Whatsoever you see creates its echo within you
Someone asked a great French artist why he painted. He said, "I draw pictures only to find what form a certain emotion, a certain feeling of my heart, can take on a canvas. In my efforts to express that feeling, a picture emerges." If someone meditates on that picture, he can experience the same emotion as was present in the painter’s heart.
When you see a painting you just see a form; you don’t realize that the soul of the artist is entering you. Those crisscross lines on the canvas are not just the lines of that form. If you concentrate on them, a picture with crisscross lines will emerge within you too... because it is the nature of the mind that it vibrates in you with a similar resonance to that which it sees outside it.
You probably do not know that the joy which you feel when you see a flower is not so much because of the flower itself but because of the symmetry of its petals, which is also induced in you. When you are attracted to a beautiful face of someone, it is not because of that person’s beauty but because it corresponds to your inner image of beauty. It produces a resonance of beauty in you which makes you feel that something within you is also beautified. In a similar way, the presence of an ugly face makes you feel uncomfortable. The experience of joy in the presence of someone who is beautiful is because of the flow of beauty which it brings about in you, making you also more beautiful. Ugliness means that something is disproportionate, crude, non-symmetrical and crooked; and this evokes in us a feeling of disharmony, repulsion, disorder and discomfort.
Nijinsky, the famous Russian ballet dancer, committed suicide. When people went to his house to investigate, they came out within ten or fifteen minutes feeling a sort of discomfort. They said that it did not feel good to go into his house, that if anyone stayed in it as long as Nijinsky had, they too would commit suicide. What was it about his house which was so unpleasant? He had painted all the walls and ceilings red and black – for two years it had been like this. It was not surprising that he went mad and that he committed suicide. Those who went inside his house said that if anyone were to stay in that house for two years they would also go mad and commit suicide. Nijinsky must have been a very courageous man – he had created around himself a very anarchic situation.
Whatsoever you see creates its echo within you, and in some deep sense you become like that which you see.
Hidden Mysteries, Chapter #4 - Osho