The concept of beauty in integral yoga



Integral yoga and beauty . If we analyze ourselves deeply, we can still find within us the roots of a medieval tendency to reject what is beautiful as an agent of distraction and deviation from the spiritual path.

The woman tout-court was a temptation, and all the beautiful things in the world were a desire for vanity.

Vitality was then harassed and humiliated in favor of a paralyzing " memento mori ", or "remember that you must die".

Although not so manifestly manifest, this tendency is often unconsciously still active in us, a tendency to connect what is spiritual to what is austere, serious, detached from the transient.

This tendency is not typically Western and Semitic, we find it also in India, where, following Buddhism which declares that forms and life itself are an illusion, an intense lack of interest in the outer sphere of existence has precipitated individuals and society in a rotting stagnation, a lazy and sleepy decomposition, a passivity that resulted in degradation is that it required a colonial invasion to be shaken.

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Beauty: a power

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were clear about this point: beauty is a real power.

If the purpose of the spirit is bliss, that of the mind is knowledge, the purpose of life is power, that of matter is beauty.

Beauty is in matter what in truth is the truth in the higher spheres. When the Mother joined Sri Aurobindo's ashram in Podicherry, she first brought this vibration of beauty with her ... order, hygiene, care, rejection of bad smells, ungainly ways, habits that favor inertia and disorder, discipline and care of the body, a continuous harmony that ranges from everyday practices, to architecture, to flower-filled gardens and clothes.

Someone objected that the Mother spent energies in frivolous things like taking care of her own external appearance, and Sri Aurobindo himself replied that the Mother works through beauty and that preventing her from expressing it would be like asking her not to meditate .

Spiritual beauty

One of the reasons why beauty has been separated from spiritual life is that it (or rather, what is commonly believed to be beauty) is often a vehicle for things very different from the vibrations of the spirit. Often it is vulgar and does not elevate consciousness but rather lowers it, excites it.

There is talk of a vital beauty, linked to the astral, submental energies, typical of animals and of animal man, which considers the objects of life to be something to consume, the type of person who consumes and is consumed.

The solution proposed by the Semitic tendencies and by the oriental illusionist schools was that of refusing life to confine itself to a sterile spirituality .

Many modern neo-pagan tendencies propose to tolerate animal vitality.

In integral yoga the vital powers are neither mortified nor tolerated in their lower form but are assumed and integrated for a transformation.

The four aspects of the Mother

According to integral yoga, the cosmic Mother manifests itself in three main ways:

> The first is a patient, sovereign, compassionate aspect of universal wisdom that grants each creature what it needs to express its divine potential.

> A second aspect is made of irresistible, unredeemed and irrepressible power, an ardent, impetuous and transforming will.

> A third aspect is intimate, does not judge, works in detail with a direct and secret knowledge, precise, accurate, always at work.

> But the Mother would not be the Mother without a fourth aspect: the sweet wonder, the ecstasy and the harmony of a beauty that shakes the world and ignites aspirations, the grace of the universes, the mystery of a love that makes wisdom, the power and perfection even wiser, more powerful and more perfect.

It is the miracle that attracts all the elements of the cosmos, an enchantment that binds them together, intoxicates the matter of the spirit, its solar gaze transforms being with a play of shapes, rhythms, unfathomable melodies.

However, this Mother does not grant herself where beauty is absent, where disharmony, ill will, pettiness, letting go, regress, gross and sordid, wallow.

This power is granted and in the soul that aspires and manifests itself with a beauty that embodies something timeless .

It is no coincidence that beauty is also considered a parameter of sustainability and therefore lasts over time: when we create beautiful things, we have a tendency to maintain them, cure them, remember them ... the ugly is gladly broken and rebuilt, with a waste of strength and resources.

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