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Read Summary of '''[[Perfection Summary|Perfection]]'''
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= What is Perfection? =
 
'''Perfection in General'''
 
Perfection is all that we want to become in our highest aspiration. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/15/perfection#p10</ref>
 
<center>~</center>
 
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. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/04/30-december-1950#p5</ref>
 
<center>~</center>
The mundane perfection is sometimes conceived of as something outward, social, a thing of action, a more rational dealing with our fellow-men and our environment, a better and more efficient citizenship and discharge of duties, a better, richer, kindlier and happier way of living, with a more just and more harmonious associated enjoyment of the opportunities of existence. By others again a more inner and subjective ideal is cherished, a clarifying and raising of the intelligence, will and reason, a heightening and ordering of power and capacity in the nature, a nobler ethical, a richer aesthetic, a finer emotional, a much healthier and better-governed vital and physical being. Sometimes one element is stressed, almost to the exclusion of the rest; sometimes, in wider and more well-balanced minds, the whole harmony is envisaged as a total perfection. A change of education and social institutions is the outward means adopted or an inner self-training and development is preferred as the true instrumentation. Or the two aims may be clearly united, the perfection of the inner individual, the perfection of the outer living. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/the-integral-perfection#p2</ref>
= What is '''Elements of Perfection? ='''
Perfection It is all , then, this spiritual fulfilment of the urge to individual perfection and an inner completeness of being that we want to become 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 highest aspirationfirst 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/cwmcwsa/1522/perfectionthe-divine-life#p10p19</ref>
The Divine is the perfection towards which we move. <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/14/the-divine-and-man#p8~</refcenter>
Perfection is something which lacks nothing. The divine perfection is These three elements, a union with the supreme Divine in His entirety, which lacks nothing. The divine perfection is unity with the universal Self, and a supramental life action from this transcendent origin and through this universality, but still with the Divine individual as a wholethe soul-channel and natural instrument, from whom nothing has been taken away—so it is just constitute the opposite! For essence of the moralists integral divine perfection means all of the virtues that they representhuman being. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/1024/aphorismthe-63integral-64-65#p24perfection?search=perfection</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 '''Where is the very meaning Power of progress. (The Mother, 30 December 1950) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/04/30-december-1950#p5</ref>Perfection?'''
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>
The characteristic law of Spirit is self-existent perfection and immutable infinity. It possesses always and in its own right the immortality which is the aim of Life and the perfection which is 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 and activities in which it dwells, are the glory of the spiritual life. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/23/the-threefold-life#p7</ref>'''Divine Perfection'''
As you pursue this labour of purification and unification, you must at the same time take great care to perfect the external and instrumental part of your being. When the higher truth manifests, it must find in you a mind that The Divine is supple and rich enough to be able to give the idea that seeks to express itself a form of thought perfection towards 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 perfectionwe move. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/1214/the-sciencedivine-ofand-livingman#p6p8</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. <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/22/the-divine-life#p6~</refcenter>
A divine perfection of the human being is our aim. We must know then first what are the essential elements that constitute man's total perfection; secondly, what we mean by a divine as distinguished from a human perfection of our being. That man as a being is capable of self-development and of some approach at least to an ideal standard of perfection which his mind is able to conceive, fix before it and pursue, is common ground to all thinking humanity, though it may be only the minority who concern themselves with this possibility as providing the one most important aim of life.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/the-integral-perfection#p1</ref>
<center>~</center> The mundane characteristic law of Spirit is self-existent perfection and immutable infinity. It possesses always and in its own right the immortality which is the aim of Life and the perfection which is sometimes conceived the goal of as something outward, social, a thing Mind. The attainment of action, a more rational dealing with our fellow-men the eternal and our environment, a better the realisation of that which is the same in all things and more efficient citizenship and discharge of dutiesbeyond all things, a better, richer, kindlier equally blissful in universe and happier way of livingoutside it, with a more just untouched by the imperfections and more harmonious associated enjoyment limitations of the opportunities of existence. By others again a more inner forms and subjective ideal is cherishedactivities in which it dwells, a clarifying and raising are the glory of the intelligencespiritual life. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/23/the-threefold-life#p7</ref> <center>~</center> Man, will and reasonthe mental being, a heightening has an imperfect life because mind is not the first and ordering highest power of consciousness of power and capacity in the natureBeing; even if mind were perfected, a nobler ethicalthere would be still something yet to be realised, not yet manifested. For what is involved and emergent is not a richer aestheticMind, but a finer emotionalSpirit, a much healthier and better-governed vital and physical being. Sometimes one element mind is stressed, almost to not the exclusion native dynamism of consciousness of the restSpirit; sometimessupermind, in wider and more well-balanced mindsthe light of gnosis, the whole harmony is envisaged as its native dynamism. If then life has to become a total perfection. A change manifestation of education and social institutions the Spirit, it is the outward means adopted or an inner self-training manifestation of a spiritual being in us and development is preferred as the true instrumentation. Or the two aims may divine life of a perfected consciousness in a supramental or gnostic power of spiritual being that must be clearly united, the perfection of the inner individual, the perfection secret burden and intention of the outer livingevolutionary Nature. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2422/the-integraldivine-perfectionlife#p2p3</ref> <center>~</center>
Perfection of all kinds is indeed good, as it is the sign of the pressure of the consciousness in the material world towards full self-expression in this or that limit, on this or that level. In a certain sense it is an urge of the Divine itself hidden in forms that tends in the lesser degrees of consciousness towards its own increasing self-revelation. Perfection of an object or a scene in inanimate Nature, animate perfection of strength, speed, physical beauty, courage or animal fidelity, affection, intelligence, perfection of art, music, poetry, literature,—perfection of the intellect in any kind of mental activity, the perfect statesman, warrior, artist, craftsman,—perfection in vital force and capacity, perfection in ethical qualities, character, temperament,—all have their high value, their place as rungs in the ladder of evolution, the seried steps of the spirit's emergence. If one likes to call that spiritual because of this hidden urge behind it one can do so; it can at least be regarded as a preparation for the secret spirit's emergence. But thought and knowledge can only proceed by making the necessary distinctions. Much confusion is created by neglecting them. This mental idealism, ethical development, religious piety and fervour, occult powers and feats have all been taken as spirituality and the spiritual evolution kept tied to the moorings of the planes of lesser consciousness which do indeed prepare the soul by experience for the spiritual consciousness but are not themselves that. For perfection can only become truly spiritual when it is founded on the awakened spiritual consciousness and takes on its peculiar essence.<ref> http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/28/idealism-and-spirituality#p1</ref>
