Question: Does resurrection come when perfection in body and mind is attained?

Sri Chinmoy: Man’s perfection in the body and mind? Man can be perfect in the soul, in the heart, in the mind, in the vital and eventually even in the body. Perfection must dawn on all levels. If man achieves perfection in the physical body, then the body will be automatically transformed, but it will take a few centuries.

There are two processes. What you call resurrection, I wish to call transformation. Resurrection would mean (as it does in the Christian tradition) that we would leave the physical body, ascend to a higher world, then come down again and animate the inert body with a higher consciousness than it had before. This process would not be necessary. For millions and millions of years, the body has been in darkness, this physical body, but not the heart, not the soul, not the mind. So this physical body, in the march of evolution may take a few hundred or even a thousand years to be perfected. When perfection has dawned in the mind, in the heart, and in the soul and when the soul within the body is fully realised by the outer being, at that time there would be two ways of living on earth. One way is this transformation which is the complete perfection of the body. The other way will be what you can call the divinisation of the body. Right now, if you want to speak in the strict sense of the term, the body is undivine; it is not divinised. However, with aspiration and inner realisation, everything will be divinised. So one process is the transformation and physical perfection of the human body here on earth, which is similar to what you call resurrection; the other is divinisation in which all the functions of the physical body lose their mechanical, automatic nature and are controlled directly by the inner will. Everything in the body will be luminous, malleable and totally at the direct, supple service of the inner divinity, the soul.

An ordinary seeker in the future will have the capacity to transform his physical body by using his spiritual Light and his inner spiritual powers. His bodily perfection will be divinely “normal” at that time. In the case of a realised person, however, his physical body will be not only transformed and made perfect, but it will also be divinised. He will not have to go back and take another incarnation in order to have a divine or perfect body.

Then there is a third method. That method is that the beginning of human existence would not take place here on earth. The soul will take its physical form, its human shape in the psychic world. In the psychic world, the soul will be able to unite with a physical sheath or form, a divine body already created. Then at that time there will be no necessity for the spiritually realised soul to enter into a human mother, the human body. At that time, procreation will be stopped for those spiritually realised persons. They will no longer enter the earth through human birth. But in ordinary human beings, procreation will go on.

Just as we came out of the animal kingdom and we still see around us monkeys, elephants, dogs and all, so these divinised beings will be surrounded by ordinary human beings. But after thousands and thousands of years, millions of years probably, there will be a golden creation. It will be the creation of divinised, transformed beings. It will be a new Golden Age.