Changes

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">The physical world is the world of form and the perfection of form is</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">beauty</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">'''.'''</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">Beauty interprets, expresses, manifests the Eternal. Its role is to put all manifested nature in contact with the Eternal through the perfection of form, through harmony and a sense of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"> the ideal which uplifts and leads towards something higher.

<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. When we rise high enough, we discover that these four aspects unite with each other in a single consciousness, full of love, luminous, powerful, beautiful, containing all, pervading all.</span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">Spiritual beauty has a contagious power. Beauty is the joyous offering of Nature.</span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">Beauty is a great power. Beauty does not get its full power except when it is surrendered to the Divine.</span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">To bring the Divine Love and Beauty and Ananda into the world is, indeed, the whole crown and essence of our Yoga.</span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">...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.</span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">Beauty is not sufficient in itself, it wants to become divine. Pure sense of beauty can be acquired only through a great purification.</span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">He means that it [seeking for beauty] is </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"> instinctive</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">, that it isn't rational, it doesn't depend on the domain of reason, it is something instinctive.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; 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 says that this is the infrarational stage of the aesthetic </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"> sense. It is absolutely obvious that a child, who sees a pretty flower and has the feeling of beauty he does not know why, would never be able to tell you that it's because the form is balanced and the colours are lovely; he cannot explain it. Therefore it is not rational, it is altogether instinctive, it is an attraction, an impulse drawing one towards something, a harmony one feels, without being able to define it. But most often it is like that. It is rarely that one is able to say, "This thing is beautiful because of that, because of this," and to give a whole lecture on the beauty of something. Usually, one simply feels that it is beautiful; if later one wonders, "Why did I feel it is beautiful?" then, by making an effort with one's intelligence one may succeed in understanding it; but at the beginning one is not pre-occupied with the why, one feels that it is beautiful, and that's all, one is satisfied with that.</span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">For example, you enter a historical building, and suddenly you are seized by the sense of a great beauty; how do you explain it? If someone asks you about it you would say, "Well, I feel that it is beautiful." But if an architect enters a building and has the same feeling that it is beautiful, he will immediately tell you, "It's because the lines meet harmoniously, the mass of the volumes is in harmony, the entire structure follows certain laws of beauty, order and rhythm", and he will explain them to you. But that's because he is an architect, and yet you could have felt the beauty as much as he without being able to explain it. Well, your feeling for beauty is what Sri Aurobindo calls infrarational, and his feeling for beauty is what Sri Aurobindo calls rational, because he can explain with his reason why he finds it beautiful. (The Mother, 1 June 1955)</span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">It [beauty] 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. But what precisely he tells us in this paragraph is that when it is an instinct it is found mixed with movements of ignorance and a lack of culture and refinement. So this </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"> instinct is sometimes very gross and very imperfect in its expression.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; 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; </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"> 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... At first your sense of beauty is instinctive, impulsive, infrarational, lacking light, wanting reason, simply without any true understanding, and so, because the origin of the aesthetic sense is infrarational, it is understood, one always says this: "There's no disputing tastes and colours." You know, there are all kinds of popular proverbs which say that the appreciation of the beautiful is not a matter of reasoning, everyone likes a particular thing he doesn't know why, he takes pleasure in looking at a thing, and this pleasure cannot be discussed. Well, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"> this is the infrarational stage of the aesthetic sense. (The Mother, 1 June 1955)<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/07/1-june-1955#p24</ref></span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">The </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"> higher principle of beauty is a suprarational principle</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">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> </span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">To understand truly what Sri Aurobindo means here, you must yourself have had the experience of transcending reason and establishing your consciousness in a world higher than the mental intelligence. For from up there you can see, firstly, that everything that exists in the universe is an expression of Sachchidananda (Being-Consciousness-Bliss) and therefore behind any appearance whatever, if you go deeply enough, you can perceive Sachchidananda, which is the principle of Supreme Beauty. Secondly, you see that everything in the manifested universe is relative, so much so that there is no beauty which may not appear ugly in comparison with a greater beauty, no ugliness which may not appear beautiful in comparison with a yet uglier ugliness.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/10/aphorism-19#p3</ref></span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">And what will be the bliss nature when it manifests in a new supramental race? The fully evolved soul will be one with all beings in the status and dynamic effects of experience of a bliss-consciousness intense and illimitable. And since love is the effective power and soul-symbol of bliss-oneness he will approach and enter into this oneness by the gate of universal love, a sublimation of human love at first, a divine love afterwards, at its summits </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"> a thing of beauty, sweetness and splendour now to us inconceivable. He will be one in bliss-consciousness with all the world-play and its powers and happenings and there will be banished for ever the sorrow and fear, the hunger and pain of our poor and darkened mental and vital and physical existence. He will get that power of the bliss-freedom in which all the conflicting principles of our being shall be unified in their absolute values. All evil shall perforce change itself into good; the universal beauty of the </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"> All-beautiful will take possession of its fallen kingdoms</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"><nowiki>; every darkness will be converted into a pregnant glory of light and the discords which the mind creates between Truth and Good and Beauty, Power and Love and Knowledge will disappear on the eternal summit, in the infinite extensions where they are always one. </nowiki></span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">In the free infinity of the self-delight of Sachchidananda there is a play of the divine Child, a rāsa līlā of the infinite Lover and its mystic soul-symbols repeat themselves in characters of beauty and movements and harmonies of delight in a timeless forever.