It <center>~</center> 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 isthe spirit, the inner Reality, that has built up and uses the mind, thenvital 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 fulfilment 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 urge turn to individual perfection the spiritual life it is we who must create ourselves and an our world. In this new formula of creation, the inner completeness life becomes of being that we mean the first when we speak of a divine lifeimportance and the rest can be only its expression and outcome. It is this, indeed, that is indicated by our own strivings towards perfection, the first essential condition perfection of a perfected our own soul and mind and 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 life of the individual with all around him race. For we are given a world which is obscure, ignorant, material, imperfect, and our second preoccupation; external conscious being is itself created by the energies, the pressure, the solution moulding operations of this second desideratum lies in vast mute obscurity, by physical birth, by environment, by a complete universality training through the impacts and oneness with all shocks of life upon earth which ; 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 other concomitant result creation of an evolution into 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 gnostic consciousness image of a divine. Somewhat, and is impelled also to labour at the world outside that has been given to it and nature. But there still remains to remake that too in a greater image, in the third desideratumimage 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, a something new world, a change harmonious, perfect. <ref>http://incarnateword.in /cwsa/22/the total -divine-life #p6</ref> <center>~</center> As you pursue this labour of humanity orpurification and unification, you must at the leastsame 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 new perfected collective life in mind that is supple and rich enough to be able to give the earth-natureidea that seeks to express itself a form of thought which preserves its force and clarity. This calls for the appearance not only of isolated evolved individuals acting thought, again, when it seeks to clothe itself in the unevolved masswords, but of many gnostic individuals forming must find in you a new kind sufficient power of beings and a new common life superior to expression so that the words reveal the present individual thought and common existencedo not deform it. A collective life of this kind must obviously constitute itself on And the same principle as formula in which you embody the life truth should be manifested in all your feelings, all your acts of will, all your actions, in all the gnostic individualmovements of your being. Finally, these movements themselves should, by constant effort, attain their highest perfection. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/2212/the-divinescience-of-lifeliving#p19p6</ref>
==Perfection in the Mind==
ManThe ethical mind becomes perfect in proportion as it detaches itself from desire, sense suggestion, impulse, customary dictated action and discovers a self of Right, Love, Strength and Purity in which it can live accomplished and make it the mental being, has an imperfect life because foundation of all its actions. The aesthetic mind is not perfected in proportion as it detaches itself from all its cruder pleasures and from outward conventional canons of the first aesthetic reason and discovers a self existent self and highest power spirit of consciousness pure and infinite Beauty and Delight which gives its own light and joy to the material of the Being; even if aesthesis. The mind were of knowledge is perfectedwhen it gets away from impression and dogma and opinion and discovers a light of self-knowledge and intuition which illumines all the workings of the sense and reason, there would be still something yet to be realised, not yet manifestedall self-experience and world-experience. For what The will is involved perfected when it gets away from and emergent behind its impulses and its customary ruts of effectuation and discovers an inner power of the Spirit which is not the source of an intuitive and luminous action and an original harmonious creation. The movement of perfection is away from all domination by the lower nature and towards a Mindpure and powerful reflection of the being, power, but a knowledge and delight of the Spirit, and mind Self in the buddhi.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/purification-intelligence-and-will</ref> <center>~</center> The first need is not the native dynamism clarity and the purity of consciousness the intelligence. It must be freed from the claims of the Spirit; supermind, vital being which seeks to impose the light desire of gnosis, is its native dynamism. If then life has to become a manifestation the mind in place of the Spirittruth, it is from the manifestation claims of a spiritual the troubled emotional being in us which strives to colour, distort, limit and falsify the truth with the hue and shape of the divine life emotions. It must be free too from its own defect, inertia of a perfected consciousness the thought-power, obstructive narrowness and unwillingness to open to knowledge, intellectual unscrupulousness in thinking, prepossession and preference, self-will in a supramental or gnostic power the reason and false determination of spiritual being that the will to knowledge. Its sole will must be to make itself an unsullied mirror of the secret burden truth, its essence and its forms and measures and relations, a clear mirror, a just measure, a fine and intention subtle instrument of evolutionary Natureharmony, an integral intelligence. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2224/the-divinepower-of-the-life#p3instruments</ref>
<center>~</center>
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>
 
<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 the body has learned the art of constantly progressing towards an increasing perfection, we shall be well on the way to overcoming the inevitability of death. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/16/16-january-1972#p1</ref>
 
<center>~</center>
 
As for the question about the illness, perfection in the physical plane is indeed part of the ideal of the Yoga, but it is the last item and, so long as the fundamental change has not been made in the material consciousness to which the body belongs, one may have a certain perfection on other planes without having immunity in the body. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/31/illness-and-health#p57</ref>
 
<center>~</center>
 
The physical being of man has always been felt by the seekers of perfection to be a great impediment and it has been the habit to turn from it with contempt, denial or aversion and a desire to suppress altogether or as far as may be the body and the physical life. But this cannot be the right method for the integral Yoga. The body is given us as one instrument necessary to the 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 other members, the vital being, heart and mind and reason. It has like them to be changed and perfected and to undergo a transformation. As we must get ourselves a new life, new heart, new mind, so we have in a certain sense to build for ourselves a new body.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/the-power-of-the-instruments</ref>
 
<center>~</center>
Transformation and the Body : The supramental perfection means that the body becomes conscious, is filled with consciousness and that as this is the Truth consciousness all its actions, functionings etc. become by the power of the consciousness within it harmonious, luminous, right and true—without ignorance or disorder. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/28/transformation-and-the-body#p3</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) <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/06/21-april-1954#p31~</refcenter>
As 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 question about consciousness of the illnessbody is that it can feel ("feel", can we say "feel"?—"experience"—the word "aware" expresses it best) all things simultaneously, perfection 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 physical plane cells. It is indeed something much more concrete naturally, but much more perfect in the body than in any other part of the ideal 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 Yogamost difficult to transform, to perfect. But of all, but it is the last item one most capable of perfection. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/06/21-april-1954#p31</ref> <center>~</center> It is precisely because the body decays, declines andends in a complete degradation that death becomes necessary. But if the body followed the progressive movement of the inner being, so long if it had the same sense of progress and perfection as the fundamental change has psychic being, there would be no necessity for it to die. One year added to another need not been made in 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 material consciousness to movement for perfection which is at the body belongsbeginning of life might continue under another form. I have already told you that one does not foresee an uninterrupted growth, one 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. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/05/17-june-1953#p36</ref> = Why Do We Need Perfection? = == For Discovering the Truth of Living== For the awakened individual the realisation of his truth of being and his inner liberation and perfection must be his primary seeking,—first, because that is 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> <center>~</center> There is a certain 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 on other planes without having immunity 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 bodyuniverse, and there is a truth and self of humanity, a human spirit, a destiny of human life. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/3122/illnessthe-divine-life#p36</ref> ==For Self-perfection, Progress andFulfillment== In the Dhammapada: a supreme disinterestedness and a supreme liberation is to follow the discipline of self-perfection, the march of progress, not with a precise end in view but because this march of progress is the profound law and the purpose of earthly life, the truth of universal existence and because you put yourself in harmony with it, spontaneously, whatever the result may be. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/the-healthbrahmin#p57p43</ref>
When the body has learned the art of constantly progressing towards an increasing perfection, we shall be well on the way to overcoming the inevitability of death. (The Mother, 16 January 1972) <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/16/16-january-1972#p1~</refcenter>
