We have become far too clever. Our brains have been trained to become verbally, intellectually, very bright. They are crammed with a great deal of information and we use this for a profitable career. A clever, intellectual person is praised, shown honour. Such people seem to usurp all the important places in the world: they have power, position, prestige. But their cleverness betrays them at the end. In their hearts they never know what love is or deep charity and generosity, for they are enclosed in their vanity and arrogance. This has become the pattern of all the highly endowed schools. A boy or girl, accepted in the conventional school, gets trapped in modern civilization and is lost to the whole beauty of life. When you wander through the woods with heavy shadows and dappled light and suddenly come upon an open space, a green meadow surrounded by stately trees, or a sparkling stream, you wonder why man has lost his relationship to nature and the beauty of the earth, the fallen leaf and the broken branch. If you have lost touch with nature, then you will inevitably lose relationship with another. Nature is not just the flowers, the lovely green lawn or the flowing waters in your little garden, but the whole earth with all the things on it. We consider that nature exists for our use, for our convenience, and so lose communion with the earth. This sensitivity to the fallen leaf and to the tall tree on a hill is far more important than all the passing of examinations and having a bright career. Those are not the whole of life. Life is like a vast river with a great volume of water without a beginning or an ending. We take out of that fast running current a bucket of water and that confined water becomes our life. This is our conditioning and our everlasting sorrow 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 ones own pains and anxieties, but in encompassing the whole existence of man. 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.
Posted on: Mon, 29 Sep 2014 18:43:11 +0000
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