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/23/gnosis-and-ananda#p18</ref></span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">The master and Mover of our works is the One, the Universal and Supreme, the Eternal and Infinite. He is the transcendent unknown or unknowable Absolute, the unexpressed and unmanifested Ineffable above us; but he is also the Self of all beings, the Master of all worlds, transcending all worlds, the Light and the Guide, the All-Beautiful and All-Blissful, the Beloved and the Lover. He is the Cosmic Spirit and all-creating Energy around us; he is the Immanent within us. All that is is he, and he is the More than all that is, and we ourselves, though we know it not, are being of his being, force of his force, conscious with a consciousness derived from his; </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"> even our mortal existence is made out of his substance and there is an immortal within us that is a spark of the Light and Bliss that are for ever.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">No matter whether by knowledge, works, love or any other means, to become aware of this truth of our being, to realise it, to make it effective here or elsewhere is the object of all Yoga.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/23/the-master-of-the-work#p1</ref></span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">... that there is nothing but That—something we cannot name, cannot define, cannot describe, but something we can feel and can more and more become. A Something that is </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"> more perfect than all the perfections, more beautiful than all the beauties</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">, 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. (The Mother, 8 October 1966)<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/16/8-october-1966#p7</ref> </span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">The general power of Delight is love and the special mould which the joy of love takes is the vision of beauty. The God-lover is the universal lover and he embraces the All-blissful and All-beautiful. When universal love has seized on his heart, it is the decisive sign that the Divine has taken possession of him; and when he has the vision of the All-beautiful everywhere and can feel at all times the bliss of his embrace, that is the decisive sign that he has taken possession of the Divine. Union is the consummation of love, but it is this mutual possession that gives it at once the acme and the largest reach of its intensity. It is the foundation of oneness in ecstasy.</span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">Love is a passion and it seeks for two things, eternity and intensity, and in the relation of the Lover and Beloved the seeking for eternity and for intensity is instinctive and self-born. Love is a seeking for mutual possession, and it is here that the demand for mutual possession becomes absolute. Passing beyond desire of possession which means a difference, it is a seeking for oneness, and it is here that the idea of oneness, of two souls merging into each other and becoming one finds the acme of its longing and the utterness of its satisfaction. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"> Love, too, is a yearning for beauty,</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">and it is here that the yearning is eternally satisfied in the vision and the touch and the joy of the All-beautiful. Love is a child and a seeker of Delight, and it is here that it finds the highest possible ecstasy both of the heart-consciousness and of every fibre of the being. Moreover, this relation is that which as between human being and human being demands the most and, even while reaching the greatest intensities, is still the least satisfied, because only in the Divine can it find its real and its utter satisfaction. Therefore it is here most that the turning of human emotion God-wards finds its full meaning and discovers all the truth of which love is the human symbol, all its essential instincts divinised, raised, satisfied in the bliss from which our life was born and towards which by oneness it returns in the Ananda of the divine existence where love is absolute, eternal and unalloyed.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/the-godward-emotions#p14</ref></span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">Psychic love is quite satisfying, and it can change even the vital love into something great and beautiful.</span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">What is meant in the terminology of the Yoga by the psychic is the soul element in the nature, the pure psyche or divine nucleus which stands behind mind, life and body (it is not the ego) but of which we are only dimly aware. It is a portion of the Divine and permanent from life to life, taking the experience of life through its outer instruments. As this experience grows it manifests a developing psychic personality which insisting always on the good, true and beautiful, finally becomes ready and strong enough to turn the </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"> nature towards the Divine. It can then come entirely forward, breaking through the mental, vital and physical screen, govern the instincts and transform the nature. Nature no longer imposes itself on the soul, but the soul, the Purusha, imposes its dictates on the nature.</span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">...the psychic entity in us persists and is fundamentally the same always: it contains all essential possibilities of our manifestation but is not constituted by them; it is not limited by what it manifests, not contained by the incomplete forms of the manifestation, not tarnished by the imperfections and impurities, the defects and depravations of the surface being. It is an ever-pure flame of the divinity in things and nothing that comes to it, nothing that enters into our experience can pollute its purity or extinguish the flame. This spiritual stuff is immaculate and luminous and, because it is perfectly luminous, it is immediately, intimately, directly aware of truth of being and truth of nature;</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">it is deeply conscious of truth and good and beauty because truth and good and beauty are akin to its own native character,</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">forms of something that is inherent in its own substance. It is aware also of all that contradicts these things, of all that deviates from its own native character, of falsehood and evil and the ugly and the unseemly; but it does not become these things nor is it touched or changed by these opposites of itself which so powerfully affect its outer instrumentation of mind, life and body. For the soul, the permanent being in us, puts forth and uses mind, life and body as its instruments, undergoes the envelopment of their conditions, but it is other and greater than its members.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/22/the-triple-transformation#p3</ref> </span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">The plants are very psychic, but they can express it only by silence and beauty. Form, colour, scent + something else which is indefinable [constitute the beauty of flowers].