It is precisely because the body decays, declines and ends For one who wants to grow 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 self-perfection as the psychic being, there would be are no necessity great or small tasks, none that are important or unimportant; all are equally useful for one who aspires for it to die. One year added to another need not bring a deteriorationprogress and self-mastery. It is said that one only a habit of Nature. It is only a habit of does well what one is happening at this momentinterested in doing. And that This is exactly the cause of death. One can foresee quite welltrue, on the contrary, that the movement for perfection which but it is at the beginning of life might continue under another form. I have already told you truer still that one can learn to find interest in everything one does not foresee an uninterrupted growth, for that would need changing even in what appear to be the height most insignificant chores. The secret of the houses after some time! But this growth attainment lies in height may be changed into a growth in perfection: the urge towards self-perfection of the form. All the imperfections of the form may be gradually correctedWhatever occupation or task falls to your lot, all the weaknesses replaced by strengthyou must do it with a will to progress; whatever one does, all the incapacities by skill. Why should one must not only do it not be like this? You as best one can but strive to do not think it better and better in that a constant effort for perfection. In this way because you have everything without exception becomes interesting, from the most material chore to the habit of seeing things otherwisemost artistic and intellectual work. But there The scope for progress is no reason why this should not happeninfinite and can be applied to the smallest thing. (The Mother, 17 June 1953) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/0512/17the-four-austerities-and-the-junefour-1953liberations#p36p17</ref>
= How to Achieve Perfection? =<center>~</center>
The Master of our works respects our nature even when he Perfection is not a static state, it is transforming an equilibrium. But a progressive, dynamic equilibrium. One may go from perfection to perfection. There can come a state from which itwould not be necessary to descend to a lower rung in order to go farther; he works always through at the nature and not by any arbitrary caprice. This imperfect nature of ours contains moment the materials march of our perfectionNature is like that, but inchoate, distorted, misplaced, thrown together in disorder or a poor imperfect order. All this material has new state, instead of being obliged to go back to be patiently perfectedable to start again, purified, reorganised, new-moulded and transformedone can walk always forward, not hacked and hewn and slain or mutilated, not obliterated by simple coercion and denialwithout ever stopping. This world and we who live in it As things are his creation and manifestation, and he deals with it and us in one comes to a way our narrow certain point and ignorant mind , as human beings as they are at present cannot understand unless it falls silent and opens progress indefinitely, one must pass to a divine knowledge. In our errors is higher species or leave the substance of a truth which labours to reveal its meaning to our groping intelligencepresent species and create another. 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 being as he is at the truth hidden and protected under every false cover. Our sins are the misdirected steps moment cannot attain perfection unless he gets out of himself—man is a seeking Power that aims, not at sin, but at perfection, at something that we might call a divine virtuetransitional being. Often they are the veils of a quality that has to In ordinary language it may be transformed and delivered out of this ugly disguisesaid: otherwise"Oh, in the this man is perfect providence of things", they would not have been suffered to exist or to continuebut that is a literary figure. The Master of our works maximum a human being can attain just now is neither a blunderer nor an indifferent witness nor a dallier with the luxury of unneeded evilsequilibrium which is not progressive. He may attain perhaps a static equilibrium but all that is wiser than our reason and wiser than our virtuestatic can be broken for lack of progress. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/2304/the30-master-of-thedecember-work1950#p6p19</ref>
<center>~</center>
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=perfection</ref>
==Prerequisites==<center>~</center>
Our soul's dissatisfaction with imperfection as a law of life upon earth, its aspiration towards the elimination of all imperfections from our nature, not only in a heaven beyond where it would be automatically impossible to be imperfect, but here and now in a life where perfection has to be conquered by evolution and struggle, are as much a law of our being as that against which they revolt; they too are divine,—a divine dissatisfaction, a divine aspiration. In them is the inherent light of a power within which maintains them in us so that the Divine may not only be there as a hidden Reality in our spiritual secrecies but unfold itself in the evolution of Nature. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/21/the-divine-and-the-undivine#p8</ref>
The first necessity is some fundamental poise of the soul both in its essential and its natural being regarding and meeting the things, impacts and workings of Nature. This poise we shall arrive at by growing into a perfect equality, samatā. The self, spirit or Brahman is one in all and therefore one to all; it is, as is said in the Gita which has developed fully this idea of equality and indicated its experience on at least one side of equality, the equal Brahman, samaṁ brahma; the Gita even goes so far in one passage as to identify equality and yoga, samatvaṁ yoga ucyate. That is to say, equality is the sign of unity with the Brahman, of becoming Brahman, of growing into an undisturbed spiritual poise of being in the Infinite. Its importance can hardly be exaggerated; for it is the sign of our having passed beyond the egoistic determinations of our nature, of our having conquered our enslaved response to the dualities, of our having transcended the shifting turmoil of the gunas, of our having entered into the calm and peace of liberation. Equality is a term of consciousness which brings into the whole of our being and nature the eternal tranquillity of the Infinite. Moreover, it is the condition of a securely and perfectly divine action; the security and largeness of the cosmic action of the Infinite is based upon and never breaks down or forfeits its eternal tranquillity. That too must be the character of the perfect spiritual action; to be equal and one to all things in spirit, understanding, mind, heart and natural consciousness,—even in the most physical consciousness,—and to make all their workings, whatever their outward adaptation to the thing to be done, always and imminuably full of the divine equality and calm must be its inmost principle. That may be said to be the passive or basic, the fundamental and receptive side of equality, but there is also an active and possessive side, an equal bliss which can only come when the peace of equality is founded and which is the beatific flower of its fullness. <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/the-elements-of-perfection#p2~</refcenter>
The next necessity of perfection It is to raise all the active parts of the human only if our nature to that highest condition and working pitch of their power and capacitydevelops beyond itself, śakti, at which they become capable if it becomes a nature of being divinised into true instruments of the freeself-knowledge, perfect, spiritual and divine action. For practical purposes we may take the mutual understanding, the heartunity, the prana a nature of true being and true life that the body as the four members result can be a perfection of ourselves and our nature which have thus to be preparedexistence, and we have to find the constituent terms a life of their perfection. Also there is the dynamical force in us (vīrya) true being, a life of the temperamentunity, character and soul naturemutuality, svabhāvaharmony, which makes the power a life of true happiness, a harmonious and beautiful life. If our members effective nature is fixed in action and gives them their type and direction; this what it is, what it has to be freed from its limitationsalready become, enlargedthen no perfection, rounded so that the whole manhood no real and enduring happiness is possible in us may become earthly life; we must seek it not at all and do the basis of a divine manhoodbest we can with our imperfections, when the Purushaor we must seek it elsewhere, the real Man in usa supraterrestrial hereafter, the divine Soul, shall act fully or we must go beyond all such seeking and transcend life by an extinction of nature and ego in some Absolute from which this human instrument strange and shine fully through this human vesselunsatisfactory being of ours has come into existence. To divinise the perfected nature we have to call But if in the divine Power or Shakti to replace us there is a spiritual being which is emerging and our limited human energy so that this may be shaped into the image present state is only an imperfection of and filled with half-emergence, if the force of Inconscient is a greater infinite energy, daivī prakṛti, bhāgavatī śakti. This perfection will grow starting-point containing in itself the measure in potency of a superconscience and supernature which we can surrender ourselveshas to evolve, first, to the guidance and then to the direct action a veil of apparent Nescience in which that Power greater consciousness is concealed and from which it has to unfold itself, if an evolution of the Master of our being and our works to whom it belongs, and for this purpose faith is the essentiallaw, faith then what we are seeking for is not only possible but part of the great motor-power eventual necessity of things. It is our being in our aspirations spiritual destiny to perfectionmanifest and become that supernature,—here, a faith in God and —for it is the Shakti which shall begin in the heart and understandingnature of our true self, but shall take possession of all our naturestill occult, all its consciousnessbecause unevolved, all whole being. A nature of unity will then bring inevitably its dynamic motivelife-force. These four things are the essentials result of this second element of perfectionunity, mutuality, the harmony. An inner life awakened to a full consciousness and to a full powers power of the members of the instrumental natureconsciousness will bear its inevitable fruit in all who have it, self-knowledge, the a perfected dynamis of the soul natureexistence, the assumption joy of them into a satisfied being, the action happiness of the divine Power, and a perfect faith in all our members to call and support that assumption, śakti, vīrya, daivī prakṛti, śraddhāfulfilled nature. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2422/the-elementsdivine-of-perfectionlife#p3p23</ref>
