Part I

SCA 1167-1171. These questions were asked in 1976.

Question: How can we see life itself as art?

Sri Chinmoy: When you have a good thought, feel that it is your art. You have created that good thought. And the next thing is, that good thought has to feel the necessity of manifesting you. So your creation is your thought, and your thought’s duty is to manifest you. Anything that you do from now on should be based on that realisation.

When you talk to someone, immediately the goodwill that you feel for that person must come to the fore so that you can manifest more of your divinity.

If art and life cannot be combined, then life will not be fulfilled. Art in life is your aspiration and art without life is inconscience or ignorance. You have to combine art and life at every moment while you are aspiring. It is your life and when you do not use it to aspire, that is your spiritual death. While you aspire, you are alive. While you are not aspiring, you are dead.

In a sense, you can say that both life and death are art. But the art that is not alive has to be brought into the art that is alive. We are in ignorance. That is one art, true. Again, if we are aspiring to become a divine instrument of God, that is another art. So the lesser art, which we right now represent, has to enter into the higher art.

The lesser or inferior art is lack of oneness with God and the superior art is conscious oneness with God. Every day you stand between the inferior art and the superior art. Early in the morning, when you pray and meditate, you create a higher art. At that time you are consciously aware of God. Then, during the day, the moment you are about to forget God, just catch your awareness and throw it into your morning prayer. In this way, you are compelling your inferior art to enter into the superior.

Life is divided into conscious art and unconscious art, superior art and inferior art, higher art and lesser art. So it is you who have to be between the two arts and throw the lesser one into the higher one, the inferior into the superior, the unconscious into the conscious. Then life’s problems will be solved.