effects the entire spiritual and ideal conversion of play of will in power and will in unegoistic action. This integrality also can be attained by the integral Yogabeing. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2324/the-synthesisintegral-of-the-systems#p19perfection?search=perfection</ref>
== Perfection But if you remain in that consciousness and look from there, then you begin to understand something of All Kinds ==the truth. And this consciousness has to be so total, that even if things come directly against you, even the physical movement of someone coming to beat you (you must not allow him to kill you, no; you have perhaps to do what is necessary not to get killed), but if you are yourself in this perfect consciousness and have no personal reaction, well, I give you the guarantee the other cannot kill you. He will not be able to, even if he tries. He will not be able to beat you, even if he tries. Only, you must not have a single violent or wrong vibration, you understand? Even if there is just a little false vibration, that opens the door and the thing enters and all goes wrong. You must be fully conscious, have the full knowledge, the perfect mastery over everything, the clear vision of the Truth—and perfect peace. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/05/20-may-1953#p54</ref>
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</ref> "The supramental world has to be formed or created in us by the Divine Will as the result of a constant expansion and self-perfecting." (The Mother, 27 June 1956) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/08/27-june-1956#p31</ref> Moral perfection is to have all the qualities that are considered moral: to have no defects, never to make a mistake, never to err, to be always what one conceives to be the best, to have all the virtues. (The Mother, 1 October 1958) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/09/1-october-1958#p3</ref> == Consciousness and Perfection == The way to attain to this perfect consciousness is to increase your actual consciousness beyond its present grooves and limits, to educate it, to open it to the Divine Light and to let the Divine Light work in it fully and freely. But the Light can do its full and unhindered work only when you have got rid of all craving and fear, when you have no mental prejudices, no vital preferences, no physical apprehensions or attractions to obscure or bind you. (The Mother, 30 June 1929) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/30-june-1929#p8</ref> Ignorance is dispelled by a growing consciousness; what you need is consciousness and always more consciousness, a consciousness pure, simple and luminous. In the light of this perfected consciousness, things appear as they are and not as they want to appear. It is like a screen faithfully recording all things as they pass. You see there what is luminous and what is dark, what is straight and what is crooked. Your consciousness becomes a screen or mirror; but this is when you are in a state of contemplation, a mere observer; when you are active, it is like a searchlight. You have only to turn it on, if you want to see luminously and examine penetratingly anything in any place. (The Mother, 30 June 1929) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/30-june-1929#p7~</refcenter>
This power of the soul over its nature is of the utmost importance in the Yoga of self-perfection; if it did not exist, we could never get by conscious endeavour and aspiration out of the fixed groove of our present imperfect human being; if any greater perfection were intended, we should have to wait for Nature to effect it in her own slow or swift process of evolution. In the lower forms of being the soul accepts this complete subjection to Nature, but as it rises higher in the scale, it awakes to a sense of something in itself which can command Nature; but it is only when it arrives at self-knowledge that this free will and control becomes a complete reality. The change effects itself through process of nature, not therefore by any capricious magic, but an ordered development and intelligible process. When complete mastery is gained, then the process by its self-effective rapidity may seem a miracle to the intelligence, but it still proceeds by law of the truth of Spirit,—when the Divine within us by close union of our will and being with him takes up the Yoga and acts as the omnipotent master of the nature. For the Divine is our highest Self and the self of all Nature, the eternal and universal Purusha. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/the-psychology-of-self-perfection#p8</ref>
= Individual Perfection =<center>~</center>