==ProcessTo Grow in the Spiritual Oneness==
"To work for your perfection 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 first step secret of its spiritual significance. For in this spiritual bliss and being he will be one with That which is to become conscious the origin and continent and inhabitant and spirit and constituting power of all existence. This will be the highest reach of yourselfself-perfection." (The Mother, 13 January 1951) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/0424/13the-elements-januaryof-1951#p16perfection</ref>
To work for your perfection, the first step is to become conscious of yourself, of the different parts of your being and their respective activities. You must learn to distinguish 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.<refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/12/the-science-of-living#p5~</refcenter>
If So long as he remains in passing the world-existence, this perfection must radiate out from one domain to another we renounce what has already been given us from eagerness for our new attainmenthim, if in reaching —for that is the mental life we cast away or belittle necessity of his oneness with the physical life universe and its beings,—in an influence and action which is our basis, help all around who are capable of it to rise to or if we reject advance towards the mental same perfection, and physical for the rest in our attraction to the spiritualan influence and action which help, we do not fulfil God integrally, nor satisfy as only the conditions of His self-manifestation. We do not become perfectruler and master man can help, but only shift in leading the field human race forward spiritually towards this consummation and towards some image of our imperfection or at most attain a limited altitudegreater divine truth in their personal and communal existence. 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 He becomes a light and power of the higher Truth to which we have attained, is true divinity of naturehe has climbed and a means for others’ ascension.<ref>httpttp://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2124/the-destinyperfection-of-the-individual#p9mental-being?search=perfection</ref>
But we can attain = How to the highest without blotting ourselves out from the cosmic extension. Brahman preserves always Its two terms of liberty within and of formation without, of expression and of freedom from the expression. We also, being That, can attain to the same divine self-possession. The harmony of the two tendencies is the condition of all life that aims at being really divine. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/21/the-destiny-of-the-individual#p18</ref>Achieve Perfection? =
The Master of our works respects our nature even when he is transforming it; he works always through the nature and not by any arbitrary caprice. This imperfect nature of ours contains the materials of our perfection, but inchoate, distorted, misplaced, thrown together in disorder or a poor imperfect order. All this material has to be patiently perfected, purified, reorganised, new-moulded and transformed, not hacked and hewn and slain or mutilated, not obliterated by simple coercion and denial. This world and we who live in it are his creation and manifestation, and he deals with it and us in a way our narrow and ignorant mind cannot understand unless it falls silent and opens to a divine knowledge. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/23/the-master-of-the-work#p6</ref>
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>==Prerequisites==
FundamentallyThe first necessity is some fundamental poise of the soul both in its essential and its natural being regarding and meeting the things, whatever be impacts and workings of Nature. This poise we shall arrive at by growing into a perfect equality, samatā. The self, spirit or Brahman is one in all and therefore one to all; it is, as is said in the Gita which has developed fully this idea of equality and indicated its experience on at least one side of equality, the equal Brahman, samaṁ brahma; the path Gita even goes so far in one follows—whether passage as to identify equality and yoga, samatvaṁ yoga ucyate. That is to say, equality is the path sign of surrenderunity with the Brahman, consecrationof becoming Brahman, knowledge—if one wants of growing into an undisturbed spiritual poise of being in the Infinite. Its importance can hardly be exaggerated; for it is the sign of our having passed beyond the egoistic determinations of our nature, of our having conquered our enslaved response to the dualities, of our having transcended the shifting turmoil of the gunas, of our having entered into the calm and peace of liberation. Equality is a term of consciousness which brings into the whole of our being and nature the eternal tranquillity of the Infinite. Moreover, it is the condition of a securely and perfectly divine action; the security and largeness of the cosmic action of the Infinite is based upon and never breaks down or forfeits its eternal tranquillity. That too must be the character of the perfectspiritual action; to be equal and one to all things in spirit, understanding, mind, heart and natural consciousness,—even in the most physical consciousness,—and to make all their workings, whatever their outward adaptation to the thing to be done, it is always equally difficultand 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 but one wayalso an active and possessive side, one an equal bliss which can only, I know come when the peace of only one: that equality is founded and which is perfect sincerity, but perfect sincerity! (The Mother, 12 May 1954) the beatific flower of its fullness. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/0624/12the-mayelements-of-1954perfection#p34p2</ref>
If you said to yourself, my children, "We want to be as perfect instruments as possible to express the divine Will in the world", then for this instrument to be perfect, it must be cultivated, educated, trained. It must not be left like a shapeless piece of stone. When you want to build with a stone you chisel it; when you want to make a formless block into a beautiful diamond, you chisel it. Well, it is the same thing. When with your brain and body you want to make a beautiful instrument for the Divine, you must cultivate it, sharpen it, refine it, complete what is missing, perfect what is there. (The Mother, 13 May 1953) <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/05/13-may-1953#p18~</refcenter>
There is a world The next necessity of ideas without form and it perfection is there that you must enter if you want to seize what is behind raise all the active parts of the words. So long as you have human nature to draw your understanding from the forms that highest condition and working pitch of wordstheir power and capacity, ''śakti'', you are likely to fall at which they become capable of being divinised into much confusion about the true sense; but if in a silence instruments of your mind you can rise into the world from which ideas descend to free, perfect, spiritual and divine action. For practical purposes we may take formthe understanding, the heart, at once the real understanding comes. If you are prana and the body as the four members of our nature which have thus to be sure of understanding one anotherprepared, you must be able and we have to understand in silencefind the constituent terms of their perfection. There Also there is a condition the dynamical force in us (vīrya) of the temperament, character and soul nature, ''svabhāva'', which your minds are 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 well attuned and harmonised together that one perceives the thought whole manhood in us may become the basis of a divine manhood, when the other without any necessity of words. But if there is not this attunementPurusha, there will always be some deformation of your meaningthe real Man in us, because to what you speak the other mind supplies its own significancedivine Soul, shall act fully in this human instrument and shine fully through this human vessel. I use a word To divinise the perfected nature we have to call in a certain sense the divine Power or shade of its sense; you are accustomed Shakti to put replace our limited human energy so that this may be shaped into it another sense or shade. Thenthe image of and filled with the force of a greater infinite energy, evidently''daivī prakṛti, you bhāgavatī śakti''. This perfection will understandgrow in the measure in which we can surrender ourselves, not my exact meaning in itfirst, but what to the word means guidance and then to you. This is true not the direct action of that Power and of speech only, but the Master of reading also. If you want our being and our works to understand a book with a deep teaching in whom itbelongs, you must be able and for this purpose faith is the essential, faith is the great motor-power of our being in our aspirations to read it perfection,—here, a faith in the mind's silence; you must wait God and let the expression go deep inside you into Shakti which shall begin in the region where words are no more heart and from there come slowly back to your exterior understanding, but shall take possession of all our nature, all its consciousness and , all its surface understandingdynamic motive-force. But if you let 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 words jump at your external mind and try to adapt and adjust assumption of them into the action of the twodivine Power, you will have entirely missed their real sense and power. There can be no a perfect understanding unless you are faith in union with the unexpressed mind all our members to call and support that is behind the centre of expressionassumption, ''śakti, vīrya, daivī prakṛti, śraddhā''. (The Mother, 26 May 1929) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/0324/26the-elements-mayof-1929perfection#p21p3</ref>
