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of the body. But physical beauty does not make a person necessarily beautiful, because a very ugly soul can exist in a very beautiful body. And it happens more often, because the people who have beautiful bodies don't care much about the soul; they are satisfied with the beautiful body. They have already 'got it' they feel, there is nothing else to achieve, god has given them enough, so they remain confined to the body, and deep down an ugly ungraceful soul exists.
This is one of the problems: when people fall in love with each other they fall in love with their physical beauty -- naturally because that is apparent, you can see it. Slowly, slowly, when you live together you start becoming aware of the inner. It needs a little intimacy, time, patience, different situations, different contexts, in which the inner can become revealed. And the moment the inner becomes revealed, problems arise; the honeymoon is over. Then there is conflict and jealousy and domination, and all kinds of ugly things start surfacing.
Grace means inner beauty: the beauty of meditation, prayer, love compassion. The contemporary mind is too concerned with the physical. There are many beauticians, hairdressers, and so much goes on in the name of physical beauty; almost seventy per cent industry in the world is concerned with the physical. And nobody seems to be concerned with the spiritual beauty. That's exactly our concern.
Sannyas means an effort to create inner beauty, a beauty which is not of the body, not even of the mind, but of your consciousness. And this is the mystery: once your consciousness has grace, your whole body becomes beautiful, suffused with the inner. The inner starts filtering out of the physical, it starts radiating.
There are two traditions about Jesus. One tradition says he was very ugly, the other tradition says he was very beautiful. Down the ages Christians have been quarreling about what was actually the case, and they cannot decide. My feeling is that he was both. He must have been physically ugly and then suddenly when the inner explosion happened, the grace started flowing though his ugly body, he must have looked beautiful, tremendously
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