1,727
edits
Changes
Aesthetic Sense Compilation (view source)
Revision as of 15:47, 15 August 2018
, 15:47, 15 August 2018no edit summary
|}
<div style="color:#000000;">Beauty is the aesthetic instinct of man, and the good is his ethical instinct, and these two things are very important in human education and growth. (The Mother, 25 May 1955) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/07/25-may-1955#p39</ref> </div>
<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">“</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">The business of both parent and teacher is to enable and to help the child to educate himself, to develop his own intellectual, moral, aesthetic and practical capacities and to grow freely as an organic being, not to be kneaded and pressured into form like an inert plastic material.” (Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle)</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><u><ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/12/teachers#p14</ref></u></span>
<div style="color:#000000;">It is the consciousness of beauty. Aesthetic means that which concerns beauty, art. There are people, for example, who move around in life and see landscapes, see people and things and have absolutely no sense of whether it is beautiful or not; and into the bargain, it makes no difference at all to them. They look at the sky, see whether there are any clouds, whether it will rain or be clear, for instance; or whether the sun is hot or the wind cold. But there are others—when they raise their eyes and look at a beautiful sky, it gives them pleasure, they say, "Oh! It is fine today, the sunrise is lovely today, the sunset is beautiful, the clouds have fine shapes." So, the first kind do not have an aesthetic conscience, the second have.(The Mother, 1 June 1955) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/07/1-june-1955#p3 http:<//incarnateword.in/cwm/07/1-june-1955#p3ref></refdiv>
== The Experience of Ananda ==
<div style="color:#000000;">By aesthesis is meant a reaction of the consciousness, mental and vital and even bodily, which receives a certain element in things, something that can be called their taste, Rasa, which passing through the mind or sense or both, awakes a vital enjoyment of the taste, Bhoga, and this can again awaken us, awaken even the soul in us to something yet deeper and more fundamental than mere pleasure and enjoyment, to some form of the spirit's delight of existence, Ananda. </div>
<div style="color:#000000;">Ordinarily, we suppose that aesthesis is concerned with beauty, and that indeed is its most prominent concern: but it is concerned with many other things also. It is the universal Ananda that is the parent of aesthesis and the universal Ananda takes three major and original forms, beauty, love and delight, the delight of all existence, the delight in things, in all things. Universal Ananda is the artist and creator of the universe witnessing, experiencing and taking joy in its creation. In the lower consciousness it creates its opposites, the sense of ugliness as well as the sense of beauty, hate and repulsion and dislike as well as love and attraction and liking, grief and pain as well as joy and delight; and between these dualities or as a grey tint in the background there is a general tone of neutrality and indifference born from the universal insensibility into which the Ananda sinks in its dark negation in the Inconscient. All this is the sphere of aesthesis, its dullest reaction is indifference, its highest is ecstasy. Ecstasy is a sign of a return towards the original or supreme Ananda: that art or poetry is supreme which can bring us something of the supreme tone of ecstasy. For as the consciousness sinks from the supreme levels through various degrees towards the Inconscience the general sign of this descent is an always diminishing power of its intensity, intensity of being, intensity of consciousness, intensity of force, intensity of the delight in things and the delight of existence. So too as we ascend towards the supreme level these intensities increase. As we climb beyond Mind, higher and wider values replace the values of our limited mind, life and bodily consciousness. Aesthesis shares in this intensification of capacity. The capacity for pleasure and pain, for liking and disliking is comparatively poor on the level of our mind and life; our capacity for ecstasy is brief and limited; these tones arise from a general ground of neutrality which is always dragging them back towards itself. As it enters the overhead planes the ordinary aesthesis turns into a pure delight and becomes capable of a high, a large or a deep abiding ecstasy.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/27/the-overmind-aesthesis#p61</ref> </div>
== <span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">A True & and Wide Consciousness</span> ==
<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">There are two kinds of beauty. There is that universal beauty which is seen by the inner eye, heard by the inner ear etc.—but the individual consciousness responds to some forms, not to others, according to its own mental, vital and physical reactions. There is also the aesthetic beauty which depends on a particular standard of harmony, but different race or individual consciousnesses form different standards of aesthetic harmony.</span> <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/27/beauty-in-women#p18 http:<//incarnateword.in/cwsa/27/beauty-in-women#p18ref></refspan>
