Beauty: Compilation

The physical world is the world of form and the perfection of form is beauty. Beauty interprets, expresses, manifests the Eternal. Its role is to put all manifested nature in contact with the Eternal through the perfection of form, through and a sense of the ideal which uplifts and leads towards something higher.

On the physical plane the expresses himself through beauty, on the mental plane through knowledge, on the vital plane through power and on the psychic plane through love. When we rise high enough, we discover that these four aspects unite with each other in a single, full of love, luminous, powerful, beautiful, containing all, pervading all.

Spiritual beauty has a contagious power. Beauty is the joyous offering of Nature.

There is a psychic world—a sort of Heaven of and beauty and harmony. It is also a place of rest for the soul between two in which it absorbs its past experiences and becomes ready for another birth.

It [aesthetic conscience] 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.

Beauty is the aesthetic instinct of man, and the good is his ethical instinct, and these two things are very important in human education and growth…

… there is a beauty of thought, a beauty of feeling. This is something we perceive very often; when someone has done a very noble deed, very generous, very unselfish, quite spontaneously we say, “It is beautiful!” And it’s true, it gives the sense of beauty.

All Beauty in the world is there the beauty of the Beloved, and all forms of beauty have to stand under the light of that eternal Beauty and submit themselves to the sublimating and transfiguring power of the unveiled Divine Perfection.

Beauty is not sufficient in itself, it wants to become divine. Pure sense of beauty can be acquired only through a great purification.

“Harmony and beauty of the mind and soul, harmony and beauty of the thoughts and feelings, harmony and beauty in every outward act and movement, harmony and beauty of the life and surroundings, this is the demand of. … Where love and beauty are not or are reluctant to be born, she does not come.”

We must go farther on, we must advance, climb greater heights and go beyond the arid search for pleasure and personal welfare, not through fear of punishment, even punishment after death, but through the development of a new sense of beauty, a thirst for truth and light, through understanding that it is only by widening yourself, illumining yourself, setting yourself ablaze with the ardour for, that you can find both integral peace and enduring happiness.

…and the heart’s call for the Divine have a truth—it is the truth of the divine. The will for has in it a truth—it is the truth of the Spirit’s mastery over its members. The musician and poet stand for a truth, it is the truth of the expression of the Spirit through beauty . There is a truth behind the mental Affirmer; even there is a truth behind the mental doubter, the Russellian, though far behind him—the truth of the denial of false forms. Even behind the two vital personalities there is a truth, the truth of the possession of the inner and outer worlds—not by the but by the Divine. That is the harmonisation for which our stands—but it cannot be achieved by any outward arrangement, it can only be achieved by going inside and looking, willing and acting from the psychic and from the spiritual centre. For the truth of the being is there and the secret of Harmony also is there.

…from the point of view beauty and harmony are as important as any other expression of the Divine. But they should not be isolated, set up apart from all other relations, taken out from the ensemble; they should be one with the expression of life as a whole. People have the habit of saying, “Oh, it is an artist!” as if an artist should not be a man among other men but must be an extraordinary being belonging to a class by itself, and his art too something extraordinary and apart, not to be confused with the other ordinary things of the world.