The Beautiful

ReFramed

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Beauty & The Feast. License to Behold.

 

“The soul is weighed in the balance by what delights her.” St Augustine

 

“Beauty…is the highest integrative level of understanding and the most comprehensive capacity for effective action. It allows us to go with, rather than against, the deepest tendency or theme of the universe.” 

Frederick Turner

 

“The arts, whose task once was considered to be that of manifesting the beautiful, will discuss the idea only to dismiss it, regarding beauty only as the pretty, the simple, the pleasing, the mindless and the easy.

Because beauty is conceived so naively, it appears as merely naive, and can be tolerated only if complicated by discord, shock, violence, and harsh terrestrial realities.

I therefore feel justified in speaking of the repression of beauty.” 

James Hillman

 

 

The Beautiful.

What is it? What isn’t it?

Where does it exist? 

How does beauty reach us? 

Who determines such things? 

Why does beauty matter?

 

 

DREAMING BEAUTY AWAKE:

A slippery slope, a razor's edge or a stick in the eye?

They say, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” That’s fair enough. Eye tend to agree. Eye daily persist, resist and desist from in here, to out there. But this old maxim never intended to chase Beauty into some corner of perpetual absolution or relativity. To always stay, as it were, within “sight lines”. That is, aligned with all the many, visual-faculty, common-language trappings. "Here, "look". Let me "show" you." Indeed, for many, many people, Beauty is beheld as a glorious and sustaining constant, originating and arriving from some mysterious source beyond structure or stricture. An out-of-sight "sacred absolute" as it were. These are the  "Source-erors", if you will.

 

Still, these days, defining or accumulating The Beautiful is not everyone’s priority. Survival alone, keeps most folks occupied, distracted, non-dreaming and/or aligned with limitation. So, in passing, it is easy to over-"look" what this old maxim really means. It's personal-depth implication lost through repetitious, school-daze conditioning, in the "stare"-ility of assuming the subject/object role for the umpteenth time.

What, "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.", really points out, is that we ourselves are the Beauty in all our supremely genuine and intricately idiosyncratic character. We ourselves are the great mystery of the ages.

The only story we came here to live is our own.

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In recent decades, we have been delivered into a dubious, dangerous and disingenuous (yet also, an increasingly miraculous and empowering), moment in history. One with very demanding and unreasonable expectations that we can either adopt willingly or else blow-off completely. That is, the impression and pressure, particularly for the young (which we all once were), that, because the world is so dangerous, hateful and toxic (according to all the 5 o'clock news "shows"), we must always appear as self-possessed, all-knowing, even omnipresent beings. As in the phrase, "You're not the boss of me!" Or else, as some sort of amenable, adaptable “citizens”. A time where we are expected to imagine, assume and reenforce our own total-authority over our own (however biased) “realities”. A potentially very divisive, default-formula for living because, anyone’s “reality”, if based in limitation, begins to enact the avoidant, Either/Or observation-model and, therefor, are likely to make choices based on an attitude of scarcity.

(However, if you are a Self-realized Creature-Citizen, Please rush $19.99, plus shipping and handling to SPIRITUS ABSURDUM for the accepting and empowering, Both/And attitude-formula toward Life.)

 

With such a stubborn kind of self-certainty, it becomes challenging to convince these people of just about anything. Including positive alternatives about general attitude. If one avoids help or has become so conditioned that they can’t recognize “a way out”, than the alternative becomes that anything in the material substance context will suffice and seduce us. If anything mimicking it’s own most shiny packaging serves to “save” us from ourselves, than "Everything..", and not just some sacred Beauty, “is in the eye of the beholder.” 

This is why our times are either debilitating or empowering. If everything is in the eye of the beholder, then some beholders will know enough not to believe everything they themselves think. Others are convinced, usually through some manifestation of insecurity, that they must behold what the collective maintains. 

