That is really cool. I don't think I've ever written a poem like that. But now I've got something to work on!

. I want you to understand this ...

. Truth always leads to beauty, but beauty does not lead necessarily to truth ...

. See, attentively this insight from Lau Tsu -

"True words are rarely elaborate.
Elaborate words are rarely truthful.
Good words are rarely eloquent.
Eloquent words are rarely good.
He who knows is rarely learned.
He who is learned rarely knows.
The wise do not hoard wisdom."

. Milarepa, a poet is not in search of truth. His search is for beauty, and through the search for beauty nobody has ever become enlightened. One can become a great poet, a great painter, a great singer, a great dancer; but on the path of beauty, enlightenment is not possible.

. The seeker of truth, and only the seeker of truth, attains to enlightenment. And this is the miracle of enlightenment that once you have discovered truth, then beauty, the good, and all that is valuable simply become available to you.

. Beauty cannot lead to enlightenment, but enlightenment opens your eyes to all dimensions and all directions.

. Rabindranath was very close to enlightenment, but his search was not for enlightenment – he was searching for the beautiful. And the search for the beautiful, deep down is the search for expressing beauty – in words, in music, in dance, in any kind of creativity. The seeker of beauty is really seeking a vision which he can reproduce in his poetry, in his song, in his painting. Always the search is inner, but the goal is somewhere outside. And that’s the problem for all great creative people: they come to know, but then expression becomes difficult; they come to experience beauty, but how to share it? You may see a rose flower and be suddenly overwhelmed by its beauty, but how to share it? How to express it?

. The concern of the artist is expression; the concern of the seeker is experience. Neither of them is able to express, but because the seeker of truth is totally concerned with experiencing, he comes to enlightenment, and he can die with a smile on his face, with fulfillment, whether he has been able to say something about it or not – that is not his concern, that is not his angst, his anxiety.

. The artist also comes to know what he is seeking, but his problem is that basically, his interest in seeking beauty is for expression – and expression is almost impossible. At the most you can stutter a little bit – all your songs are stutterings of great poets. They look beautiful to you, immensely meaningful and significant, but to the poet… he knows he has failed.

. All artists, either in the East or in the West, have felt an immense failure. They have tried their best, and they have produced great pieces of art – for us they are great pieces of art, but for them they are faraway echoes of their experience. Hence, they die either mad….

. Almost seventy percent of painters, dancers, poets have gone mad. They have made too much effort. They have put too much tension into their being, so that it brought a breakdown, a nervous breakdown. And many of the artists have even committed suicide. The wound of failure became unbearable: to live any longer and to carry the same wound, and feeling again and again… became too difficult, and it was better to destroy oneself. And those who have not gone mad or committed suicide, they have also not died in a blissful way.

. In the East, we have defined the ultimate values as three: satyam, shivam, sundaram. Satyam means truth – that is the highest. The seeker, the mystic follows that path. Then comes shivam: goodness, virtue. The moralist, the saint, the sage – they follow that path. And sundaram means beauty. The poets, the singers, the musicians – they follow that path.

. Those who attain to truth automatically come to know what is good and what is beauty. Those who follow good, neither come to know what is true, nor do they come to know what is beauty. The followers of good – the moralists, the puritans – also never achieve enlightenment. All that they achieve is a repressed personality – very beautiful on the surface, but deep inside very ugly. They have great reputation, honor, respect, but inside they are hollow.

. The people who follow sundaram, beauty, are inside fulfilled, utterly fulfilled, but their misery is that, that is not their aim: just to be fulfilled. They want all that they have experienced to be brought into language, into paintings, into sculpture, into architecture. Hence, even though they have experienced beautiful spaces they remain anxiety-ridden.

. The people who follow beauty are most often not very respectable – not in the same sense as the saints are. They are very natural people, very loving and very lovable, but they don’t have any ego, any idea of holier-than-thou; they remain just simple and ordinary.

. So the people who have become enlightened have never painted, have never made beautiful statues, have never composed music; they have never danced. They have never followed the dictates of the society, they have never followed the conventions of the society; hence most of them have been crucified, poisoned, killed – because people want you to be a puritan, a moralist. In people’s eyes morality is a social value, truth is not. Beauty is for entertainment; they don’t take it seriously.

Great post. In the West the German romantic poets, inspired by Rousseau, were the ones who started saying "follow the heart and beauty and don't worry about all the questions of the head". I feel like in the face of criticism members of religions tend to say the same thing, but that is another topic

Almost seventy percent of painters, dancers, poets have gone mad. — Anand-Haqq

I dont know if this is completely accurate, but some people have a more artistic side and often leads to mental illness. People who are too analytical and only seek truth often become mentally ill too. So we have to be careful against generalizations. The middle way is usually preferable, but everyone has to follow their own conscience. My conscience may tell me to do something you think is immoral, but I do not care, because it's my conscience, my business. That's the essence of Western culture

"Like beauty, however, what is negative and what is positive lies in the eye of the beholder, and what is negative for one may turn out to be another's supreme ideal" wrote a Buddhist once. Tolerance is evenness of mind