BEAUTY - our aesthetic ground

Beauty is truth, truth is beauty, - that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

(Keats)

As initially conceived, it was thought that the benefits of Dialogue would be best attained amongst a group of approximately 30 people who wished to explore their personal depths, and learn from others’ similarly shared explorations. There would be no ‘leader’ guiding the dialogue, but rather a ‘facilitator’ who was disinterested in the overall outcome of the exercise (no personal bias), being only concerned that it unfold on its own and not wander too far from topic; also, it was the facilitator’s function to ensure that all in attendance were heard and no one was overly heard. Participation was by invitation and not open to everyone, the selection being made from those considered to have demonstrated a proficiency in thinking and original perception. Of course, the process of Dialogue could be scaled back to the state of “when two or more are gathered together…” but key insights such as might arise from any members of the larger group would then not be available as a springboard toward the synergistic enrichment of all.

Facilitator: In this present Dialogue, we will look into the realm of Beauty. The sincerest offerings of all are solicited – insights from those still living and also from those who will attend only in Spirit through the ‘tracks’ of their passage whilst in life – their recorded words. The casual reader might think this exercise only a play of imagination, yet may come to see that imagination is our greatest human gift, and an essential faculty in an understanding of BEAUTY – our aesthetic ground. As one who has deeply studied human nature and Beauty, the renowned naturalist philosopher, George Santayana, will commence this session.

George Santayana: Ah yes – Imagination – the crucible wherein our lives are compounded. The chief intellectual and aesthetic value of our ideas will always come from the creative action of the imagination…… Expression depends upon the union of two terms, one of which must be furnished by the imagination; and a mind cannot furnish what it does not possess. The expressiveness of everything accordingly increases with the intelligence of the observer….. Science is the response to the demand for information, and in it we ask for the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Art is the response to the demand for entertainment, for the stimulation of our senses and imagination, and truth enters into it only as it sub-serves these ends…. Beauty itself as we feel it is something indescribable: what it is or what it means can never be said.

Douglas Harding: Without beauty the truth becomes solemn, ponderous, dreary; and goodness becomes joyless and over-earnest. Lightness of touch, spontaneity, gaiety, even abandon, are needed if the saint and the sage are to avoid taking on an ugly appearance, not to say an evil one. And indeed the universe does not look like the product of a logician, or a works-manager, and still less like the work of a priest; but much more like that of an artist who is well aware of the value of nonsense, of play, and of the superbly bountiful imagination. In Hell we are all admirably practical and down-to-earth; we do not find life fun, but take it and ourselves very seriously. But I suspect that all Heaven is light-hearted and merry, and that the skies are one broad smile, and that the blessed galaxies are even now shaking their fiery manes with laughter, while Satan is profoundly shocked at their lack of gravity and earnest common sense.

Federico Garcia Lorca: For me, imagination is synonymous with discovery. To imagine, to discover, to carry our bit of light to the living penumbra where all the infinite possibilities, forms, and numbers exist. I do not believe in creation but in discovery, and I don’t believe in the seated artist but in the one who is walking the road. The imagination is a spiritual apparatus, a luminous explorer of the world it discovers. The imagination fixes and gives clear life to fragments of the invisible reality where man is stirring.

The imagination merely discovers things already created, it does not invent, and whenever it does so it is defeated by the beauty of reality. The imagination hunts for images using tried and true techniques of the hunt. The mechanics of poetic imagination are always the same: a concentration, a leap, a flight, a return with the treasure, and a classification and selection of what has been brought back. The poet dominates his imagination and sends it wherever he wants. When he is not happy with its services he punishes it and sends it back, just as the hunter punishes the dog who is too slow in bringing him the bird. Sometimes the hunt is splendid, but the most beautiful birds and the brightest lights almost always get away.

The imagination is limited by reality: one cannot imagine what does not exist. It needs objects, landscapes, numbers, planets, and it requires the purest sort of logic to relate those things to one another. The imagination hovers over reason the way fragrance hovers over a flower, wafted on the breeze but tied, always, to the ineffable center of its origin.