== Perfect Individual ==An integral Yoga includes as a vital and indispensable element in its total and ultimate aim the conversion of the whole being into a higher spiritual consciousness and a larger divine existence. Our parts of will and action, our parts of knowledge, our thinking being, our emotional being, our being of life, all our self and nature must seek the Divine, enter into the Infinite, unite with the Eternal. But man's present nature is limited, divided, unequal,—it is easiest for him to concentrate in the strongest part of his being and follow a definite line of progress proper to his nature: only rare individuals have the strength to take a large immediate plunge straight into the sea of the Divine Infinity. Some therefore must choose as a starting-point a concentration in thought or contemplation or the mind's one-pointedness to find the eternal reality of the Self in them; others can more easily withdraw into the heart to meet there the Divine, the Eternal: yet others are predominantly dynamic and active; for these it is best to centre themselves in the will and enlarge their being through works. United with the Self and source of all by their surrender of their will into its infinity, guided in their works by the secret Divinity within or surrendered to the Lord of the cosmic action as the master and mover of all their energies of thought, feeling, act, becoming by this enlargement of being selfless and universal, they can reach by works some first fullness of a spiritual status. But the path, whatever its point of starting, must debouch into a vaster dominion; it must proceed in the end through a totality of integrated knowledge, emotion, will of dynamic action, perfection of the being and the entire nature. In the supramental consciousness, on the level of the supramental existence this integration becomes consummate; there knowledge, will, emotion, the perfection of the self and the dynamic nature rise each to its absolute of itself and all to their perfect harmony and fusion with each other, to a divine integrality, a divine perfection. For the supermind is a Truth-Consciousness in which the Divine Reality, fully manifested, no longer works with the instrumentation of the Ignorance; a truth of status of being which is absolute becomes dynamic in a truth of energy and activity of the being which is self-existent and perfect. Every movement there is a movement of the self-aware truth of Divine Being and every part is in entire harmony with the whole. Even the most limited and finite action is in the Truth-Consciousness a movement of the Eternal and Infinite and partakes of the inherent absoluteness and perfection of the Eternal and Infinite. An ascent into the supramental Truth not only raises our spiritual and essential consciousness to that height but brings about a descent of this Light and Truth into all our being and all our parts of nature. All then becomes part of the Divine Truth, an element and means of the supreme union and oneness; this ascent and descent must be therefore an ultimate aim of this Yoga.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/23/the-supermind-and-the-yoga-of-works#p1</ref>
A child should never ===By Learning to be scolded. I am accused of speaking ill of parents! But I have seen them at work, you see, and I know that ninety per cent of parents snub a child who comes spontaneously to confess a mistake: "You are very naughty. Go away, I am busy"—instead of listening to the child with patience and explaining to him where his fault lies, how he ought to have acted. And the child, who had come with good intentions, goes away quite hurt, with the feeling: "Why am I treated thus?" Then the child sees his parents are not perfect—which is obviously true of them today—he sees that they are wrong and says to himself: "Why does he scold me, he is like me!" (The Mother, 8 January 1951) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/04/8-january-1951#p31</ref>Witness===
In ...we find ourselves to be not the Dhammapada: mind, but a mental being who stands behind the action of the embodied mind, not a supreme disinterestedness mental and vital personality,—personality is a supreme liberation composition of Nature,—but a mental Person,manomaya puruṣa. We become aware of a being within who takes his stand upon mind for self-knowledge and world-knowledge and thinks of himself as an individual for self-experience and world-experience, for an inward action and an outward-going action, but is to follow yet different from mind, life and body. First, he has the intuition of himself as someone observing the discipline action of the mind; it is something which is going on in him and yet before him as an object of his regarding knowledge. This self-perfectionawareness is the intuitive sense of the witness Purusha, ''sākṣī''. Witness Purusha is a pure consciousness who watches Nature and sees it as an action reflected upon the march of progressconsciousness and enlightened by that consciousness, not but in itself other than it.To enter into identity with that Spirit must then be his way to control and lordship. He can do it passively by a precise end sort of reflection and receiving in view his mental consciousness, but because this march of progress then he is only a mould, channel or instrument, not a possessor or participant in the profound law and power. He can arrive at identity by an absorption of his mentality in inner spiritual being, but then the purpose conscious action ceases in a trance of identity. To be active master of earthly lifethe nature he must evidently rise to some higher supramental poise where there is possible not only a passive, but an active identity with the controlling spirit. To find the truth way of universal existence rising to this greater poise and because you put yourself in harmony with itbe self-ruler, spontaneouslySwarat, whatever the result may beis a condition of his perfection. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/0324/the-brahmin#p43perfection-of-the-mental-being?search=perfection</ref>