<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">For instance, if your consciousness is limited to one place, that is, it is a national consciousness (the consciousness of any one country), what is </span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">beautiful</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;"> </span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">for one country is not </span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">beautiful</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;"> </span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">for another.</span>
<div style="color:#000000;">Only those who have developed a little artistic taste, have travelled much and seen many things have widened their consciousness and they are no longer so sectarian. (The Mother, 21 October 1953)<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/05/21-october-1953#p60</ref>
<div style="color:#000000;">If you have the true consciousness, you experience this joy of seeing, of being in a conscious contact with something very beautiful, very harmonious, and then that's all. (The Mother, 9 February 1955)<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/07/9-february-1955#p7</ref>
<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">Artistic taste is pleased with beautiful things and is itself beautiful.</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><u><ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/15/beauty#p1</ref></u></span>
== Stages of Aesthesis ==
<div style="color:#000000;">We have a sense of beauty and love beauty without even knowing why, and there are things which give the sense of beauty without our knowing why, without our reasoning. It is instinctive. He (Sri Aurobindo) says that this is the infrarational stage of the aesthetic sense. (The Mother, 1 June 1955)<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/07/1-june-1955#p21</ref></div>
<div style="color:#000000;">It is a kind of harmony which you experience much more than think, and the true suprarational relation with beauty is not at all a "reasonable" relation (Sri Aurobindo will tell you this at the end), it completely overpasses reason, it is a contact in a higher realm.</div>
<div style="color:#000000;">One can experience an aesthetic pleasure (let us call it that) in seeing something which is truly beautiful and at the same time something else which is not beautiful, but which gives one some sort of pleasure, because it is mixed, because one's aesthetic instinct is not pure, it is mixed with all kinds of sensations which are very crude and untrained. So it is here, as he says, that reason has its role, that it comes in to explain why a thing is beautiful, to educate the taste; but it is not final, and reason is not the final judge; it can very well make mistakes, only it is a little higher, as judgment, than that of a completely infrarational being who has no reason and no understanding of things. It is a stage. It is a stage, that's what he says, it is a stage. But if you want to realise true beauty, you must go beyond that, very far beyond this stage.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/07/1-june-1955#p24</ref></div>
<div style="color:#000000;">The higher principle of beauty is a suprarational principle and therefore reason understands nothing at all about it. If you want to judge art by reason you are sure to say foolish things.(The Mother, 25 May 1955)<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/07/25-may-1955#p37</ref>
= Where is the Aesthetic Sense Situated? =
== In the Physical Plane ==
<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">On the physical plane the Divine expresses himself through beauty, on the mental plane through knowledge, on the vital plane through power and on the psychic plane through love.</span><ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/15/the-divine-working-in-the-universe#p6</ref></span>
<div style="color:#000000;">… so that joy is a joy which has an object, it is because you read that sentence that you feel this joy, if you had not read the sentence, you would not have felt the joy. (The Mother, 5 December 1956)<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/08/5-december-1956#p17</ref></div>
When we rise high enough, we discover that these four aspects unite with each other in a </span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">single consciousness, full of love, luminous, powerful, beautiful, containing all, pervading all.</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/15/the-divine-working-in-the-universe#p7</ref></span>
== In the Vital Plane ==
<div style="color:#333333;">It is obvious that as one goes farther, as it were, from the material world, the forms and consciousness of those beings are of a purity, beauty and perfection much higher than our ordinary physical forms. It is only in the nearest vital world, the one which is, so to say, mixed with our material life―though it lies beyond it and there is a zone where the vital is no longer mixed with the material world―of that material vital one can say that in some of its aspects it is even uglier than things here, for it is filled with a bad will which is not counterbalanced by the presence of the psychic being which, in the physical world, amends, corrects, puts right, directs this bad will. But it is rather a limited zone and, as soon as one goes beyond it, one can find and meet things that are not favourable to human life, beings not on the same scale as human existence, but having their own beauty and grandeur, with whom one may establish relations which may become quite pleasant and even useful.(The Mother, 11 July 1956) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/08/11-july-1956#p10</ref></div>
