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Aesthetic Sense Compilation (view source)
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“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.” <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/12/teachers#p14</ref>
= What is Aesthetic Sense? =
== The Perception of Beauty ==
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. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/07/1-june-1955#p3</ref>
== The Experience of Ananda ==
== The Experience of Ananda A True and Wide Consciousness ==
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. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/27/beauty-in-women#p18</ref>
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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. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/05/21-october-1953#p60</ref>
<div style="color:#000000;"center>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.~</divcenter>
Artistic taste is pleased with beautiful things and is itself beautiful. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/15/beauty#p1</ref>
== Stages of Aesthesis ==
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<div style="color:#000000;"center>(The Mother, 21 October 1953)~</div><div style="color:#0066cc;"><u><ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/05/21-october-1953#p60</ref></u></divcenter>
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. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/07/25-may-1955#p37</ref>
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. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/15/the-divine-working-in-the-universe#p6</ref>
<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;"center>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></spancenter>
<div style="color:#000000;"center>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. ~</div><div style="color:#000000;">(The Mother, 1 June 1955)</div><div style="color:#0066cc;"><u><ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/07/1-june-1955#p21</ref></u></divcenter>
<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;"center>(The Mother, 25 May 1955)~</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><u><ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/07/25-may-1955#p37</ref></u></spancenter>
Now, obviously, most often what people—unless they are initiated—call "soul" is the vital activity. If someone has a strong, active, obstinate vital which rules the body's activities, which has a very living or intense contact with people and things and events, if he has a marked taste for art, for all expressions of beauty, we are generally tempted to say and believe, "Oh! He has a living soul"; but it is not his soul, it is his vital being which is alive and dominates the activities of the body. That is the first difference between someone who is beginning to be developed and those who are still in the inertia and tamas of the purely material life. This gives, first to the appearance and also to the activity, a kind of vibration, of intensity of vibration, which often creates the impression that this person has a living soul; but it is not that, it is his vital which is developed, which has a special capacity, is stronger than the physical inertia and gives an intensity of vibration and life and action that those whose vital being is not developed do not possess. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/09/9-april-1958#p4</ref>
== In the Mental Plane ==
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<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;"center>(The Mother, 5 December 1956)~</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><u><ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/08/5-december-1956#p17</ref></u></span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;"center>
== In the Vital Spiritual Plane ==
<div style="color:#333333;"center>(The Mother, 11 July 1956)~</div><div style="color:#0066cc;"><u><ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/08/11-july-1956#p10</ref></u></divcenter>
<div style="color:#000000;"center>Now, obviously, most often what people—unless they are initiated—call "soul" is the vital activity. If someone has a strong, active, obstinate vital which rules the body's activities, which has a very living or intense contact with people and things and events, if he has a marked taste for art, for all expressions of beauty, we are generally tempted to say and believe, "Oh! He has a living soul"; but it is not his soul, it is his vital being which is alive and dominates the activities of the body. That is the first difference between someone who is beginning to be developed and those who are still in the inertia and tamas of the purely material life. This gives, first to the appearance and also to the activity, a kind of vibration, of intensity of vibration, which often creates the impression that this person has a living soul; but it is not that, it is his vital which is developed, which has a special capacity, is stronger than the physical inertia and gives an intensity of vibration and life and action that those whose vital being is not developed do not possess. ~</div><div style="color:#000000;">(The Mother, 9 April 1958)</div><ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/09/9-april-1958#p4</refcenter>
<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;"center>The impulsive reactive sensational mentality, the life-cravings and the mind of emotional desire are taken up by the intelligent will and are overcome, are rectified and dominated by a greater ethical mind which discovers and sets over them a law of right impulse, right desire, right emotion and right action. The receptive, crudely enjoying sensational mentality, the emotional mind and life mind are taken up by the intelligence and are overcome, rectified and dominated by a deeper, happier aesthetic mind which discovers and sets above them a law of true delight and beauty.~</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><u><ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/purification-intelligence-and-will#p9</ref></u></spancenter>
