On Beauty and the Art of Growing Wings

Bouquet of Sunflowers, by Monet

The mind that is whole has a quality of passive listening presence. It cares, and has this quality of a deep abiding sense of love of wisdom.  Such a mind is the whole that you come upon when you begin to inquire into what meditation is. Then we can proceed to find out what is sacred.

Please listen. It is your life. Give your heart and mind to find out a way of living differently, which means when the mind has abandoned all control. That does not mean to lead a life of doing what you like, yielding to every desire, to every lustful glance or reaction, to every pleasure, to every demand of the pursuit of pleasure, but to find out, to find out whether you can live a daily life without a single control. That is part of meditation.

That means one has to have this quality of passive listening presence. That passive listening presence has brought about insight into the right place of thought and seen that thought is dividing, and that where there is control, there is the controller and the controlled, which is dividing. So to find out a way of living without a single control, requires tremendous awareness, great discipline.

We are not talking of the discipline that you are accustomed to, which is merely suppression, control, conformity, but of a discipline that means to learn.

Can the mind, your mind, be absolutely quiet, without control, without the movement of thought?

It will be quiet naturally if you really have the insight that brings about the right place for thought—if thought has its right place, therefore the mind is quiet.

What does it mean that the mind is quiet? What is silence?

You can make the mind quiet by taking a drug, by repeating a mantra or a word. By constantly repeating, naturally your mind will become quiet, but such a mind is just dull. You haven´t changed all your thought distortions.

What is silence? There is a silence between two noises. There is silence between two notes. There is silence between two movements of thought. There is silence of an evening when the birds have made their noise, chattering, and have gone to bed. When there isn’t a flutter among the leaves, there is no breeze, there is absolute quietness. Not in a city, but when you are out with nature, when you are with the trees or sitting on the banks of the river, there silence descends on the earth and you are part of that silence. So there are different kinds of silence.

But the silence I´m talking about, the quietness of a mind, that silence is not to be bought, is not to be practised, is not something you gain as a reward, a compensation to an ugly life. It is only when the ugly life has been transformed into the good life—by good I mean not having plenty, but the life of goodness—in the flowering of that goodness, that beauty, then the silence comes.

Plato said that this is accomplished by the soul “growing wings.” In this beautiful image of the soul becoming winged, and hence capable of moving upward, away from the earth and the world of matter, Plato affirms that the human being has a celestial, as well as a terrestrial home. The way to return to our celestial home is by cultivating the spiritual qualities of beauty, wisdom, goodness, and every other excellence. Through nourishing ourselves on these sublime qualities, we not only “grow wings” but also realize our own immortality, lifting ourselves beyond the sphere of the earth to the stars. There the winged soul meets Zeus and a host of gods and spirits at the summit of the arch of the heavens. Going beyond even this arch, it contemplates an indescribable reality: the reality with which true knowledge is concerned, a reality without colour or shape, intangible but utterly real, apprehensible only by philosophy which is the pilot for the soul.

Hummingbird and Passionflowers, by Martin Johnson Heade

You have to inquire into what beauty is. What is beauty? Have you ever gone into this question? Will you find it in a book and tell me, or tell each other that book says what beauty is?

What is beauty? Are you looking at the sunset in the evening? Do you feel the light and the glory of that light on a leaf? Or do you think beauty is sensuous, and that a mind that is seeking sacred things cannot be attracted to beauty, cannot have anything to do with beauty, and therefore only concentrate on your little image that you have projected from your own thought as the good.

If you want to find out what meditation is, you have to find out what beauty is, beauty in the face, beauty in character—not character, character is a cheap thing that depends on reaction to environment; the cultivation of that reaction is called character—the beauty of action, the beauty of behaviour, conduct, the inward beauty, the beauty of the way you walk, the way you talk, the way you gesture. All that is beauty and, without having that, meditation becomes merely an escape, a compensation, a meaningless action.

There is beauty in frugality; there is beauty in great austerity - not the austerity of the sannyasi, the austerity of a mind that has order. Order comes when you understand the whole disorder in which you live, and out of that disorder comes naturally order

that is virtue. Therefore virtue, order, is supreme austerity, not the denial of three meals a day or fasting, or shaving your head, and all the rest of that business.

So there is order, which is beauty. There is beauty of love of wisdom, beauty of compassion. And also there is the beauty of a clean street, of good architectural form of a building; there is beauty of a tree, a lovely leaf, the great big branches.

To see all that is beauty; not merely to go to museums and talk everlastingly about beauty. The silence of a quiet mind is the essence of that beauty.

In the Phaedrus, we find Plato comparing the beatific vision to initiation in the mysteries. He even uses the term mystai and epotai – terms taken from the Eleusinian Mysteries that refer to two levels of initiate – in the following passage, in which the ultimate vision is described:

…”then resplendent beauty was to be seen…a joyous view and blessed of all…celebrating these…encountering, as mystai and epoptai, happy apparisions in pure splendor, being pure ourselves.” (Phaedrus 250bc, trans. In Burkert, Ancient Mystery Cults, 92).

Let Voces8 guide your soul on its ascent into eternal beauty (May it Be - Enya/Lord of the Rings) – from Voces8 'Enchanted Isle':