Facilitator: In that Beauty ‘is in the mind’, it may be that the whole cosmos is an aspect of Mind. Barry, please comment on the relationship between observer and the observed.

Barry Long: The sensory universe and our entire existence is like a single cloud in a void, a speck in nothing. The void is timeless and the speck is time. The void is the divine mind, God's mind. The speck in it is the existence of the human brain and its reflection, the human mind. You don't have to try to understand this because it's a description of the reality of every body in existence. Every body consists of this vast nothingness underneath the restless and ever-moving mind. On those occasions when the mind stops, we feel the incredible stillness or peace of the void. Or if we are very much attached to existence, then in moments of the void the mind will feel disturbed, fearful and insecure.

Look into the blue sky or into the space between the stars and there is nothing. As without, so within. The blue sky, or the magnificence of the black night between the stars, is the representation of the truth of nothing. The whole appearance of the starry night, right around the whole dome of the heavens and all the stars, is a representation of the divine mind. Go out on a cloudless clear night and look at the whole of it. Look through the stars, not at them like the scientist, or you will miss the beauty. Look at the whole. See the pristine beauty of it, the wondrous, stark singleness of it. Then you will get a perception of what God's mind is, represented in space and time through the sense mechanism of the human brain. For what you see out there is purely a representation of the energetic reality of everything inside of you.

Albert Einstein: A human being is a part of the whole (called by us the Universe) a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest – a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and of a foundation for inner security.

Eckhart Tolle: If you cannot stop thinking altogether except maybe for a moment or two, then the mind is using you. You are unconsciously identified with it, so you don't even know that you are its slave. It's almost as if you were possessed without knowing it, and so you take the possessing entity to be yourself. The beginning of freedom is the realization that you are not the possessing entity - the thinker. Knowing this enables you to observe the entity. The moment you start watching the thinker, a higher level of consciousness becomes activated. You then begin to realize that there is a vast realm of intelligence beyond thought, that thought is only a tiny aspect of that intelligence. You also realize that all the things that truly matter - beauty, love, creativity, joy, inner peace - arise from beyond the mind. You begin to awaken.

It wasn't through the mind, through thinking, that the miracle that is life on earth or your body was created and is being sustained. There is clearly an intelligence at work that is far greater than the mind. How can a single human cell measuring 1/1,000 of an inch across contain instructions within its DNA that would fill 1,000 books of 600 pages each? The more we learn about the workings of the body, the more we realize just how vast is the intelligence at work within it and how little we know. When the mind reconnects with that, it becomes a most wonderful tool. It then serves something greater than itself.

Bertrand Russell: I do not understand where the 'beauty' and 'harmony' of nature are supposed to be found. Throughout the animal kingdom, animals ruthlessly prey upon each other. Most of them are either cruelly killed by other animals or slowly die of hunger. For my part, I am unable to see any very great beauty or harmony in the tapeworm. Let it not be said that this creature is sent as a punishment for our sins, for it is more prevalent among animals than among humans. I suppose what is meant by this 'beauty' and 'harmony' are such things as the beauty of the starry heavens. But one should remember that the stars every now and again explode and reduce everything in their neighbourhood to a vague mist.

Fyodor Dostoevski: The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man.

Kahlil Gibran: He who does not see the angels and devils in the beauty and malice of life will be far removed from knowledge, and his spirit will be empty of affection.

John Muir: None of Nature's landscapes are ugly so long as they are wild.

Yasuhiko Genku Kimura: The master artist whose vision for beauty has unfolded to an extraordinary degree can behold the finer beauty in Nature that eludes others. His artwork serves as his way of communicating the beauty that he beholds to others who may experience or may unfold a finer vision for beauty to experience the same beauty through his artistic creation……Beauty is thus unconcealed, illumined-out from the darkness of its concealment, through the opening of the vision that can behold it….Beauty is truth, as unconcealment; and truth is beauty, as unconcealing.

Marnie: Most of my paintings are from nature. When I am struck by the beauty of a certain place, or a certain thing, I do my best to convey the emotion I feel about it to any who may view it. If someone tells me they like it, I smile and thank them, glad that I could channel enough of what I felt and saw to stir another.