If this is our evolutionary destiny, it remains for us to see where we stand at this juncture in the evolutionary progression,—a progression which has been cyclic or spiral rather than in a straight line or has at least journeyed in a very zigzag swinging curve of advance,—and what prospect there is of any turn towards a decisive step in the near or measurable future. In our human aspiration towards a personal perfection and the perfection of the life of the race the elements of the future evolution are foreshadowed and striven after, but in a confusion of half-enlightened knowledge; there is a discord between the necessary elements, an opposing emphasis, a profusion of rudimentary unsatisfying and ill-accorded solutions. These sway between the three principal preoccupations of our idealism,—the complete single development of the human being in himself, the perfectibility of the individual, a full development of the collective being, the perfectibility of society, and, more pragmatically restricted, the perfect or best possible relations of individual with individual and society and of community with community. An exclusive or dominant emphasis is laid sometimes on the individual, sometimes on the collectivity or society, sometimes on a right and balanced relation between the individual and the collective human whole. One idea holds up the growing life, freedom or perfection of the human individual as the true object of our existence,—whether the ideal be merely a free self-expression of the personal being or a self-governed whole of complete mind, fine and ample life and perfect body, or a spiritual perfection and liberation. In this view society is there only as a field of activity and growth for the individual man and serves best its function when it gives as far as possible a wide room, ample means, a sufficient freedom or guidance of development to his thought, his action, his growth, his possibility of fullness of being. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/22/the-divine-life#p34</ref>===By Developing Detachment===
It is, then, this spiritual fulfilment The seeker of the urge integral state of knowledge must be free from attachment to individual perfection action and an inner completeness equally free from attachment to inaction. Especially must any tendency to mere inertia of being mind or vitality or body be surmounted, and if that we mean first when we speak of a divine life. It habit is found growing on the first essential condition nature, the will of the Purusha must be used to dismiss it. Eventually, a perfected state arrives when the life on earth, and we are therefore right in making the utmost possible individual perfection our first supreme business. The perfection body perform as mere instruments the will of the spiritual and pragmatic relation of Purusha in the mind without any strain or attachment, without their putting themselves into the individual action with all around him that inferior, eager and often feverish energy which is our second preoccupationthe nature of their ordinary working; they come to work as forces of Nature work without the solution fret and toil and reaction characteristic of this second desideratum lies life in a complete universality and oneness with all life upon earth which the body when it is the other concomitant result not yet master of an evolution into the gnostic consciousness and naturephysical. But there still remains the third desideratumWhen we attain to this perfection, a new worldthen action and inaction become immaterial, a change in since neither interferes with the total life freedom of humanity the soul or, at draws it away from its urge towards the least, a new perfected collective life Self or its poise in the earth-natureSelf. This calls for the appearance not only But this state of isolated evolved individuals acting perfection arrives later in the unevolved mass, but Yoga and till then the law of many gnostic individuals forming moderation laid down by the Gita is the best for us; too much mental or physical action then is not good since excess draws away too much energy and reacts unfavourably upon the spiritual condition; too little also is not good since defect leads to a new kind habit of beings inaction and a new common life superior even to an incapacity which has afterwards to the present individual and common existencebe surmounted with difficulty. A collective life Still, periods of this kind must obviously constitute itself on the same principle absolute calm, solitude and cessation from works are highly desirable and should be secured as often as the life possible for that recession of the gnostic individualsoul into itself which is indispensable to knowledge. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2223/the-divinerelease-from-subjection-to-lifethe-body#p19p8</ref>
== Perfection in Work =By Developing Equality===