<div style="color:#333333000000;">There is a world in which you are the supreme maker of forms: that is your own particular vital world. You are the supreme fashioner and you can make a marvel of your world if you know how to use it. If you have an artistic or poetic consciousness, if you love harmony, beauty, you will build there something marvellous which will tend to spring up into the material manifestation. (The Mother, 11 July 18 April 1956)</div><div style="color:#0066cc;"><u><ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/08/1118-julyapril-1956#p10p55</ref></u></div>
== In the Mental Plane ==
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/the-ananda-brahman#p2</ref></u></div>
<div style="color:#000000;">It (spiritual bliss) may present itself first as a yearning for some universal Beauty which we feel in Nature and man and in all that is around us; or we may have the intuition of some transcendent Beauty of which all apparent beauty here is only a symbol. That is how it may come to those in whom the aesthetic being is developed and insistent and the instincts which, when they find form of expression, make the poet and artist, are predominant. </div>
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/the-ananda-brahman#p3</ref>
<div style="color:#000000;">Yes, this beauty of soul that is visible in the face, this kind of dignity, this harmony of integral realisation. When the soul becomes visible in the physical, it gives this dignity, this beauty, this majesty, the majesty that comes from one's being the Tabernacle. Then, even things that have no particular beauty put on a sense of eternal beauty, of it the eternal beauty.</div>
<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">(The Mother, 1 July 1958)</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#1155cc;"><u>
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/15/july-1958-1#p3</ref></u></span>
= <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">Why is it Important to Have Aesthetic Sense?</span> =
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">But the way the world is organized, people without aesthetic needs go back to a very primitive life—which is wrong. We need a place where life... where the very setting of life would be, not an individual thing, but a </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">beauty that would be like the surroundings natural to a certain degree of development.</span><div style="color: #000000;"> (The Mother, 25 March 1970) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/agenda/11/march-25-1970#p49</ref></div>
<div style="color: #000000;">And if you are not stopped by the appearance, physical or moral or aesthetic, but get behind and are in touch with the Spirit, the Divine Soul in things, you can reach beauty and delight even through what affects the ordinary sense only as something poor, painful or discordant.</div>
<div style="color: #000000;">(The Mother, 28 April 1929)</div>
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/28-april-1929#p18</ref>
== Aesthetic Sense & Yoga ==
<div style="color: #000000;">The discipline of Art has at its centre the same principle as the discipline of Yoga. In both the aim is to become more and more conscious; in both you have to learn to see and feel something that is beyond the ordinary vision and feeling, to go within and bring out from there deeper things. Painters have to follow a discipline for the growth of the consciousness of their eyes, which in itself is almost a Yoga. If they are true artists and try to see beyond and use their art for the expression of the inner world, they grow in consciousness by this concentration, which is not other than the consciousness given by Yoga. Why then should not Yogic consciousness be a help to artistic creation? (The Mother, 28 July 1929)<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/28-july-1929#p7</ref>
<div style="color: #000000;">To do this yoga, one must have, at least a little, the sense of beauty. If one does not, one misses one of the most important aspects of the physical world. (The Mother, 1 July 1958)<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/15/july-1958-1#p1</ref>
<div style="color: #000000;">The aesthetic and emotional mind and aesthetic forms are used by Yoga as a support for concentration even in the Yoga of knowledge and are, sublimated, the whole means of the Yoga of love and delight, as life and action, sublimated, are the whole means of the Yoga of works.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/23/the-higher-and-the-lower-knowledge#p10</ref></div>
<div style="color: #000000;">Art, poetry, music are not Yoga, not in themselves things spiritual any more than philosophy either is a thing spiritual or science… </div>
<div style="color: #000000;">But this vital is a strange creature. It is a being of passion, enthusiasm and naturally of desire; but, for example, it is quite capable of getting enthusiastic over something beautiful, of admiring, sensing anything greater and nobler than itself. And if really anything very beautiful occurs in the being, if there is a movement having an exceptional value, well, it may get enthusiastic and it is capable of giving itself with complete devotion—with a generosity that is not found, for example, in the mental domain nor in the physical. It has that fullness in action that comes precisely from its capacity to get enthused and throw itself wholly without reserve into what it does. </div>
<div style="color: #000000;">(The Mother, 9 September 1953)</div>
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #0066cc;"><u>