It’s funny; I can’t remember anything ugly in nature. When I’m feeling down, I may think I do but if I wait a moment the light changes, colours shift and the hidden beauty comes out. Maybe though, it’s a shift in me – by intensely looking, I’ve gone deeply inside where the Self that is part of the whole lives, and that Self almost always sees beauty in everything and everyone.

Albert Einstein: There are moments when one feels free from one's own identification with human limitations and inadequacies. At such moments one imagines that one stands on some spot of a small planet, gazing in amazement at the cold yet profoundly moving beauty of the eternal, the unfathomable; life and death flow into one, and there is neither evolution nor destiny; only Being.

Alex Grey: (contemporary artist) As to an intelligent design in the universe - Absolutely. I concur with Ken Wilber that the materialists can't offer more than a "whoops!" theory for the universe manifesting. Whoops, it occurred by some chance. That's an infantile orientation to the complexity and beauty of the evolutionary design of the earth and cosmos. I think we can come up with something deeper. Spirit, God, Primordial Nature of the Mind, whatever you call it, is the source and goal of it all.

Barry Long: Energetically we are all life that has ever been on earth, all the trees and the flowers are energetically inside of us. What we are is utterly magnificent. If we can only make the journey back, instead of going out and out . . . instead of measuring how wide the universe is out there, go back. Go inside, where it all comes from. And once you get through all the impeding structures, when you no longer cry out, 'Oh God what's it all about?' or, 'What am I doing?' then the miracle and the mystery of life is revealed. It's a great romance, isn't it?'

Lee Smolin: (physicist) It's unnecessary to think in terms of an intelligent designer - the idea that the complexity and beauty we see around us was intended by a single intelligence is silly. Instead we understand, in the biological context, that the living world has created itself — organized itself — because of the action of simple principles - primarily natural selection - that inevitably operate. I believe that the same will turn out to be true about the laws of physics and the structure of the cosmos.

Perhaps for the first time in human history, we know enough to imagine how a universe like ours might have come to be without the infinite intelligence and foresight of a god. For is it not conceivable that the universe is as we find it to be because it has made itself; because the order, structure and beauty we see at every scale are the manifestations of a continual process of self-organization, of self-tuning, that has acted over very long periods of time.

Albert Hofmann: (discoverer of LSD) I am hopeful about the future evolution of the human species. I am hopeful because I have the impression that more and more human individuals are becoming conscious, and that the creative spirit, which we call “God,” speaks to us through his creation--through the endlessness of the starry sky, through the beauty and wonder of the living individuals of the plant, the animal, and the human kingdoms.
We human beings are able to understand this message because we possess the divine gift of consciousness. This connects us to the universal mind and gives us divine creativity. Any means that helps to expand our individual consciousness--by opening up and sharpening our inner and outer eyes, in order to understand the divine universal message--will help humanity to survive. An understanding of the divine message--in its universal language--would bring an end to the war between the religions of the world.

Santayana: Beauty is a value; it cannot be conceived as an independent existence which affects our senses and which we consequently perceive. It exists in perception, and cannot exist otherwise. A beauty not perceived is a pleasure not felt, and a contradiction.

Facilitator: It is often heard that “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”. It follows that we have an innate ability to discriminate at a sensory level on ‘value’ scales. Thus judgments of beauty are sensory, emotional, and intellectual all at once. Keith, you have been unusually quiet….

Keith: When amongst giants, it is best to listen and learn. It is my great privilege to dialogue directly with all of you whose words I have studied and greatly valued. Personally, I feel that the joyous and ecstatic feeling that one experiences in the presence of beauty lies within the observer himself – although we conventionally attribute the feeling to an exterior ‘something’ from outside that triggered the inner sense of harmony and beauty. Whereas another person who is ‘battling his demons’ would not be able to see the exterior object claimed to be beautiful. Not only exterior objects trigger this inner aesthetic, since a person may engage the ‘beauty’ sense thru calling up certain memories, scenes or quotes that attune him to the ‘field’ of wholeness, harmony and beauty. Like ‘truth’, beauty is a subjective and relative ideal, and what is ‘beautiful’ may be different to different people. To some extent one’s sense of beauty is an acquired taste that unfolds when one has learned how to open his beauty vision aperture.

