One of the several arguments against Beauty is rooted in the notion Beauty is Subjective. Further still from a face-off or contrarian perspective, Beauty has grown as form of taboo substantiated by cultural standards. Given the hard and narrow push for the acceptance of the abject and the minimising of Beauty’s significance, this Lapin is penned for the remembrance of Emerson’s and Scarry’s writings on Beauty, as a means to widening the cultural production and being just and spiritually fulfilled.
Afferent Beauty, relates to Perceptive Beauty. To state the obvious: people differ in perceptions. Perception is something considered malleable. Where the responsibility is placed, within the individual or the company, brand, or government, often has bodies pointing physically into thin air. The word: society or they or them, is a gesture to the ghost of our time, the spirit to come to terms with. Where did the ideas and perceptions come from aside from someone’s psyche, and who put them there? Beauty can be a remembering for each and every person to have the right to make up their own mind.
Within the different perceptions are intrinsic orientations toward a Beauty that has the capacity to cross lines ascribed as cultural or related to time. The sense of knowing time is not linear or vertical but rather another form of perception yolks in a contingent understanding of mass, velocity, and magnetism. After all, we would have nothing if not bound together by something.
Yet, the time we live in, whether then, now, or to come, relies on the invisible, ideological space present within the performance of speech, posture, apparel and so on. The permission of behavior or creative choices are indicated by the ayudar of the media, technology and: your attention. The tolerance or intolerance of sensual and cognitive choices begs to ask the origins of the thought police. The thought police are the subtle informants of what you are willing to let yourself think or not think. The skrikkelig situated part of this is, it’s at the end of the day: you. You decided to edit your thoughts, believe something whether or not it was substantiated, or in the worst case scenario, be in the presence of pathological liars. Yes, this is all quite scary. Now we are already deep down in the dark burrow, and yet you are in actual safety. The cognitive operative driving the motor of people only works if you let your mind drive your life, or let someone else’s mind dictate yours, or further, allow someone to negate your feelings, suggesting they are not real, and undermine intrinsic trust. So when people say we are living in strange times, they are quite mental times, and the health or unhealthiness of those is a larger formation demanding a reconciling within ourselves and each other.
Social conditioning relative to Beauty has proven to invite experience through a spectrum of safety through danger. Despite differences of physiological, biological, and cultural orientations, a deep well of truth remains when the contrarian mind occupied by the love to propagate danger, whether to personhood, relationships, or ecology is released to welcome the experience of an afferent, and simultaneously mindful and thoughtless, sensual beauty, pointing to an intelligence humans have and even robots seem able to grok their limitations in accessing. Robots or A.I. primarily, and presently access these thigns analytical processes alone with the help of engineers and biochemists; they are at work attempting to mimic your human behavioural biology. If you know anything about neural link or the human genome project, you will find out how far human curiosity is willing to go, and how much that risk is being not only permitted but funded, while currently living human beings face increasing gaps between poverty and what we can call abject wealth. Can those tolerances be considered anything but ugly? Since Beauty of the afferent magnitude requires a nervous system…so far anyway.
This is not a call to wake up, because that call assumes a position you are not awake or dreaming. In terms of consciousness, the unconscious is typically regarded as the body, which animates the nocturnal dream state. The waking state then asks for the unification of the unconscious and conscious.
In all practical, literal, and spiritual senses, people are awake and aware, but may need the time and space to deepen and reflect upon decisions and what they are tacitly permitting or not, and where ideas lead to in the future, as well as space to expand awareness. Blind faith has historically shown detrimental. The use of Beauty can be fouled up such as in, Annihilation, the movie, a prime examples of horrifying beauty, or the type of Beauty cults leading people into dangerous behavior exhibit. This is not the Beauty I want to incite. The kind of Beauty I am interested in incites a nonreactive, nonviolent courage, a Beauty that remains in a wordless space, constant and yet ever subtly changing flow.
Vastly differing subjectivities can appreciate and share visions or phenomena as beautiful. Those experiences of Afferent Beauty run current to concerns for geological empathy in an increasing desire to understand how to healthfully inhabit the earth, and relate as people, man, women, or the increasing number of subjective identities with each other. Without veering into the tricky wicket of politics of any sort, which is the way Beauty becomes mentalised instead of felt or spiritualised, means the mentalisation itself can produce affective states in the body. Psychosomatics as the term suggests, runs deep.
Why all these words for Beauty, being so obvious and felt in experience of thought and appearance? The decline of its presence seems to be doing something to the cognitive and self authoring functions of people. The mass formation compounded by a mix of historical ignorance and performed cognitive function of rewriting history, has created a group pathology. To transform the ugly wetiko of societal narcissism, it seems everyone agrees we have to do something…so what will that be? Beauty of virtues holds together through dominance and power dynamics, is gathered and protected after conflict. Beauty as this requires courage and discernment.