<div style="color:#000000;"center>Aesthetics is concerned mainly with beauty, but more generally with rasa, the response of the mind, the vital feeling and the sense to a certain "taste" in things which often may be but is not necessarily a spiritual feeling. Aesthetics belongs to the mental range and all that depends upon it; it may degenerate into aestheticism or may exaggerate or narrow itself into some version of the theory of "Art for Art's sake". The Overmind is essentially a spiritual power. Mind in it surpasses its ordinary self and rises and takes its stand on a spiritual foundation. It embraces beauty and sublimates it; it has an essential aesthesis which is not limited by rules and canons; it sees a universal and an eternal beauty while it takes up and transforms all that is limited and particular. It is besides concerned with things other than beauty or aesthetics. It is concerned especially with truth and knowledge or rather with a wisdom that exceeds what we call knowledge… ~</div><div style="color:#000000;"><ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/27/the-overmind-and-aesthetics#p1</ref></divcenter>
<div style="color:#000000;"center>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></spancenter>
The aesthetic downfall is perhaps due to other causes, a disappointed idealism in its recoil generating its opposite, a dry and cynical intellectualism which refuses to be duped by the ideal, the romantic or the emotional or anything that is higher than the reason walking by the light of the senses. The Asuras of the past were after all often rather big beings; the trouble about the present ones is that they are not really Asuras, but beings of the lower vital world, violent, brutal and ignoble, but above all narrow-minded, ignorant and obscure. But this kind of cynical narrow intellectualism that is rampant now, does not last—it prepares its own end by increasing dryness—men begin to feel the need of new springs of life. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/28/science-and-yoga#p43</ref>
<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;"center>That is what the experience of the normal life is meant to lead to by its widening culture of the intellect, the aesthetic and emotional mind and of our parts too of will and active experience. It widens and refines the normal being so that it may open easily to all the truth of That which was preparing it for the temple of its self-manifestation.~</span><ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/the-mystery-of-love#p3</refcenter>
An ordinary consciousness, altogether ordinary, dull like all ordinary consciousness—as soon as it sees something beautiful, whether it be an object or a person, hop! "I want it!" It is deplorable, you know. And into the bargain it doesn't even have the joy of the beauty, because it has the anguish of desire. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/07/9-february-1955#p7</ref>
<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;"center>Aesthetically, the delight takes the appearance of Rasa and the enjoyment of this Rasa is the mind's and the vital's reaction to the perception of beauty. The spiritual realisation has a sight, a perception, a feeling which is not that of the mind and vital;—it passes beyond the aesthetic limit, sees the universal beauty, sees behind the object what the eye cannot see, feels what the emotion of the heart cannot feel and passes beyond Rasa and Bhoga to pure Ananda—a thing more deep, intense, rapturous than any mental or vital or any physical rasa reaction can be. It sees the One everywhere, the Divine everywhere, the Beloved everywhere, the original bliss of existence everywhere, and all these can create an inexpressible Ananda of beauty—the beauty of the One, the beauty of the Divine, the ~</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">beauty of the Beloved, the beauty of the eternal Existence in things. It can see also the beauty of forms and objects, but with a seeing other than the mind's, other than that of a limited physical vision—what was not beautiful to the eye becomes beautiful, what was beautiful to the eye wears now a greater, marvellous and ineffable beauty. The spiritual realisation can bring the vision and the rapture of the All-Beautiful everywhere.</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><u><ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/27/art-beauty-and-ananda#p7</ref></u></spancenter>
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== Aesthetic Sense and Yoga ==
<div style="color:#000000;"center>An ordinary consciousness, altogether ordinary, dull like all ordinary consciousness—as soon as it sees something beautiful, whether it be an object or a person, hop! "I want it!" It is deplorable, you know. And into the bargain it doesn't even have the joy of the beauty, because it has the anguish of desire.~</divcenter>
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. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/0715/9july-february1958-19551#p7p1</ref>
<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;"center>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.~</span>[http://incarnateword.in/cwm/10/aphorism-297-298#p6 http://incarnateword.in/cwm/10/aphorism-297-298#p6]<div style="color:#000000;">You can read sacred books and yet be far away from the Divine; and you can read the most stupid productions and be in touch with the Divine.</divcenter>
<div style="color:#000000;"center>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)</divcenter>
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>
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. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/05/9-september-1953#p19</ref>
<div style="color:#000000;"center>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. ~</divcenter>
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''Q. Can those who have a see of beauty also become cruel?''