Yet there is no ‘good’ without its opposite. Thus as one increasingly relates to the balance, harmony and beauty of the universe, one sees that Beauty too is a quantifiable and measurable attribute, and this reality places upon the trained and educated viewer a great deal of responsibility to tolerate defect. Thus, beauty is in the eye of the beholder only so far as the beholder exercises toleration. To me, Beauty is subjective but in relation to one's intelligence and understanding.

Santayana: Criticism and idealization involve each other. The habit of looking for beauty in everything makes us notice the shortcomings of things; our sense, hungry for complete satisfaction, misses the perfection it demands. But this demand for perfection becomes at the same time the nucleus of our observation; from every side a quick affinity draws what is beautiful together and stores it in the mind, giving body there to the blind yearnings of our nature.

David Hume: Beauty in things exists in the mind that contemplates them.

Bertrand Russell: Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty – a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show.

Buckminster Fuller: When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I've finished, if the solution isn't beautiful, I know it's wrong.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not…… Each moment of the year has its own beauty, a picture which was never seen before and which shall never be seen again.

Marnie: While we desire to see beauty in everything, it is not always there, so we take what we can that satisfies our thirst for the beautiful. This is especially true in our relationships with other people. Most times, we can only find certain aspects of them beautiful according to our criteria but if we can concentrate on those aspects, we may find that the rest of the person can be incorporated because of those parts agreeable to our sensibility.

Kahlil Gibran: The appearance of things changes according to the emotions, and thus we see magic and beauty in them, while the magic and beauty are really in ourselves.

Marcus Aurelius: Whatever is in any way beautiful hath its source of beauty in itself, and is complete in itself; praise forms no part of it. So it is none the worse nor the better for being praised.

Santayana: Beauty is a value; it cannot be conceived as an independent existence which affects our senses and which we consequently perceive. It exists in perception, and cannot exist otherwise. A beauty not perceived is a pleasure not felt, and a contradiction.

And psychologically speaking, there is no such thing as a landscape; what we call such is an infinity of different scraps and glimpses given in succession. Even a painted landscape, although it tends to select and emphasize some parts of the field, is composed by adding together a multitude of views. When this painting is observed in its turn, it is surveyed as a real landscape would be, and apperceived partially and piecemeal; although, of course, it offers much less wealth of material than its living original, and is therefore vastly inferior. .

Marnie: I can relate to Mr. Santayana’a comment. When I paint a landscape, not only do I move parts of it around to make a more pleasing composition, there can even be additions from other places I have seen and admired. The purpose of this device is to make the painting more emotionally appealing because I feel that an exact copy, no matter how perfect, has a ‘dead’ feel to it if there is nothing of the artist in it. And thus, the viewer, in turn, may see the finished painting and either its entirety or parts of it may remind him of completely different personal experiences he has encountered in nature. Similarly, in his stories Keith tries to share his existential gratitude with others, and awaken others’ innate balance and harmony, as relief from self-alienation.

Keith: This begs the question “Where are the receptors or portals in the mind through which we connect with beauty?” On a very deep level, I believe that participation in beauty is through the innate structural principles of balance, symmetry and harmony, and each of us – being sentient Agents of the universe – embody the Principal’s access codes. We are the sense organs of our Source – we resonate with that from which we arose. As the universe itself is always in balance, so its sentient agents strive to be in balance.

Kimura: Yes – the whole is necessarily always in balance, and through the attainment of balance we restore our own wholeness….Imbalance exists only as a localized phenomenon, but a local imbalance can always be balanced-out within the larger whole that embraces it.

