' External stimulus '...

To have seen Himalaya's snows turn pink at sunset and the Taj Mahal's marble turn phosphorescent in moonlight, is to have seen beauty indeed.

Yet after all it is not the place or the handiwork that really matters when we have gone, but the emotion evoked, the memory etched, and the taste refined.

All these are mental things.

We find at such high moments of appreciation, of aesthetic uplift, that the very essence of beauty is already present within ourselves, is an internal fact, made momentarily vivid by an external stimulus.



-- Notebooks Category 21: Mentalism >
Chapter 2: The World As Mental > # 71
Paul Brunton