Changes

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For example, you are obliged to cook and want to prepare a good dish. Well, if you have not trained your sees you will have to try out a little of this and a little of that and then taste it and again correct, arrange. If you have trained your taste you know very well—the taste and smell at the same time, these two are very close and must complement each other—you know what kind of food you are cooking, you get the smell of the thing you are cooking and then, because of the smell and the nature of the thing you will know exactly what more you can put in to complete the taste, what you must add of this thing or that, all kinds of ingredients, you see, to combine things; combine the different vegetables, for instance, or the different tastes of things, in such a way that they make a homogeneous whole. And then you will have a dish without needing to taste it every three minutes to find out if you have put enough salt or pepper, enough butter or… You will know exactly what should be done and will do it without a mistake.

It is the same thing for smell. If you have trained your see of smell, for instance, you can mix things in exact proportions, know the nature… the nature of a perfume, for example, know with which other perfume… Take flowers; you smell them. Well, there are smells, which do not harmonise. If you put them together it makes something that grates, that has no… harmony, unity. But if you have cultivated your see of smell, when you get one particular odour you know exactly what kind of smells can go harmoniously with it. And you will be able to bring close things made to go together.

With colours it is the same thing. The education in colours is tremendous—in both detail and complexity. If you learn how to distinguish all the colours, to know to what family of colours each belongs, what kind of harmony it can bring about—you can know, it is the same thing. You can keep the memory of the colour as you keep the memory of the form. You want to match all your things… for example, you want to match two things: you want to match a cloak with a skirt or a… well, anything at all… or maybe one kind of cloth with another. Usually you are obliged to take one and then go and compare it with the others; and finally, after many trials, if you are not too clumsy, you finish by finding it. But if you have the training in colour, you look at the colour once and go straight to what matches with it, without any hesitation, because you remember exactly the nature of this colour and go to a colour that can harmonise with it.

But you see, in order to educate yourself you can make lots and lots of… almost games, can’t you? You have a whole series of things, take anything you like: bits of cloth, anything at all, bits of ribbons, little bits of paper, many different colours. And then you arrange them to make a scale, and you see in what order they have to be put. By the side of this one, which should go? By the side of this other, which should go? And so on. And you make an uninterrupted scale in such a way that nothing shouts and you can go from one extreme of colour to the other.

There are countless opportunities for doing things like that. One doesn’t use them. But if you look at the problem from the point of view of education, you have constantly an opportunity for educating yourself, constantly. It seems people make terrible mistakes in taste; if you knew, from the point of view of artistic harmony, you simply live in a chaos! Take just the relations of colours—there are many other things, there is the relation of forms which is more complicated still—but the relation of colours: you take a colour and put it beside another; and it happen that these groups of colours don’t go together. Then, if you have no training, sometimes you are not even aware of it. Sometimes you say, “Oh, it is not very pretty.” But you don’t know why, you are not at all conscious of the reason. But when you are trained, when you have trained your eye, first of all you never make a mistake like this, you never bring together two things which don’t go together; and if by chance, on someone else you see things which are not at all made to go together, you don’t have that vague kind of feeling which says, “Oh, it is not pretty, oh, it is not good”, a kind of vague thing… you don’t know why it isn’t pretty, it isn’t pleasant. And it is precisely because one colour belongs to one class and the other to another class of colours, and if you bring together these two different classes without some intermediary colours to harmonise them, they shriek. You can immediately find the remedy because you know where the fault lies.

Well, from the point of view of forms it is the same thing, you know. You arrange a room. You place anything at all anywhere at all and then, when entering, someone who has a sense of harmony feels uneasy. He feels he is entering a chaos. But if you have the sense of colour and form, you must add to it the sense of order and organisation; but still, even without this utilitarian see of order and organisation, if you have the true see of form—of forms which can complement and harmonise with one another, and of colours which can complement and harmonise with one another—when you have to arrange a room, even if you have just three pieces of furniture, you will put them in the right place. But most people do not know, it makes no difference to them. They think only of one thing: “Oh, it will be more convenient to have this here and more convenient to have that there!” And then, sometimes they don’t even think of this, they put things anywhere at all.

But when they enter their room, the place where they have to live for several hours of the day, they enter a confusion and disorder; and if they are not sensitive they do not become aware of it, they do not feel uneasy. However, this does not help in harmonising them within; while if one has… You have a room like that; in this room which has certain dimensions, you have to put a certain given number of articles of furniture, not more, not less; and you must arrange them in a particular order. For example, there is a harmony of lines, you see; and if you place things without considering this harmony of lines, immediately you get the impression of something shouting aloud. But if you know where a curve is required, where an angle, where something small is needed and where something large, and you put things in order…. Take just four articles of furniture: you can put them in the right place or the wrong one; and it happen that if you truly have good taste and are well trained, your organisation is not only harmonious but the most practical. Some people, you know, pile up a considerable number of things in one small place and put them so clumsily that they can’t even move without knocking against something.

==For Expansion of Consciousness==