Beauty

[Nick_A]

Hi All

Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars — mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is "mere". I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination — stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern — of which I am a part... What is the pattern or the meaning or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little more about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent? ~ Richard P. Feynman

"Beauty is the only finality here below. As Kant said very aptly, it is a finality which involves no objective. A beautiful thing involves no good except itself, in its totality, as it appears to us. We are drawn toward it without knowing what to ask of it. It offers its own existence. We do not desire something else, we possess it, and yet we still desire something. We do not know in the least what it is. We want to get behind beauty, but it is only a surface. It is like a mirror that sends us back our own desire for goodness. It is a sphinx, an enigma, a mystery which is painfully tantalizing. We should like to feed upon it, but it is only something to look at; it appears only from a certain distance. The great trouble in human life is that looking and eating are two different operations. Only beyond the sky, in the country inhabited by God, are they one and the same operation. ... It may be that vice, depravity and crime are nearly always ... in their essence, attempts to eat beauty, to eat what we should only look at." Simone Weil

Putting these excerpts together allows me to experience the external attraction of the mechanics of science as one thing and the inner reality of wholeness that beauty draws us to as another. A lot of the battle between science and religion is that this difference in direction is not recognized and their complimentary value is not appreciated. It is believeed that for example that the more scientific knowledge is revealed, the attraction to what lies beyond beauty must necessarily diminish. They are not seen as complimentary and that one can further the other in a realistic perspective. The attraction to the intellectual appreciation of universal mechnanics is completely different from the attraction to the living good that exists as the source of creation

Feynman said: "What is the pattern or the meaning or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little more about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it."

But is this true? If we become obsessed with the trees, can we remember the life of the forest? Everything I've seen suggests that the obsession with science at the expense of the human need for higher meaning behind beauty has only fed corrupted collective egotism furthering expressions of selfish force and power.

Simone Weil was one of those rare individuals who had a brilliant scientific mind but an even greater inner transcendent understanding and could understand the value of science serving man rather than man serving science. IMO it is sad that she was such an exception.

Is it possible though that she could see into the future as to how man could, if he doesn't destroy himself first, eventually reconcile these seemingly contradictory attractions of science and beauty where science seeks to disect and the conscius path seeks to transcend beauty to experience what it indicates..

I believe that one identical thought is to be found--expressed very precisely and with only slight differences of modality-- in. . .Pythagoras, Plato, and the Greek Stoics. . .in the Upanishads, and the Bhagavad Gita; in the Chinese Taoist writings and. . .Buddhism. . .in the dogmas of the Christian faith and in the writings of the greatest Christian mystics. . .I believe that this thought is the truth, and that it today requires a modern and Western form of expression. That is to say, it should be expressed through the only approximately good thing we can call our own, namely science. This is all the less difficult because it is itself the origin of science. Simone Weil....Simone Pétrement, Simone Weil: A Life, Random House, 1976, p. 488

Watcha think?

[Chippingaway]

Hello Nick,

have enjoyed reading your thoughts.

What is beauty?

To me, it's that which is percieved that that expands the normal consciousness regarding the percieved beyond the normal responses. There is an element of non language possabilities in the response. There is also the element of one 'fitting' harmoniously with the percieved.

Why should science be excluded from this? That i know the rainbow is made up of moisture droplets acting as prisms to sunlight doesn't spoil my delight at the luminouse transparancy of the colors. Not he droplets, nor the sunlight are the rainbow, tho in thier own nature are marvelouse enough, do not convey the glory of thier union manifested as rainbow. Appreciated seperatly and appreciated together, non is possible without the appreciater.
The appreciater need not be limited to science OR beauty when the appreciater is understood.

Your thoughts?

[Nick_A]

Originally Posted by Chippingaway

Hello Nick,

have enjoyed reading your thoughts.

What is beauty?

To me, it's that which is percieved that that expands the normal consciousness regarding the percieved beyond the normal responses. There is an element of non language possabilities in the response. There is also the element of one 'fitting' harmoniously with the percieved.

Why should science be excluded from this? That i know the rainbow is made up of moisture droplets acting as prisms to sunlight doesn't spoil my delight at the luminouse transparancy of the colors. Not he droplets, nor the sunlight are the rainbow, tho in thier own nature are marvelouse enough, do not convey the glory of thier union manifested as rainbow. Appreciated seperatly and appreciated together, non is possible without the appreciater.
The appreciater need not be limited to science OR beauty when the appreciater is understood.

