Beauty is the theme of this first issue of our newsletter for 2012. It would be an interesting exercise to bring to mind how many times a day we encounter the word or idea of ‘beauty’, whether in speech, written words, songs and in thought or even in feelings and through the senses, silently. This will give us an indication of how often in a day we may be affiliated and associated with this phenomenon called beauty or with what intensity we feel beauty within us. But is it so important to live such an association? What could beauty possibly serve in our lives?
This newsletter throws some light on beauty in light of integral philosophy, and some possibilities of beauteous experiences in our own lives and around us and the greater good that beauty could serve. But before attending to any issues or questions on beauty, one needs to be intimately familiar with what beauty means in the psyche of each one of us. What do we hold as beautiful – this must then be the primary question that one ought to pose oneself. It takes some time to get to the root of this but it is worth trying. For in the attempt at coming to an understanding of what beauty means to oneself, one is made to delve into something about oneself, of the stuff that one is made out of. The determining factor could be a mental framework we carry with us, or something that pleases the heart or it could be one that makes one feel, “just good”. What makes one decide that something is or is not beautiful? Then there is another question worth pondering over…. Are there common objects or subjects of beauty that every human being would accept as beautiful? If yes, what would these be? And if no, can there be an ultimate beauty that one can aspire for or take as a standard against which to measure all other expressions of beauty?
Sri Aurobindo, in his vast wisdom, has presented beauty as an expression of Divine Ananda and explains that one is negated in the absence of the other or if not negated, than less able to be manifest with ease. He expresses also that there does exist the highest form of beauty that is able to be manifest on earth and that is Supramental Beauty. He categorically points out that beauty is an expression of the spirit and that in order to fathom beauty in anything at all, one would first have to penetrate into the spirit of that subject, since the seat of beauty is in the spirit.
How much of this high interpretation of the Indian Psyche fits into our common mould? What are the terms of references in our lives? What are the theoretical standpoints of beauty we subscribe to, or the philosophical standpoint that helps us to determine beauty where it exists?
Perhaps beauty is beyond all these mental complexities? Perhaps, as The Mother would have said, beauty is in simplicity? However, this beauty will have to be known integrally, for its fullest experience. The mind needs to know beauty and how it limits beauty within its mental frameworks. The heart will have to intimately feel beauty which it probably can when it lifts ingrained preferences, its likes and dislikes born out of a limited and limiting ego and the body will have to live beauty in its flesh and veins, in its very cells. Then can we know that we have integrally experienced beauty and move on and on, expanding the boundaries of what is beauty. Perhaps this can happen in a flash, when one knows one’s “secret self” which is again said to be All-Beauty, All-Goodness and All-Truth.
But again, these are mere words. Let’s turn the pages and direct some blunt questions to ourselves. Do we know beauty? Have we truly touched the body of beauty? Lived it? Only we can tell, each one of us, explicitly, in our own terms …..
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