MIND : ITS MYSTERIES AND CONTROL : 23.3.1

Chapter 23 : Pleasure And Pain : 3.1
3. Sense-Pleasure Is Only A Mental Deception-1.

Pleasure and pain, beauty and ugliness are all false imaginations of the mind. Mind is a false illusory product.
Conceptions of the mind also must, therefore, be false.
They are all Mrigatrishna (like a mirage in the desert).

What is beautiful for you is ugly for another.
Beauty and ugliness are relative terms.
Beauty is only a mental concept. It is only a mental projection.
It is only a civilised man that takes much of symmetry of form, good features, graceful gaits, elegance of manners, graceful form,

An African negro has no idea of all these things.
Real beauty is in the Self only.
Pleasure and beauty reside in the mind and not in the objects.
Mango is not sweet; the idea of mango is sweet.

It is all Vritti.
It is all mental deception, mental conception, mental creation, mental Srishti.

Destroy the Vritti; beauty vanishes.

The husband stretches his own idea of beauty in his ugly wife and finds his wife very beautiful through passion.

Shakespeare has rightly expressed this in his "Mid-summer Night's Dream": -
"Cupid is painted blind. It finds Helen's beauty in the brow of Egypt."
Swami Sivananda
   To be continued....