A converted vital is an all-powerful instrument. And sometimes it gets converted by something exceptionally beautiful, morally or materially. When it witnesses, for example, a scene of total self-abnegation, of uncalculating self-giving one—of those things so exceedingly rare but splendidly beautiful—it can be carried away by it, it can be seized by an ambition to do the same thing. It begins by an ambition, it ends with a consecration… And this vital, if you place it in a bad environment, it will imitate the bad environment and do bad things with violence and to an extreme degree. If you place it in the presence of something wonderfully beautiful, generous, great, noble, divine, it can be carried away with that also, forget everything else and give itself wholly. </span>
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">(The Mother, 9 September 1953)</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #0066cc;"><u>
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/05/9-september-1953#p20</ref></u></span>
<div style="color: #000000;">Sometimes, when one sees a generous act, hears of something exceptional, when one witnesses heroism or generosity or greatness of soul, meets someone who shows a special talent or acts in an exceptional and beautiful way, there is a kind of enthusiasm or admiration or gratitude which suddenly awakens in the being and opens the door to a state, a new state of consciousness, a light, a warmth, a joy one did not know before. That too is a way of catching the guiding thread. </div>
<div style="color: #000000;">(The Mother, 26 December 1956)</div>
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/08/26-december-1956#p23</ref>
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">''Can those who have a see of beauty also become cruel?''</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">That's a psychological problem. It depends on where their sense of beauty is located. One may have a physical sense of beauty, a vital sense of beauty, a mental sense of beauty. If </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">one has a moral sense of beauty—a sense of moral beauty and nobility—one will never be cruel… But those who were unified, in the sense that they truly lived their art—those, no; they were generous and good.</span>
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">(The Mother, 17 March 1954)</span>
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/06/17-march-1954#p34</ref>
<div style="color: #000000;">But supposing you take a real genius—a musician or artist or writer of genius—who has fully mastered his instrument, who can use it to produce works that express the utmost human possibility, if you add to this a spiritual consciousness, the supramental force, then you will have something truly divine.</div>
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">(The Mother, 24 April, 1957)</span>
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/09/24-april-1957#p13</ref>
<div style="color: #000000;">I look at a rose, a thing that contains such a concentration of spontaneous beauty...how can one study sincerely, with attention and care, without being absolutely convinced that the Divine is there? … something we cannot name, cannot define, cannot describe, but something we can feel and can more and more become. A Something that is more perfect than all the perfections, more beautiful than all the beauties, more marvellous than all the marvels, so that even the totality of all that exists cannot express it. And there is nothing but That. And it is not a Something floating in nothingness: there is nothing but That.</div>
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">(The Mother, 8 October 1966)</span>
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/16/8-october-1966#p7</ref>
<div style="color: #000000;">… the perception and enjoyment of the divine Beauty and Delight which pervade the universe. And I said that as we embrace the whole of life in Yoga, so we accept the entire genuine self-expression of the spirit of life in poetry. We would range up and down the whole realm of poetic creation like free, unattached worshippers of the Divine Beauty and seekers of the divine Delight.</div>
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">(The Mother, 13 July 1943)</span>
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/17/13-july-1943#p2</ref>
<div style="color:#000000;">All those who have a sure and developed sense of harmony in all its forms, and the harmony of all the forms among themselves, are necessarily artists, whatever may be the type of their production.</div>
<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">(The Mother, 21 October 1953)</span>
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/05/21-october-1953#p26</ref>
<div style="color:#000000;">… "art" was no longer to express physical life but mental life or vital life. And so came all the schools, like the Cubists and others, who created from their head. But in art it is not the head that dominates, it is the feeling for beauty. And they produced absurd and ridiculous and frightful things. Now they have gone farther still, but that, that is due to the wars—with every war there descends upon earth a world in decomposition which produces a sort of chaos. And some, of course, find all this very beautiful and admire it very much.</div>
<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">(The Mother, 28 October 1953)</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><u>
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/05/28-october-1953#p7</ref></u></span>
