Beauty is not simply an attractive object that the perceiver senses "out there." Rather, it is a profoundly relational reality. When I see the beauty of a landscape - like the rainbow colors of the Badlands, for example - the thing that often goes unnoticed is the fact that I am also having an experience of being WORTHY to perceive such beauty. After all, the beauty of the landscape makes me feel good inside on a truly deep level. And what is that good feeling if not a perception of being lovable and worthy to inhabit this earth at this particular time and place?
This means that I don't have to try to possess the beauty I see, for it is already a part of me. After all, beauty is an innately relational reality - the balance or harmony between perceiver and perceived. Beauty is an experience of coming alive; in visual terms, a "luminosity." As the medieval Persian Islamic philosopher Alhazen once put it, "The highest pleasure is when a luminous object encounters the luminous nature within us. This pleasure is based upon the proportions among things, in particular the adaptation of mind and world to one another. It is based ultimately on the metaphysical love which binds reality together."
This realization can make us less possessive in our experience of other people. When we find ourselves attracted to a person we consider "beautiful," our first impulse is to want somehow to possess them. But what if we realized that the reason why they appear beautiful to us at all is because our very act of PERCEIVING is itself beautiful? As Irish mystic John O'Donohue says: "Only if there is beauty in us can we recognize beauty elsewhere: beauty knows beauty. In this way, beauty can be a mirror that manifests our own beauty . . . There is a profound balancing within beauty."
Abbot Joseph of St. Benedict's Trappist Monastery in Snowmass, Colorado once put it this way: "When I find myself attracted to a woman, my first impulse is to somehow want to possess her. However, I find peace in realizing that - from a spiritual perspective - I ALREADY possess her, and am possessed by her. For at the deepest level, both of us are truly One in God." Beauty is never contained in an object "out there." Instead, it is always already a profoundly relational experience occurring between perceiver and perceived. This realization enables us to relax, let go, and allow the beautiful "other" to be the sacred reality which they truly always are.
Photo: Yellow Mounds Section, Badlands National Park, SD; May 17, 2013
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