Beautiful Thought
Visitor: You said in your
Chhandogya Upanishad that the pattern of our thought must be beautiful. This
means that our spontaneous thoughts are not beautiful, but they should be. Is
this the true meaning?
SWAMIJI: What is spontaneous
thought?
Visitor: That which comes
without our instruction.
SWAMIJI: Generally,
spontaneous thought is not beautiful because it is an emotional thought, or a
distracted thought, or a thought born of anxiety. That is the usual thought
that people have, so how can it be beautiful?
Visitor: How can we make it
beautiful?
SWAMIJI: You must think that
which is beautiful. Then, your thought also becomes beautiful. You think that
which is most beautiful, and your thought immediately becomes beautiful by the
impact of the form of that which is considered beautiful. Which is that which
is beautiful? Tell me. What is beautiful?
Visitor: The unity.
SWAMIJI: Unity of what?
Visitor: To see God in all
persons and in everything.
SWAMIJI: If you can plant God
in everything, you will see only God. You will see nothing else. If you see
only God, and nothing else anywhere, that is a beautiful thought. But no other
thought can be really beautiful.
Visitor: But why does the
spontaneous thought become beautiful?
SWAMIJI: In a very advanced stage
of meditation, your spontaneous thought also will be God-thought, but normally,
a human being cannot think God always. So, effort is necessary. Meditation
requires some effort in the beginning. Otherwise, normally, people are not
thinking of God in their minds. They are thinking of their own problems, and
business, and all that, so that such thought cannot be called beautiful. But,
if you are able to spontaneously manifest God-thought only, and no other
thought, then you can say that spontaneous thought also is beautiful. Is it
possible to think only God, and no other thought will come?
Visitor: No.
SWAMIJI: So, the other
thought, which is spontaneous, naturally will not be beautiful. It will be a
fragmentary and broken thought. Only God-thought is beautiful; no other thought
can be called finally beautiful.
A complete structure is
necessary for anything to be beautiful. Nothing that is not complete can be
beautiful. So, who is complete in this world? Tell me. Nobody. And, therefore,
nobody is beautiful. Sometimes the most beautiful thing, which is God, gets
reflected in something; then, that also looks beautiful. Do you understand?
Though God alone is ultimately beautiful, that in which God is reflected also
looks beautiful. A child is beautiful, and a saint is beautiful, because both
child and saint have no ego. Wherever there is no ego, that state looks
beautiful. Wherever there is ego, it looks ugly. Egolessness is the nature of
God; and God gets reflected in a child, and also in a saint. So, both look
beautiful; but the middle people are not beautiful, because they are neither
saints nor children.
If you are a child, then you
are beautiful, because in a child there is innocence, absence of egoism, and
self-affirmation, so God reflects Himself in that condition. God can be
reflected in the things of the world also, provided these things are
"minus ego," and are innocent. Then, God will be reflected there.
A saint also has no ego. He is
like a child, so he also is radiant. Finally, it means that God is beautiful.
The essence of it is that and anything that reflects God also is beautiful. So,
if your thought is spontaneous, and spontaneously you are thinking this kind of
thing, then your thought is beautiful.
Visitor: We can achieve it only by practising more and
more?
SWAMIJI: Yes, by practising
total thinking.
Visitor: It is the only way to have those spontaneous
thoughts?
SWAMIJI: Yes – by practising.
It requires great effort on your part in the beginning to entertain a
"complete thought." Only a complete thought can be a beautiful
thought.
Visitor: What is a complete
thought?
SWAMIJI: A complete thought
has nothing outside it. It is holistic. And, only God can be so complete. That
is Beauty.
Excerpts from:
Beautiful Thought - Chapter 29 Your Questions
Answered by Swami Krishnananda
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