 

Meanwhile, as with other noteworthy subjects, beauty, when given enough thoughtful musing or passionate discernment, takes up it’s own peculiar flag of consequence and asks us to place Her predominant-or-illusive ordering-principles upon the altar of our deeper considerations. Why is beauty significant? Is beauty important or is this subject a veritable can of worms, pulling our attention away from “the important” things, potentially creating an endless cycle of argument, enmity, and frustration for those in a hurry? Is it worthy of our trouble? Is it really rather a benign subject? A naive subject? A highly critical subject? A quintessential subject? How does it land? Where does it land? Could a sudden awakening through the beautiful be the catalyst for some kind of Super Subjectivity? (See PataPhysics)

 

In related news:

In the infancy of this strange world, the Soul of the World (the Anima Mundi) and all individual human souls were One. There was no separation between them. Our psyches were from Nature Herself. From The No-thing or Void (zero) came The One (the total, unified mystery or Monad). From The One, came The Two, the distinction of our complex, component aspect (or Duad) and the glorious proclamation, “I Am, that I Am.”. In the same way, from Nature came Psyche. Long before the psychology of self, Psyche was the celebration of the great mystery of our existence. To be ensouled within as magical contents, in the same way as what was ensouled without (the natural world which included trees, rivers, gods and spirits) as a magical container, was the discovery and beginning of our personal agency. 

In ancient Greece, Gaia, Mother of the Earth and of all the gods, “the Oldest One, the Foundation” was the first being to arise out of chaos. As such, she is the origin of “cosmos”-literally, an “ordering”, a “harmonious whole” in which the mind could rest (it wasn’t until some millennia later that we could contemplate from that place of rest). Then, from the early 17th century (as a noun denoting the art of beautifying the body): from French cosmétique, from Greek kosmētikos, from kosmein ‘arrange or adorn’, from kosmos ‘order or adornment’, we have the English word cosmetic(s). Carl Jung said that archetypes are universal images of instincts. And yet, from the archetype of totality, the singular-and-multifaceted, harmonious whole, The Great Mother of All, Gaia, we have today what appears to be merely the technical language, equipment and paraphernalia of that rather degraded image-instinct of wholeness. One where our priorities (our cosmos or “ordering” sense) puts the ego dream at center in that world/cosmos at the expense of our mysterious World itself. In the common day order of business and expectation, “beauty” becomes concerned with defining, adorning and beautifying women and men, in hopes to become, once again, that same sacred substance, yet from a highly insecure desire to be known, seen and validated as that same, original mystery. Perhaps without a profound and emphatic YES to having no Self-image, or else a profound and emphatic YES to incomprehensibly mysterious Life, The Great Mystery of Existence does not sit well upon our surfaces. Our superficiality has super-fictionalized us. We lose, to some degree, our link to our inborn essence. Our innate and original character. Like the flower, our innate Being needn’t boast. It just Is. Radiant, glorious, naturally harmonious from the light of the Sun. In this same way, The Life is The Great Secret of the alchemists. We Become by flourishing in our nature, rather than pretending at what we’re told, one way and another, to be.

There are wrong-conceptions of the beautiful: “Beauty Salon” (which is here being reclaimed from that irony); “Beauty Parlor"; “..School”; “..Pageant”; magazines and industry. To my mind, this includes any accolade-driven obsession to achieve praise and notoriety. For example, attending ivy-league colleges for status and material gains rather than making a positive contribution to society. When we don’t truly know ourselves (which includes knowing the collective plight and suffering of our fellow kin-folk; as well as lacking respect for the more-than-human-world), the insane and the confused and the “short-sighted” desperation to be wealthy, known, beautiful, praised, even worshipped, will gladly take a stand and strike a pose.