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">There is a psychic world—a sort of Heaven of peace and beauty and harmony. It is also a place of rest for the soul between two incarnations in which it absorbs its past experiences and becomes ready for another birth.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/28/the-psychic-being#p100</ref></span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">True art means the expression of beauty in the material world.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">In a world wholly converted, that is to say, expressing integrally the divine reality, art must serve as the revealer and teacher of this divine beauty in life.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/12/arts#p15</ref></span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">True art is intended to express the beautiful, but in close intimacy with the universal movement. The greatest nations and the most cultured races have always considered art as </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"> a part of life and made it subservient to life. Art was like that in Japan in its best moments; it was like that in all the best moments in the history of art. But most artists are like parasites growing on the margin of life; they do not seem to know that </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"> art should be the expression of the Divine in life and through life</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">. In everything, everywhere, in all relations truth must be brought out in its all-embracing rhythm and every movement of life should be an expression of beauty and harmony. Skill is not art, talent is not art. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"> Art is a living harmony and beauty that must be expressed in all the movements of existence.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">This manifestation of beauty and harmony is part of the Divine realisation upon earth, perhaps even its greatest part.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/28-july-1929#p14</ref></span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">...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, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"> art should be an element in the education of men's taste</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">, of young and old, and it is the teaching of true beauty, that is, the essential beauty which expresses the divine truth. This is the raison d'être of art. Now, between this and what is done there is a great difference, but this is the true raison d'être of art. (The Mother, 28 October 1953)<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/05/28-october-1953#p4</ref></span>

<div style="color: #000000;">Perhaps not the highest sense of beauty, but in the vital one finds a complete sense of beauty and harmony. The beauty which is fundamental, profound, universal, constant belongs only to the psychic, but the sense of the beauty of form, of appearance, of colour, the educated, refined vital fully possesses.<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"> (The Mother, 1 March 1951)</span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">...this spiritual bliss is here also in our hearts. It is hidden in from the toil of the surface mind which catches only at weak and flawed translations of it into various mental, vital and physical forms of the joy of existence. But if the mind has once grown sufficiently subtle and pure in its receptions and not limited by the grosser nature of our outward responses to existence, we can take a reflection of it which will wear perhaps wholly or predominantly the hue of whatever is strongest in our nature. It 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 </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"> we may have the intuition of some transcendent Beauty of which all apparent beauty here is only a symbol</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">. 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. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/the-ananda-brahman#p3</ref></span>

<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/30/the-universal-or-cosmic-consciousness#p56</ref> </span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">If you compare the human body as it now is with a higher ideal of beauty, obviously very few would pass the examination. In almost everyone there is a sort of unbalance in the </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"> proportions; we are so accustomed to it that we do not notice it, but if we look from the standpoint of the higher beauty, it becomes visible; very few bodies would bear comparison with perfect beauty. There are a thousand reasons for this unbalance but only one remedy, to instil into the being this instinct, this sense of true beauty, a supreme beauty which will gradually act on the cells and make the body capable of expressing beauty. This is still a thing which is not known: the body is infinitely more plastic than you believe. You must have surely noticed (perhaps very vaguely) </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"> that those who live in an inner peace, in an inner beauty, a light, and perfect goodwill, have an expression which is not quite the same as of people who live in bad thoughts, in the lower part of their nature. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"> When the human being is at his best, above his base animality, he reflects something which is not there when he lives in a state of bestiality. (The Mother, 25 January 1951)<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/04/25-january-1951#p27</ref></span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"><div style="color: #000000;">''Can those who have a sense of beauty also become cruel?''</div> That's a psychological problem. It depends on where their sense of beauty is located. One may have a physical see of beauty, a vital sense of beauty, a mental sense of beauty. If one has a moral sense of beauty—a sense of moral beauty and nobility—one will never be cruel. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"> One will always be generous and magnanimous in all circumstances. But as men are made of many different pieces.... For instance, I was thinking about all the artists I knew—I knew all the greatest artists of the last century or the beginning of this century, and they truly had a sense of beauty, but morally, some of them were very cruel. When the artist was seen at his work, he lived in a magnificent beauty but when you saw the gentleman at home, he had only a very limited contact with the artist in himself and usually he became someone very vulgar, very ordinary. Many of them did, I am sure of it. But those who were unified, in the sense that they truly lived their art—those, no; they were generous and good.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/06/17-march-1954#p33</ref></span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">But for one who has more inner sensitivity, appearances are no longer deceptive and he can perceive the ugliness hidden beneath a pretty face and the beauty concealed beneath a mask of ugliness.