The Mother

लेख्य-चैत्य-पाषाण-मृन्मय-काष्ठ-मिश्रादि-प्रतिमा-लक्षण।
ध्यानयोगस्य संसिद्धैः प्रतिमालक्षणं स्मृत ॥

The characteristics of an image (be it painted, or made of stone, clay, or wood)
are determined by the perfection of dhyana-yoga (meditative vision). It is the inner vision that dictates the proportions and features of the sacred art.

The Significance Of Indian Art

A great oriental work of art does not easily reveal its secret to one who comes to it solely in a mood of aesthetic curiosity or with a considering critical objective mind, still less as the cultivated and interested tourist passing among strange and foreign things; but it has to be seen in loneliness, in the solitude of one's self, in moments when one is capable of long and deep meditation and as little weighted as possible with the conventions of material life.

Sri Aurobindo
The Significance Of Indian Art

The Significance of Indian Architecture

The Significance of Indian Sculpture

Indian Painting and Its Central Motive and Significance

Sri Aurobindo

Architecture, sculpture and painting, because they are the three great arts which appeal to the spirit through the eye, are those too in which the sensible and the invisible meet with the strongest emphasis on themselves and yet the greatest necessity of each other. The form with its insistent masses, proportions, lines, colours, can here only justify them by their service for the something intangible it has to express; the spirit needs all the possible help of the material body to interpret itself to itself through the eye, yet asks of it that it shall be as transparent a veil as possible of its own greater significance.

Sri Aurobindo
The Significance Of Indian Art

A seeing in the self accordingly becomes the characteristic method of the Indian artist and it is directly enjoined on him by the canon. He has to see first in his spiritual being the truth of the thing he must express and to create its form in his intuitive mind; he is not bound to look out first on outward life and Nature for his model, his authority, his rule, his teacher or his fountain of suggestions.

Sri Aurobindo
The Significance Of Indian Art

The Yogin's aim in the Arts should not be a mere aesthetic, mental or vital gratification, but, seeing the Divine everywhere, worshipping it with a revelation of the meaning of its works, to express that One Divine in Gods and men and creatures and objects. The theory that sees an intimate connection between religious aspiration and the truest and greatest Art is in essence right; but we must substitute for the mixed and doubtful religious motive a spiritual aspiration, vision, interpreting experience. For the wider and more comprehensive the seeing, the more it contains in itself the sense of the hidden Divine in humanity and in all things and rises beyond a superficial religiosity into the spiritual life, the more luminous, flexible, deep and powerful will the Art be that springs from that high motive.

Sri Aurobindo
handwritten by The Mother

Never forget that you are not alone.
The Divine is with you helping and guiding you.
He is the companion who never fails,
the friend whose love comforts and strengthens.
Have faith and He will do everything for you

- The Mother

The theory of ancient Indian art at its greatest—and the greatest gives its character to the rest and throws on it something of its stamp and influence—is of another kind. Its highest business is to disclose something of the Self, the Infinite, the Divine to the regard of the soul, the Self through its expressions, the Infinite through its living finite symbols, the Divine through his powers. Or the Godheads are to be revealed, luminously interpreted or in some way suggested to the soul's understanding or to its devotion or at the very least to a spiritually or religiously aesthetic emotion.

Sri Aurobindo
The Significance Of Indian Art

This yoga implies not only the realisation of God, but an entire consecration and change of the inner and outer life till it is fit to manifest a divine consciousness and become part of a divine work. This means an inner discipline far more exacting and difficult than mere ethical and physical austerities. One must not enter on this path, far vaster and more arduous than most ways of yoga, unless one is sure of the psychic call and of one's readiness to go through to the end.

Sri Aurobindo

Open to Sri Aurobindo's consciousness and let it transform your life .

The Mother