The beauty of the soul reveals the spring and dynamism of its creative play instinct.
With its help it can reconcile the opposites of good and evil, light and darkness within us and lead us to blissful serenity.
In the Bhagavad Gita (Chapter 15) the universe is depicted in the image of a cosmic world tree. Its shape cannot be perceived by us. It is rooted in the heights of spiritual-divine worlds of Being (Sat), Consciousness (Cit) and Bliss (Ananda). Its branches and fruits reach down to the earth and awaken the desire of man. But by reaching for them and clinging to them, he takes root in the earth. From then on, he experiences the eternal coming into being of the divine gifts in the earthly opposites of birth and death, good and evil, light and darkness. He is given the task of turning back and assimilating himself to the divine world tree, in other words, from an earthly perspective, to become an inverted tree (arbor inversa) that draws its essential nutrients from heaven.
When his soul is able to free the gifts of eternal nature in himself, its great beauty will be able to creatively unfold in him. One of its most valuable fruits will be the rediscovered blissful serenity.
Cheerfulness is nowadays a fair-weather term and refers to a radiant sun above a clear blue and cloudless sky. However, it also refers to the pure mood of a state of mind in which the inner and outer worlds are not separated.
We often experience this state without realizing its full significance.
I remember moments when I was able to experience the inner state of this serenity.
I was used to swimming in the Atlantic ocean in summer. I knew only too well that it can be very dangerous. It was also always cold, and it was a real effort of will for me to dive into it. On those summer days, it had the color of a clear blue ocean reflecting the bright, cloudless blue sky and the light of the sun. I swam into this blue infinity and felt safe in it. The more I moved away from the mainland, the easier it was for me to let go of all my inner hardships and attachments, and in the midst of this beauty and freedom, all my limbs stirred and new inner strength flooded through me.
This experience has left a deep impression on me. Today I can interpret it as a call from eternity to make my way to it and let it fill my soul completely. It was the serenity of the Heaven that was reflected in me and created a very special state of well-being by stimulating all my powers and bringing about a union of inner light, refreshing clarity and free mobility.
The German word for serenity, Heiterkeit, originally meant clarity, lightfulness.
No wonder that we call the 18th century the Age of Enlightenment and the French call it the siècle des lumières, the “century of lights”. These terms refer to the keen, bright and intellectually lucid (i.e. emotionless) inner enlightenment of the great minds of the time.
Serenity differs from other forms of a good attitude to life. Merriment, for example, can be lively and bustling and burst into loud laughter, while joking can express the release of inner tension.
In the Romance countries, the term “cheerfulness” is derived from the Latin serenus (cheerful, serene) [1] and refers to the calm and contemplative attitude of a person who is serenely and calmly above things with a certain composure.
Life is serious, serene is art
This sentence ends Schiller’s prologue to his historical drama Wallenstein. Wallenstein, the Habsburg emperor’s successful general during the Thirty Years’ War and hero of the drama, is torn between the fulfilment of duty and free rebellion. Ultimately, he becomes the victim of his imaginative plans to bring the Thirty Years’ War to an early end and will express his disillusionment by stating:
But here is no choice, I must exercise violence or suffer […] War feeds war.
Cheerfulness is not a gift to be taken for granted, but a virtue that is acquired in the struggle with the dark forces of life.
Schiller presents a utopian artistic model that envisages an “aesthetic education of man”. This means that the original, creative-artistic faculty of the human soul is awakened. The soul should become free again from the domination of the opposing drives that weigh it down: the compulsion of its physical-sensual nature (the “material instinct”) on the one hand, and that of its nature endowed with reason (the “form instinct”) on the other. Thus, the inner will to substance and the will to form in man are opposed to each other. However, there is a third faculty in the soul, which Schiller calls its “play instinct”.
I would like to again give an example from my childhood that shows how the beauty of the human soul can revitalize its inner play instinct and make it the greatest artist of our lives.
Since I was born towards the end of the last world war into the chaotic and dark post-war years, I longed for light and clarity from an early age. I lived surrounded by music and its sounds, as my mother (a wonderful pianist) practiced for days on end – especially romantic music. This music, however, oppressed me and I always asked her to please play Mozart for me, his A major sonata. As soon as I heard this music, my soul brightened up again. What was happening inside me? Mozart, who himself had to go through deep emotional abysses in his life, was able to creatively process his inner longing for light, and his music is therefore usually described as cheerful. “In my deepest distress, I still find a beautiful resonance that gives me hope”, he said. Mozart awakened this resonance in me too. However, as my mother later explained to me, anyone who only plays him cheerfully has not understood him.
I learnt later that his cheerfulness was the fruit of his difficult and tragic inner artistic struggle for the unbroken beauty of his soul.
Thus, it is the beauty of the soul that reveals the spring and dynamism of its creative play instinct. We are called to contribute to the perfection of our soul. The play instinct is given to us for this purpose, because the great work of our renewal – despite all the effort involved – is accomplished through play. With the help of the play instinct, the soul is able to reunite the opposites of good and evil, light and darkness within us and lead us to blissful serenity (Ananda), which springs from the soul’s rediscovered, superior inner peace. In this way, the play instinct of my still open childlike soul was unconsciously stimulated and a process within me was stimulated in which I experienced how the opposing forces and impressions can unite on a higher level.
Thus, the beauty of the soul is a force on whose wings it rises up again towards heaven, and Mozart finally said:
How beautiful life was! We have to be cheerful, that is what Providence has destined us to be.
Literature:
Friedrich Schiller, Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen – in einer Reihe von Briefen (On the Aesthetic Education of Man – in a series of letters), Reclam, Ditzingen 2000.
Harald Weinrich, Kleine Literaturgeschichte der Heiterkeit (A short literary history of cheerfulness), Munich, 2001
Francois Cheng, Über die Schönheit der Seele (On the Beauty of the Soul), Munich, 2018
The quotations from Mozart can be found as “Mozart quotes” at: https//:Worldday.de
[1] serenus (Latin) developed into sérénité in French, serenidad in Spanish and sereno in Portuguese.
