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== In the Mental Plane ==
<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">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></span>
<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">… </span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">there is a just and permissible, a quite legitimate human enjoyment of these things, which is, to speak in the language of Indian psychology, predominantly sattwic in its nature. It is an enlightened enjoyment principally by the perceptive, aesthetic and emotive mind, secondarily only by the sensational, nervous and physical being, but all subject to the clear government of the buddhi, to a right reason, a right will, a right reception of the life impacts, a right order, a right feeling of the truth, law, ideal sense, beauty, use of things. The mind gets the pure taste of enjoyment of them, rasa, and rejects whatever is perturbed, troubled and perverse. Into this acceptance of the clear and limpid rasa, the psychic prana has to bring in the full sense of life and the occupying enjoyment by the whole being, bhoga, without which the acceptance and possession by the mind, rasa-grahaṇa, would not be concrete enough, would be too tenuous to satisfy altogether the embodied soul. This contribution is its proper function.</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><u><ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/purification-the-lower-mentality#p3</ref></u></span>
<div style="color:#000000;">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></div>
== In the Spiritual Plane ==
<div style="color:#000000;">The beginning of the heart's attraction to the Divine may be impersonal, the touch of an impersonal joy in something universal or transcendent that has revealed itself directly or indirectly to our emotional or our aesthetic being or to our capacity of spiritual felicity. That which we thus grow aware of is the Ananda Brahman, the bliss existence. There is an adoration of an impersonal Delight and Beauty, of a pure and an infinite perfection to which we can give no name or form, a moved attraction of the soul to some ideal and infinite Presence, Power, existence in the world or beyond it...</div><div style="color:#000000;"><u><ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/the-ananda-brahman#p2</ref></u></div>
<div style="color:#000000;">It (spiritual bliss) may present itself first as a yearning for some universal Beauty which we feel in Nature and man and in all that is around us; or we may have the intuition of some transcendent Beauty of which all apparent beauty here is only a symbol. That is how it may come to those in whom the aesthetic being is developed and insistent and the instincts which, when they find form of expression, make the poet and artist, are predominant. </div><ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/the-ananda-brahman#p3</ref></div>
<div style="color:#000000;">Yes, this beauty of soul that is visible in the face, this kind of dignity, this harmony of integral realisation. When the soul becomes visible in the physical, it gives this dignity, this beauty, this majesty, the majesty that comes from one's being the Tabernacle. Then, even things that have no particular beauty put on a sense of eternal beauty, of it the eternal beauty.</div><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">(The Mother, 1 July 1958) </span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#1155cc;"><u><ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/15/july-1958-1#p3</ref></u></spandiv>
<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">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. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/the-mystery-of-love#p3</ref></span>
<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">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</ref>  <span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">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></span>
= <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">Why is it Important to Have Aesthetic Sense?</span> =
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">But the way the world is organized, people without aesthetic needs go back to a very primitive life—which is wrong. We need a place where life... where the very setting of life would be, not an individual thing, but a </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">beauty that would be like the surroundings natural to a certain degree of development.</span><div style="color: #000000;"> (The Mother, 25 March 1970) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/agenda/11/march-25-1970#p49</ref></div>
 
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000;">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.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #0066cc;"><u>
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/28/science-and-yoga#p43</ref></u></span>
<div style="color: #000000;">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.</div>
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/07/9-february-1955#p7</ref>
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