<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">The mistake of the artist is to believe that artistic production is something that stands by itself and for itself, independent of the rest of the world. Art as understood by these artists is like a mushroom on the wide soil of life, something casual and external, not something intimate to life; it does not reach and touch the deep and abiding realities, it does not become an intrinsic and inseparable part of existence. True art is intended to express the beautiful, but in close intimacy with the universal movement. </span>
<div style="color:#000000;">(The Mother, 28 July 1929)</div>
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/28-july-1929#p14</ref>
<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">To create something truly beautiful, he has first to see it within, to realise it as a whole in his inner consciousness; only when so found, seen, held within, can he execute it outwardly; he creates according to this greater inner vision.</span>
<div style="color:#000000;">(The Mother, 28 July 1929)</div>
<div style="color:#0066cc;"><u>
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/28-july-1929#p19</ref></u></div>
<div style="color:#000000;">… art must act as a revealer and teacher of this divine beauty in life; that is to say, an artist should be capable of entering into communion with the Divine and of receiving inspiration about what form or forms ought to be used to express the divine beauty in matter. And thus, if it does that, art can be a means of realisation of beauty, and at the same time a teacher of what beauty ought to be, that is, art should be an element in the education of men's taste, of young and old, and it is the teaching of true beauty, that is, the essential beauty which expresses the divine truth.</div>
<div style="color:#000000;">(The Mother, 28 October 1953)</div>
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/05/28-october-1953#p4</ref>
<div style="color:#000000;">I believe even almost all the beautiful works, are not signed. All those paintings in the caves, those statues in the temples—these are not signed. One does not know at all who created them… All was done in a movement of aspiration to express a higher beauty, and above all with the idea of giving an appropriate abode to the godhead who was evoked. </div>
<div style="color:#000000;">(The Mother, 28 October 1953)</div>
<div style="color:#0066cc;"><u><ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/05/28-october-1953#p30</ref></u></div>
<div style="color:#000000;">That is how Sri Aurobindo describes the different pantheons of different countries, specially of Greece or India. That is to say, it is an aesthetic and intellectual way of transforming all things into divine creatures, divine beings: all the forces of Nature, all the elements, all spiritual forces, all intellectual forces, all physical forces, all these are transformed into a number of godheads and they are given an aesthetic and intellectual reality. It is a symbolic and artistic and literary and poetic way of dealing with all the universal forces and realities. That is how these pantheons came into existence, like the Greek or Egyptian pantheon or else the pantheon of India.</div>
<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">(The Mother, 16 May 1956)</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><u>
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/08/16-may-1956#p20</ref></u></span>
<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">All these gods are representations which Sri Aurobindo calls "aesthetic and intellectual"―a way of conceiving the universe. </span>
<div style="color:#000000;">(The Mother, 16 May 1956)</div>
<div style="color:#0066cc;"><u>
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/08/16-may-1956#p21</ref></u></div>
<div style="color:#000000;">"In any cult the symbol, the significant rite or expressive figure is not only a moving and enriching aesthetic element, but a physical means by which the human being begins to make outwardly definite the emotion and aspiration of his heart, to confirm it and to dynamise it. </div>
<div style="color:#000000;">(The Mother, 1 August 1956)</div>
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/8/1-august-1956#p54</ref>
<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">The dance was once one of the highest expressions of the inner life; it was associated with religion and it was an important limb in sacred ceremony, in the celebration of festivals, in the adoration of the Divine. </span>
<div style="color:#000000;">(The Mother, 28 July 1929)</div>
<div style="color:#0066cc;"><u>
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/28-july-1929#p22</ref></u></div>
<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">Music, no doubt, goes nearest to the infinite and to the essence of things because it relies wholly on the ethereal vehicle,</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;"> </span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">''śabda''</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;"> </span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">(architecture by the by can do something of the same kind at the other extreme even in its imprisonment in mass); but painting and sculpture have their revenge by liberating visible form into ecstasy, while poetry though it cannot do with sound what music does, yet can make a many-stringed harmony, a sound-revelation winging the creation by the word and setting afloat vivid suggestions of form and colour,—that gives it in a very subtle kind the combined power of all the arts. Who shall decide between such claims or be a judge between these godheads?</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><u>