Tom Atlee: Most of us feel deeply at home with sunsets, mountains, oceans, and the rain—and the way the moon and stars look. We are part of the earth, and kin with everything on it. Every atom in our bodies has been part of this planet for eons, flowing through life in all its forms, including its winds, seas and lands. Some people even identify with the entire universe, saying (with considerable scientific evidence) that humans are “star dust” and that “we are the universe becoming conscious of itself”.

Santayana: A certain musical phrase, as it were, is played in the brain; the awakening of that echo is the act of apperception and the harmony of the present stimulation with the form of that phrase; the power of this particular object to develop and intensify that generic phrase in the direction of pleasure, is the test of the formal beauty of this example. For these cerebral phrases have a certain rhythm; this rhythm can, by the influence of the stimulus that now reawakens it, be marred or enriched, be made more or less marked and delicate; and as this conflict or reinforcement comes, the object is ugly or beautiful in form.

Robert Schumann: I distinguish between two kinds of beauty, natural beauty and poetic beauty: the former being found in the contemplation of nature, the latter in a person's conscious, creative intervention into nature. In music, or other art, both kinds of beauty appear, but the former is only sensual delight, while the latter begins where the former leaves off.

Plato: Beautiful objects incorporate proportion, harmony, and unity among their parts.

Aristotle: For once I agree with you, my esteemed teacher, only adding that I have found the universal elements of beauty to be order, symmetry, and definiteness.

Barry Long: Life is beautiful. Life begins with nature and ourselves. You don't have to compromise with life. It's just there, in you and around you. Life is all that is beautiful and natural.

Life is good because life is true. And it is every moment once you surrender the right to be unhappy.

I want you to see the vastness of this existence and beyond. That's where I'm taking you. As I stretch you with the vastness, broadness and wideness of it all, you start to become vast, broad and wide in your perception of life, love, death, God and consciousness.

William Hogarth: I see beauty as consisting of :

(1) fitness of the parts to some design;

(2) variety in as many ways as possible;

(3) uniformity, regularity or symmetry, which is only beautiful when it helps to preserve the character of fitness;

(4) simplicity or distinctness, which gives pleasure not in itself, but through its enabling the eye to enjoy variety with ease;

(5) intricacy, which provides employment for our active energies, leading the eye "a wanton kind of chase"; and

(6) quantity or magnitude, which draws our attention and produces admiration and awe.

Schiller: Aesthetic appreciation of beauty is the most perfect reconciliation of the sensual and rational parts of human nature.

John Macmurray: I am inclined to think that the worst feature of modern life is its failure to believe in beauty. For human life, beauty is as important as truth - even more important - and beauty in life is the product of true feeling. The strongest condemnation of modern life is not that it is cruel and materialistic and wearisome and false, but simply that it is ugly and has no sense of beauty.

Kimura: As beauty arises with balance, so ugliness arises with imbalance. As beauty arises with wholeness and oneness, so ugliness arises with localization and isolation. Ugliness is the symptom of our forgetfulness of wholeness. Ugliness is the syndrome of the errancy-modes of our sensibility and openness for beauty.

For those whose intelligence has not yet unfolded or is closed off, the world is not ugly but relatively beauty-less. In order for them to recognize what is ugly, they need to have developed or opened up their intelligence sufficiently to know what is beautiful. They need to have known resonance to recognize dissonance, and harmony to recognize disharmony. Just as the experience of beauty evokes the emotion of love, so the experience of ugliness evokes the emotion of hate. For we hate that which is ugly.

As beauty is balance and ugliness is imbalance, and as balance is wholeness and ugliness is localization, to transform ugliness to beauty means to eliminate imbalance and localization, which in turn means to increase the order of balance and wholeness.

Editor’s comment: This is an aim of “Our Stories”: to restore family balance through unfolding truths and life-insights to promote higher group intelligence and eventual harmony.

Marnie: Horace has said “Nothing is beautiful from every point of view”. We sometimes call people, creatures or things ugly. It is not so much the physical appearance since that is superficial, but rather how they make us feel. For instance, a spider may seem ugly to a fastidious housekeeper; it makes cobwebs that reflect on her cleanliness. But a gardener knows that every spider eats its weight in plant-destroying bugs each day and is an example of utilitarian beauty since it is doing its job in the scheme of things. People are complex as well – a person with a beautiful façade may be so self-consumed as to be constantly causing the ugliness of pain and suffering in others.

