BENGALURU:So, what is beauty, we are asking. When you compare two great paintings, the comparison between that painter and that painter, or that poem or the other poem, this book or that, what is actually going on in one’s brain? You are comparing, you are judging, you are evaluating. Some have said Keats is the greatest poet who ever lived, or if he had lived longer he would have been far greater than Shakespeare, and so on.
And when you put aside all the paintings in the world, in museums and in your own house and so on, and when you see the great mountains with their snow and against a blue sky in the morning light, there is a certain quality of silence, certain quality of breathless adoration and the perception of that immovable – the deep valleys, the lakes and the rivers and the forests – when you see all that the very greatness of it drives away our petty little life, may be for a minute or for a few seconds: when the self is not beauty is.
Do we understand? Are we together in this? When you look at all those mountains, rivers and the beautiful architecture, or read a poem, some part of the ancient literature, the Old Testament or the Upanishads and so on, to observe all that without thought, without ‘the me’ interfering with your perception, then there is that quality of immense beauty which is not put together by thought. And to come upon that beauty is to enquire whether the self, ‘the me’, the persona, all the characteristic tendencies and all the troubles, pain and anxieties and loneliness, can all that be put aside, not make that which is great make you put everything aside, then that greatness becomes merely a toy.
But if one can put all that aside, the very nature of the self, the psyche, then there is that immense beauty which is really timeless existence. Now let’s go on to something else. Which is: what is death? We are going to enquire together what is death. And also we are going to talk over together what is it that continues? And the continuity is a movement of time - right? Are you following? So we must ask also: is there anything permanent in us, in the world outside of us, is there anything imperishable that cannot be destroyed, that is endlessly permanent? Man has asked this question from the most ancient of times because he sees round him everything in a flux, everything changing, gaining, losing, being destroyed and put together again.
And we also see ourselves changing, not only biologically but psychologically – we are all moving a little bit, bit by bit, moving, changing, not fundamentally changing but a little. So seeing all that, this constant change, dying and being reborn, one asks: is there anything permanent, lasting, and what is that thing that lasts? Is it a continuity of what we are? You understand? Does this all interest you? Don’t just say ‘Yes’, that’s no fun! But if you are really interested in this because it has to do with one’s life, one’s daily life, and is there anything in one’s daily life that is permanent?