You The calm established in the whole being must remain the same whatever happens, in health and disease, in pleasure and in pain, even in the strongest physical pain, in good fortune and misfortune, our own or that of those we love, in success and failure, honour and insult, praise and blame, justice done to us or injustice, everything that ordinarily affects the mind. If we see unity everywhere, if we recognise that all comes by the divine will become more , see God in all, in our enemies or rather our opponents in the game of life as well as our friends, in the powers that oppose and more perfect resist us as well as the powers that favour and assist, in your work as all energies and forces and happenings, and if besides we can feel that all is undivided from our self, all the consciousness growsworld one with us within our universal being, increasesthen this attitude becomes much easier to the heart and mind. But even before we can attain or are firmly seated in that universal vision, widens we have by all the means in our power to insist on this receptive and active equality and calm. Even something of it, alpam api asya dharmasya, is a great step towards perfection; a first firmness in it is the beginning of liberated perfection; its completeness is enlightenedthe perfect assurance of a rapid progress in all the other members of perfection. For without it we can have no solid basis; and by the pronounced lack of it we shall be constantly falling back to the lower status of desire, ego, duality, ignorance. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/1424/progressthe-andaction-perfection-inof-workequality#p1p5</ref>
In all action, all work done, the degree ===By Purification of perfection depends upon the degree of consciousness. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/14/progress-and-perfection-in-work#p3</ref>Nature===
Perfection ...purification is an essential means towards self-perfection. All these impurities and inadequacies result in various kinds of limitation and bondage: but there are two or three primary knots of the bondage,—ego is the principal knot,—from which the work others derive. These bonds must be got rid of; purification is not complete till it brings about liberation. Besides, after a certain purification and liberation has been effected, there is still the conversion of the purified instruments to the law of a higher object and utility, a large, real and perfect order of action. By the conversion man can arrive at a certain perfection of fullness of being, calm, power and knowledge, even a greater vital action and more perfect physical existence. One result of this perfection is a large and perfected delight of being, Ananda.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/the-perfection-of-the-mental-being?search=perfection</ref><center>~</center>The divine existence is of the aimnature not only of freedom, but of purity, beatitude and perfection. An integral purity which shall enable on the one hand the perfect reflection of the divine Being in ourselves and on the other the perfect outpouring of its Truth and Law in us in the terms of life and through the right functioning of the complex instrument we are in our outer parts, is the condition of an integral liberty. Its result is an integral beatitude, in which there becomes possible at once the Ananda of all that is in the world seen as symbols of the Divine and the Ananda of that which is not-world. And it is only by prepares the integral perfection of our humanity as a type of the Divine in the conditions of the human manifestation, a perfection founded on a very patient effort that this certain free universality of being, of love and joy, of play of knowledge and of play of will in power and will in unegoistic action. This integrality also can be obtainedattained by the integral Yoga. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/1423/progressthe-andsynthesis-perfectionof-inthe-worksystems#p19</ref>
Open yourself more and more to the Divine's force and your work will progress steadily towards perfection. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/14/progress-and-perfection-in-work#p21</ref>===By Cultivating Faith===
Let nothing short There is one kind of perfection faith demanded as indispensable by the integral Yoga and that may be your ideal described as faith in God and the Shakti, faith in the presence and power of the Divine in work us and the world, a faith that all in the world is the working of one divine Shakti, that all the steps of the Yoga, its strivings and sufferings and failures as well as its successes and you satisfactions and victories are sure utilities and necessities of her workings and that by a firm and strong dependence on and a total self-surrender to become a true instrument of the Divineand to his Shakti in us we can attain to oneness and freedom and victory and perfection. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/1424/progressfaith-and-shakti?search=perfection-in-work#p25</ref>
There must be order and harmony in work. Even what is apparently ===By Silencing the most insignificant thing must be done with perfect perfection, with a sense of cleanliness, beauty, harmony and order. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/14/progress-and-perfection-in-work#p26</ref>Mind===
