There is an eternal law that can guide man. It will never leave him in doubt about what he should do. It contains no room for extenuating circumstances, justifications or changing values of the kind that snarl up man-made and mind-made laws. It is a law that the innocent bewildered part of man can understand. Even though he may infringe it, he can see for himself at every turn of the way the unerring signpost of eternal justice.
The law is: Divide and die.
This law does not refer to physical division but to the mental fences we erect. We live in a narrow no-man’s land of fences that divide us from the world on one side and our being on the other.
You are your being when you know the moment of love and experience the happiest, most ecstatic moments of your life — moments that do not come from fulfilling any desire you can name. It is your being that knows love. It is your being that knows beauty.
Your being is your self made conscious. Your non-conscious self is mechanical man with his robot mind. The robot cannot experience love or beauty. Nor can it know your being. But when the mind is still and innocent of desire it becomes transparent.
Then you become your being and you shine through the machine like a thousand suns. You feel divine. And you are.
Your being unites: your mind divides.
Division is death for your being and life for your mind.
Only by division does the individual robot grow.
Union is death to your mind and life to your being.
Union is immortality.
When you smile and mean it, in the moment of giving yourself your being reaches out and unites with the object of your smile. It might be two birds playing on a branch or an infant trying to stand up. In smiling you have added the object to your being; and yet you have given of yourself. You become bigger; and yet you have become smaller. It is your beautiful being that is bigger: your divisive thinking self is smaller. You don’t suffer when you smile.
When you frown or scowl you divide yourself from the object or event. Instead of going out to it, you step back from it. Your beautiful being shrinks and you, your mind, the thinker, the judge, the divider, the individual robot, grow bigger. You have divided yourself from another and by the eternal law you must suffer. The immediate penalty for breaking the law is unhappiness — feelings of irritation, anger, hatred, envy and bitterness.
But this is an eternal law too. Its justice is felt in the eternal world as well as in time. While you go on breaking this great law you separate yourself from immortality; for it is your being that is immortal. Unless you are being your being you are not immortal.
To divide yourself from your being is living death. But that is how man lives — in a sort of death which he treasures as life. Do you see the superb justice of this great law?
You do not really harm others with your scowl or curse. You harm yourself.
This law is for the individual alone, because only individuals can learn to be honest with themselves. All the world may say a man has done wrong, but if he knows his words or actions have not been divisive, he is free.
Only the individual can know if he or she has obeyed the law. And the knowledge is important only to the individual.
Your being knows only two states. One is the state of neutrality or rest; the other is beauty.
The harmony of beauty is in being. When you suddenly see something of beauty, and you like it immediately, without thinking, its beauty has struck the same note of beauty in your being.
There are no opposites in being; no liking or disliking. Neither beauty nor neutrality requires judgment. They are states, just as immersion in water is a state, and you do not have to judge or think to experience them.
Being either likes and loves (and in the absence of thought that is beauty); or being is neutral and life is spent in innocent indifference to most of the things around you.
Mind is busy all the time. It hates the state of neutrality, or being at rest without an interest to occupy it, because that threatens its mastery. When it encounters the state it rushes for a book or the television or someone to talk to.
Mind’s desperate measures to fill every moment keep you from consciously being your immortal being. To consciously reach your being you have to resist the mind’s constant demand for activity, and endure the restlessness, loneliness and discontent.
If you feel disharmony with a person or in a place, then go. There is no need to be divided. Unite yourself with another place or person.
I like this post. I've never thought about beauty in this way, but I can recognise all the things you're saying.