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/27/music-and-poetry#p1</ref></u></span>
<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">In the Yogin's vision of universal beauty all becomes beautiful, but all is not reduced to a single level. There are gradations, there is a hierarchy in this All-Beauty and we see that it depends on the ascending power (vibhuti) of consciousness and Ananda that expresses itself in the object. All is the Divine, but some things are more divine than others. </span>
<div style="color:#0066cc;"><u>
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/27/art-for-arts-sake#p4</ref></u></div>
<div style="color:#000000;">It is a literary way of speaking, you must understand it in a literary way; it is a literary description of the word; it is very precise, but it is literary. So I cannot produce literature on this literature. One must have the taste for forms, for a beautiful way of saying things, a little exceptional, not too banal; but it is just one way, it's a way of saying things which is charming. Literature exists completely in the way of saying things. You catch what you can of what's behind. If you are indeed open to the literary meaning, it evokes things for you; but it cannot be explained. It is a means of evocation which corresponds also with music. Naturally, one can analyse literature and see how the sentence is constructed, but this is like your changing a human being into a skeleton. It is not pretty, a skeleton. It's the same thing. If in music you study counterpoint, and if this note must necessarily bring in this other, and this group of notes has necessarily to bring in that one, you spoil the music too, you make a skeleton of the music; it is not interesting. These things have to be felt with the corresponding senses, the charm of the phrase with the literary sense—catching the harmony of words and what it evokes.</div>
<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">(The Mother, 21 September 1955)</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><u>
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/07/21-september-1955#p2</ref></u></span>
= How Can One Cultivate Aesthetic Sense? =
<div style="color:#000000;">… in this order: consciousness first, then the vital (mainly from the aesthetic point of view, but a study of sensations as well), then the mind, then spiritual realization. And in between the vital and mental phases came the brief period of occultism, serving both as a transition and a basis for spiritual development.</div><div style="color:#000000;">(The Mother, 28 July 1962)</div>
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/agenda/03/july-28-1962#p9</ref>
<div style="color:#000000;">Each thing is exactly in its place, each person exactly in his place, each movement exactly in its place—and in its place in an ascending progressive movement, without any relapse, that is to say, quite the contrary to what happens in ordinary life. Naturally, this presupposes a kind of perfection, this presupposes a kind of unity, this presupposes that the different aspects of the Supreme can be manifested and, of course, an exceptional beauty, a total harmony and a power strong enough to command obedience from the forces of Nature.</div>
<div style="color:#000000;">(The Mother, 18 July 1961)</div>
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/15/18-july-1961#p11</ref>
<div style="color:#000000;">Take a great musician; well, even with a wretched piano and missing notes, he will produce something beautiful; but give him a good piano, well-tuned, and he will do something still more beautiful. The consciousness is the same in either case but for expression it needs a good instrument—a body with mental, vital, psychic and physical capacities.</div>
<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">(The Mother, 15 January 1951)</span>
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/04/15-january-1951#p11</ref>
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/23/the-higher-and-the-lower-knowledge#p8</ref>
<div style="color:#000000;">Suppose you have a beautiful experience, that suddenly in answer to your aspiration a great light comes; you feel all flooded with joy, force, light, beauty, and have the impression that you are on the point of being transfigured...mentally, instead of being immobile and attentive, something has begun to ask, "Wait a minute, what is this experience? What does it mean?", begun to try to find an explanation (what it calls an "understanding"). Or maybe in the vital something has begun to enjoy the experience: "How pleasant it is, how I would like it to grow, how good if it were constant, how...." Or something in the physical has said, "Oh! It is a bit hard to endure that, how long am I going to be able to keep it?" It is perhaps not as obvious as all this, but it is a wee bit hidden like this, somewhere. You will always find one of these three things or others analogous. Then, it is there the lantern is needed: where is the weak point? where is the egoism? where is the desire? where is that old dirt we do not want any longer? where is that thing which turns back upon itself instead of giving itself, opening itself, losing itself? which turns back upon itself, tries to take advantage of what has happened, wants to appropriate to itself the fruit of the experience? Or rather which is too weak, too hard, too rigid to be able to follow the movement?... It is that, you are now on the track, you begin precisely to put the light you have just acquired upon it; it is that you must do, focus the light upon it, turn it in such a way that the thing cannot resist it.</div><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">(The Mother, 26 April 1951)</span>
