Inquiry

It's so amazing to see Gary Oldman's play as a Dracula in a Francis Ford Coppola's movie, 1992. His eyes look so tired, depressed, as if saying: "I've seen everything, but there is no magic anymore. Those all just nothing."  

On the other hand, I found very bright and vivid eyes of high spirited persons. I always fall in love with these kind of person. From them I can expect a piece of wisdom, though they are younger than me and not necessarily have sufficient formal education. 

Is that beauty ? Maybe. Sometimes I see that beauty as inner strength (as opposed to Coppola's Dracula who looks so tired and has a big problem with acceptance), and at certain level that quality is closer to charisma (Because you like them as they are, no less no more. You want to support, even protect them somehow). They look so self-integrated, contrasting with Dracula which is seemed so ... isolated.

Yes, I've found strength is the primary ingredient of beauty. A high self-control, no fear, no effort to prove anything, as well as the ability to find newness on anything ... these things I see as inner strength, which is came from a well connection with their innermost being. 

That's why sustaining inner power is so important for me. Because all the time I find out that interconnectedness with my inner core makes things so acceptable on many levels, with or without logical understanding. Furthermore, a strong bond with your innerself also makes everything feels like your extended body.

This kind of power, integrity, self-acceptance, interconnectedness, are they sorts of beauty ? Yes, I think we can say so.  

Today the beauty within me is much like looking through a clear glass window. It gives to me a clear vision of the beauty in eveyone and the world. But my story around beauty didn't start out this way. It took a lot of cleaning of that window to make it shine and luminate its light . About thirty years to be exact.

I grew up in the fifties in the deep South. My praise from others always centered around my beauty. I was told that my beauty would help me find someone to take care of me. When I brought home grade cards showing excellence in my work everyone, except my Mother, said being smart was a handicap for a women. Men didn't like this. Slowly my grades deteriorated as did my self-esteem. I also had para-normal experiences, which I had to keep secret, because of being brought up in a Baptist fundamentalist family and culture. This created a backlash of unusual illness's that kept re-occuring that no one could diagnose.

To say the least, growing up for me was very painful. But I did have great beauty. And I won all the beauty awards and became the object of all the boy's desire. When I was a senior in high school I had a special teacher, Mr Ford, who saw something beyond my beauty. He taught physics and I was the only girl in the class. I loved two things passionately, reading and science. That year I tied for the physics award which would give me a small scholarship to LSU. The principle decided to give the scholarship to the boy. After all, the principle said, you are so beautiful and will find a wonderful husband to take care of you. And that I did. In the next thirty years of my life I found several husbands who tried to take care of me. But I felt ugly, worthless, and deeply abandoned by those who couldn't see all my beauty, including my husbands.My sweet Mother, today, says how sorry she didn't march right into that principle's office and demand I be given my honor.

I did not start to see myself as beautiful until I made the decision to live alone. I went back to school and finished my education, began therapy and started doing meditation and yoga. I don't have any regrets that my path took me in a direction of pain and suffering. I do regret that I hurt others along that path. I should have never been in any of those marriages. I married them under a false identity. I tried so hard to be what others wanted me to be. And I idealized them hoping they would be who I wanted. What a mess we make when we don't honor who we are.

My story has a happy ending. I'm beautiful in my whole being. And I feel so blessed, to have this wonderful beautiful window of who I am, to see through to a world that is also so beautiful. Everyone I meet I see me in all my beauty. They reflect this back in so many ways. I have made loving peace with everyone that I hurt. It is sad that in this modern era we live, women still struggle with identity crisis. But its exciting to see someone, young and beautiful as Vanessa Fisher, taking a passionate role in helping women see; we must become conscious of our feminism in its fully integrated union with masculine. We continue to just be half of who we are. And the same with our beautiful men. These energies need to advance to a more soul/sublte mind consciousness where these dualties dance together instead of compete. 

