Perception and experience of beauty
One way of viewing the Diamond Path is that it is a path of three journeys.
- The journey to presence
- The journey with presence
- The journey in presence
How might these three journeys look from the experience of a specific aspect of essence, like beauty?
In our conventional world of duality – subject-object experience – there is a subjective me seeing beautiful things, hearing beautiful things, and experiencing the affect of beauty internally. We may desire to create beautiful things or find ways to express beauty in our lives and the world. We may desire to be beautiful.
From this perspective, we are looking at beauty.
Is beauty in the eye of the holder?
The journey to beauty would mean discovering what beauty is and everything beautiful shares. What’s the underlying essence of beauty? Or is beauty simply a surface phenomenon, an arrangement of colors, shapes, notes, etc., in an appealing way?
The journey to beauty requires asking questions like the above, exploring beyond what is taken for granted or not even questioned. The journey to beauty is an open-ended inquiry into the phenomenology of beauty, an experiential dive beyond our thoughts, ideas, concepts, and history of beauty.
This inquiry will eventually lead us to catch beauty’s scent, taste beauty, and experience beauty as an actual presence. Our perception and experience of beauty deepens. Beauty is no longer a surface presentation; it has depth, and it penetrates and imbues not only the objective but the subjective as well.
Beauty is not caused. It is. Emily Dickinson
When we discover this more intimate nature of beauty, we are affected by it. Our hearts, minds, and bodies become more sensitive to the presence of beauty; our lives are more moved by beauty. A recognition arises that there is no need to get beauty as beauty cannot be grasped. Something may be beautiful, but beauty is not the thing; it is what cannot be grasped.
Beauty is a reflection of truth, and truth is ultimately true nature. And the dimension of true nature that reveals this essential beauty is that of divine love. – A. H. Almaas, The Inner Journey Home: Soul’s Realization of the Unity of Reality
As our hearts open to beauty, we may experience tears. If we pay close attention to the tears, we may feel like we are melting and dissolving. This is an effect of the real on ego boundaries and structures. The dissolving may be experienced as coemergent with expansiveness. We may feel like a poignant delicacy emerging.
The journey with beauty is like a dance, beauty dancing with beauty. The sense of beauty is part of our subjectivity, which begins to perceive itself in all external forms and actions.
Beauty is the radiance of your soul. Asad Meah
On the journey with beauty, sometimes our experience is like before we discovered the essence of beauty – things are beautiful, and I appreciate beauty. Still, the in-touchness with the essence of beauty isn’t so immediate. The memory of our experience with the essence of beauty will be an influence and may heighten our experience, but it will fall short of beauty dancing with beauty.
Other times, our experience will be the fullness of the dance, the expansiveness and lightness of the rarefied. Experience of beauty becomes more refined, transparent, and sublime. Everything is suffused and infused with beauty. At times, our consciousness is naught but beauty.
From this perspective, we see from beauty: beauty is the seeing, the seer, and the seen.
Eventually, the journey with beauty deepens-opens to the journey in/as beauty. Beauty is. It is the foreground of perception and experience without a perceiver or experiencer. Beauty is as subtle as the flash of light out of the corner of your eye. Flashing, flashing, flashing, but never caught or seen. Beauty is the luminosity, the sheen of reality that ripples on the surface and to the depth as it manifests from the absolute ground.
People may say, “You’re a beautiful soul.” Your life may be full of beauty, but there is no you there in relation to beauty; there is simply beauty – the flash of bedazzlement in the infinite mystery.
Perception is invisible lightning.
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