Your thoughts?

Hello Chippingaway

I agree I think. I'm not sure what you mean by the appreciator.

The appreciater need not be limited to science OR beauty when the appreciater is understood.

Simone is asserting the need to experience the reality beauty represents. If you mean that "know thyself reveals the appreciator that would not experience a contradiction and yet have a better connection with this ineffable, then I would agree.

[Chippingaway]

Nick..

"If you mean that "know thyself reveals the appreciator that would not experience a contradiction and yet have a better connection with this ineffable, then I would agree."

That is what i mean.

you will find a pm, and when you read it you will laugh.

[Nick_A]

Originally Posted by Chippingaway

Nick..

"If you mean that "know thyself reveals the appreciator that would not experience a contradiction and yet have a better connection with this ineffable, then I would agree."

That is what i mean.

you will find a pm, and when you read it you will laugh.

Yes, I respectfully agree with your observation.

What an absolutely wonderful surprise and how perceptive of you! I definitely appreciate the opportunity for learning more of your wisdom. You've made my day.

Would you agree that beauty is not a necessary emotional experience for life on earth? For example, fear serves a purpose. when it is justifiable it makes us more alert and stimulates the release of adrenalin to better cope with the danger. Love is a form of animal bonding that serves to unify and nurture life.

But the emotional experience of beauty isn't necessary for life on earth. This is one reason that I believe our ability to experience beauty indicates a higher reality and acts as a type of stimulis that attracts our heart and awakens it to the reality of a higher quality of being that it is attracted to. Would you agree?

At the end of Simone Weil's excerpt in my OP, I was impressed with the following remark that raises questions for me. She wrote:

It may be that vice, depravity and crime are nearly always ... in their essence, attempts to eat beauty, to eat what we should only look at.

Is this one of the meanings of the story of Adam and Eve eating the fruit in Genesis 1? To eat means to analyse which they weren't prepared to do so psychologically got caught up in details forgetting the wholeness of their psychology. It wasn't their time to eat and grow in their being as would be possible so had to be forced artificially to forget? Now that the time is right, conscious help from above helps us to remember but the secular resistance we've acquired blocks it other then for a minority.

[shaw-n]

"Beauty" is in the eye of the beholder.
When one wakes up, they see the "beauty" in everything.
One's definition of "beauty" will undergo changes when one wakes up though.

[Nick_A]

Originally Posted by shaw-n

"Beauty" is in the eye of the beholder.
When one wakes up, they see the "beauty" in everything.
One's definition of "beauty" will undergo changes when one wakes up though.

Perhaps awakening reveals the reality behind beauty. Simone Weil describes this in her usual laconic fashion

And yet at the present time ... the beauty of the world is almost the only way by which we can allow God to penetrate us.... a sense of beauty, although mutilated, ... is present in all the preoccpations of secular life. If it were made true and pure, it would sweep away all secular life in a body to the feet of God....

Beauty then may also be a qualitative experience as well as an expansive experience.

[Chippingaway]

To repeat Nick, i very much enjoy reading your thoughts, there is a freshness to them.

i haven't thought much about beauty, that is in a slice and dice way re man's psychic relationships with it.

But yes, now that you point it out i would tentivly agree with you that beauty is not important to mechanical survival. So, it must affect something non mechanical, or something non mechanical responds to it yes?

That first instant of what becomes an AHHHHH moment is an opening up, a forgetting of the "I", in affect no thought and no memory involvment because there is no accessing of data, it has been a surprise. Then comes the response, and as soon as there is the response the seperation of the experience and experiencer begins.
At some basic level it becomes important to capture what is so elusive, we write about it, we take photos of it we paint it we put it to music, in affect, trying to re-create the moment.

i saw something very beautiful a couple years back, hopefully you'll forgive an old lady regressing for a moment.....i have a friend who both by her profession and her emotional make-up is very no nonesense. We were visiting my daughter and walking her pasture. i asked her to call the horse herd which was down in the heavily timbered valley, we were standing at the very edge of the trees. She called and we could hear them comming, and they were comming at a dead run. As they got closer and closer we were no near to seeing them then when they were in the valley...so we stood in the hot summer sun, feeling the earth begin to vibrate and hoping they wouldn't come out twhere we were standing. It got suspensful. Suddenly they exploded into the open, not 15 feet from us, running as a unit, manes flying, feet thundering, muscles rippling in the sunlight, and the thing i will never forget is my no nonesense friend shouting in exhaultation, " How beautiful!" That shout was so pure, so unguarded, so spontainiouse, so primal in response to something so primaly overpowering...at that moment the 3 of us never thought we might have been close to death. The friend told us later she would have that memory till the day she died.