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/04/26-april-1951#p29</ref>
<div style="color:#000000;">I have known people with such opposite sides in their nature, so contradictory, that one day they could make a magnificent, luminous, powerful formation for realisation, and then the next day a defeatist, dark, black formation—a formation of despair—and so both would go out. And I was able to follow in the course of circumstances the beautiful one being realised, and while it was being realised, the dark one demolishing what the first one had done. And that is how it is in the larger lines of life as in its smaller details. And all that because one does not watch oneself thinking, because one believes one is the slave of these contradictory movements, because one says, "Oh! Today I am not feeling well. Oh! Today things seem sad to me", and one says this as if it were an ineluctable fate against which one could do nothing. But if one stands back or ascends a step, one can look at all these things, put them in their place, keep some, destroy or get rid of those one does not want and put all one's imaginative power—what is called imaginative—only in those one wants and which conform with one's highest aspiration. That is what I call controlling one's imagination.</div>
<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">(The Mother, 3 September 1958)</span>
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/09/3-september-1958#p15</ref>
<div style="color:#000000;">Without outer and inner discipline, one can achieve nothing in life, either spiritually or materially. All those who have been able to create something beautiful or useful have always been persons who have known how to discipline themselves.</div>
<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">(The Mother, 23 June 1934)</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><u>
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/16/23-june-1934#p3</ref></u></span>
== Detachment ==
<div style="color:#000000;">In fact people who work in order to develop their taste, to refine it, are rarely very much attached to food. It is not through attachment to food that they do it. It is for the cultivation of their senses, which is a very different thing. It is like the artist, you know, who trains his eyes to appreciate forms and colours, lines, the composition of things, the harmony found in physical nature; it is not at all through desire that he does this, it is through taste, culture, the development of the sense of sight and the appreciation of beauty. And usually artists who are real artists and love their art and live in the sense of beauty, seeking beauty, are people who don't have many desires. They live in the sense of a growth not only visual, but of the appreciation of beauty. There is a great difference between this and people who live by their impulses and desires.(The Mother, 23 February 1955)<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/07/23-february-1955#p5</ref>
<div style="color:#000000;">For the universal soul all things and all contacts of things carry in them an essence of delight best described by the Sanskrit aesthetic term, rasa, which means at once sap or essence of a thing and its taste. It is because we do not seek the essence of the thing in its contact with us, but look only to the manner in which it affects our desires and fears, our cravings and shrinkings that grief and pain, imperfect and transient pleasure or indifference, that is to say, blank inability to seize the essence, are the forms taken by the Rasa… If we could be entirely disinterested in mind and heart and impose that detachment on the nervous being, the progressive elimination of these imperfect and perverse forms of Rasa would be possible and the true essential taste of the inalienable delight of existence in all its variations would be within our reach…</div>
<div style="color:#000000;">We attain to something of this capacity for variable but universal delight in the aesthetic reception of things as represented by Art and Poetry, so that we enjoy there the Rasa or taste of the sorrowful, the terrible, even the horrible or repellent; and the reason is because we are detached, disinterested, not thinking of ourselves or of self-defence (jugupsā), but only of the thing and its essence… </div>
<div style="color:#000000;">Certainly, this aesthetic reception of contacts is not a precise image or reflection of the pure delight which is supramental and supra-aesthetic; for the latter would eliminate sorrow, terror, horror and disgust with their cause while the former admits them: but it represents partially and imperfectly one stage of the progressive delight of the universal Soul in things in its manifestation and it admits us in one part of our nature to that detachment from egoistic sensation and that universal attitude through which the one Soul sees harmony and beauty where we divided beings experience rather chaos and discord…. </div>
<div style="color:#000000;">The world is full of things that are not pleasing or beautiful, but that is no reason why one should live in a constant feeling of repulsion for these things. All feelings of shrinking and disgust and fear that disturb and weaken the human mind can be overcome. A Yogi has to overcome these reactions; for almost the very first step in Yoga demands that you must keep a perfect equanimity in the presence of all beings and things and happenings.</div>