<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"center>~<u><ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/05/9-september-1953#p19</ref></u></span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;"center>
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== Aesthetic Sense and The Divine ==
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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. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/09/24-april-1957#p13</ref>
<div style="color:#000000;"center>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; 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. ~</divcenter>
<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;"center>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. As the capacity of understanding grows in 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… A methodical and enlightened cultivation of the senses can, little by little, eliminate from the child whatever is by contagion vulgar, commonplace and crude. This education will have very happy effects even on his character. For one who has developed a truly refined taste will, because of this very refinement, feel incapable of acting in a crude, brutal or vulgar manner. This refinement, if it is sincere, brings to the being a nobility and generosity which will spontaneously find expression in his behaviour and will protect him from many base and perverse movements.~</span><ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/12/vital-education#p11</refcenter>
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>
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. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/16/8-october-1966#p7</ref>
<div style="color:#000000;"center>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. ~</divcenter>
...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 style="colorref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/17/13-july-1943#000000;">(The Mother, 26 December 1956)p2</divref>
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<div style="color:#000000;"center>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.~</divcenter>
<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;"center>… ~</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">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.</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><u><ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/10/aphorism-19#p3</ref></u></spancenter>
''Q. What does "the beauty of the hideous" mean?''
[Based on Aphorism 48—I knew my mind to be conquered when it admired the beauty of the hideous, yet felt perfectly why other men shrank back or hated.]<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/10/aphorism-48#p3</ref>
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<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;"center>(The Mother, 13 July 1943)~</span><ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/17/13-july-1943#p2</refcenter>
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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. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/28-july-1929#p19</ref>
… 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. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/05/28-october-1953#p4</ref>
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<div style="color:#000000;"center>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.~</divcenter>
<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;"center>Art for Art's sake? But what after all is meant by this slogan and what is the real issue behind it? Is it meant, as I think it was when the slogan first came into use, that the technique, the artistry is all in all? The contention would then be that it does not matter what you write or paint or sculpt or what music you make or about what you make it so long as it is beautiful writing, competent painting, good sculpture, fine music… Only, you can say of him on the basis of this theory that as a work of art his creation should be judged by its success of craftsmanship and not by its contents; it is not made greater by the value of his ethical ideas, his enthusiasms or his metaphysical seekings.~</span><ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/27/art-for-arts-sake#p1</refcenter>
If these painters were sincere, if they truly painted what they feel and see, the picture would be the expression of a confused mind and an unruly vital. But, unhappily, the painters are not sincere and then these pictures are nothing else than the expression of a falsehood, an artificial imagination based only on the will to be strange and to bewilder the public in order to attract attention and that has indeed very little to do with beauty. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/12/arts#p35</ref>
Supreme art expresses the Beauty which puts you in contact with the Divine Harmony. <div style="colorref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/12/arts#000000;">There are not only aesthetic values but life-values, mind-values, soul-values, that enter into Art. p11</</divref>
<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><u><ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/27/art-for-arts-sake#p5</ref></ucenter>~</spancenter>
<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;"center>''What does "the beauty of the hideous" mean?''~</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">It is always the same realisation presented from different angles, expressed through </span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">various experiences: 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.</span><ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/10/aphorism-48#p3</refcenter>
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. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/08/16-may-1956#p20</ref>
All these gods are representations which Sri Aurobindo calls "aesthetic and intellectual"―a way of conceiving the universe. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/08/16-may-1956#p21</ref>