The perfection There is a world of ideas without form and it is there that you must enter if you want to seize what is behind the words. So long as you have to draw your understanding from the forms of words, you are likely to fall into much confusion about the true sense; but if in a silence of your mind you can rise into the world from which ideas descend to take form, at once the real understanding comes. If you are to be sure of understanding one another, you must be able to understand in silence. There is a condition in which your minds are so well attuned and harmonised together that one perceives the thought of the work done other without any necessity of words. But if there is much more important than not this attunement, there will always be some deformation of your meaning, because to what you speak the other mind supplies its own significance. I use a word in a certain sense or shade of its bulk sense; you are accustomed to put into it another sense or shade. Then, evidently, you will understand, not my exact meaning in it, but what the bigness word means to you. This is true not of speech only, but of reading also. If you want to understand a book with a deep teaching in it, you must be able to read it in the mind's silence; you must wait and let the expression go deep inside you into the region where words are no more and from there come slowly back to your exterior consciousness and its scopesurface understanding. But if you let the words jump at your external mind and try to adapt and adjust the two, you will have entirely missed their real sense and power. There can be no perfect understanding unless you are in union with the unexpressed mind that is behind the centre of expression. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/1403/progress26-may-1929#p21</ref><center>~</center>Man, too, becomes perfect only when he has found within himself that absolute calm and passivity of the Brahman and supports by it with the same divine tolerance and the same divine bliss a free and-perfection-inexhaustible activity. Those who have thus possessed the Calm within can perceive always welling out from its silence the perennial supply of the energies that work in the universe. It is not, therefore, the truth of the Silence to say that it is in its nature a rejection of the cosmic activity. The apparent incompatibility of the two states is an error of the limited Mind which, accustomed to trenchant oppositions of affirmation and denial and passing suddenly from one pole to the other, is unable to conceive of a comprehensive consciousness vast and strong enough to include both in a simultaneous embrace. The Silence does not reject the world; it sustains it. Or rather it supports with an equal impartiality the activity and the withdrawal from the activity and approves also the reconciliation by which the soul remains free and still even while it lends itself to all action. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/21/reality-workomnipresent#p38p5</ref>
In works, aspiration towards =Difficulties on the Path to Perfection is true spirituality. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/14/progress-and-perfection-in-work#p45</ref>=
=== Practical Tips for Perfection No man is perfect; the vital is there and the ego is there to prevent it. It is only when there is the total transformation of the external and the internal being down to the very subconscient, that perfection is possible. Till then imperfection will remain as our common heritage. <ref>http://incarnateword.in Work ===/cwsa/31/the-subconscient-and-the-integral-yoga#p2</ref>
Do not worry about mistakes in work. Often you imagine that things are badly done by you when really you have done them very well; but even if there are mistakes, it is nothing to be sad about. Let the consciousness grow—only in the divine consciousness is there an entire perfection. The more you surrender to the Divine, the more will there be the possibility of perfection in you. <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/29/practical-concerns-in-work#p39~</refcenter>
Someone who is learning to paint or play music or write and does not like to have his mistakes pointed out by those who already know—how is he to learn at all or reach any perfection The egoism of technique? <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/29/practical-concerns-in-work#p45</ref> == Perfection and Inter-relation with Others == ...man is separated in his mind, his life, his body from the universal and therefore, even instrument can be as he does not know himself, is equally and even dangerous or more incapable of knowing his fellow-creatures. He forms by inferences, theories, observations and a certain imperfect capacity dangerous to spiritual progress than the egoism of sympathy a rough mental construction about them; but this is not knowledge. Knowledge can only come by conscious identity, for that is the only true knowledge,—existence aware of itselfdoer. We know what we are so far as we are consciously aware of ourself, the rest The ego-sense is hidden; so also we can come really contrary to know that with which we become one in our consciousnessspiritual realisation, but only so far as we how can become one with it. If the means any kind of knowledge are indirect and imperfect, the knowledge attained will also ego be indirect and imperfect. It will enable us to work out with a certain precarious clumsiness but still perfectly enough from our mental standpoint certain limited practical aims, necessities, conveniences, a certain imperfect and insecure harmony of our relations with that which we know; but only by a conscious unity with it can we arrive at a perfect relation. Therefore we must arrive at a conscious unity with our fellow-beings and not merely at the sympathy created by love or the understanding created by mental knowledge, which will always be the knowledge of their superficial existence and therefore imperfect in itself and subject thing to denial and frustration by the uprush of the unknown and unmastered from the subconscient or the subliminal in them and us. But this conscious oneness can only be established by entering into that in which we are one with them, the universal and the fullness of the universal exists consciently only in that which is superconscient to us, in the Supermind: encouraged? As for here in our normal being the greater part of it is subconscient and therefore in this normal poise of mindmagnified ego, life and body it cannot be possessed. The lower conscious nature is bound down to ego in all its activities, chained triply to the stake of differentiated individuality. The Supermind alone commands unity in diversity. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/21/the-problem-of-life#p9</ref> 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. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/31/problems-in-human-relations#p9</ref> You stop short at the perfection that others should realise and you are seldom conscious of the goal you should be pursuing yourself. If you are conscious of it, well then, begin with the work which is given to you, that is to say, realise what you have most perilous obstacles to do and do not concern yourself with what others do, because, after all, it is not your business. And the best way to the true attitude is simply to say, "All those around me, all the circumstances of my life, all the people near me, are a mirror held up to me by the Divine Consciousness to show me the progress I must make. Everything that shocks me in others means a work I have to do in myself." <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/10/aphorism-8#p15</ref> And perhaps if one carried true perfection in oneself, one would discover it more often in others. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/10/aphorism-8#p16</ref> For the awakened individual the realisation of his truth of being and his inner liberation and perfection must be his primary seeking,—first, because that is the call of the Spirit within him, but also because it is only by liberation and perfection and realisation of the truth of being that man can arrive at truth of living. A perfected community also can exist only by the perfection of its individuals, release 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 should 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 usbig I, so our only means of true perfection is the sovereignty and self-effectuation of the spiritual Reality in all the elements of our nature. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/22/the-divine-life#p37</ref> We have to recognise once more that the individual exists not in himself alone but in the collectivity and that individual perfection and liberation are not the whole sense of God's intention in the world. The free use of our liberty includes also the liberation of others and of mankind; the perfect utility of our perfection is, having realised in ourselves the divine symbol, to reproduce, multiply and ultimately universalise it in otherseven a small one. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2331/the-threefoldego-life#p30</ref> The best way of helping others is to transform oneself. Be perfect and you will be in a position to bring perfection to the world. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/14/helping-others-and-the-world#p12</ref> There is a Reality, a truth of all existence which is greater and more abiding than all its formations and manifestations; to find that truth and Reality and live in it, achieve the most perfect manifestation and formation possible of it, must be the secret of perfection whether of individual or communal being. This Reality is there within each thing and gives to each of its formations its power of being and value of being. The universe is a manifestation of the Reality, and there is a truth of the universal existence, a Power of cosmic being, an all-self or world-spirit. Humanity is a formation or manifestation of the Reality in the universe, and there is a truth and self of humanity, a human spirit, a destiny of human life. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/22/the-divine-lifeforms#p36p54</ref> === When Man Becomes Perfect… ===
Man, too, becomes perfect only when he has found within himself that absolute calm and passivity of the Brahman and supports by it with the same divine tolerance and the same divine bliss a free and inexhaustible activity. Those who have thus possessed the Calm within can perceive always welling out from its silence the perennial supply of the energies that work in the universe. It is not, therefore, the truth of the Silence to say that it is in its nature a rejection of the cosmic activity. The apparent incompatibility of the two states is an error of the limited Mind which, accustomed to trenchant oppositions of affirmation and denial and passing suddenly from one pole to the other, is unable to conceive of a comprehensive consciousness vast and strong enough to include both in a simultaneous embrace. The Silence does not reject the world; it sustains it. Or rather it supports with an equal impartiality the activity and the withdrawal from the activity and approves also the reconciliation by which the soul remains free and still even while it lends itself to all action. <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/21/reality-omnipresent#p5~</refcenter>