 

As mentioned earlier, people who lack the courage to ask for help and to participate, often act from a place of limitation or scarcity (the Either/Or, not the Both/And attitude). By default, they become convinced that their existence alone is license to be the ‘all-knowing’, god-like, master-factor of their own lives. This is a terrible and unfortunate confusion. The phrase, “You’re not the boss of me!”, comes to mind here. Rebellion, I think, can be very healthy. However, an attitude of constant limitation can cause a person to assume that there are tyrants a’plenty because they themselves can’t find their own natural wholeness and abundance. They must find an oppressor to blame so that they don’t have to contend with freedom, to account for what they might actually want, but are afraid to seek.

 

About this project: Creature Citizen Beauty Salon

Why Beauty? Why make Beauty part of the defining title and subject of this creative resource center for Self-governance practices; germinating conscious collaborations and personal artistic transformation? 

Well, beauty is an ancient and primary instinct in human beings that, if beheld correctly, still provides radical well-being and abundant mysteries for us. Also, there is a certain ironic vagueness and simultaneous gravity around the word beauty. Like Truth, Freedom or Love, Beauty can seem like a displaced ideal, an antiquated, worn-out concept or the realization of deep and vast realms of sacred riches in the discovery of personal power. Sometimes it’s like the poster child of challenged subjectivity or else empowered imagination. On one hand, beauty colludes with the ill-fated perfection of self-image. On the other hand, beauty facilitates a context where Self-realization of a soul’s true character is discovered and becomes identified with. 

 

But this emphasis on beauty is also only demonstrative. More fulfilling than this is the overall practice of exploring various functional concepts. Majesty for example. Or accountability. Or luster. Challenge, courage, delight or enjoyment all set the soul in her ordered place. All is well in the cosmos. Keep it Real on the inside. Shine your truth’s mystery to the outside.

I want to offer folks the mysterious and exciting challenge of defining their own terms, exploring the possibility of greater Self-governance and prayer-forming their real-time reactions through physical theater and paratheater group-ritual-dynamics while further-confronting their own beliefs, maps, desires, concepts, outworn assumptions and associations. In our times, Renewal is both appropriate and desired.

 

 

Feeling lost is just as common as feeling found. Suddenly, with peacefulness, a change of environment and the easing of any busy mind from it’s patterns, anyone may catch up to the fact that we’ve been imagining our immediate reality all the time. The idle or substantial, perhaps astounding, but seldom horrifying, memory that there is never separation between subject and surroundings. Perhaps this is a gateway to more beauty, benevolence, pleasure, astonishment, mystery, ad infinitum in our lives. 

 

But again, I’ve chosen the subject of beauty precisely because of it’s changing, mercurial nature to be many things and then, just as suddenly, to be nothing at all. It mirrors, rather perfectly, a condition where we lose our brightness in shadows (become “lost”) or else when our spring of uniqueness gushes triumphantly into Being. The Art of Being Human is in Being. We are not Human Doings.

 

 

For aeons, human beings have created mental structures to live by. Perhaps we are best summed up as map-makers. Weather it was learning not fondle fire, or remembering the days of the week, or the way to Grandmother’s house, or replacing memory entirely with algorithms and digital calendars, everything necessary (and unnecessary) has found it’s order in the maps that we’ve tracked by way of our duty, business, function and purpose in society.

 

The ancient Greeks, among other early cultures of the world, were fascinated with the concept of Beauty and used it as the primary ordering principle of the cosmos. Without it, the universe (or what we now call the natural world) would have been an impartial and chaotic jungle of unknowable variables. More gods would be hostile. A constant, formidable opponent as-cosmos was not an attractive or functional alternative. Also, because beauty comes as (and is still) a function of pleasure, they grew to behold it in the natural world and imagine it in the stars at night. With Beauty as the constant lens for discerning The How of all things: such as appropriate governance; societal progress; richness of soil and crops; and especially personal soul-purpose, the common ideal of outward attitude and inward awareness was appropriately that of abundance, peace and charity. It is a terrible, collective lie that this can’t be true within our worlds today. But we’re actually getting closer than ever.