In that memory i think she attempts to eat the beauty, just as the painter, the composer, etc tries to. And this is that old bugaboo also called attachement.
The mechanical, the ego, tries to make permanent that which is impermanent because the ego is impermanent in a constant state of flux it's experiences must also be so.

Near as i can make out Nick, it's like a cycle, when unguarded, the beauty eats us, consumes us for a nano second, and then that pesky ego ( body/mind) tries to eat it.

The higher quality of being you talk about is that beauty, but when ego is subjective to that higher quality of being the beauty is not fleeting so the ephemeral quality isn't present, nor is the contrasting element of ugliness, so shawn-n is right, the quality never changes but the perception does because ego is not the arbitrator.

In your last Simone Weil quote, ( in the post responding to me) again i think she is talking of attachment, of owning that which should not be owned, different wods i am using but the same thought.

We are dammed by what we own which in reality owns us, shapes us. "Dammed" in the sense of that cycle so difficult to break out of.

Re your thoughts about Adam/Eve and the fruit....it's interesting that the analogy features fruit, fruit, the end result, that which carries seeds, cause and affect. But yes, i think you are on the right track. i have so many thoughts about this story....i think the primary theme in the fall is they sought to own the promise of the fruit, but prematurly perhaps, and it ended up owning them. That they saw they were naked may be another way of saying thier perceptions were now locked TO, OF, and BY the body.

Look foreward to your response

[arthra]

There were three aspects that I think were a masterstroke of Socratic wisdom:

The Good;

The Beautiful,

and the True

[Nick_A]

Chippingaway

You expression of appreciation is truly a meaningful compliment.

We agree that our ability to experience beauty since unnecessary for mechanical life must indicate the truth of higher consciousness and universal order. The atheist must say that beauty is a meaningless evolutionary accident serving no essential purpose and only distracts us from keeping our nose in the ground and experiencing scientific truths.

Your account of the horse herd is a good example of why you are necessary. You are unafraid to experience the rawness of life and to get down and dirty. Your wisdom is as a result of experience and not the usual plastic expression of New Age BS from people incapable of your freedom. Simone put it this way

"A test of what is real is that it is hard and rough. Joys are found in it, not pleasure. What is pleasant belongs to dreams." -- Gravity and Grace

You are one of those that understand what she means. You described a violent experience. That was a lot of power coming at you. It was not the time for "my my, oh how wonderful. You welcome these experiences which is a sign of a genuine seeker.

Your account is important to me since I sense the quality of emotion in your experience. The regressions of this ol lady are really worth something

In that memory i think she attempts to eat the beauty, just as the painter, the composer, etc tries to. And this is that old bugaboo also called attachement.
The mechanical, the ego, tries to make permanent that which is impermanent because the ego is impermanent in a constant state of flux it's experiences must also be so.

Now here is another facet of this from Father Sylvan as recorded in "Lost Christianity"

"It is extraordinary to think how much of the intellectual activity of man is actually a beginning contact with this force, this third person of the Holy Trinity. All efforts to think, being the call for confrontation between levels, are a first step towards the prayer to the holy reconciliation of presence. Thought begins with seeing, but ends, unfortunately, with the slavery to the mechanisms of conceptualization. Out of these conceptualizations, which are only the records left in the nervous system by moments of seeing, and which are needed as instruments of the energy of the spirit existing in the world, or the lower reality - out of these neural results of the spirit man erroneously tries to imitate the work of the spirit. but only the spirit can do the work of the spirit.

Thought, which means in essence seeing, exists on these many levels. There are no esoteric thoughts or esoteric ideas, as such; but there is esoteric thinking, an inner action which carries the energy of harmonization and reconciliation between levels........................"

