BENGALURU: The movement of thought is not beauty. Thought can create what appears to be beautiful-the painting, the marble figure or a lovely poem-but this is not beauty. Beauty is supreme sensitivity, not to the sense of one’s own pains and anxieties, but encompassing the whole existence of humanity. There is beauty only when the current of the “me” has completely dried up. When the “me” is not, beauty is. With the abandonment of the self, the passion of beauty comes into being.
We have been talking over together in these letters the degeneration of the mind. We have pointed out for your examination and investigation some of the ways of this deterioration. One of its basic activities is thought.
Thought is a breaking up of the wholeness of the mind. The whole contains the part, but the part can never be that which is complete. Thought is the most active part of our life. Feeling goes with thought. Essentially they are one, though we tend to separate them. Having separated them, we give great importance to feeling, to sentiment, to romanticism and devotion; but thought, like a string in a necklace, weaves itself through them all, hidden, alive, controlling and shaping. It is always there, though e like to think our deep emotions are essentially different. In this lies great illusion, a deception that is highly regarded and leads to dishonesty.
As we have said, thought is the actuality of our daily life. All so-called sacred books are the product of thought. They may be revered as revelation, but they are essentially thought. Thought has put together the turbine and the great temples of the earth, the rocket, and the enmity in men. Thought has been responsible for wars, for the language one uses and the image made by the hand or by the mind. Thought dominates relationship. Thought has described what love is, the heavens and the pain of misery. Man worships thought, admires its subtleties, its cunning, its violence, its cruelties in the name of a cause.
Thought has brought great advances in technology and with them a capacity for destruction. This has been the story of thought, repeated throughout the centuries. We have never questioned the very nature of thought. We have accepted thought as inevitable as our eyes and legs. We have never probed to the very depth of thought, and because we have never questioned it, it has assumed preeminence. It is the tyrant of our life, and tyrants are rarely challenged.
So, as educators we are going to expose it to the bright light of observation. The light of observation not only instantly dispels illusion, but the clarity of its light reveals the tiniest detail of that which is being observed. Now can you notice with extraordinary clarity the whole movement of thought? The very observation of thought is the observation of your whole being, and this very being is put together by thought. As thought is finite, limited, so are you.