The three stages towards this perfection are the following. The first stage is to make God as great and as perfect as your imagination can. It is in order to help man to perfect God in himself that the teachers gave various prayers, the prayers to God, calling Him the Judge, the Forgiver, most Compassionate, most Faithful, most Beautiful, most Loving. All these attributes are our limited conceptions. God is greater than what we can say about Him.

And when by all these conceptions and by our imagination we make God as great as we are able to, it must still be understood that God cannot be made greater than He is. We cannot give God pleasure by making Him great.

But by making God great we ourselves arrive at a certain greatness; our vision widens, our deepens, our ideal reaches higher. We create a greater vision, a wider horizon, for our own expansion. We should, therefore, by way of prayer, by praise, by contemplation, make God as great as we can possibly imagine.

The truth behind this is that a person who sees good points in others and wants to add what is lacking in others, becomes nobler everyday. By making others noble, by thinking good of others, he himself becomes nobler and better than those of whom he thinks good; and the one who thinks evil of others in time becomes wicked, for he covers up the good in him and produces thus the vision of evil.

Therefore the first stage and the first duty of every seeker after truth is to make God as great as possible, for his own good, because he is making an ideal within himself; he is building within himself that which will make him great.

2. The Work of the Heart

The second stage is the work of the heart. The first is of the head. To make God great intellectually, with thought and imagination, is really the painter's work, but still more important is the work of the heart.

In our everyday life we see the phenomenon of love.

The first lesson that love teaches us is: "I am not; thou art." The first thing to think of is to erase ourselves from our minds and to think of the one we love. As long as we do not arrive at this idea, so long the word love remains only in the dictionary. Many speak about love but very few know it. Is love a pastime, an amusement, a drama; is it a performance? The first lesson of love is sacrifice, service, self-effacement.

There is a little story of a peasant girl who was passing through a field where a Muslim was offering his prayers. And the law was that no one should pass by a place where somebody was praying. After a time this girl returned by the same way, and the man said, "O girl, what a terrible thing you have done today." She was shocked and asked, "What did I do?" He said, "You passed by this way! It is a great sin. I was praying, thinking of God!" She said, "Were you thinking of God? I was going to see my young man! I did not see you; how did you see me when you were thinking of God?'

To close the eyes for prayer is one thing, and to produce the love of God is another thing. That is the second stage in spiritual realization; where in the thought of God one begins to lose oneself the same way that the lover loses the thought of self in the thought of the beloved.

3. Self-Realization

And the third stage is different again. In the third stage the beloved becomes the self, and the self is there no more. For then the self, as we think it to be, no longer remains; the self becomes what it really is. It is that realization which is called self-realization.

Vol. 6, The Alchemy of Happiness

The Stages toward Perfection

-ALL-

Vol. 6, The Alchemy of Happiness

The Stages toward Perfection

1. The Work of the Mind

2. The Work of the Heart

3. Self-Realization