Symbols
Reflection
There is an old Navajo blessing that starts with ‘may you walk in beauty’, a reminder to appreciate what a gift it is to belong in the world.
The beauty of existence runs deep beneath its surface, into its structure and even into our perception of it.
Things aren’t beautiful because we perceive them as such. We perceive them as beautiful because they align with the way reality, and our own beings, which are part of it, organizes itself.
Everything participates in this giant quest for harmony and order, everything, from our mental constructions to our visual patterns, to our emotions. Everything we perceive as beautiful just fits effortlessly into the larger frame of reference.
Beauty springs secondary aspects by association, aspects like peace, love, virtue.
We’re often unaware of those unconscious associations and we nod knowingly when they’re pointed out to us, still in the dark about the fact the associations themselves are an expression of those same underlying principles we call beauty.
Walking in beauty is not a happy accident. It’s a way of being in which the viewer is in harmony with his or her surroundings. This harmony casts back upon the viewer the beauty we often see in saints, sages and artists.
Such beauty is so overwhelming our souls can’t fit it all in, and it spills back into the world in creative form.
People will object that beautiful things are so in different ways, that artful pottery, a sunset or a piece of music don’t share features.
What they share instead is the underlying structure of beauty, the one we perceive before we’re even conscious of it, reflected in proportion, symmetry, consistency, scale, rhythm, function, balance, harmony.
These are the verbs of reality, its connective tissue, the relationships between its many parts.
Their orienting principles, which command instant recognition, are ingrained in instincts hundreds of thousands of years old, as old as our senses and our capacity to emote, and found artistic expression on cave walls and hill sides before the development of language.
We walk in beauty every moment without seeing it, the beauty of a humble weed, the tiny dust particles hovering in a ray of light, a soap bubble.
How can we be too busy for the only thing that matters in the world, the drive to evolve order that reality so generously lays before us in ways that align with our senses so we can understand it?
In beauty we see more, first because we’re naturally repelled by ugly things and second because we want to know beauty, we want to know what makes the image, piece of music, dance, or landscape extraordinary, so we can recreate it.
We yearn to replicate beauty, whether or not we realize it, we always want more of it.
Reality started with the most basic building blocks, which allow us to share essence with the rocks and the air, and from this essence it built different types of things, and refined their characteristics until the things themselves could not be thought to belong together anymore, but at the core of this drive to refine complexity there is always the same principle: things can not embody an essence different from that of the material of which they were made.
Beauty rebuilds that bridge of unity inside of being, with invisible connections between its seemingly unrelated parts, so we can see the world as a continuum of transformation, not a discordant jumble of discrete parts.
Is there any difference then between beauty and organization or structure?
Isn’t there beauty in chaos too, sometimes?
There is no chaos, my dear friend. Everything is order, just not the kind that you’d expect.
In conclusion, what are the points worth remembering?
- Beauty reflects the organizing structure inside things and inside our perception of things.
- Our concepts of beauty are hard-wired in our brain, they are not a matter of individual choice. We use our unconscious understanding of the way things fit together at a basic level, which we call beauty, to orient ourselves in the world, just like we use our senses and emotions.
- Perception is a two-way street: what we touch with our senses touches us back. When we recognize beauty, we become its mirrors in the world.
- Things can not embody an essence different from that of the material from which they were made. Beauty is an intrinsic quality of reality.
- Beauty brings up the desire to make more of it.
- At the most basic, there is only one creative principle – evolving complexity from simple forms – and we understand it as beauty.
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