Practice Makes Perfect
Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.
Bible, Matthew 5:48
Maharaj Charan Singh used to tell us that if we were perfect we would not be here.
Our spiritual path is a journey from imperfection to perfection. The author of The Gospel of Jesus writes:
There is human perfection and divine perfection, the one being a reflection of the other.… If it seems to us that the creation has imperfection, then that is only from our point of view. If the creation is to continue, it has to be the way it is or all the souls would immediately return to Him. There has to be something to keep souls here – and that something is what we call imperfection. Just as a shadow only exists because of the light, so too does imperfection only exist because of perfection. From His point of view, the creation is entirely as He wants it: it is perfectly imperfect.
We have created our own imperfection and we perpetuate it on a daily basis through the choices we make. The world we see and the life we live is our own choice. If we choose not to get up and meditate, we perpetuate our imperfection. If we get up and meditate, we work at developing our own perfection.
It is our conditioned freedom of choice that creates and perpetuates the personality or ego. An artist captures an impression on a canvas which is an expression of something from within himself. The appreciation of a painting is always subjective, as viewers of the canvas can never see the original image in the artist’s mind. All they see is the reflection on the canvas and they cannot always interpret and understand the artist’s depiction.
Our lives are like paintings: every choice we make adds a facet to the picture we create. Our deeply engrained beliefs form the background or watermark on our canvas, and the splashes of colour represent the choices we make. It is these choices that build the personality.
We may think the painting we are creating is near-perfect, but those with whom we interact will quickly find flaws in the image we project of ourselves, because the image of who we think we are is very different from the image they perceive. Like the critics of an artist’s painting, they can never be inside our head. No one can know the level of our pain, our joy or the overpowering paralysis of our fears. Each of us can only interpret from our own level of experience. At best we have no more than a vague understanding of each other.
As we observe the painting, we rarely think of the pure white canvas, the foundation which made it all possible. It is this foundation -this purity – that is the perfection we seek. This is our true essence and nature: the Shabd. But on our own we don’t know how to contact or experience the Shabd. As with everything in life, we need a teacher to explain the spiritual process to us and to guide us in the right direction. Once we accept the Master’s teachings, it is our responsibility to practise what he teaches us. This will slowly lead us to progress along the inner path leading us from imperfection to perfection. Practice makes perfect – and perfection is our release from this world.
When we are obsessed with the creation, splashing colours over our canvas in the play of the ego, we have forgotten the Lord and are pursuing personal desires and personal enhancement. At this time our attention is focused in the world, which means we have turned away from reality – away from God. Then the individual self, with its narrow and petty vision, becomes stronger.
When we focus on God we move away from the self and move closer to God and divine perfection. If God is the essence of perfection, we must make ourselves worthy of meeting Him. Therefore our starting point on our spiritual journey must be to develop the human virtues of perfection. Once we have developed human perfection, we have the foundation on which to build divine perfection. This foundation is built by following the four principles unconditionally – without compromise.
We could refer to them as the four perfections because they are the stepping-stones that will lead us to perfection. The first three – the vegetarian diet, abstinence from alcohol and recreational drugs, and living a moral life – create the necessary human virtues in us.
The fourth principle, our meditation practice, develops in us a greater awareness of the Shabd, which leads us to divine perfection. As we become more aware of the Shabd, it helps us persevere with the first three principles.
In The Gospel of Jesus, we read that the best and most effective approach in the quest for human perfection is to seek divine perfection through meditation on the Word of God – the Shabd, through which our good human qualities become apparent. It is from a divine and perfect Master that we receive the grace to become perfect too, for as Jesus said, the disciple will become like his Master:
The disciple is not above his Master:
But every one that is perfect shall be as his Master.
Bible, Luke 6:40
Some of us do our meditation as requested by the Master – that is, we sit each and every day for the required two and a half hours without fail. Some of us sincerely try to meditate but find it an ongoing battle, while others are hopelessly casual in their approach to their meditation. Still others simply quit when the going gets tough. We need to keep reminding ourselves that the Master’s teachings take hold and work their magic in a very subtle way and that we must have patience. If we eat ice cream every day for a month, it becomes a habit. The taste buds crave the ice cream. If we do our practice every day as we should, the mind will eventually crave the practice.
The only thing that will give us the inner strength we need to break our old habits and the powerful hold the senses have over us is to attach ourselves to the Shabd, which we do through our regular practice of meditation. Meditation inspires us – it makes us realize that we can let go of worldliness. It is this letting go that sets us free to pursue perfection.
When we are able to let go of the patterns on our canvas and the obsessions we have with improving our picture, we will come to realize how unimportant they are, and this will be a sign that our practice is reaping rewards. And although purity and perfection may still be a long way away, we are slowly disentangling ourselves from the world as we learn to surrender more completely to the Master’s instructions – to his will.
Surrender in any form is never easy and to surrender our will to the will of the Master is extremely difficult. The Masters tell us it can only be done by attaching ourselves to Shabd. It is only through the power of Shabd that we can slowly remove all the impressions imprinted on our mental body and uncover the pristine being within – just as we would slowly and carefully remove the colours left by the strokes and swirls of the artist’s brush to reveal the pure white canvas underneath it all. We are told that the final goal is so great and sublime that we should not allow anything to get in the way of achieving it.
It will not benefit us to simply pay lip-service to the path. We have to practise, otherwise we are simply wasting a wonderful opportunity to reach both human and divine perfection. Meditation is our journey to perfection under the guidance of a perfect Master.
Again we read in The Gospel of Jesus that the tasteless water of an imperfect and worldly human being is turned into the sweet wine of perfection through the intermediary of the Truth, the Word of God. With such a promise, where should our effort be – in the gratification of the ego or the pursuit of perfection? We should be consistent, sincere and intense in our practice, and should not allow our desire for perfection to weaken. We also read this in The Gospel of Jesus:
The rendezvous with this beautiful, radiant and spiritual form of their Master is the first goal to which the devotees of the universal mystic path aspire. The only obstacles to experiencing it are those that lie within the mind. For only a pure and perfect soul can come before the radiance of one who is purity and perfection personified.