Mila (Venezuela)  You said in your Chhandogya Upanishad that the pattern of our thought must be beautiful. This means that our spontaneous thoughts are stupid, but the spontaneous thoughts should be beautiful? Is this the true meaning?

SWAMIJI:  What is spontaneous thought?

Mila:  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?

Mila:  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?

Mila:  The unity.

SWAMIJI:  Unity of what?

Mila:  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.

Mila:  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?

Mila:  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. Do you understand me?

Mila:  Yes.

SWAMIJI:  It is very important. So, either you be a child or a saint. Otherwise it is no good. In the middle you are hanging; that is no good as a beautiful thing.

Mila:  I am in the middle. I am old and still not beautiful.

SWAMIJI:  So, you are a child, or a saint? What are you?

Bhavagrahi:  Child.

SWAMIJI:  Saint?

Bhavagrahi:  Child.

SWAMIJI:  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.

There are beautiful things in the world, like small babies. Small children are beautiful. Anybody's children are beautiful, but when they grow with moustache and beard and ego, they are no good. 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.

Mila:  We can achieve it only by practising more and more?

SWAMIJI:  Yes, by practising total thinking.

Mila:  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.

Mila:  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.