Rabindranath Tagore

Creative Unity Rabindranath Tagore

CIVILITY is beauty of behaviour. It requires for its perfection patience, self-control, and anenvironment of leisure. For genuine courtesy is a creation, like pictures, like music. It is aharmonious blending of voice, gesture and movement, words and action, in whichgenerosity of conduct is expressed. It reveals the man himself and has no ulterior purpose. Our needs are always in a hurry. They rush and hustle, they are rude andunceremonious; they have no surplus of leisure, no patience for anything else but fulfilmentof purpose. We frequently see in our country at the present day men utilising emptykerosene cans for carrying water. These cans are emblems of discourtesy; they are curt andabrupt, they have not the least shame for their unmannerliness, they do not care to be everso slightly more than useful. The instruments of our necessity assert that we must have food, shelter, clothes, comforts and convenience. And yet men spend an immense amount of their time andresources in contradicting this assertion, to prove that they are not a mere living catalogueof endless wants; that there is in them an ideal of perfection, a sense of unity, which is aharmony between parts and a harmony with surroundings. The quality of the infinite is not the magnitude of extension, it is in the Advaitam, themystery of Unity. Facts occupy endless time and space; but the truth comprehending themall has no dimension; it is One. Wherever our heart touches the One, in the small or the big, it finds the touch of the infinite. I was speaking to some one of the joy we have in our personality. I said it was becausewe were made conscious by it of a spirit of unity within ourselves. He answered that he hadno such feeling of joy about himself, but I was sure he exaggerated. In all probability he hadbeen suffering from some break of harmony between his surroundings and the spirit ofunity within him, proving all the more strongly its truth. The meaning of health comeshome to us with painful force when disease disturbs it; since health expresses the unity ofthe vital functions and is accordingly joyful. Life's tragedies occur, not to demonstrate theirown reality, but to reveal that eternal principle of joy in life, to which they gave a rudeshaking. It is the object of this Oneness in us to realise its infinity by perfect union of lovewith others. All obstacles to this union create misery, giving rise to the baser passions thatare expressions of finitude, of that separateness which is negative and therefore máyá. The joy of unity within ourselves, seeking expression, becomes creative; whereas ourdesire for the fulfilment of our needs is constructive. The water vessel, taken as a vesselonly, raises the question, "Why does it exist at all?" Through its fitness of construction, itoffers the apology for its existence. But where it is a work of beauty it has no question toanswer; it has nothing to do, but to be. It reveals in its form a unity to which all that seemsvarious in it is so related that, in a mysterious manner, it strikes sympathetic chords to themusic of unity in our own being.