Beauty entices us to experience this vertical direction that unites levels of reality which is the domain of the Spirit and Spiritual energy. The lower dominant parts of our collective psych must try put it into a horizontal mechanical context. A developed human being IMO would be able to experience both directions and unify them..The horizontal plane is the domain of knowledge while the vertical plane is the domain of "being" As we are, we are so far out of balance that we are unable to have any balance and the value of beauty more often than not must become secularized into oblivion.

The fallen quality of this corrupt ego alludes to what Simone describes:

With the exception of God, nothing short of the universe as a whole can with complete accuracy be called beautiful. All that is in the universe and is less than the universe can be called beautiful only if we extend the word beyond its strict limits and apply it to things that share indirectly in the beauty, things that are imitations of it.

All these secondary kinds of beauty are of infinite value as openings to universal beauty. But, if we stop short at them, they are, on the contrary, veils; then they corrupt. They all have in them more or less of this temptation, but in very different degrees.

There are also a number of seductive factors that have nothing whatever to do with beauty but which cause the things in which they are present to be called beautiful through lack of discernment; for these things attract love by fraud, and all men, even the most ignorant, even the vilest of them, know that beauty alone has a right to our love. The most truly great know it too....

It makes sense when you think about it. When we say something is beautiful, we don't differentiate quality and because of this, it is easy to forget that beauty can be misleading and also a veil that when taken wrongly, denies the reality behind it. So when you write:

The higher quality of being you talk about is that beauty, but when ego is subjective to that higher quality of being the beauty is not fleeting so the ephemeral quality isn't present, nor is the contrasting element of ugliness, so shawn-n is right, the quality never changes but the perception does because ego is not the arbitrator.

The objective quality that is felt by us as beauty can also be relative in the quality of its objective wholeness. Beauty can be a measure of quality our corrupt ego is incapable of discriminating within.

The long nosed, broad shouldered Aries male strikes again.

As an aside, from your great experience with meditation, could you express some words of wisdom of what the esoteric meaning is of the "Seventh Heaven?" The dictionary gives an outline

seventh heaven

n.

A state of great joy and satisfaction.

The farthest of the concentric spheres containing the stars and constituting the dwelling place of God and the angels in the Muslim and kabbalist systems.

I know of two instances where the third heaven referred to. the first is by St. Paul.

II Corinthians 12: 1 - 4

1I must go on boasting. Although there is nothing to be gained, I will go on to visions and revelations from the Lord. 2I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven. Whether it was in the body or out of the body I do not know—God knows. 3And I know that this man—whether in the body or apart from the body I do not know, but God knows— 4was caught up to paradise. He heard inexpressible things, things that man is not permitted to tell.

Simone Weil ascended to what appears to be also this third heaven. She describes it in her letter to Father Perrin before she died:

Last summer, doing Greek with T-, I went through the Our Father word for word in Greek. We promised each other to learn it by heart. I do not think he ever did so, but some weeks later, as I was turning over the pages of the Gospel, I said to myself that since I had promised to do this thing and it was good, I ought to do it. I did it. The infinite sweetness of this Greek text so took hold of me that for several days I could not stop myself from saying it over all the time. A week afterward I began the vine harvest I recited the Our Father in Greek every day before work, and I repeated it very often in the vineyard.

Since that time I have made a practice of saying it through once each morning with absolute attention. If during the recitation my attention wanders or goes to sleep, in the minutest degree, I begin again until I have once succeeded in going through it with absolutely pure attention. Sometimes it comes about that I say it again out of sheer pleasure, but I only do it if I really feel the impulse.

The effect of this practice is extraordinary and surprises me every time, for, although I experience it each day, it exceeds my expectation at each repetition.

At times the very first words tear my thoughts from my body and transport it to a place outside space where there is neither perspective nor point of view. The infinity of the ordinary expanses of perception is replaced by an infinity to the second or sometimes the third degree. At the same time, filling every part of this infinity of infinity, there is silence, a silence which is not an absence of sound but which is the object of a positive sensation, more positive than that of sound. Noises, if there are any, only reach me after crossing this silence.

She is definitely expressing levels of infinity and I sense a connection between what she and Paul are describing. Silence is also a quality that divides levels rather than an absence of sound. Somehow this is related to the seventh heaven but this third level seems to be special for Man.

Perhaps your experiences could offer some insight.