<div style="color:#000000;">(The Mother, 30 June 1929)</div>
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/30-june-1929#p5</ref>
<div style="color:#000000;">But if one deeply feels the beauty of Nature and communes with her, that can help in widening the consciousness.</div>
<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">(The Mother, 9 November 1969)</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><u>
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/16/9-november-1969#p4</ref></u></span>
<div style="color:#000000;">There is nothing which gives you a joy equal to that of gratitude. One hears a bird sing, sees a lovely flower, looks at a little child, observes an act of generosity, reads a beautiful sentence, looks at the setting sun, no matter what, suddenly this comes upon you, this kind of emotion—indeed so deep, so intense—that the world manifests the Divine, that there is something behind the world which is the Divine.</div>
<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">(The Mother, 25 January 1956)</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><u>
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/08/25-january-1956#p61</ref></u></span>
<div style="color:#000000;">There is but one remedy: that signpost must always be there, a mirror well placed in one's feelings, impulses, all one's sensations. One sees them in this mirror. There are some which are not very beautiful or pleasant to look at; there are others which are beautiful, pleasant, and must be kept. This one does a hundred times a day if necessary. And it is very interesting. One draws a kind of big circle around the psychic mirror and arranges all the elements around it. If there is something that is not all right, it casts a sort of grey shadow upon the mirror: this element must be shifted, organised. It must be spoken to, made to understand, one must come out of that darkness. If you do that, you never get bored. When people are not kind, when one has a cold in the head, when one doesn't know one's lessons, and so on, one begins to look into this mirror. It is very interesting, one sees the canker. "I thought I was sincere!"—not at all.</div>
<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">(The Mother, 1 April 1953)</span>
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/05/1-april-1953#p10</ref>
<div style="color:#000000;">The greatest obstacle to the transformation of one's own character is hypocrisy. If you always keep this in mind when dealing with a child, you can do him a lot of good. Of course, you must not sermonise or lecture him, etc. You should simply make him understand that there is a nobility in the being, a great purity, a great love of beauty, which is so powerful that even the most wicked and criminal people are forced to acknowledge a truly beautiful or heroic or selfless act.</div>
<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">(The Mother, 6 January 1951)</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><u>
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/15/6-january-1951#p28</ref></u></span>
<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">"It is a pity my arms are too thin or my legs are too long or my back is not straight or my head is not quite harmonious", if one said: "It must be otherwise, my arms must be proportionate, my body harmonious, every form in me must express a higher beauty", then one will succeed… "Why! that disharmony I had in my face is disappearing; that sign of brutality, unconsciousness which was in my expression, it is going away." And then ten years later you don't recognise yourself any longer.</span>
<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">(The Mother, 17 June 1953)</span>
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/05/17-june-1953#p39</ref>
<div style="color:#000000;">It is infinitely more difficult to tell a story beautiful from beginning to end than to write a story ending with a sensational event or a catastrophe. Many authors, if they had to write a story which ends happily, beautifully, would not be able to do it—they do not have enough imagination for that. Very few stories have an uplifting ending, almost all end in a failure—for a very simple reason, it is much more easy to fall than to rise.</div>
<div style="color:#000000;">(The Mother, 26 February 1951)</div>
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/04/26-february-1951#p23</ref>
<div style="color:#000000;">And if you know how to tell yourself a story in this way, and if it is truly beautiful, truly harmonious, truly powerful and well co-ordinated, this story will be realised in your life.</div>
<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">(The Mother, 18 April 1956)</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><u>
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/08/18-april-1956#p56</ref></u></span>
<div style="color:#000000;">When a child is full of enthusiasm, never throw cold water on it, never tell him, "You know, life is not like that!" You should always encourage him, tell him, "Yes, at present things are not always like that, they seem ugly, but behind this there is a beauty that is trying to realise itself. This is what you should love and draw towards you, this is what you should make the object of your dreams, of your ambitions."</div>
<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">(The Mother, 31 July 1957)</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><u>
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/09/31-july-1957#p8</ref></u></span>