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= How Can One Cultivate Aesthetic Sense? =
<div style="color:#000000;">… in this order: consciousness first, then the vital (mainly from the aesthetic point of view, but a study of sensations as well) , then the mind, then spiritual realization. And in between the vital and mental phases came the brief period of occultism, serving both as a transition and a basis for spiritual development.</div><div style="color:#000000;">(The Mother, 28 July 1962) </div><ref>http://incarnateword.in/agenda/03/july-28-1962#p9</ref></div>
== Perfection ==
<div style="color:#000000;">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></div>
<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.</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><u><ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/14/progress-and-perfection-in-work#p26</ref></u></span>
<div style="color:#000000;">Each thing is exactly in its place, each person exactly in his place, each movement exactly in its place—and in its place in an ascending progressive movement, without any relapse, that is to say, quite the contrary to what happens in ordinary life. Naturally, this presupposes a kind of perfection, this presupposes a kind of unity, this presupposes that the different aspects of the Supreme can be manifested and, of course, an exceptional beauty, a total harmony and a power strong enough to command obedience from the forces of Nature.</div><div style="color:#000000;">(The Mother, 18 July 1961) </div><ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/15/18-july-1961#p11</ref></div>
<div style="color:#000000;">Take a great musician; well, even with a wretched piano and missing notes, he will produce something beautiful; but give him a good piano, well-tuned, and he will do something still more beautiful. The consciousness is the same in either case but for expression it needs a good instrument—a body with mental, vital, psychic and physical capacities. (The Mother, 15 January 1951) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/04/15-january-1951#p11</ref></div>
<div span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">Take Intellectual or aesthetic delight can also be an obstacle to the spiritual perfection if there is attachment to it, although it is much nearer to the spiritual than a great musiciangross untransformed bodily appetite; well, even with in fact in order to become part of the spiritual consciousness the intellectual and aesthetic delight has also to change and become something higher. But all things that have a rasa cannot be kept. There is a wretched piano rasa in hurting and missing noteskilling others, he will produce something beautiful; but give him the sadistic delight, there is a good pianorasa in torturing oneself, well-tuned, and he will do something still more beautifulthe masochistic delight—modern psychology is full of these two. The consciousness Merely having a rasa is not a sufficient reason for keeping things as part of the same in either case but for expression it needs a good instrument—a body with mental, vital, psychic and physical capacitiesspiritual life.</div><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">(The Mother, 15 January 1951) </span><ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/0431/15-january-1951sex#p11p45</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;">Intellectual or aesthetic delight can also be an obstacle to the spiritual perfection if there is attachment to it, although it is much nearer to the spiritual than a gross untransformed bodily appetite; in fact in order to become part of the spiritual consciousness the intellectual and aesthetic delight has also to change and become something higher. But all things that have a rasa cannot be kept. There is a rasa in hurting and killing others, the sadistic delight, there is a rasa in torturing oneself, the masochistic delight—modern psychology is full of these two. Merely having a rasa is not a sufficient reason for keeping things as part of the spiritual life.</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><u>
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/31/sex#p45</ref></u></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.</span>
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/14/desires-impulses-and-self-control#p8</ref>
== Purification ==
<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">Pure sense of beauty can be acquired only through a great purification.</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><u><ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/15/beauty#p14</ref></u></span> 
<div style="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 spirit. </div><div style="color:#0066cc;"><u><ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/the-liberation-of-the-nature#p5</ref></u></div>
<div style="color:#000000;">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.</div><ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/23/the-higher-and-the-lower-knowledge#p8</ref></div>
<div style="color:#000000;">Suppose you have a beautiful experience, that suddenly in answer to your aspiration a great light comes; you feel all flooded with joy, force, light, beauty, and have the impression that you are on the point of being transfigured...mentally, instead of being immobile and attentive, something has begun to ask, "Wait a minute, what is this experience? What does it mean?", begun to try to find an explanation (what it calls an "understanding") . Or maybe in the vital something has begun to enjoy the experience: "How pleasant it is, how I would like it to grow, how good if it were constant, how...." Or something in the physical has said, "Oh! It is a bit hard to endure that, how long am I going to be able to keep it?" It is perhaps not as obvious as all this, but it is a wee bit hidden like this, somewhere. You will always find one of these three things or others analogous. Then, it is there the lantern is needed: where is the weak point? where is the egoism? where is the desire? where is that old dirt we do not want any longer? where is that thing which turns back upon itself instead of giving itself, opening itself, losing itself? which turns back upon itself, tries to take advantage of what has happened, wants to appropriate to itself the fruit of the experience? Or rather which is too weak, too hard, too rigid to be able to follow the movement?... It is that, you are now on the track, you begin precisely to put the light you have just acquired upon it; it is that you must do, focus the light upon it, turn it in such a way that the thing cannot resist it.</div><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">(The Mother, 26 April 1951) </span><ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/04/26-april-1951#p29</ref></span>
