Is black beautiful?

By BA Paramadvaiti Swami - 3.8 2018

The colours of this world mixed all together produce white, and absence of colour is black.

Black is different. It's the entry door to a world which cannot be seen with your eyes. Black represents darkness and light represents enlightenment, therefore we sometimes see the notion of people who thinks that black represents something nasty, dangerous or undesirable. This is a superficial observation of the subject because we see that black is also represented by Śyāmasundara, the beautiful blackish Lord.
 His skin colour is actually compared to a dark and rainloaded cloud which is almost black. Śyāmasundara represents Satyam, Śivam, Sundaram – the truth, auspiciousness and beauty personified, because he is the infinite lord of love who's coming to this world to teach both love and wisdom.

-Love in his rasa lila promotion, which he has given to humanity. The loving circle dance.
-Knowledge when he speaks the Bhagavad Gītā to Arjuna, his student, on the science of self realisation.

Here black, in the form of Śyām or Kṛṣṇa, is the door to the infinite opening by the divine manifestation of feelings (bhāva), rāga (music) and tāla (rhythm). Śyāmasundara is the personification of divine feelings of love. He is the personification of the flute sound playing all the ragas, capturing the hearts of humanity and especially the gopis. When he moves his feet, the anklebelts produce all the possible rhythms imaginable. Thus his feelings, his love, his bhāv has created a whole culture which is called Bhārata Varṣa – The land of feelings, music and rhythm in the service of the infinite. That is why we should be very cautious to not become influenced by the superficial interpretation of black.

Skin colours has motivated humanity to develop a pattern of prejudicism in which, the lighter and fairer your skin is, the more civilised and fortunate you should be considered. It gives the feeling that any color and shade darker than white indicates some inferior elements coming up. This discriminates all the yellowish and brownish shades which are there in the skin colors of humanity. All the way to very dark brown and some almost black colours, even though the real black does not exist as a colour. There's no colour pigment called black in the human body.

Here we see that these differences in colour is just a great test for humanity of their compassion. It is very surprising that the people who are supposed to be somewhat inferior by this colour interpretation of racial prejudice, are generally the more compassionate, spiritually inclined, musical and rhythmic people as well as being the people with the strongest feelings. They have strong feelings of love, which you can find if you open mindedly listen to the spiritual interpretations of the ancestral people in this world. The Vedic interpretation of the brownish coloured Indians also has the deepest philosophy and criteria for understanding the duties of the human form of life. But those who are in this ethnic superiority consciousness (in this case mainly Europeans), has developed a superiority thinking which has turned them into criminals, violating human rights nonstop. It is misery for the others, so how can we have any consideration based on skin colour and connect it to human quality?

From that i can conclude that black is really beautiful, brown is beautiful and any color is beautiful if love is there within the person who has that colour of his skin. Because it’s not the skin colour that that makes you wise or loving - It’s your inner development, your spiritual evolution, your understanding that you’re not this material body. That is what gives you any status of understanding truth, love, humanity and that the whole world is one family maintained by the one and same supreme power, who feeds the white, black, yellow, green, red, whoever. If we are not going beyond the prejudice and if we’re not understanding the mystical nature of life, then we will not even be able to really understand what the word beautiful even means.