Mary Linda Landauer

i have had a detached retina and that eye is often a bit red and i can pretty much only see out of the other eye which gets tired sometimes .. but i forget those things all the time .. don't notice them because there is this love inside that is so radiant and beautiful .. and it feels great to move thru space being (touch wood!) blessed with kinaesthetic bliss ..

when u look at another person while they are speaking to u .. as u sit and listen and hold the space for them .. it is some kind of miracle how they get more and more beautiful as they speak ..

also i am extremely attracted to the soul of the person .. it's the doorway for me .. if our souls resonate i am attracted to u

i will never forget seeing as an adolescent a picture in time magazine taken in a wartorn country of a baby who had died just moments before .. the baby looked so completely and utterly beautiful .. and it was then that i realized how much every single thing is beautiful 

This is a great subject and all the view points are very interesting. My story begins in my late teens when I was obsessed with the concept of beauty. I remember writing long rants about it though I had nothing to rely on. It was something that had entered my mind in an intuitive sort of way and I do feel that it was a foreboding of my leap into spirituality. I will try and capture what my ideas on beauty have been since. Bear with me; this is tentative and I never was a student of aesthetics.

Since I became aware of beauty, I loved walking around town looking at beautiful old buildings and antiques in antique shops. In those days, it seemed that only old things qualified as beautiful. Looking back, I'm not surprised that the style of the 1980s repelled me! There is no way I can find beauty in it to this day. I soon came to the conclusion that there are some guidelines to beauty. First, a classic measure of sorts that is based in the platonic ideas of the perfect proportions. The second criteria has to do with the natural world - natural materia as well as a natural attitude seem more beautiful than artificial materia and fake behaviour. The third criteria is connected to the degree to which something or someone is soulful - in other words older objects seem more beautiful because they are impregnated with more energy and the traces of use while more profound people who know themselves will appear more beautiful than shallow people. The interesting thing is that while slick perfection can be pretty, it tends to lack interest. While proportions are important, the slight imperfection (the trace of a human hand, the uneven character of a wooden floorboard) often induces more beauty rather than taking away from it.

I've never attempted to map all this out before so it's sketchy, however I would say this is how I still perceive beauty. It seems to me that the same values can be transcribed to any level of existance. Ugly is thus artificial, fake, shallow, pretentious and so on. Brainless young bimbos with implants would thus not qualify! We are surely talking of other values in that case... But... You will surely argue that some modern items as well as young people can be very beautiful. I do agree. In fact I love a lot of modern things. The freshness of new things and new ideas, or people who are only just beginning to live! Yet if we look more closely I think we can find the above values attached to these things. A modern building can be very beautiful when it has been carefully and lovingly planned with natural materials and depth of thought, as well as using a good sense of proportions (something which I feel people felt intuitively in the old days but lost since functionalism in the 20th Century).

It seems to me that I've tried to transcribe these values to my artwork (proportions, depth, meaning, materia, vintage charm and so on). A few years ago my interest in photography escalated and I found myself seeking out interesting surfaces that would make for abstract photo artwork. I loved visiting the junkyard where I found rust and decay; these surfaces made for quite beautiful pictures. In my case it was not a question of just recording what I saw. First, I had to recognize potential. Then I had to choose angle and approach. After this, I still did things to the picture in photoshop. I was in other words elevating what I saw to a higher level of aesthetic experience. It was not so much a case of seeing beauty as seeing potential that could be turn into beauty with the use of a creative attitude.

The ability to see potential in things has been transcribed to my relationships. I've had a number of boyfriends that were diamonds in the rough, but never grew to bloom in full glory. The relationships ended and I realized I had to find someone who was already "something". This something mirrors an array of personal requirements, my subjective perception of a beautiful person. It's someone who is already by force of their own intervention a reasonably accomplished, profound and wise "old soul". I suppose that in the case of human beings there is so much soul and spirit that the desire for external beauty (the perfect proportions and so on) recedes into the background (well I appreciate external beauty but am not obsessed with it and don't need for it to be present in my personal life - this has been a bit difficult to deal with and I'm not done yet, however it's important that I get there). Sure it would be great to have it all but in this world, that would be a shallow attitude! I myself am certainly not the epitome of external beauty. But I hope my inner richness will make up for that in someone else's eyes. As we all know other people only mirror what we see in ourselves. So I wouldn't expect anything else from anyone.