The seeker of the integral state of knowledge must be free from attachment to action and equally free from attachment to inaction. Especially must any tendency to mere inertia of mind or vitality or body be surmounted, and if that habit is found growing on the nature, the will of the Purusha must be used to dismiss it. Eventually, a state arrives when the life and the body perform as mere instruments the will of the Purusha in the mind without any strain or attachment, without their putting themselves into the action with that inferior, eager and often feverish energy which is the nature of their ordinary working; they come to work as forces of Nature work without the fret and toil and reaction characteristic of life in the body when it is not yet master of the physical. When we attain to this perfection, then action and inaction become immaterial, since neither interferes with the freedom of the soul or draws it away from its urge towards the Self or its poise in the Self. But this state of perfection arrives later in the Yoga and till then the law of moderation laid down by the Gita is the best for us; too much mental or physical action then is not good since excess draws away too much energy and reacts unfavourably upon the spiritual condition; too little also is not good since defect leads to a habit of inaction and even to an incapacity which has afterwards to be surmounted with difficulty. Still, periods of absolute calm, solitude and cessation from works are highly desirable and should be secured as often as possible for that recession of the soul into itself which is indispensable to knowledge. <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/23/the-release-from-subjection-to-the-body#p8~</refcenter>
The calm established in ...perfection of our instrumental nature... the whole being must remain perfection of the same whatever happensintelligence, in health and diseaseheart, in pleasure vital consciousness and in painbody, even in the strongest physical pain, in good fortune and misfortuneperfection of the fundamental soul powers, the perfection of the surrender of our own or that of those we love, in success instruments and failure, honour and insult, praise and blame, justice done action 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 allShakti, in our enemies or rather our opponents in the game depend at every moment of life as well as our friends, in the powers their progression on a... power that oppose is covertly and resist us as well as overtly the powers that favour pivot of all endeavour and assistaction, in all energies and forces and happeningsfaith, and if besides we can feel that all ''śraddhā''. The perfect faith is undivided from our self, all an assent of the world one with us within our universal whole being, then this attitude becomes much easier to the heart and mind. But even before we can attain truth seen by it or are firmly seated in that universal visionoffered to its acceptance, we have by all and its central working is a faith of the means soul in our power its own will to insist on this receptive be and attain and active equality become and calm. Even something its idea of itself and things and its knowledge, alpam api asya dharmasya, is a great step towards perfection; a first firmness in it is of which the beginning belief of liberated perfection; its completeness is the perfect assurance of a rapid progress in all intellect, the other members of perfection. For without it we can have no solid basis; heart’s consent and by the pronounced lack desire of it we shall be constantly falling back the life mind to possess and realise are the lower status of desire, ego, duality, ignoranceoutward figures. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/thefaith-actionand-of-equality#p5shakti?search=perfection</ref>
This power of The condition to be aimed at, the soul over its nature is real achievement 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 final perfection were intendedand attainment, 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 all else 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 magicpreparation, but an ordered development and intelligible process. When complete mastery is gained, then the process by its self-effective rapidity may seem a miracle consciousness in which it is impossible to do anything without the intelligenceDivine; for then, but it still proceeds by law of if you are without the truth of SpiritDivine,—when the Divine within us by close union very source of our will and being with him takes up the Yoga and acts your action disappears; knowledge, power, all are gone. But so long as you feel that the omnipotent master of the nature. For powers you use are your own, you will not miss the Divine is our highest Self and the self of all Nature, the eternal and universal Purushasupport. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/2403/the28-psychologyapril-of-self-perfection1929#p8p14</ref>
The divine existence is of the nature not only of freedom, but of purity, beatitude and perfection. An integral purity which shall enable on the one hand the perfect reflection of the divine Being in ourselves and on the other the perfect outpouring of its Truth and Law in us in the terms of life and through the right functioning of the complex instrument we are in our outer parts, is the condition of an integral liberty. Its result is an integral beatitude, in which there becomes possible at once the Ananda of all that is in the world seen as symbols of the Divine and the Ananda of that which is not-world. And it prepares the integral perfection of our humanity as a type of the Divine in the conditions of the human manifestation, a perfection founded on a certain free universality of being, of love and joy, of play of knowledge and of play of will in power and will in unegoistic action. This integrality also can be attained by the integral Yoga. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/23/the-synthesis-of-the-systems#p19</ref>==Process==
The way to attain to this perfect consciousness is to increase your actual consciousness beyond its present grooves ===By Education 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>Training===
==Difficulties==If you said to yourself, my children, "We want to be as perfect instruments as possible to express the divine Will in the world", then for this instrument to be perfect, it must be cultivated, educated, trained. It must not be left like a shapeless piece of stone. When you want to build with a stone you chisel it; when you want to make a formless block into a beautiful diamond, you chisel it. Well, it is the same thing. When with your brain and body you want to make a beautiful instrument for the Divine, you must cultivate it, sharpen it, refine it, complete what is missing, perfect what is there. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/05/13-may-1953#p18</ref>
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No man is The way to attain to this perfect; the vital consciousness is there to increase your actual consciousness beyond its present grooves and limits, to educate it, to open it to the ego is there Divine Light and to prevent let the Divine Light work in itfully and freely. It is But the Light can do its full and unhindered work only when there is the total transformation you have got rid of the external all craving and the internal being down fear, when you have no mental prejudices, no vital preferences, no physical apprehensions or attractions to the very subconscient, that perfection is possible. Till then imperfection will remain as our common heritageobscure or bind you. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/3103/the-subconscient-and-the30-integraljune-yoga1929#p2p8</ref>
In the lower grades of the ascension the new assumption, the integration into a higher principle of consciousness, remains incomplete: the mind cannot wholly mentalise life and matter; there are considerable parts of the life being and the body which remain in the realm of the submental and the subconscient or inconscient. This is one serious obstacle to the mind's endeavour towards the perfection of the nature; for the continued share of the submental, the subconscient and inconscient in the government of the activities, by bringing in another law than that of the mental being, enables the conscious vital and the physical consciousness also to reject the law laid upon them by the mind and to follow their own impulses and instincts in defiance of the mental reason and the rational will of the developed intelligence. This makes it difficult for the mind to go beyond itself, to exceed its own level and spiritualise the nature; for what it cannot even make fully conscious, cannot securely mentalise and rationalise, it cannot spiritualise, since spiritualisation is a greater and more difficult integration. No doubt, by calling in the spiritual force, it can establish an influence and a preliminary change in some parts of the nature, especially in the thinking mind itself and in the heart which is nearest to its own province: but this change is not often a total perfection even within limits and what it does achieve is rare and difficult. The spiritual consciousness using the mind is employing an inferior means and, even though it brings in a divine light into the mind, a divine purity, passion, ardour into the heart or imposes a spiritual law upon the life, this new consciousness has to work within restrictions; for the most part it can only regulate or check the lower action of the life and rigorously control the body, but these members, even if refined or mastered, do not receive their spiritual fulfilment or undergo a perfection and transformation. For that it is necessary to bring in a higher dynamic principle which is native to the spiritual consciousness and by which, therefore, it can act in its own law and completer natural light and power and impose them upon the members. <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/22/the-ascent-towards-supermind#p16~</refcenter>
