Chinese Character for Beauty
This is the Chinese ideogram representing beauty: at its base, a human being with arms and legs spread wide apart as though opening to the whole world, as if to touch the Earth, its flowers and trees, its rivers and seas; and also the air surrounding us, the sky and the stars. Crossing this ideogram are three lines representing the three levels: Earth, the human world, and the divine world. The top lines are the energy that pervades the universe.
Our theme for the month of September will be Beauty. What is it? What does it mean to you? How have our ideas of beauty changed over the years? What does the meaning of Beauty have to do with now, the times we are living in, on the threshold of the New Age as we go through the Shift?
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Beginning on September 7, and through the next three Tuesdays of this month, we will be looking at the concept of Beauty.We will be hearing from, among others:
Spiritual psychologist Piero Ferrucci and his book, Beauty and the Soul (2009).
You can L I S T E N to a recorded interview with Dr. Ferrucci on the Gary Null Radio Show, Conversations with Remarkable Minds, (abridged transcript) recorded almost one year ago today.
Two very amazing and inspiring women!
Marta Luzim, therapist and founder of Primal Healing and Art, will speak about her new book, Heart of a Woman
“Beauty is…. To experience the creative chaos and dangerous excitement of actually being alive.
To access your full creative power…the metamorphosis. …the fierce courage to heal, evolve….and create..
This is beauty…the feminine metamorphosis…
Trebbe Johnson, director of Vision Arrow, and author of The World Is A Waiting Lover, will tell us about Radical Joy for Hard Times, a new, more intimate environmentalism for all citizens of the Earth.
“Together we go to wounded places to share the stories of our experience; acknowledge our love for the places that are important to us, even though they are under assault; and create simple acts of beauty there.”
Radical Joy for Hard Times offers programs such as Earth Exchanges and Weekend Workshops, and in 2011 they will begin offering Trainings. Read more about it HERE.
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For more reading, I recommend:
Stuart Wilde on Softness and Beauty in the Eye of the Storm (12/15/2004) Here’s an excerpt:
The only safety is in softness and beauty. Only softness and gentleness will take you to the eye of that storm, where it is calm and safe. This is because the war against humanity is against the yang liars. Not just bellicose men that rob and kill people but yang-style women that have bought into vindictiveness, elitism, materialism and specialness.
However, when you go to softness and gentleness you disempower their ability to talk to you. The ghouls can pretend to be soft and gentle and talk to you in a child-like, non-threatening voice, but they can’t sustain it. The symmetry breaks down very fast. Here is an example of a symmetry break, what I call, symbies. In the mirror-world there is a place that is all white, Caucasian women, about thirty-to-fifty years old. These are women that are alive on earth today, existing simultaneously in a parallel mirror-world, or dimension if you like. All the women have the same inner traits, so they are tightly congregated into one particular area of the mirror-world, where inner feelings dictate where you find yourself location-wise.
The Forces of Light are yin and soft. The only way that they can recognize their human allies here on earth is to look for the softness and see if a human’s symmetry holds up. So in embracing a soft heart once and for all, you align with the eventual victors. For all that which is hard and ugly and asymmetrical will eventually fall away.
Of course, that softness and gentleness has to be in your heart and you will have to decide. But it’s not hard to go the right way, it is just easy to be led the wrong way. Don’t fight, don’t compete, don’t lie and don’t play at being special. Build your own sacred path, one of kindness and warmth. You have to reach a place where you are at peace with humanity.
*Everything that is holy and good starts out as symmetrical. This is because we live in a mathematically elegant universe, which is almost perfectly symmetrical. Everything ghoulish is bent out of shape (asymmetrical). Because, for example, in humans, your inner emotions and feelings eventually bleed through to your physical body and so your eyes and mouth and your overall face shape are gradually bent out of symmetry over the years. Your mouth slopes or your lips go thin and so forth.
And for a little background of the Romantic Movement of the 18th and 19th centuries, Arthur O. Lovejoy has a marvelous lecture “On the Discriminations of Romanticisms” (1924) An excerpt:
“The Romantics felt all the opinions of the Enlightenment were fraught with dangerous errors and oversimplifications. Romanticism may then be considered as a critique of the inadequacies of what it held to be Enlightened thought. The critique of the Romantics — sometime open, sometimes hidden — can be seen as a new study of the bases or knowledge and of the whole scientific enterprise. It rejected a science based on physics — physics was inadequate to describe the reality of experience. “O for a life of sensations rather than of thoughts,” wrote John Keats (1795-1821). And William Blake (1757-1827) admonished us all to “Bathe in the waters of life.” And Keats again, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty, — that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
“The Romantic universe was expanding, evolving, becoming — it was organic, it was alive. The Romantics sought their soul in the science of life, not the science of celestial mechanics. They moved from planets to plants. The experience was positively exhilarating, explosive and liberating — liberation from the soulless, materialistic, thinking mechanism that was man. The 18th century had created it. The Romantics found it oppressive , hence the focus on liberation. Listen to the way Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) put it in Prometheus Unbound:
The joy, the triumph, the delight, the madness!