Kimura: Beauty is Nature's norm, as balance is the primary structural principle of the universe. There is nothing in Nature that is not beautiful. Ugliness is only a temporary and local aberration in the universe of beauty, brought into the world by those who lack intelligence in the sense of appreciative acumen for wholeness and critical sensibility for beauty.

The ability of an individual to perceive beauty is a moral test of his character – not only in its ethical formation – but also in his work and relationships; those are the dimensions of human existence wherein a person puts into practice his commitment to cultivate a capacity for openness and wholeness in working for balance and harmony.

Lorca: The daughter of the imagination – the logical and legitimate daughter – is the metaphor, which is sometimes born from a sudden stroke of intuition and sometimes brought to light by the slow anguish of forethought.

The poet strolls through his imagination, limited by it. He hears the flowing of great rivers. His forehead feels the cool of the reeds that tremble in the midst of nowhere. He wants to hear the dialogue of the insects beneath the boughs. He wants to penetrate the current of the sap in the dark silence of great tree trunks. He wants to understand the Morse alphabet spoken by the heart of the sleeping girl.

He wants. We all want. But this is his sin: to want. One shouldn't want, one should love. And so he fails. Because when he tries to express the poetic truth of any of these motifs, he will have to make use of plastic analogies that will never be sufficiently expressive, for the imagination cannot reach those depths.

Keith: To me, Beauty is the sense of awe arising in me from forms that are sublime, elegant, balanced, graceful, harmonious and symmetrical, whether in nature or in crafted music, poetry, prose, painting, sculpture or design. Many simple things evoke the sense of being aligned with Beauty – such as one’s simple accomplishments of the day or over one’s life, simply enjoying the warmth of fireplace hearth or sharing life with another where there is love and respect present. In some way there is usually a concurrent sense of gratitude attending the beautiful feeling of well-being and peace.

Many people receive strength and comfort from scriptural passages asssuring life over death, and when their fear and anxiety is beaten back such messages are indeed beautiful to them. Beautiful to all is the restorative power of rest; Beautiful is the wisdom that comes with age – that ‘this too will pass’, accepting that with the gift of life comes the fate of all created things that they must pass out of creation.

There is the beauty of Nature’s gift of bodily health; and a special beauty in finding honesty and trust in a tricky world.

There is Beauty in the balm and nutrient of memories of good times in childhood; the beauty of contemplating primordial love and its Earthly face – the power of a mother’s love (‘Canada’s Madonna and Child’);

The beauty of special friendships that open one up to inflows of insight and guidance as to ‘the path’; the beauty of Buddha’s Four Noble Truths and Eightfold Path, and the gift of the Tao te Ching from Lao Tzu.

There is beauty in the undulating undercurrent between tension and repose – e.g. in the interaction of sunlight and shadow;

There is beauty sensed when ALL is seen as perfect just the way it is, or as Lorca taught “there is The Irresistible Beauty of All Things”;

There is a miraculous capacity for beauty gifted to us through our inherited sensory faculties such as binocular vision, and through the binocular perspectives gained in communication, and in our being able to appreciate the beauty of movement, rhythm, and proportion;or in observing joyous animals in play; or in hearing the power of waterfall or ocean surf;

And yes – there is an austere beauty acquired through the disciplines of humility, simplicity and economic prudence as precursors to attracting beauty into one’s life.

Facilitator: That was a tad lengthy, Keith – but your observations do point to the depth and breadth of the relationship between our sense of Beauty and our emotional life.

Schopenhauer: Aesthetic contemplation of beauty is the most free that the pure intellect can be from the dictates of will; here we contemplate perfection of form without any kind of worldly agenda, and thus any intrusion of utility or politics would ruin the point of the beauty. I believe that what distinguishes aesthetic experiences from other experiences is that the contemplation of the object of aesthetic appreciation temporarily allows a person a respite from the strife of desire, and allows that person entry into a realm of purely mental enjoyment. The more a person's mind is concerned with the world as mere representation or mental image, the less it feels the suffering of the world as will.