The egoism of Fundamentally, whatever be the instrument can be as dangerous or more dangerous to spiritual progress than path one follows—whether the egoism path of the doer. The ego-sense is contrary to spiritual realisationsurrender, consecration, so how can any kind of ego be a thing knowledge—if one wants it to be encouraged? As for the magnified egoperfect, it is always equally difficult, and there is but one way, one only, I know of the most perilous obstacles to release and perfection. There should be no big Ionly one: that is perfect sincerity, not even a small one. but perfect sincerity! <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/3106/ego-and12-itsmay-forms1954#p54p34</ref>
= Why ==By Becoming Conscious of Oneself===
"To work for your perfection the first step is to become conscious of yourself." <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/04/13-january-1951#p16</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>
… To work for your perfection, the first step is to become conscious of yourself, of the different parts of your being and their respective activities. You must learn to distinguish these different parts one from another, so that you may act 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 perfect knowledge 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 should be donewe can call our mission upon earth, then we must, in a very regular and without intervention—the least intervention—of constant manner, reject from us or eliminate in us whatever contradicts the reasoning mind. The mind truth of our existence, whatever is silent: opposed to it simply looks on and listens . 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 register thingsaccomplish it, it does not actwe must arm ourselves with patience and endurance, with a determination to prolong our life as long as necessary for the success of our endeavour. (The Mother, 23 December 1953) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/0512/23the-decemberscience-of-1953living#p8p5</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>
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.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/21/the-destiny-of-the-individual#p9</ref>
The condition to be aimed at, the real achievement of Yoga, the final perfection and attainment, for which all else is only a preparation, is a consciousness in which it is impossible to do anything without the Divine; for then, if you are without the Divine, the very source of your action disappears; knowledge, power, all are gone. But so long as you feel that the powers you use are your own, you will not miss the Divine support. (The Mother, 28 April 1929) <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/28-april-1929#p14~</refcenter>
All life that has still In the process of this Inconscience for its basis is stamped with change there must be by the very necessity of the mark effort two stages of a radical imperfection; for even if it is satisfied with its own typeworking. First, it is a satisfaction with something incomplete and inharmonious, a patchwork there will be the personal endeavour of discords: on the contraryhuman being, as soon as he becomes aware by his soul, even a purely mental or vital life might be perfect within its limits if it were based on a restricted but harmonious self-power and self-knowledge. It is mind, heart of this bondage to a perpetual stamp of imperfection divine possibility and disharmony that is turns towards it as the mark true object of the undivine; a divine life, on the contrary, even if progressing from the little to the more, would be at each stage harmonious prepare himself for it and to get rid of all in its principle and detail: it would be him that belongs to a secure ground upon which freedom and perfection could naturally flower or grow towards their highest stature, refine and expand into their most subtle opulence. All imperfectionslower working, of all perfections have to be taken into view that stands in our consideration the way of his opening to the difference between an undivine spiritual truth and a divine existence: but ordinarilyits power, when we make the distinction, we do it so as human beings struggling under the pressure of life to possess by this liberation his spiritual being and the difficulties turn all his natural movements into free means of our conduct amidst its immediate problems and perplexities; most self-expression… The second stage of this Yoga will therefore be a persistent giving up of all we are thinking of the distinction we are obliged to make between good and evil or of that along with its kindred problem action of the duality, nature into the blend in us hands of happiness and suffering. When we seek intellectually for a divine presence in thingsthis greater Power, a divine origin of the world, a divine government substitution of its workingsinfluence, possession and working for the presence of evilpersonal effort, until the insistence on suffering, the large, the enormous part offered Divine to pain, grief and affliction in whom we aspire becomes the economy direct master of Nature are the cruel phenomena which baffle our reason Yoga and overcome effects the instinctive faith entire spiritual and ideal conversion of mankind in such an origin and government or in an all-seeing, all-determining and omnipresent Divine Immanencethe being. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2124/the-divineintegral-and-the-undivine#p2perfection?search=perfection</ref>
It is only But if our nature develops beyond itselfyou remain in that consciousness and look from there, if it becomes a nature of self-knowledge, mutual understanding, unity, a nature then you begin to understand something of true being and true life that the result can truth. And this consciousness has to be a perfection of ourselves and our existenceso total, a life of true beingthat even if things come directly against you, a life even the physical movement of unitysomeone coming to beat you (you must not allow him to kill you, mutualityno; you have perhaps to do what is necessary not to get killed), harmonybut if you are yourself in this perfect consciousness and have no personal reaction, a life of true happinesswell, a harmonious and beautiful lifeI give you the guarantee the other cannot kill you. If our nature is fixed in what it isHe will not be able to, what it has already becomeeven if he tries. He will not be able to beat you, then no perfectioneven if he tries. Only, no real and enduring happiness is possible in earthly life; we you must seek it not at all and do the best we can with our imperfections, have a single violent or we must seek it elsewhere, in a supraterrestrial hereafterwrong vibration, 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 you understand? Even if in us there is just a spiritual being which is emerging and our present state is only an imperfection of half-emergencelittle false vibration, if that opens the Inconscient is a starting-point containing in itself door and the potency of a superconscience thing enters 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 thingsall goes wrong. It is our spiritual destiny to manifest and become that supernatureYou must be fully conscious,—for it is have 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 existencethe perfect mastery over everything, the joy clear vision of a satisfied being, the happiness of a fulfilled natureTruth—and perfect peace. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/2205/the20-divinemay-life1953#p23p54</ref>
Our soul's dissatisfaction with imperfection as a law of life upon earth, its aspiration towards the elimination of all imperfections from our nature, not only in a heaven beyond where it would be automatically impossible to be imperfect, but here and now in a life where perfection has to be conquered by evolution and struggle, are as much a law of our being as that against which they revolt; they too are divine,—a divine dissatisfaction, a divine aspiration. In them is the inherent light of a power within which maintains them in us so that the Divine may not only be there as a hidden Reality in our spiritual secrecies but unfold itself in the evolution of Nature. <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/21/the-divine-and-the-undivine#p8~</refcenter>
For one who wants to grow This power of the soul over its nature is of the utmost importance in the Yoga of self-perfection; if it did not exist, there are no great or small taskswe 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, none that are important or unimportant; all are equally useful we should have to wait for one who aspires for progress and self-mastery. It is said that one only does well what one is interested Nature to effect it in doingher own slow or swift process of evolution. This is trueIn the lower forms of being the soul accepts this complete subjection to Nature, but as it is truer still that one can learn to find interest rises higher in everything one doesthe scale, even it awakes to a sense of something in what appear to be the most insignificant choresitself 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 secret change effects itself through process of this attainment lies in nature, not therefore by any capricious magic, but an ordered development and intelligible process. When complete mastery is gained, then the urge towards process by its self-perfection. Whatever occupation or task falls to your lot, you must do it with effective rapidity may seem a will miracle to progress; whatever one doesthe intelligence, one must not only do it as best one can but strive to do it better and better in a constant effort for perfection. In this way everything without exception becomes interestingstill proceeds by law of the truth of Spirit, from —when the most material chore to Divine within us by close union of our will and being with him takes up the most artistic Yoga and intellectual workacts as the omnipotent master of the nature. The scope for progress For the Divine is infinite our highest Self and can be applied to the smallest thingself of all Nature, the eternal and universal Purusha. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/1224/the-fourpsychology-austeritiesof-andself-the-four-liberationsperfection#p17p8</ref>