== Discipline ==
<div style="color:#000000;">I have known people with such opposite sides in their nature, so contradictory, that one day they could make a magnificent, luminous, powerful formation for realisation, and then the next day a defeatist, dark, black formation—a formation of despair—and so both would go out. And I was able to follow in the course of circumstances the beautiful one being realised, and while it was being realised, the dark one demolishing what the first one had done. And that is how it is in the larger lines of life as in its smaller details. And all that because one does not watch oneself thinking, because one believes one is the slave of these contradictory movements, because one says, "Oh! Today I am not feeling well. Oh! Today things seem sad to me", and one says this as if it were an ineluctable fate against which one could do nothing. But if one stands back or ascends a step, one can look at all these things, put them in their place, keep some, destroy or get rid of those one does not want and put all one's imaginative power—what is called imaginative—only in those one wants and which conform with one's highest aspiration. That is what I call controlling one's imagination.</div><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">(The Mother, 3 September 1958) </span><ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/09/3-september-1958#p15</ref> <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> <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/14/sincerity#p9</refdiv>
<div span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">Without outer Be sincere and inner discipline, one can achieve nothing absolute in your consecration to the Divine and your life, either spiritually or materiallywill become harmonious and beautiful. All those who have been able to create something beautiful or useful have always been persons who have known how to discipline themselves<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/14/sincerity#p9</ref></divspan>
<span div style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">Without outer and inner discipline, one can achieve nothing in life, either spiritually or materially. All those who have been able to create something beautiful or useful have always been persons who have known how to discipline themselves. (The Mother, 23 June 1934) </span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><u><ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/16/23-june-1934#p3</ref></u></spandiv>
== Detachment ==
<div style="color:#000000;">In fact people who work in order to develop their taste, to refine it, are rarely very much attached to food. It is not through attachment to food that they do it. It is for the cultivation of their senses, which is a very different thing. It is like the artist, you know, who trains his eyes to appreciate forms and colours, lines, the composition of things, the harmony found in physical nature; it is not at all through desire that he does this, it is through taste, culture, the development of the sense of sight and the appreciation of beauty. And usually artists who are real artists and love their art and live in the sense of beauty, seeking beauty, are people who don't have many desires. They live in the sense of a growth not only visual, but of the appreciation of beauty. There is a great difference between this and people who live by their impulses and desires.(The Mother, 23 February 1955) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/07/23-february-1955#p5</ref></div>
<div style="color:#000000;">For the universal soul all things and all contacts of things carry in them an essence of delight best described by the Sanskrit aesthetic term, rasa, which means at once sap or essence of a thing and its taste. It is because we do not seek the essence of the thing in its contact with us, but look only to the manner in which it affects our desires and fears, our cravings and shrinkings that grief and pain, imperfect and transient pleasure or indifference, that is to say, blank inability to seize the essence, are the forms taken by the Rasa… If we could be entirely disinterested in mind and heart and impose that detachment on the nervous being, the progressive elimination of these imperfect and perverse forms of Rasa would be possible and the true essential taste of the inalienable delight of existence in all its variations would be within our reach…</div>
<div style="color:#000000;">We attain to something of this capacity for variable but universal delight in the aesthetic reception of things as represented by Art and Poetry, so that we enjoy there the Rasa or taste of the sorrowful, the terrible, even the horrible or repellent; and the reason is because we are detached, disinterested, not thinking of ourselves or of self-defence (jugupsā) , but only of the thing and its essence… </div>
<div style="color:#000000;">Certainly, this aesthetic reception of contacts is not a precise image or reflection of the pure delight which is supramental and supra-aesthetic; for the latter would eliminate sorrow, terror, horror and disgust with their cause while the former admits them: but it represents partially and imperfectly one stage of the progressive delight of the universal Soul in things in its manifestation and it admits us in one part of our nature to that detachment from egoistic sensation and that universal attitude through which the one Soul sees harmony and beauty where we divided beings experience rather chaos and discord…. </div>