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/10/aphorism-297-298#p6</ref></span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">A philosophic statement about the Atman is a mental formula, not knowledge, not experience: yet sometimes the Divine takes it as a channel of touch; strangely, a barrier in the mind breaks down, something is seen, a profound change operated in some inner part, there enters into the ground of the nature something calm, equal, ineffable. One stands upon a mountain ridge and glimpses or mentally feels a wideness, a pervasiveness, a nameless Vast in Nature; then suddenly there comes the touch, a revelation, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"> a flooding, the mental loses itself in the spiritual, one bears the first invasion of the Infinite.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">Or you stand before a temple of Kali beside a sacred river and see what?—a sculpture, a gracious piece of architecture, but in a moment mysteriously, unexpectedly there is instead a Presence, a Power, a Face that looks into yours, an inner sight in you has regarded the World-Mother. Similar touches can come too through art, music, poetry to their creator or to one who feels the shock of the word, the hidden significance of a form, a message in the sound that carries more perhaps than was consciously meant by the composer. All things in the Lila can turn into windows that open on the hidden Reality. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"> Still so long as one is satisfied with looking through windows, the gain is only initial; one day one will have to take up the pilgrim's staff and start out to journey there where the Reality is for ever manifest and present. Still less can it be spiritually satisfying to remain with shadowy reflections; a search imposes itself for the Light which they strive to figure. But since this Reality and this Light are in ourselves no less than in some high region above the mortal plane, we can in the seeking for it use many of the figures and activities of Life; as one offers a flower, a prayer, an act to the Divine, one can offer too a created form of beauty, a song, a poem, an image, a strain of music, and gain through it a contact, a response or an experience. And when that divine Consciousness has been entered or when it grows within, then too its expression in life through these things is not excluded from Yoga; these creative activities can still have their place, though not intrinsically a greater place than any other that can be put to divine use and service. Art, poetry, music, as they are in their ordinary functioning, create mental and vital, not spiritual values; but they can be turned to a higher end, and then, like all things that are capable of linking our consciousness to the Divine, they are transmuted and become spiritual and can be admitted as part of a life of Yoga.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/28/the-intellect-and-yoga#p26</ref> </span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">We must go farther on, we must advance, climb greater heights and go beyond the arid search for pleasure and personal welfare, not through fear of punishment, even punishment after death, but through the development of a new sense of beauty, a thirst for truth and light, through understanding that it is only by widening yourself, illumining yourself, setting yourself ablaze with the ardour for progress, that you can find both integral peace and enduring happiness.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/punishment#p24</ref> </span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">...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. Heroes are always people who have a strong vital, and </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"> when the vital becomes passionate about something, it is no longer a reasonable being but a warrior</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"><nowiki>; it is wholly involved in its action and can perform exceptional things because it does not calculate, does not reason, does not say "One must take precautions, one must not do this, must not do that." It becomes reckless, it gets carried away, as people say, it gives itself totally. Therefore, it can do magnificent things if it is guided in the right way. (The Mother, 9 September 1953)</nowiki><ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/05/9-september-1953#p19</ref> </span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">...the discovery of the soul, not the outer soul of thought and emotion and desire, but the secret psychic entity, the divine element within us. When that becomes dominant over the nature, when we are consciously the soul and when mind, life and body take their true place as its instruments, we are aware of a guide within that knows the truth, the good, the true delight and beauty of existence, controls heart and intellect by its luminous law and leads our life and being towards spiritual completeness. Even within the obscure workings of the Ignorance we have then a witness who discerns, a living light that illumines, a will that refuses to be misled and separates the mind's truth from its error, the heart's intimate response from its vibrations to a wrong call and wrong demand upon it, the life's true ardour and plenitude of movement from vital passion and the turbid falsehoods of our vital nature and its dark self seekings. This is the first step of self-realisation, to enthrone the soul, the divine psychic individual in the place of the ego.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #999999;"> <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/21/the-origin-and-remedy-of-falsehood-error-wrong-and-evil#p36</ref> </span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">The soul may attempt to achieve this contact mainly through the thinking mind as intermediary and instrument; it puts a psychic impression on the intellect and the larger mind of insight and intuitional intelligence and turns them in that direction. At its highest </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"> the thinking mind is drawn always towards the impersonal; in its search it becomes conscious of a spiritual essence, an impersonal Reality which expresses itself in all these outward signs and characters but is more than any formation or manifesting figure. It feels something of which it becomes intimately and invisibly aware,—a supreme Truth, a supreme Good, a supreme Beauty, a supreme Purity, a supreme Bliss; it bears the increasing touch, less and less impalpable and abstract, more and more spiritually real and concrete, the touch and pressure of an Eternity and Infinity which is all this that is and more. There is a pressure from this Impersonality that seeks to mould the whole mind into a form of itself; at the same time the impersonal secret and law of things becomes more and more visible. The mind develops into the mind of the sage, at first the high mental thinker, then the spiritual sage who has gone beyond the abstractions of thought to the beginnings of a direct experience. As a result the mind becomes pure, large, tranquil, impersonal; there is a similar tranquillising influence on the parts of life: but otherwise the result may remain incomplete; for the mental change leads more naturally towards an inner status and an outer quietude, but, poised in this purifying quietism, not drawn like the vital parts towards a discovery of new life-energies, does not press for a full dynamic effect on the nature. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/22/the-triple-transformation#p12</ref> </span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">Be sincere and absolute in your consecration to the Divine and your life will become harmonious and beautiful.</span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">...the realisation that everything is a manifestation of the Supreme, the Eternal, the Infinite, immutable in his total perfection and in his absolute reality. That is why, by conquering our mind and its ignorant and false perceptions we can, through all things, enter into contact with this Supreme Truth which is also the Supreme Beauty and the Supreme Love, beyond all our mental and vital notions of beauty and ugliness, the good and the bad. Even when we say "Supreme Truth, Supreme Beauty, Supreme Love", we should give to these words a meaning other than the one which is attributed to them by our intellect. </span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">For the spiritual man the mind's dream of perfect beauty is realised in an eternal love, beauty and delight that has no dependence and is equal behind all objective appearances...</span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; 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.

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">Let </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"> beauty</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">be your constant ideal.The </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"> beauty</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">of the soulThe </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"> beauty</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">of sentimentsThe </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"> beauty</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">of thoughtsThe </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"> beauty</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">of the action</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">The </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"> beauty</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">in the workso that nothing comes out of your hands which is not an expression of pure and harmonious </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"> beauty</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">.</span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">"Harmony and beauty of the mind and soul, harmony and beauty of the thoughts and feelings, harmony and beauty in every outward act and movement, harmony and beauty of the life and surroundings, this is the demand of Mahalakshmi.... Where love and beauty are not or are reluctant to be born, she does not come." (The Mother, 12 May 1951) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/04/12-may-1951#p1</ref> </span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">When the spirit in us is free, then what was behind this soul-force comes out in all its light, beauty and greatness, the Spirit, the Godhead who makes the nature and soul of man his foundation and living representative in cosmic being and mind, action and life. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/soul-force-and-the-fourfold-personality#p2</ref> </span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">Bhakti and the heart's call for the Divine have a truth—it is the truth of the divine Love and Ananda. The will for Tapasya has in it a truth—it is the truth of the Spirit's mastery over its members. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"> The musician and poet stand for a truth, it is the truth of the expression of the Spirit through beauty</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">. There is a truth behind the mental Affirmer; even there is a truth behind the mental doubter, the Russellian, though far behind him—the truth of the denial of false forms. Even behind the two vital personalities there is a truth, the truth of the possession of the inner and outer worlds—not by the ego but by the Divine. That is the harmonisation for which our Yoga stands—but it cannot be achieved by any outward arrangement, it can only be achieved by going inside and looking, willing and acting from the psychic and from the spiritual centre. For the truth of the being is there and the secret of Harmony also is there.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/29/the-adwaita-of-shankaracharya#p25</ref> </span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">It is, then, in the </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"> highest mind of thought and light and will or it is in the inner heart of deepest feeling and emotion that we must first centre our consciousness,</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">—</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">in either of them or, if we are capable, in both together,—and use that as our leverage to lift the nature wholly towards the Divine. The concentration of an enlightened thought, will and heart turned in unison towards one vast goal of our knowledge, one luminous and infinite source of our action, one imperishable object of our emotion is the starting-point of the Yoga. And the object of our seeking must be the very fount of the Light which is growing in us, the very origin of the Force which we are calling to move our members. Our one objective must be the Divine himself to whom, knowingly or unknowingly, something always aspires in our secret nature. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"> There must be a large, many-sided yet single concentration of the thought on the idea, the perception, the vision, the awakening touch, the soul's realisation of the one Divine.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">There must be a flaming concentration of the heart on the seeking of the All and </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"> Eternal and, when once we have found him, a deep plunging and immersion in the possession and ecstasy of the All-Beautiful. There must be a strong and immovable concentration of the will on the attainment and fulfilment of all that the Divine is and a free and plastic opening of it to all that he intends to manifest in us. This is the triple way of the Yoga. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/23/self-consecration#p18</ref> </span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">There is, behind all things, a divine beauty, a divine harmony: it is with this that we must come into contact; it is this that we must express. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/12/arts#p60</ref> </span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">One must be very much higher on the scale to see that what one does is ugly. One must already have at the core of oneself a kind of foreknowledge of what beauty, nobility, generosity are, to be able to suffer from the fact that one doesn't carry them within oneself. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/conjugate-verses#p103</ref> </span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">When the adverse forces are dealt with in the right way, all that is ugly and false disappears to leave place only for what is true and beautiful. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/15/adverse-forces#p28</ref> </span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">To accept the uglinesses of the lower nature under the pretext that they exist―if this is what is meant by realism―does not form part of the sadhana. Our aim is not to accept these things and enjoy them, but to get rid of them and create a life of spiritual beauty and perfection. That cannot be done as long as we accept these uglinesses. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/14/desires-impulses-and-self-control#p8</ref> </span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">...to be in such a state of purity and beauty that you do not perceive ugliness and evil—it is like something that does not touch you because it does not exist in you. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/10/aphorism-49#p5</ref> </span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">You can hear poor music, even music from which one would like to run away, and yet you can, not for its outward self but because of what is behind, enjoy it. You do not lose the distinction between good music and bad music, but you pass through either into that which it expresses. For there is nothing in the world which has not its ultimate truth and support in the Divine. 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. (The Mother, 28 April 1929) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/28-april-1929#p18</ref> </span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">...to be positively conscious of the supreme Good and supreme Beauty behind all things, which sustains all things and enables them to exist. When you see Him, you are able to </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"> perceive Him behind this mask and this distortion; even this ugliness, this wickedness, this evil is a disguise of Something which is essentially beautiful or good, luminous, pure. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/10/aphorism-49#p9</ref> </span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">It is one of the greatest weapons of the Asura at work when you are taught to shun beauty. It has been the ruin of India. The Divine manifests in the psychic as love, in the mind as knowledge, in the vital as power and in the physical as beauty. If you discard beauty it means that you are depriving the Divine of this manifestation in the material and you hand over that part to the Asura. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/13/india#p224</ref> </span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; 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. But it is very difficult to pull a person out of the specialised tastes of his race—I am not even speaking now of the country, I am speaking of the race. It is very difficult. It is there, you know, hidden right at the bottom, in the subconscious, and it comes back without your even noticing it, quite spontaneously, quite naturally. Even on this very point: the woman of your race is always much more beautiful than the woman of other races—spontaneously, it is the spontaneous taste. That's what I mean. So, you must rise above that. I am not even speaking of those who find everything that's outside their own family or caste very ugly and </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"> bad. I am not speaking at all of these people. I am not even speaking of those for whom one country is much more beautiful than another. And yet, these people have already risen above the altogether ordinary way of thinking. I am not even speaking of a question of race.... It is very difficult, one must go right down, right down within oneself into the subconscious—and even farther—to discover the root of these things. Therefore, if you want to have the sense of beauty in itself which is quite independent of all these tastes, the taste of the race—</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">you must have a universal consciousness</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">. Otherwise how can you have it? You will always have preferences. Even if these are not active and conscious preferences, they are subconscious preferences, instincts. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"> So, to know true beauty independent of all form, one must rise above all form</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">. And once you have known it beyond every form, you can recognise it in any form whatsoever, indifferently. And that becomes very interesting. (The Mother, 21 October 1953) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/05/21-october-1953#p61</ref> </span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">That [feeling the Mother's Presence, Love, Joy, Beauty] is one part of the psychic experience—the other is a complete self-giving, absence of demand, a prominence of the psychic being by which all that is false, wrong, egoistic, contrary to the Divine Truth, Divine Will, Divine Purity and Light is shown, falls away, cannot prevail in the nature. With all that the increase of the psychic qualities, gratitude, obedience, unselfishness, fidelity to the true perception, true impulse etc. that comes from the Mother or leads to the Mother. When this side grows, then the other, the Presence, Love, Joy, Beauty, can develop and be permanently there <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/30/the-psychic-being-and-its-role-in-sadhana#p5</ref> </span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">There must be order and harmony in work. Even what is apparently the most insignificant thing must be done with perfect perfection, with a sense of cleanliness, beauty, harmony and order. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/14/progress-and-perfection-in-work#p26</ref> </span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">For the work simply aspire for the Force to use you, put yourself inwardly in relation with the Mother when doing it and make it your aim to be the instrument for the expression of beauty without regard to personal fame or the praise and blame of others. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/31/mental-development-and-sadhana#p18</ref> </span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">You must have a </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"> strong body and strong nerves</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">. You must have a strong basis of equanimity in your external being. If you have this basis, you can contain a world of emotion and yet not have to scream it out. This does not mean that you cannot express your emotion, but you can express it in a beautiful harmonious way. To weep or scream or </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"> dance about is always a proof of weakness, either of the vital or the mental or the physical nature; for on all these levels the activity is for self-satisfaction. One who dances and jumps and screams has the feeling that he is somehow very unusual in his excitement; and his vital nature takes great pleasure in that. (The Mother, 14 April 1929) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/14-april-1929#p24</ref> </span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">You carry with you, around you, in you, the atmosphere created by your actions, and if what you do is beautiful, good and harmonious, your atmosphere is beautiful, good and harmonious; on the other hand, if you live in a sordid selfishness, unscrupulous self-interest, ruthless bad will, that is what you will breathe every moment of your life and that means misery, constant uneasiness; it means ugliness that despairs of its own ugliness. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/conjugate-verses#p106</ref> </span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">When the surroundings, circumstances, atmosphere, the way of living and above all the inner attitude are altogether of a low kind, vulgar, gross, egoistic, sordid, love is reluctant to come, that is, it always hesitates to manifest itself and generally does not stay long. A home of beauty must be given for Beauty to stay. I am not speaking of external things—a real house, real furniture and all that—I am speaking of an inner attitude, of something within which is beautiful, noble, harmonious, unselfish. There Love has a chance to come and stay. But when, as soon as it tries to manifest, it is immediately mixed with such low and ugly things, it does not remain, it goes away. This is what Sri Aurobindo says: it is "reluctant to be born"—it could be said that it immediately regrets being born. Men always complain that love does not stay with them but it is entirely their fault. They give this love such a sordid life, mixed with a heap of horrors and such vulgarity, things so base, so selfish, so dirty, that the poor thing cannot stay. If they don't succeed in killing it altogether, they make it utterly sick. So the only thing it can do is to take flight. People always complain that love is impermanent and passing. To tell the truth, they should be very grateful that it manifested in them in spite of the sordidness of the house they gave it. (The Mother, 12 May 1951) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/04/12-may-1951#p4</ref></span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">I have said that from a young age children should be taught to respect good health, physical strength and balance. The great importance of beauty must also be emphasised. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"> A young child should aspire for beauty, not for the sake of pleasing others or winning their admiration, but for the love of beauty itself</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">; for beauty is the ideal which all physical life must realise. Every human being has the possibility of establishing harmony among the different parts of his body and in the various movements of the body in action. Every human body that undergoes a rational method of culture from the very beginning of its existence can realise its own harmony and thus become fit to manifest beauty. When we speak of the other aspects of an integral education, we shall see what inner conditions are to be fulfilled so that this beauty can one day be manifested <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/12/physical-education#p12</ref></span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">To this general education of the senses and their functioning there will be added, as early as possible, the cultivation of discrimination and of the aesthetic sense, the capacity to choose and adopt what is beautiful and harmonious, simple, healthy and pure. For there is a psychological health just as there is a Physical health, a beauty and harmony of the sensations as of the body and its movements. As the capacity of understanding grows in </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"> the child, he should be taught, in the course of his education, to add artistic taste and refinement to power and precision. He should be shown, led to appreciate, taught to love beautiful, lofty, healthy and noble things, whether in Nature or in human creation. This should be a true aesthetic culture, which will protect him from degrading influences. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/12/vital-education#p11</ref> </span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">And so, when the first experience comes, which sometimes begins when one is very young, the first contact with the inner joy, the inner beauty, the inner light, the first contact with that, which suddenly makes you feel, "Oh! that is what I want," you must cultivate it, never forget it, hold it constantly before you, tell yourself, "I have felt it once, so I can feel it again. This has been real for me, even for the space of a second, and that is what I am going to revive in myself".... And encourage the body to seek it—to seek it, with the confidence that it carries that possibility within itself and that if it calls for it, it will come back, it will be realised again. (The Mother, 31 July 1957) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/09/31-july-1957#p11</ref> </span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">Art is nothing less in its fundamental truth than the aspect of beauty of the Divine manifestation. Perhaps, looking from this standpoint, there will be found very few true artists; but still there are some and these can very well be considered as Yogis. For like a Yogi an artist goes into deep contemplation to await and receive his inspiration. To </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"> create something truly beautiful, he [Yogi] has first to see it within, to realise it as a whole in his inner consciousness;</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">only when so found, seen, held within, can he execute it outwardly; he creates according to this greater inner vision. This too is a kind of yogic discipline, for by it he enters into intimate communion with the inner worlds. (The Mother, 28 July 1929) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/28-july-1929#p19</ref></span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">Copy many beautiful things, but try even more to catch the emotion, the deeper life of things <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/12/arts#p38</ref></span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">Why do you want to do the details? That is not at all necessary. Painting is not done to copy Nature, but to express an impression, a feeling, an emotion that we experience on seeing the beauty of Nature. It is this that is interesting and it is this that has to be expressed.. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/12/arts#p49</ref></span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">An evolution from the Inconscient need not be a painful one if there is no resistance; it can be a deliberately slow and beautiful efflorescence of the Divine. One ought to be able to see how beautiful outward Nature can be and usually is, although it is itself apparently "inconscient". Why should the growth of consciousness in inward Nature be attended by so much ugliness and evil spoiling the beauty of the outward creation? Because of a perversity born from the Ignorance, which came in with Life and increased in Mind—that is the Falsehood, the Evil that was born because of the starkness of the Inconscient's sleep separating its action from the luminosity of the secret Conscient that was all the time within it. But it need not have been so except for the overriding Will of the Supreme which meant that the possibility of Perversion by inconscience and ignorance should be manifested in order to be eliminated through being given their chance, since all possibility has to manifest somewhere: once it is eliminated, the Divine Manifestation in Matter will be greater than it otherwise could be because it will gather all the possibilities involved in this difficult creation and not some of them as in an easier and less strenuous creation might naturally be. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/28/spiritual-evolution-and-the-supramental#p33</ref> </span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">Certainly, the supramental manifestation does not bring peace, purity, force, power of knowledge only; these give the necessary conditions for the final realisation, are part of it, but Love, Beauty and Ananda are the essence of its fulfilment. And although the supreme Ananda comes with the supreme fulfilment, there is no real reason why there should not be the love and Ananda and beauty of the way also. Some have found that even at an early stage before there was any other experience. But the secret of it is in the heart, not the mind—the heart that opens its inner door and through it the radiance of the soul looks out in a blaze of trust and self-giving. Before that inner fire the debates of the mind and its difficulties wither away and the path however long or arduous becomes a sunlit road not only towards but through love and Ananda. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/31/the-difficulties-of-yoga#p11</ref> </span>

<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">I have objected in the past to vairagya of the ascetic kind and the tamasic kind—and by the tamasic kind I mean that spirit which comes defeated from life, not because it is really disgusted with life but because it could not cope with it or conquer its prizes; for it comes to Yoga as a kind of asylum for the maimed or weak and to the Divine as a consolation prize for the failed boys in the world-class. The vairagya of one who has tasted the world's gifts or prizes but found them insufficient or, finally, tasteless and turns away towards a higher and more beautiful ideal or the vairagya of one who has done his part in life's battles but seen that something greater is demanded of the soul, is perfectly helpful and a good gate to the Yoga. Also the sattwic vairagya which has learned what life is and turns to what is above and behind life. By the ascetic vairagya I mean that which denies life and world altogether and wants to disappear into the Indefinite—and I object to it for those who come to this Yoga because it is incompatible with my aim which is to bring the Divine into life. But if one is satisfied with life as it is, then there is no reason to seek to bring the Divine into life,—so vairagya in the sense of dissatisfaction with life as it is is perfectly admissible and even in a certain sense indispensable for my Yoga. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/29/asceticism-and-the-integral-yoga#p31</ref></span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">Tamas brings into our emotional nature insensibility, indifference, want of sympathy and openness, the shut soul, the callous heart, the soon spent affection and languor of the feelings, into our aesthetic and sensational nature the dull aesthesis, the limited range of response, the insensibility to beauty, all that makes in man the coarse, heavy and vulgar </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;"> spirit.</span> <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/the-liberation-of-the-nature#p5</ref>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">It is the physical centre—sex is only one of its movements. Naturally, if the sex is active (instead of giving place to Beauty and Ananda) and if the lower movements are active, it forms an obstacle to the establishment of the higher consciousness. But the higher can descend, if there is at all an opening, even before the lower movements have definitely gone—it has then to complete the work of displacing them. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/31/sex#p102</ref></span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">If it [the vital] admires all beautiful things, not women only, without desire—then there would be no harm [in admiring women]. But specially applied to women, it is a relic of the "sex-appeal". <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/31/sex#p143</ref></span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">The desires of the heart and the body which stand in the way of Brahmacharya give a glow to the vital and emotive nature and prevent it from being dry and shut to feeling. To keep the heart warm and open, not dried up or closed, and at the same time attain to spiritual purity the best way is to turn it towards that which is eternal, pure and ever true, behind and beyond these earthly emotions—the ever-living Love, Bliss and Beauty. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/31/sex#p97</ref></span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">This world is a chaos in which darkness and light, false-hood and truth, death and life, ugliness and beauty, hate and love are so closely intertwined that it is almost impossible to distinguish one from the other, still more impossible to disentangle them and put an end to an embrace which has the horror of a pitiless struggle, all the more keen because veiled, especially in human consciousness where the conflict changes into an anguish for knowledge, for power, for conquest,—a combat obscure and painful, all the more atrocious because it seems to be without issue, but capable of a solution on a level above the sensations and feelings and ideas, beyond the domain of the mind—in the Divine Consciousness. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/15/the-divine-working-in-the-universe#p9</ref> </span>