There is just one more thing I'd like to add. In the 1990s as I got to know New Age people and the movement I was a bit surprised to find that aesthetically speaking, people chose glitter and slick looking pictures with space themes or otherworldly subjects. While some glitter and slickness is fine, too much of it becomes boring to me. I then realized that these people were indeed reaching for "other than this reality" and that it was a very different form of spirituality than what I was interested in. My career as an artist does reflect to a very high degree the aesthetics of this realm and a desire to express values connected to the earth. I don't think my preferences are particularly personal. I would think they are quite "integral" and universal in nature.

I hope I've made sense!

www.vivimaricarpelan.com

 How deep is your skin??

• My exterior is a human male form.  I am a series of systematic organic bulges.  My face suggests honest expression.  Its contours are just and soft at the same time.  Capable of protection, sexual exertion, and comedy I hone my body like a temple.  Laugh with me. Or cry with me.  Yell at me.  Love me.

My interior comes equipped with presence.  Intent pours out my eyeballs to the exterior world.  Shining in the eyes.  Thoughts are relationship oriented, juxtaposed or coinciding to action.  This goes with that and this with this.  I enter deeper into myself.  

•  I am attracted to women for intimate relationship (or just in general) who are in their bodies.  Outside of culture norms or disfunction, unconventional yet symmetrical, capable of child bearing!

laughing open hearted women ensnare my attention.  Radiant, sexually resilient, supportive gaze, automatic reciprocity.   Is she in there? (yes!)

•  Humanity cannot duplicate nature.  There are echoes of natural forms in our art and music mathematics.  This is desired!  Harmony, networks, utopia, idealism.  eh.  Levels of truth!  Evolutionary impulse.  

Architecture, weather, celestial phenomenon- patterns, systems!

Putting this into an imprint or impression of my perspective as a combo-perspective is my scope and depth.  

-S

A few months before I retired as a conservation area manager, I wrote the following about my love for beauty in nature and the environment and which speaks to the topic of this Inquiry:

I am a 48 year-old female.  When I think of beauty, I rarely think of physical beauty in the typical sense, but yet I am inundated with beauty every single day.  I see it in the people with whom I cross paths, I see it in the trees, plants, animals, birds, and even the insects.  It sounds trite to say such a thing, but a shift happened and I simply became conscious of the world around me in a totally different way.  And really, it is more of a feeling of beauty that occurs, felt deep within, rather than just the observation and acknowledgment of beauty, which is more or less how it used to be for me.  It is almost as if I can feel the soul of the trees, of people, of animals... Sometimes it is a very joyful and awe-inspiring experience and sometimes it is painful beyond measure, but the beauty is always there if I look.  

Within this, one would think that I have also aligned my own "beauty" with this "universal" beauty I have discovered, but that has been far more challenging.  Quite simply, I am my own worst critic.

The people that I am attracted to see me as I see them, on this deeper plane.  Although the only person in my life thus far that has been able to do that passed away in 2006.

I don't feel I relate to beauty differently in the 3 different planes.  I feel they are all part of the same thing.

It is hard to say how much of my sense of beauty is shaped culturally since culture is so deeply embedded.  I was always taught to appreciate the beauty in the world around me, but the perspective I now have is vastly different than how I had originally interpreted that to be.  But then, had I not been taught that, perhaps my perspective would not have evolved to be what it is today.  ??

Certainly, what is considered to be physical beauty varies vastly over cultures and over time.  Like many others, I believe the U.S. over-emphasizes physical beauty, whatever the definition de jour happens to be.  The prevalence of diseases like anorexia and the booming plastic surgery business shows just how far people will go to fit this definition.  The problem with this skin-deep perspective, when we are multi-layered and multi-faceted creatures, is it just leaves way too much out of the definition.  And it leaves untold amounts of beauty undiscovered. 

-- I experience beauty within my self as a sensory experience.  When I am dancing and feel connected with my existence.  When I feel balanced, whole, connected, and the flow of life I most sense the beauty.

When I see others happy and in tune with themselves and their environment I can see the beauty.  I tend to be attracted to sensitive, loving, creativie, playful and visionary types of people.

I relate to the beauty around me through my five senses: touch, sight, smell, sound, taste.  Well actually more than just those because I have more ways to experience reality but its a start.  The more present I am the better I can contact this beauty. 

Mystical beauty- try to look at it or grasp it and it dissapears.