<div style="color:#000000;"center>… "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.~</divcenter>
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<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;"center>The true painting aims at creating something more beautiful than the ordinary reality.~</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><u><ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/12/arts#p19</ref></u></spancenter>
<div style="color:#000000;"center>… 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</refcenter>
Music, no doubt, goes nearest to the infinite and to the essence of things because it relies wholly on the ethereal vehicle, ''śabda'' (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? <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/27/music-and-poetry#p1</ref>
God had opened my eyes; for I saw the nobility of the vulgar, the attractiveness of the repellent, the perfection of the maimed and the beauty of the hideous. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/10/aphorism-20#p1</ref>
<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;"center>True art means the expression of beauty in the material world. 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.~</span><ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/12/arts#p15</refcenter>
… technique is a means of expression; one does not write merely to use beautiful words or paint for the sole sake of line and colour; there is something that one is trying through these means to express or to discover. What is that something? The first answer would be—it is the creation, it is the discovery of Beauty… But there is not only physical beauty in the world—there is moral, intellectual, spiritual beauty also… But here again, what after all is Beauty? How much is it in the thing itself and how much in the consciousness that perceives it? Is not the eye of the artist constantly catching some element of aesthetic value in the plain, the ugly, the sordid, the repellent and triumphantly conveying it through his material,—through the word, through line and colour, through the sculptured shape? <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/27/art-for-arts-sake#p2</ref>
<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;"center>If these painters were sincere, if they truly painted what they feel and see, the picture would be the expression of a confused mind and an unruly vital. But, unhappily, the painters are not sincere and then these pictures are nothing else than the expression of a falsehood, an artificial imagination based only on the will to be strange and to bewilder the public in order to attract attention and that has indeed very little to do with beauty.~</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><u><ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/12/arts#p35</ref></u></spancenter>
<center>~</center>
Art leads to the same end; the aesthetic human being intensely preoccupied with Nature through aesthetic emotion must in the end arrive at spiritual emotion and perceive not only the infinite life, but the infinite presence within her; preoccupied with beauty in the life of man he must in the end come to see the divine, the universal, the spiritual in humanity. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/23/the-higher-and-the-lower-knowledge#p4</ref>
<div style="color:#000000;"center>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.~</divcenter>
<div style="color:#000000;"center>"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)</divcenter>
The aesthetic and impersonal vision of things can develop into the sight of the Divine Beauty everywhere which is in its nature entirely pure. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/827/1physical-beauty-and-augustsex-1956sensation#p54p6</ref>
<center>~</center>
<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;"center>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></divcenter>
== In Perception =How can One Cultivate Aesthetic Sense? =
… 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. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/agenda/03/july-28-1962#p9</ref>
==By Perfection ==
64—God often fails in His workings; it is the sign of His illimitable godhead.
<center>~</center>
<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;"center>''Are there people who have not been affected by this vital impurity and who appreciate beauty in a subtle aesthetic way only?''~</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">Yes, certainly. Artists who have trained their mind to a purely aesthetic look at beauty and beautiful things—for one instance. There are many others also, who have a sufficiently developed refinement of the aesthetic sense not to associate it with the crude vital wish for possession, enjoyment or sensual contact.</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><u><ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/27/physical-beauty-and-sex-sensation#p4</ref></u></spancenter>
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. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/04/15-january-1951#p11</ref>
<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;"center>The aesthetic and impersonal vision of things can develop into the sight of the Divine Beauty everywhere which is in its nature entirely pure.~</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><u><ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/27/physical-beauty-and-sex-sensation#p6</ref></u></spancenter>
<div style="color:#000000;"center>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></spancenter>
<div style="color:#000000;"center>When they speak of God, think of Him as "something else," they think that He cannot be weak, ugly or imperfect—they think wrongly, they divide, they separate… Perfection is something which lacks nothing.~</div><div style="color:#0066cc;"><u><ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/10/aphorism-63-64-65#p24</ref></u></divcenter>
<div style="color:#000000;"center>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</refcenter>