In the Dhammapada: a supreme disinterestedness and a supreme liberation is to follow the discipline of self-perfection, the march of progress, not with a precise end in view but because this march of progress is the profound law and the purpose of earthly life, the truth of universal existence and because you put yourself in harmony with it, spontaneously, whatever the result may be. <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/the-brahmin#p43~</refcenter>
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>
===By Learning to be a Witness===
== Perfection ...we find ourselves to be not the mind, but a mental being who stands behind the action of the embodied mind, not a mental and vital personality,—personality is a 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 yet different from mind, life and body. First, he has the intuition of himself as someone observing the action of the mind; it is something which is going on in him and Interyet before him as an object of his regarding knowledge. This self-relation awareness 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 consciousness and enlightened by that consciousness, but in itself other than it.To enter into identity with Others =that Spirit must then be his way to control and lordship. He can do it passively by a sort of reflection and receiving in his mental consciousness, but then he is only a mould, channel or instrument, not a possessor or participant in the power. He can arrive at identity by an absorption of his mentality in inner spiritual being, but then the conscious action ceases in a trance of identity. To be active master of the 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 way of rising to this greater poise and be self-ruler, Swarat, is a condition of his perfection.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/the-perfection-of-the-mental-being?search=perfection</ref>
...man is separated in his mind, his life, his body from the universal and therefore, even as he does not know himself, is equally and even more incapable of knowing his fellow-creatures. He forms by inferences, theories, observations and a certain imperfect capacity of sympathy a rough mental construction about them; but this is not knowledge. Knowledge can only come by conscious identity, for that is the only true knowledge,—existence aware of itself. We know what we are so far as we are consciously aware of ourself, the rest is hidden; so also we can come really to know that with which we become one in our consciousness, but only so far as we can become one with it. If the means of knowledge are indirect and imperfect, the knowledge attained will also be indirect and imperfect. It will enable us to work out with a certain precarious clumsiness but still perfectly enough from our mental standpoint certain limited practical aims, necessities, conveniences, a certain imperfect and insecure harmony of our relations with that which we know; but only by a conscious unity with it can we arrive at a perfect relation. Therefore we must arrive at a conscious unity with our fellow-beings and not merely at the sympathy created by love or the understanding created by mental knowledge, which will always be the knowledge of their superficial existence and therefore imperfect in itself and subject to denial and frustration by the uprush of the unknown and unmastered from the subconscient or the subliminal in them and us. But this 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: for here in our normal being the greater part of it is subconscient and therefore in this normal poise of mind, life and body it cannot be possessed. The lower conscious nature is bound down to ego in all its activities, chained triply to the stake of differentiated individuality. The Supermind alone commands unity in diversity. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/21/the-problem-of-life#p9</ref>===By Developing Detachment===
To make The seeker of the effort for one's own perfection integral state of knowledge must be free from attachment to action and not equally free from attachment to inaction. Especially must any tendency to mere inertia of mind or vitality or body be surmounted, and if that habit is found growing on the nature, the will of the Purusha must be disturbed by used to dismiss it. Eventually, a state arrives when the life and the body perform as mere instruments the will of the Purusha in the mind without any mistake strain or attachment, without their putting themselves into the action with that inferior, eager and often feverish energy which is the nature of their ordinary working; they come to work as forces of Nature work without the fret and toil and reaction characteristic of life in the body when it is not yet master of the physical. When we attain to this perfection, then action and inaction become immaterial, since neither interferes with the freedom of the soul or draws it away from its urge towards the Self or its poise in others but reply the Self. But this state of perfection arrives later in the Yoga and till then the law of moderation laid down by a silent will the Gita is the best for their perfection 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 always not good since defect leads to a habit of inaction and even to an incapacity which has afterwards to be surmounted with difficulty. Still, periods of absolute calm, solitude and cessation from works are highly desirable and should be secured as often as possible for that recession of the right attitudesoul into itself which is indispensable to knowledge. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/3123/problemsthe-inrelease-from-subjection-to-humanthe-relationsbody#p9p8</ref>
You stop short at the perfection that others should realise and you are seldom conscious of the goal you should be pursuing yourself. If you are conscious of it, well then, begin with the work which is given to you, that is to say, realise what you have to do and do not concern yourself with what others do, because, after all, it is not your business. And the best way to the true attitude is simply to say, "All those around me, all the circumstances of my life, all the people near me, are a mirror held up to me by the Divine Consciousness to show me the progress I must make. Everything that shocks me in others means a work I have to do in myself." <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/10/aphorism-8#p15</ref>===By Developing Equality===
And perhaps 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 carried true 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 oneself, one would discover it more often is the beginning of liberated perfection; its completeness is the perfect assurance of a rapid progress in othersall 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/1024/aphorismthe-action-of-8equality#p16p5</ref>
For the awakened individual the realisation ===By Purification of his truth of being and his inner liberation and perfection must be his primary seeking,—first, because that is the call of the Spirit within him, but also because it is only by liberation and perfection and realisation of the truth of being that man can arrive at truth of living. A perfected community also can exist only by the perfection of its individuals, and perfection can come only by the discovery and affirmation in life by each of his own spiritual being and the discovery by all of their spiritual unity and a resultant life unity. There can be no real perfection for us except by our inner self and truth of spiritual existence taking up all truth of the instrumental existence into itself and giving to it oneness, integration, harmony. As our only real freedom is the discovery and disengagement of the spiritual Reality within us, so our only means of true perfection is the sovereignty and self-effectuation of the spiritual Reality in all the elements of our nature. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/22/the-divine-life#p37</ref>Nature===
We have ...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 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 recognise once 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 that 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 individual exists nature not in himself alone 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 collectivity other the perfect outpouring of its Truth and that individual perfection Law in us in the terms of life and liberation through the right functioning of the complex instrument we are not 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 whole sense Ananda of God's intention all that is in the world. The free use seen as symbols of our liberty includes also the liberation of others Divine and the Ananda of mankind; that which is not-world. And it prepares the perfect utility integral perfection of our perfection is, having realised humanity as a type of the Divine in ourselves the divine symbolconditions of the human manifestation, a perfection founded on a certain free universality of being, to reproduceof love and joy, multiply of play of knowledge and ultimately universalise it of play of will in power and will in othersunegoistic action. This integrality also can be attained by the integral Yoga. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/23/the-threefoldsynthesis-of-the-lifesystems#p30p19</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>===By Cultivating Faith===