Albert Einstein: The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science... To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms--this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness.

Marshall McLuhan: Art always functions as a "counter-environment" designed to make visible what is usually invisible about a society. Perhaps this is what shocks us or awakens one when coming across beauty unexpectedly.

Leanne Cadden: Beauty is everywhere, but one may see the beautiful view and the other sees a dirty window. You have the power within you to choose what you see, what you think and what you paint.

Marnie: I wonder….Do we really have the power to choose beauty over ugliness ordinarily or does it depend on what state of consciousness we are in at the time, which cascade of chemicals our brains are producing. If one is angry, depressed or bleak, it is almost impossible to see anything beautiful in one’s life. If one is ecstatic, everything is beautiful. Neither state is balance, where one feels at peace with the All and can see what there is to see whether beauty or ugliness and accept what is with detachment. Notwithstanding external provocations, if it is possible to transcend oneself and show sensitivity, caring and love for other sentient beings, we may be able to attain sufficient balance to bring harmony and therefore beauty into others’ lives and our own at the same time. But when we disparage, condemn and shun others, then disharmony and ugliness in relationships is the result.

Osho: This “ordinary” life is ordinary only because you are dull, because you are thick and ‘asleep’. It is ordinary only because you don’t have the perception to see its depth. You can't see the colours of life and the forms of life and the eternal benediction that goes on showering every moment of it. It is a continuum. Because you can’t see the beauty of the stars in the night, and because you can’t see the beauty of human eyes, hence out of this poverty arises the desire for some transcendental experience – experiencing God, heaven, paradise, experiencing the serpent power in your spine. Experiencing these things - or desiring to experience these things - is all mind games. The true religion is always of the here and now.

Kimura: In the presence of beauty, we experience more of life in its pristine liveliness and sacredness than that to which we are otherwise accustomed in our ordinary, mundane world. That pristine liveliness and sacredness is beauty's calling that allures us to its open embrace. …This experiential movement towards beauty's open embrace, towards a higher-order of balance, wholeness, and openness, is what is termed "Buddha" in Sanskrit. The Buddha is not any person or end-state but the dynamic, eternal, evolutionary movement towards an ever-higher order of balance, wholeness, and openness. That is, the Buddha is the evolutionary process of beauty's ever-greater awakening to itself. To committedly enter and to permanently dwell in the stream of this evolutionary movement is what it means to attain Buddhahood and to become a Buddha. The terms "Christ" and "Christhood" can be interpreted within the same evolutionary context.

People who are engaged in a creative search for authentic beauty and truth increasingly tune-in to the evolutionary thrust for self-optimization and self-realization existing within and without, and with the Creativity of the universe, which is the source of their own creativity. When we are tuned-in with the Creativity of the universe, we remain in a state of creativity and maintain a creative state of mind. As this Creativity is the very Spirit of the universe, when we are attuned to it, we become fountainheads of true spirituality. Thus, we will not find spirituality in the hypocritical 'Churchianity' or funereal 'Buddhibusiness' at all, but in our direct communion with Nature within and without, the only original church and temple of beauty and truth.

Michelangelo: As to external beauty, it is the frail and weary weed in which God dresses the soul, which he has called into time.

Santayana: Our consciousness of the ideal becomes distinct in proportion as we advance in virtue and in proportion to the vigor and definiteness with which our faculties work. When the vital harmony is complete, when the act is pure, faith in perfection passes into vision. That man is unhappy indeed, who in all his life has had no glimpse of perfection, who in the ecstasy of love, or in the delight of contemplation, has never been able to say: “It is attained”. Such moments of inspiration are the source of the arts, which have no higher function than to renew them.

Lorca: The poet who wants to break free from the imagination, and not merely live on the images produced by real objects, stops dreaming and starts to desire. Then, when the limits of his imagination become unbearable and he wants to free himself from his enemy – the world – he passes from desire to love. He goes from imagination, which is a fact of the soul, to inspiration, which is a state of the soul. He goes from analysis to faith, and the poet, previously an explorer, is now a humble man who bears on his shoulders the irresistible beauty of all things.