= More on Perfection.The thing to which he has given his assent and set his mind and heart and will to achieve, the divine perfection of the whole human being, is apparently an impossibility to the normal intelligence, since it is opposed to the actual facts of life and will for long be contradicted by immediate experience, as happens with all far-off and difficult ends, and it is denied too by many who have spiritual experience but believe that our present nature is the sole possible nature of man in the body and that it is only by throwing off the earthly life or even all individual existence that we can arrive at either a heavenly perfection or the release of extinction.<ref>http://incarnateword. in/cwsa/24/faith-and-shakti?search=perfection</ref>
=== Ease, Difficulty and Perfection ===<center>~</center>
You must not cherish 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 illusion activities, by bringing in another law than that if you want 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 straight pathmental reason and the rational will of the developed intelligence. This makes it difficult for the mind to go beyond itself, if you are modestto exceed its own level and spiritualise the nature; for what it cannot even make fully conscious, if you seek puritycannot securely mentalise and rationalise, if you are disinterestedit cannot spiritualise, if you want to lead since spiritualisation is a solitary existence greater and more difficult integration. No doubt, by calling in the spiritual force, it can establish an influence and have a clear judgmentpreliminary change in some parts of the nature, things will become easyespecially 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.... It The spiritual consciousness using the mind is quite employing an inferior means and, even though it brings in a divine light into the mind, a divine purity, passion, ardour into the contrary! When you begin heart or imposes a spiritual law upon the life, this new consciousness has to advance towards inner work within restrictions; for the most part it can only regulate or check the lower action of the life and outer rigorously control the body, but these members, even if refined or mastered, do not receive their spiritual fulfilment or undergo a perfectionand 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 difficulties start at the same timemembers. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/0322/impuritythe-ascent-towards-supermind#p29p16</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>httpdiv style="text-align://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/4-august-1929#p6</refcenter;">
=== Conflicts and Perfection ===One man’s perfection still can save the world.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/34/the-finding-of-the-soul</ref></div>
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 '''Content Curated by correcting the human view of perfection or putting it aside as a too limited mental standard. We may say that not only is the Spirit in things absolutely perfect and divine, but each thing also is relatively perfect and divine in itself, in its expression of what it has to express of the possibilities of existence, in its assumption of its proper place in the complete manifestation. Each thing is divine in itself because each is a fact and idea of the divine being, knowledge and will fulfilling itself infallibly in accordance with the law of that particular manifestation. Each being is possessed of the knowledge, the force, the measure and kind of delight of existence precisely proper to its own nature; each works in the gradations of experience decreed by a secret inherent will, a native law, an intrinsic power of the self, an occult significance. It is thus perfect in the relation of its phenomena to the law of its being; for all are in harmony with that, spring out of it, adapt themselves to its purpose according to the infallibility of the divine Will and Knowledge at work within the creature. It is perfect and divine also in relation to the whole, in its proper place in the whole; to that totality it is necessary and in it it fulfils a part by which the perfection actual and progressive of the universal harmony, the adaptation of all in it to its whole purpose and its whole sense is helped and completed. If to us things appear undivine, if we hasten to condemn this or that phenomenon as inconsistent with the nature of a divine being, it is because we are ignorant of the sense and purpose of the Divine in the world in its entirety. Because we see only parts and fragments, we judge of each by itself as if it were the whole, judge also the external phenomena without knowing their secret sense; but by doing so we vitiate our valuation of things, put on it the stamp of an initial and fundamental error. Perfection cannot reside in the thing in its separateness, for that separateness is an illusion; perfection is the perfection of the total divine harmony. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/21/the-divine-and-the-undivine#p6</ref>Prema Sankar'''
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==References==
= References =
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