There is a Reality, a truth one kind of all existence which is greater faith demanded as indispensable by the integral Yoga and more abiding than all its formations and manifestations; to find that truth may be described as faith in God and Reality and live in it, achieve the most perfect manifestation and formation possible of itShakti, must be faith in the secret of perfection whether of individual or communal being. This Reality is there within each thing presence and gives to each of its formations its power of being and value of being. The universe is a manifestation of the Reality, Divine in us and there is a truth of the universal existenceworld, a Power of cosmic being, an faith that all-self or in the world-spirit. Humanity is a formation or manifestation the working of one divine Shakti, that all the Reality in steps of the universeYoga, its strivings and sufferings and there is a truth failures as well as its successes and satisfactions and victories are utilities and self necessities of humanity, her workings and that by a human spirit, firm and strong dependence on and a destiny of human lifetotal self-surrender to the Divine and to his Shakti in us we can attain to oneness and freedom and victory and perfection. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2224/thefaith-divineand-life#p36shakti?search=perfection</ref>
=== When Man Becomes Perfect… By Silencing the Mind===
There is a world of ideas without form and it is there that you must enter if you want to seize what is behind the words. So long as you have to draw your understanding from the forms of words, you are likely to fall into much confusion about the true sense; but if in a silence of your mind you can rise into the world from which ideas descend to take form, at once the real understanding comes. If you are to be sure of understanding one another, you must be able to understand in silence. There is a condition in which your minds are so well attuned and harmonised together that one perceives the thought of the other without any necessity of words. But if there is not this attunement, there will always be some deformation of your meaning, because to what you speak the other mind supplies its own significance. I use a word in a certain sense or shade of its sense; you are accustomed to put into it another sense or shade. Then, evidently, you will understand, not my exact meaning in it, but what the word means to you. This is true not of speech only, but of reading also. If you want to understand a book with a deep teaching in it, you must be able to read it in the mind's silence; you must wait and let the expression go deep inside you into the region where words are no more and from there come slowly back to your exterior consciousness and its surface understanding. But if you let the words jump at your external mind and try to adapt and adjust the two, you will have entirely missed their real sense and power. There can be no perfect understanding unless you are in union with the unexpressed mind that is behind the centre of expression. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/26-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 inexhaustible activity. Those who have thus possessed the Calm within can perceive always welling out from its silence the perennial supply of the energies that work in the universe. It is not, therefore, the truth of the Silence to say that it is in its nature a rejection of the cosmic activity. The apparent incompatibility of the two states is an error of the limited Mind which, accustomed to trenchant oppositions of affirmation and denial and passing suddenly from one pole to the other, is unable to conceive of a comprehensive consciousness vast and strong enough to include both in a simultaneous embrace. The Silence does not reject the world; it sustains it. Or rather it supports with an equal impartiality the activity and the withdrawal from the activity and approves also the reconciliation by which the soul remains free and still even while it lends itself to all action. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/21/reality-omnipresent#p5</ref>
= More Difficulties on the Path to Perfection... =
=== EaseNo 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, Difficulty that perfection is possible. Till then imperfection will remain as our common heritage. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/31/the-subconscient-and Perfection ===-the-integral-yoga#p2</ref>
You must not cherish the illusion that if you want to follow the straight path, if you are modest, if you seek purity, if you are disinterested, if you want to lead a solitary existence and have a clear judgment, things will become easy.... It is quite the contrary! When you begin to advance towards inner and outer perfection, the difficulties start at the same time. <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/impurity#p29~</refcenter>
=== MoralityThe egoism of the instrument can be as dangerous or more dangerous to spiritual progress than the egoism of the doer. The ego-sense is contrary to spiritual realisation, Diversity 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 Perfection ===-its-forms#p54</ref>
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) <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/4-august-1929#p6~</refcenter>
=== Conflicts 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 Perfection ==-shakti?search=perfection</ref>
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. <refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/knowledge-by-unity-with-the-divine-the-divine-will-in-the-world#p5~</refcenter>
=== Perfection In the lower grades of the ascension the new assumption, the integration into a higher principle of consciousness, remains incomplete: the mind cannot wholly mentalise life and Harmony ===matter; there are considerable parts of the life being and the body which remain in the realm of the submental and the subconscient or inconscient. This is one serious obstacle to the mind's endeavour towards the perfection of the nature; for the continued share of the submental, the subconscient and inconscient in the government of the activities, by bringing in another law than that of the mental being, enables the conscious vital and the physical consciousness also to reject the law laid upon them by the mind and to follow their own impulses and instincts in defiance of the mental reason and the rational will of the developed intelligence. This makes it difficult for the mind to go beyond itself, to exceed its own level and spiritualise the nature; for what it cannot even make fully conscious, cannot securely mentalise and rationalise, it cannot spiritualise, since spiritualisation is a greater and more difficult integration. No doubt, by calling in the spiritual force, it can establish an influence and a preliminary change in some parts of the nature, especially in the thinking mind itself and in the heart which is nearest to its own province: but this change is not often a total perfection even within limits and what it does achieve is rare and difficult. The spiritual consciousness using the mind is employing an inferior means and, even though it brings in a divine light into the mind, a divine purity, passion, ardour into the heart or imposes a spiritual law upon the life, this new consciousness has to work within restrictions; for the most part it can only regulate or check the lower action of the life and rigorously control the body, but these members, even if refined or mastered, do not receive their spiritual fulfilment or undergo a perfection and transformation. For that it is necessary to bring in a higher dynamic principle which is native to the spiritual consciousness and by which, therefore, it can act in its own law and completer natural light and power and impose them upon the members. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/22/the-ascent-towards-supermind#p16</ref>
It is possible to escape from the problem otherwise<div style="text-align: center; for, admitting always the essential Presence, we "> One man’s perfection still can endeavour to justify the divinity of the manifestation by correcting the human view of perfection or putting it aside as a too limited mental standard. We may say that not only is the Spirit in things absolutely perfect and divine, but each thing also is relatively perfect and divine in itself, in its expression of what it has to express of the possibilities of existence, in its assumption of its proper place in the complete manifestation. Each thing is divine in itself because each is a fact and idea of the divine being, knowledge and will fulfilling itself infallibly in accordance with the law of that particular manifestation. Each being is possessed of the knowledge, the force, the measure and kind of delight of existence precisely proper to its own nature; each works in the gradations of experience decreed by a secret inherent will, a native law, an intrinsic power of the self, an occult significance. It is thus perfect in the relation of its phenomena to the law of its being; for all are in harmony with that, spring out of it, adapt themselves to its purpose according to the infallibility of the divine Will and Knowledge at work within the creature. It is perfect and divine also in relation to the whole, in its proper place in the whole; to that totality it is necessary and in it it fulfils a part by which the perfection actual and progressive of the universal harmony, the adaptation of all in it to its whole purpose and its whole sense is helped and completed. If to us things appear undivine, if we hasten to condemn this or that phenomenon as inconsistent with the nature of a divine being, it is because we are ignorant of the sense and purpose of the Divine in save 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/2134/the-divinefinding-andof-the-undivine#p6soul</ref></div>  '''Content Curated by Prema Sankar'''
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==References==
= References =
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