I think that my experience of beauty is both personal and cultural.  I don't live totally alone and have learned new ways of experiencing beauty from others.  As I grow up though I am learning to say "What does Stacie Like and Want"  What is beautiful to me?  Maybe what is beautiful to another is different, and that is OK.  Then Inclusivity is beautiful, but that is not my original idea, so then that is cultural on some level.  So back to what I was saying about growing up personally, getting into the quiet zone and discovering beauty for myself, a beauty brand new all of its own.

IBWY always-already

“Beauty is the final contentment of the Eros of the Universe.” --

Randy Mack

It is so  interesting to me that you post this. The answer to all three is yes. I find beauty in absolutely everything I see. I look for the beauty. I came to a personal conclusion awhile back that I am supposed to make things beautiful. If there is less than absolute beauty-then I need to fix it. Even if it is in another person. I slowly and cleverly need to help that individual deal with their shadows so that thier beauty can SHINE. This is one of my largest purposes here. I'm bringing beauty back-(pun of the song by Justin Timberlake-I'm bringing sexy back)

Rhythmic, Radiant, Holistic, Sublime.

When Socrates addresses this inquiry in Plato's Hippias Major we find a man going to great lengths to tease apart the nuanced distinctions between what is Beautiful and what merely (in this case) Wonderful, Pleasing, Attractive, etc.  Like us he is not so much concerned to produce a doctrine or even "win against the Sophists" but rather to establish an intersubjective & mutually developmental field of discursive benevolence oriented around the radiant figure of a self-authenticating, self-consistent Divine Quality or Virtue.  

Along similar lines I find it now very difficult to say "this" or "that" is beautiful, even the effulgent light of spiritual radiance that appears palpably before my inner eye when I contemplate.

• there is a very sweet idiosyncrasy in my own life-history, a vaguely-boundaried sense of the basic pleasure of the structural forms in which I was raised, of the near-unbearable quality of parental love, of the perfectly me-appropriate memories of domestic detail and the living landscape of rural British Columbia, of overwhelming promise, of the wild but benevolent Nature Powers; this is a special beauty I find in myself.
• there is an undeniable seductive beauty only hinted at (to me) in the Feminine form but not actualized until it is elicited as intelligent recognition-encouragement in the eyes; and there is sorrowful beauty in the contemplation of a deeply human tenderness being acted out, even in "entertainment".
• there is the exacting precision of minimalist beauty which, bizarrely can be found in almost any form -- but is not found in every form; Andre Breton's definition of the perfect convulsive juxtaposition which defines Surrealist beauty; the slow migration migration of my taste from Dali & Magritte to Manet & Van Gogh as my capacity to discern the peculiar nuances of strange beauty became sharper;  

But again I am almost loathe to speak in these terms since I cannot stray very far from the tangible sense the Beauty Herself is beautiful... and all other beauty is merely borrowed (or, to say it more happily, conductive through the lucidity of appropriate occasions.)  

Example?  As a boy I spent long hours with my mother watching the nearly unbearable beauty of the moon's radiance moving like electricity on the dark ocean waters.  This was Schopenhauer's beauty... a promise of perfection from Nature that provoked in me an artistic urge to complete it, reach it, embrace it more completely.  Today I merrily dismiss these painful-perfect intensities.  I no long feel driven to "get across" to some fuller beauty.  This pleases me more.  I trust Beauty better than I once did.  I see it more often.  I know it better.  I help when I can.  The romantic yearning it provoked, even the wild enthusiasm for my most peculiar favorites among beautiful things, now seems to me too feeble to encompass my relationship to Beauty.  

While others are standing in awe of the sunset... I walk on.  I no long compose poems or take photographs.  I trust it to be THERE.

Addendum - Beauty seems to be a subtle quality made available through particular experiential configurations of material elements.  Greater human technological mastery of complex computational patterns could well reveal a particular trend among configuration-styles which would make easy to production of Naturalness or Beauty etc.  The particular set of organizational types which seems to us, as part of the universe, to be "conductive" to bio-energy, harmony, health, beauty may be part of the Gross realm's destiny -- establishing a reliable technological (i.e. gross) bridge to/from the Subtle.  In a sense we are all working on this task.

Layman Pascal,

pretendtomeditate@gmail.com