<div style="color:#000000;">The full liberation can come to us only by a similar liberation in all our parts, the universal aesthesis, the universal standpoint of knowledge, the universal detachment from all things and yet sympathy with all in our nervous and emotional being.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/21/delight-of-existence-the-solution#p14</ref></div>
<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">In the view of old philosophies pleasure and pain are inseparable like intellectual truth and falsehood and power and incapacity and birth and death; therefore the only possible escape from them would be a total indifference, a blank response to the excitations of the world-self… In the freer and higher movements there is demanded of us only a limited and specialised equality and impersonality proper to a particular field of consciousness and activity while the egoistic basis of our practical life remains to us; in the lower movements the whole foundation of our life has to be changed in order to make room for impersonality, and this the desire-soul finds impossible.</span><ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/21/the-double-soul-in-man#p10</ref></span>
<div style="color:#000000;">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.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/purification-intelligence-and-will#p10</ref></div>
== Devotion ==
<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">Devotion selects the emotional and aesthetic powers of the soul and by turning them all God-ward in a perfect purity, intensity, infinite passion of seeking makes them a means of God-possession in one or many relations of unity with the Divine Being. All aim in their own way at a union or unity of the human soul with the supreme Spirit.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/the-principle-of-the-integral-yoga#p4</ref></span>
<div style="color:#000000;">The world is full of things that are not pleasing or beautiful, but that is no reason why one should live in a constant feeling of repulsion for these things. All feelings of shrinking and disgust and fear that disturb and weaken the human mind can be overcome. A Yogi has to overcome these reactions; for almost the very first step in Yoga demands that you must keep a perfect equanimity in the presence of all beings and things and happenings. (The Mother, 30 June 1929) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/30-june-1929#p5</ref></div>
<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">Devotion selects the emotional and aesthetic powers of the soul and by turning them all God-ward in a perfect purity, intensity, infinite passion of seeking makes them a means of God-possession in one or many relations of unity with the Divine Being. All aim in their own way at a union or unity of the human soul with the supreme Spirit.</span><ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/the-principle-of-the-integral-yoga#p4</ref> <div style="color:#000000;">The world is full of things that are not pleasing or beautiful, but that is no reason why one should live in a constant feeling of repulsion for these things. All feelings of shrinking and disgust and fear that disturb and weaken the human mind can be overcome. A Yogi has to overcome these reactions; for almost the very first step in Yoga demands that you must keep a perfect equanimity in the presence of all beings and things and happenings.</div><div style="color:#000000;">(The Mother, 30 June 1929) </div><ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/30-june-1929#p5</ref><div style="color:#000000;">But if one deeply feels the beauty of Nature and communes with her, that can help in widening the consciousness.</div> <span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">(The Mother, 9 November 1969) </span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><u><ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/16/9-november-1969#p4</ref></u></span>  <div style="color:#000000;">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.</div>
<div style="color:#0066cc000000;"><u>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. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/22/the-triple-transformation#p15</ref></u></div>
<div style="color:#000000;">There is nothing which gives you a joy equal to that of gratitude. One hears a bird sing, sees a lovely flower, looks at a little child, observes an act of generosity, reads a beautiful sentence, looks at the setting sun, no matter what, suddenly this comes upon you, this kind of emotion—indeed so deep, so intense—that the world manifests the Divine, that there is something behind the world which is the Divine.</div><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">(The Mother, 25 January 1956) </span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><u><ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/08/25-january-1956#p61</ref></u></spandiv>
<span style="background-color:transparent;color:#000000;">The eye of his will must look beyond to a purity of divine being, a motive of divine will-power guided by divine knowledge of which his perfected nature will be the engine, yantra. That must remain impossible in entirety as long as the dynamic ego with its subservience to the emotional and vital impulses and the preferences of the personal judgment interferes in his action. A perfect equality of the will is the power which dissolves these knots of the lower impulsion to works. This equality will not respond to the lower impulses, but watch for a greater seeing impulsion from the Light above the mind, and will not judge and govern with the intellectual judgment, but wait for enlightenment and direction from a superior plane of vision.</span><span style="background-color:transparent;color:#0066cc;"><u><ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/the-perfection-of-equality#p9</ref></u></span>
<div style="color:#000000;">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. &nbsp;</div><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 =
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