The power of ethical knowledge and the ethical habit of thought and will to purify is obvious. Philosophy not only purifies the reason and predisposes it to the contact of the universal and the infinite, but tends to stabilise the nature and create the tranquillity of the sage; and tranquillity is a sign of increasing self-mastery and purity. The preoccupation with universal beauty even in its aesthetic forms has an intense power for refining and subtilising the nature, and at its highest it is a great force for purification. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/23/the-higher-and-the-lower-knowledge#p8</ref>
<div style="color:#000000;"center>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</refcenter>
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. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/04/26-april-1951#p29</ref>
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. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/09/3-september-1958#p15</ref>
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. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/07/23-february-1955#p5</ref>
<div style="color:#000000;"center>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 spirit. ~</div><div style="color:#0066cc;"><u><ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/the-liberation-of-the-nature#p5</ref></u></divcenter>
<div style="color:#000000;"center>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</refcenter>
<div style="color:#000000;"center>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.~</divcenter>
== Detachment By Devotion ==
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<div style="color:#000000;"center>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… ~</divcenter>
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<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><u><ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/21/delight-of-existence-the-solution#p14</ref></ucenter>~</spancenter>
<div style="color:#000000;"center>The ethical mind becomes perfect in proportion as it detaches itself from desire, sense suggestion, impulse, customary dictated action and discovers a self of Right, Love, Strength and Purity in which it can live accomplished and make it the foundation of all its actions. The aesthetic mind is perfected in proportion as it detaches itself from all its cruder pleasures and from outward conventional canons of the aesthetic reason and discovers a self existent self and spirit of pure and infinite Beauty and Delight which gives its own light and joy to the material of the aesthesis.~</divcenter>
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Beauty does not get its full power except when it is surrendered to the Divine. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/15/beauty#p10</ref>
<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;"center>(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></spancenter>
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. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/15/6-january-1951#p28</ref>
<div style="color:#000000;"center>It is through a love and adoration of the All-beautiful and All-blissful, the All-Good, the True, the spiritual Reality of love, that the approach is made; the aesthetic and emotional parts join together to offer the soul, the life, the whole nature to that which they worship.~</divcenter>
<div style="color:#000000;"center>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></spancenter>
<div style="color:#000000;"center>We make a distinction between truth and beauty; but there can be an aesthetic response to truth also, a joy in its beauty, a love created by its charm, a rapture in the finding, a passion in the embrace, an aesthetic joy in its expression, a satisfaction of love in the giving of it to others. Truth is not merely a dry statement of facts or ideas to or by the intellect; it can be a splendid discovery, a rapturous revelation, a thing of beauty that is a joy for ever. The poet also can be a seeker and lover of truth as well as a seeker and lover of beauty. It can give to beauty its most splendid passion of luminous form and the consciousness that receives it a supreme height and depth of ecstasy. ~</divcenter><div style="color:#0066cc;"><u><ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/27/the-overmind-aesthesis#p63</ref></u></div> <span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">Beauty does not get its full power except when it is surrendered to the Divine.</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><u><ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/15/beauty#p10</ref></u></span> = Recommended Practices =
"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.
You are all, here, youthful matter; you must know how to profit by it—and not for petty, selfish and stupid reasons but for the love of beauty, for the need of harmony. <ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwm/05/17-june-1953#p39,p40</ref>
<div style="color:#000000;"center>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.~</divcenter>
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<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;"center>(The Mother, 6 January 1951)~</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/15/6-january-1951#p28</u></spancenter>
Let beauty be your constant ideal.The beauty of the soul
Spiritual beauty has a contagious power. <span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">(The Mother, 17 June 1953)</spanref>[http://incarnateword.in/cwm/0512/17-june-1953arts#p39 http:p3<//incarnateword.in/cwm/05/17-june-1953#p39]ref>
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<div style="color:#000000;"center>(The Mother, 26 February 1951)~</divcenter>
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<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;"center>(The Mother, 18 April 1956)~</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><u>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/08/18-april-1956#p56</u></spancenter>
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Read Summary of '''[[Aesthetic Sense]]'''