The boundless, overflowing, bursting gladness,
The vaporous exultation not to be confined!
Ha! Ha! The animation of delight
Which wraps me, like an atmosphere of light,
And bears me as a cloud is borne by its own wind.
“The Romantics returned God to Nature — the age revived the unseen world, the supernatural, the mysterious, the world of medieval man. It is no accident that the first gothic novel appears early in the Romantic Age. Nature came to be viewed historically. The world was developing, it was a world of continuous process, it was a world in the process of becoming.
“The Romantics sought Nature’s glorious diversity of detail — especially its moral and emotional relation to mankind. On this score, the Romantics criticized the 18th century. The philosophe was cold, mechanical, logical and unfeeling. There was no warmth in the heart. For the Romantics, warmth of heart was found and indeed enhanced by a communion with Nature. The heart has reasons that Reason is not equipped to understand. The heart was a source of knowledge — the location of ideas “felt” as sensations rather than thoughts. Intuition was equated with that which men feel strongly. Men could learn by experiment or by logical process—but men could learn more in intuitive flashes and feelings, by learning to trust their instincts. The Romantics distrusted calculation and stressed the limitations of scientific knowledge. The rationality of science fails to apprehend the variety and fullness of reality. Rational analysis destroys the naïve experience of the stream of sensations and in this violation, leads men into error.
“One power possessed by the Romantic, a power distinct and superior to reason, was imagination. Imagination might apprehend immediate reality and create in accordance with it. And the belief that the uncultured—that is, the primitive — know not merely differently but best is an example of how the Romantics reinterpreted the irrational aspect of reality — the Imagination. The Romantics did not merely say that there were irrational ways of intuiting reality. They rejected materialism and utilitarianism as types of personal behavior and as philosophies. They sought regeneration — a regeneration we can liken to that of the medieval heretic or saint. They favored selfless enthusiasm, an enthusiasm which was an expression of faith and not as the product of utilitarian calculation. Emotion — unbridled emotion — was celebrated irrespective of its consequences.
“The 18th century life of mind was incomplete. The Romantics opted for a life of the heart. Their relativism made them appreciative of diversity in man and in nature. There are no universal laws. There are certainly no laws which would explain man. The philosophe congratulated himself for helping to destroy the ancien regime. And today, we can perhaps say, “good job!” But after all the destruction, after the ancient idols fell, and after the dust had cleared, there remained nothing to take its place. In stepped the Romantics who sought to restore the organic quality of the past, especially the medieval past, the past so detested by the pompous, powdered-wig philosophe.
“Truth and beauty were human attributes. A truth and beauty which emanated from the poet’s soul and the artist’s heart. If the poets are, as Shelley wrote in 1821, the “unacknowledged legislator’s of the world,” it was world of fantasy, intuition, instinct and emotion. It was a human world.”
Please share your thoughts, comments, and any related material you have, including your own!
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“Beautifully” stated Joseph! Your thoughts are so poetic. What a pleasure to read your stream of consciousness.
Thank you so much for this~~~
September 2, 2010 at 7:02 am
Beauty and how it relates to the movement of individual spirit, through the transition of awareness that is happening, to me, is like the relationship between perception by an ego-id-super-ego state and the object being viewed. Is that too obvious, Beauty is in the eye of the beholder? Sorry, low hanging fruit, I will try again.
Beauty is many things, it exists in a face or body, in a melodious song, in a concept sublime, in a sacrifice and in a celebration, beauty has a home wherever one part of life sees another part and decides it would like to be on that side of the fun. to switch perspectives some.
When a leaf leans into the sun, it finds beauty in the fulfulment of its chlorophyl. When a seed germinates and blooms and is pollinated and the cycle repeats, with diversity and infinity, that is beauty. When man and woman make new generations that hold the hope and intelligence of our efforts thus far, hope and beauty bloom.
Hope is the fuel, beauty the nectar lure and pollinating destination of the bee, the peacock in mating display, also serves as scintilating eye candy to attract the attention of a mate who is looking for your particular traits.
September 1, 2010 at 9:10 pm