Facilitator: Moving now from the definition and analysis of Beauty to its creation. Marnie?

Marnie: The daily bombardment of bad news we “need to hear, read, listen to, see” can drive us into a protective shell. As this armour grows to protect us from this all too human world, we could become more and more closed to the beauty all around us – in nature, in other people, in ourselves. We drop into a pool of darkness and despair. It is the realization of what is happening to us that is difficult and until we can correct it, we will add to the dissonance around us through our own actions. If we can recognize what is happening to us with a quiet walk in nature, through music or meditation, we can begin to restore our innate sense of balance and wholeness.

Laara Lindo: Today, when we understand the thought-wave nature of the universe, we recognize that we may choose between the many “channels” to which we can tune our lives —the 500 available in the television realm perhaps being but a fraction of those levels of thought available for us to choose from in our moving picture of life.  So we must recognize the fact that our very choices actually put us in the dimension of life which flows naturally from our thinking.  Therefore, we can be safe in surmising that the reason for the conditions of war, crime, sordidness and ugliness is that those who have created those conditions with their thinking are condemned through lack of true knowledge of the “thought-nature” of life to endure them.  In other words, a certain type of thinking has created a certain karma in which the condition will remain until transformed thought followed by step-by-step action for the better leads those involved into happier circumstances.  On the other hand, if we choose instead to practice karuna—the alleviation of suffering—and to create the beautiful and good in our lives, we are on the path to happiness in our lives, and creating beauty and happiness in the lives of others.

What comprises beauty?  Our first response to beauty is “love.”  Not only do we experience love for the beautiful, but we are inspired and uplifted by the warmth and joy of a general sense of love.  This natural current of love sets the law of “rhythmic balanced interchange” into action, for love always longs to share, to return love to that which is loved and to extend itself outward to recreate beauty and harmony.  Thus love creates beauty and goodness.  However, in order to ensure that love is wisely in balance, the creation of beauty, goodness and harmony requires that the extension of love includes the element of balance we name “truth,”—the fundamental truth which lies at the core of knowing.  The creation of beauty includes the elements of love, truth and life energy.

To see goodness and beauty in all things does not mean that we do not deeply experience those elements of sorrow and loss that come to all.  It does mean, however, that by conscious choice we view everything in life from the perspective of love, truth and life energy: that we become conscious creators of beauty.

Leonardo da Vinci: A painter was asked why, since he made such beautiful figures, which were but dead things, his children were so ugly; to which the painter replied that he made his pictures by day, and his children by night.

Marnie: I feel my painting improves when I am personally balanced, and that is a beautiful feeling in itself. Then I can sometimes surrender to the flow of the ‘great dancer within’ and the painting evolves almost like automatic writing, riding a stream of magic pouring from within.

As we go about our daily lives, there are many things we do over and over again, necessary chores that have to be done. Usually we go about these duties mindlessly, just wanting them over with and most times, bored senseless because we can do everything that needs doing by rote. Now, suppose we enter into everything we do with intention, watching every nuance of our involvement; what we feel, how our bodies work, what miracles we really are. Then we find that the little things take on a beauty and joy of their own as we enter into the true spirit of living.

Walter Russell: As the first principle of beauty is balance, so right thinking is an equilibrium, inducing an ecstasy from which the Universal Poet is born. I believe that this same right thinking from which the aesthetic sense is born, and which is the foundation of all the arts, is the thing that lifts us to life's lofty pinnacle.

Frank Lloyd Wright: The longer I live the more beautiful life becomes. If you foolishly ignore beauty, you will soon find yourself without it. Your life will be impoverished. But if you invest in beauty, it will remain with you all the days of your life.

In other pleasures, it is said, we gratify our senses and passions; in the contemplation of beauty we are raised above ourselves, the passions are silenced and we are happy in the recognition of a good that we do not seek to possess.

(George Santayana)

Posted by Marnie and Keith Elliott 19-12-06

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