Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 4
- Choosing to do Yoga
- Order and Discipline
- Organise your Life
- Doing for Her Sake
- Will and Desire
- A Sign and A Symbol
- Sleep and Pain
- The Mind's Bazar
- Spirits in Trees
- Are Not Dogs More Faithful Than Men
- The Work Here
- Thought the Creator
- Thought and Imagination
- Poetry and Poetic Inspiration
- Divine Living
- Perfection and Progress
- Psychological Perfection
- The Origin of Desire
- Asceticism
- Are Not The Ascetic Means Helpful At Times
- Human Birth
- Regarding the Body
- Sadhana Must be Done in the Body
- On Food
- Meat-Eating
- Faith and Progress
- Value of Religious Exercises
- Prayer and Aspiration
- Meditation and Wakefulness
- Dealing with a Wrong Movement
- Personal Effort and Surrender
- The Surrender of an Inner Warrior
- Opening to the Divine
- To Melt into the Divine
- Love Divine
- Buddha and Shankara
- The Significance of Dates
- The Value of Money
- Meditation
- The Psychic Being
- The Divine Grace
- The Story of Love
- How Can Time Be a Friend
- How to Become Indifferent to Criticism
- The Modern Taste
- The Origin
- The Supramental Vision
- The Supramental Manifestation and World Change
- The True Teaching
- On Teachers and Teaching
- Education of Girls
- How to Listen
- Goal of Evolution
- Health in the Ashram
- The Mother on Herself
- Cycles of Creation
- Beyond Vedanta
- Life in and Through Death
- Transfiguration
- Mind and the Mental World
- Beyond the Dualities
- The World is One
- Consciousness as freedom
- Education as the Growth of Consciousness
- Education is Organisation
- Beyond Love and Hate
- The Divine Grace and Love
- Go Through
- Night and Day
- The Evolution of Language
- The Relative Best
- Miracles - Their True Significance
- Short Notes
- Prayers and Meditations of the Mother
- Savitri
- How to Read Sri Aurobindo and the Mother
- A True Professor
- Consciousness
- Love and Love
- God's Debt
- India the World and the Ashram
- The Mystery of the Five Senses
- The Mystery of the Five Elements
- On Discipline
- Effort and Grace
- The Moral and the Spiritual
- Cling to Truth
- The Golden Bridge
- The Opening Scene of Savitri
- The Golden Life
- Cosmonautics
- The Triple Cord
- The Ladder of Unconsciousness
- The Mounting Fire
- The Labours of the Gods
- Body-Energy
- Towards the Immortal Body
- The Test of Truth
- The Ideal Centre
- Two Equations
- In these Fateful Days
- Our Finest Hour
- Sri Aurobindo
- This Great Earth, Our Mother
- The Stress of the Spirit
- The Sorrows of God
- Love and Death
- The World Tragedy
- The Hero and the Nymph
- The Double Trinity
- Notes on Freedom
- The Story of Dr. Faustus Retold
- The Sunlit Path
- Index
The Modern Taste
FROM the standpoint of artistic and literary taste and culture, the present world is a thing of extremes. On one side, it is trying hard to discover something very noble, and on the other, it is sinking into a vulgarity which is infinitely greater than the vulgarity, say, of two or three centuries ago. In those times people who were not cultured were crude, but their crudeness resembled the crudeness of animals and had not much perversion in it-there was something certainly, for as soon as the mind appears, perversion also comes in. But in our days, what does not rise to the peak, remains on level earth, is a crudeness of the most perverted kind; that is to say, it is not only ignorant or stupid, it is ugly, dirty, repulsive, it is deformed, it is vile, it is extremely low. What makes it so is the wrong use of the mind. If there were no mind, this perversion would not exist. Now what is ugly is ugly from all points of view.
There are things that are considered beautiful these days. I have seen photographs and reproductions which are frightfully vulgar in the perverted sense, and yet people are uproarious about them and find them beautiful. That means there is something there which has not only no culture and development, but has developed in the wrong way, that is to say, is deformed, which is worse, for it is much more difficult to straighten a perverted and deformed object than to enlighten that which is merely ignorant or without education.
I believe there are certain things that have become great instruments of perversion and among them I name the Cinema. The Cinema could have been, and I hope one day it will be, an instrument of education and culture. But for the moment it is largely an instrument of perversion, a truly hideous perversion: perversion of taste, perversion of consciousness, a moral
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and even a physical ugliness. And yet it is something which can be serviceable for education, for progress, for artistic culture and growth. It can be made a means for the spread of the sense of the beautiful and the creation of things beautiful in a way much more general and accessible to all than was possible by the older methods. But what could have been better, is not better but has become worse.
As I said, we are in a period of excesses; we move from one excess to another. If it is not an excess of zeal towards perfection, we fall back into the opposite excess of perversion. As we live in the midst of such a world, if we carefully note we shall find that we automatically share in the universal vulgarism, unless we are watchful over ourselves and bring down into our being the light of our highest consciousness; at every step we run the risk of grave errors of taste, in matters spiritual also.
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