The Feast of Life - 2

How About Mental Pleasures?

Higher pleasures of the mind, literature, art, music, religion and philosophy. What does a painting do except to give us a landscape or a portrait and recall in us the sensuous pleasures of seeing a real landscape or a beautiful face?  And what does literature does except to re-create a picture of life, to give us the atmosphere and colour, the fragrant smell of the pastures or the stretch of city glitters?

Poetry is but, truth coloured with emotion, music is sentiment without words and religion is but wisdom expressed in fancy.  As painting is based on colour and vision, poetry is based on the sense of sound and tone and rhythm in addition to its emotional truth.

Music is pure sentiment itself, dispensing entirely with the language of words with which alone the intellect can operate.

Degeneration of religion begins with reason.  This religion unhappingly long ago ceased to be wisdom expressed in fancy in order to become superstition overlaid with reasoning.  The delay of religion is due to pedantic spirit in the invention of creeds, formulas, articles of faith, doctrines and apologies.  We become increasingly our beliefs and become so sure that we are right.  That’s why every religion becomes a narrow sect, which believes itself to have discovered the only truth.  Consequently, more we justify our beliefs, more narrow minded we become.  This has led the religion to be associated with the worst forms of bigotry, narrow mindedness and pure selfishness in personal life.

I can see no other for the existence of art and poetry and religion expect as they tend to restore in us a freshness of vision and a more emotional glamour and more vital sense of life.  For as we grow older in life, our senses become gradually benumbed, our emotions becomes more callous to suffering and injustice and cruelty, and our vision of life is warped by too much preoccupation with cold, trivial realities.

Art should be a satire and a warning against our paralyzed emotions, our devitalized thinking and our denaturalized living.  It teaches us unsophistication in a sophisticated world.  Miserable indeed is a world where we have knowledge without understanding, criticism without appreciation, beauty without love, truth without passion, righteousness without mercy and courtesy without a warm heart.

I prefer talking with a coloured maid to talking to a mathematician.  Her words are more concrete her laughter is more energetic and I generally gain more in knowledge of human nature by talking with her.

Any true philosopher or true human being ought to be ashamed to of himself when he sees a child or even a lion cub in a cage.  How perfectly nature has fashioned him with his paws, with muscles, his beautiful coat of fur, his pricking ears, his bright round eyes, his agility and his sense of fun.  God made perfection become man made imperfection.

What is God given is called nature, the follow the nature is called “the way”, to cultivate the way is called culture.  Before joy, anger, sadness and happiness are expressed, they are called the inner self.  When they are expressed to the proper degree, they are called harmony.  When a man has achieved the inner self and harmony, the heaven and earth are orderly and the myrid things are nourished and grow thereby.

To arrive at understanding from being ones true self is called nature and to arrive at being-one’s true self from understanding is called nature.  He who is his true self has thereby understanding and he who has understanding finds thereby his true self.  Only those who are their absolute selves in the world can fulfill their own nature.  Only those who fulfill their own nature can fulfill the nature of others can fulfill the nature of things.  Those who fulfill the nature of things are worthy to help Mother Nature in growing and sustaining life.  And those who are worthy to help Mother Nature in growing and sustaining life are the equals of heaven and earth.