While important to account for diverse people, we have also a duty to remember, a great majority of people regardless of identity increasingly report feeling lost in a vacuous ideological schism. Therefore a felt Beauty holds space for all Vision-Body relationships.
Beauty is what I see through a feeling in my heart, or thereabout from my core radiating a cascade of comfort around my body as if held in an eternal embrace, suggesting the impossibility of being totally alone. This fulfilment through Beauty remains more satisfying when shared. As an old saying goes: joy shared is compounded, sorrows shared are halved. Beauty shared may therefore fuel compassion and love, sparking joy and halving sorrow. This Beauty relies on a willingness to see and reconcile behaviors that harm oneself and those arounds them.
We are relational beings. That gives rise to wonders on why and how Beauty has become such a tumultuous subject within select intellectual frameworks. Beauty as subjective instead of perceptive means an ugly use of life to escape fears of annihilation grown through age within those unreconciled with mortality, or as features of robots seems more celebrated than the imperfections of humans. This relies on examining the object/subject relationship through mental and spiritual frameworks, existing as a ghost demanding increased ability to perceive the multiple layers operating within the complexity of being.
I came to learn, perhaps late, some live in a gamified view of life, placing the driver of the perceived game in a dominance relationship to the world around them through a poor contraption for control: a few buttons. Players seem to simultaneously gloat and suffer in the relative dominance their subjective mental framework constructs, as if the Virtual Reality glowing grid realized in the headsets was already part of the predatory, gamed view of life. This is not a survival behavior such as actual hunting to provide nourishment for the self, family, or group but a means to gain dopamine hits through external objects, or even people, to fulfill their life. Virtual or physiological, the subjective experience turns out to be destructive, and not the beautiful from a distance type of destruction, but more of a slow internal rot.
This view is echoed in the notion of the universe (a proxy word for god) resides within each of us. As far as I have found, a type of stand-off/ish posture around subjectivity historically incites anything but getting along.
In the interest of getting along, a Perceptive and Afferent Beauty establishes presence in as quick of a deep breath, quiets the mind, and structures correct and compassionate action. The reach to control external behavior or minds, that would be indicated by the desire to control whether or not Beauty was accepted as valuable or worthless, taken for granted or appreciated. There are other options on those spectrums of course, yet those are the typical tendencies choices tend to lead to.
Some mental frameworks perceive Beauty as power. In that cultural perspective, the notion all power is abused gets wrapped to Beauty. And yet, in moments of destructive action, Beauty is replaced by things such as “ugly crying” or “ugly thoughts and behaviour.” I had argued the relational claim on Beauty as power in the context of the way I personally see Beauty as inviting understanding: if power is abused it is not power at all. The abuse of power is a negation of the persistent Beauty existing regardless of mental frameworks.
When listening to subjective visions of life, I heard utterances from others or myself that were not Beautiful. I often heard ugly utterances in the distinguished voices of esteemed leaders which I have also heard many people quietly murmur they felt. The spiritual war against Beauty fuels lapses in perception to feed hatred and contempt that consume instead of grow Beauty. These experiences led me to see gross misuses of power as cowardice in action and revere the respiratory relation to Beauty.
Through breath and body, the heart has valves, and therefore holes. We exist not because we are totalistic gods but because we respirate and relate. Even when we are alone, we are signaling and forming our future through imagination, desire, will through mystical experience of living. That feels Beautiful: existing with eyes closed, open, or through watery veils, both within and beyond, as plentiful and deep where games about power or abuse are entirely unimaginable.
The deep well of Beauty heals, is certain as water and stones are, as light and darkness need each other, as seaweed survives each tide and storm, there is a Beauty from the furtherest reaches of theoretical cosmos concurrently running through our electromagnetic tissue making movements from the cells birthed through lungs and bones.
All that withstanding, these are examples of the way metaphysics mated with new age theory to confabulate a notion of the universe as contained within the invididual. Our individual and relational connection with life has come under cultural critique to pave the way for robotic and transhumanist celebration.
This is precisely why Subjective Beauty has revealed a tendency to stall out, stale, or grow out of fashion, and why I want to underline an invitation to Perceptive and Afferent Beauty. Are we really still kids? Learning to play on the playground, instead of bullying each other into submission? That’s the main reason I have withdrawn care for understanding the canon of Subjective Beauty, which enables the suggestion of people as pawns or subjects, to be gamified, played or used. Even if the military organisations see bodies that way, we can, such as in standing meditation choose to embrace the Beauty that is in being.
The abundance of Beauty leads not directly to spoil but does so in the presence of apathy or greed. The way people see, eye to eye or not, directly derives from what Chinese Medicine calls the Conception Vessel. That is describe the vision someone sees with, is what is rooted deep within their sacrum. Linguistically this points to vision as a sacred relationship between sight and sacrum which are not only faculties of body but also of mind and spirit.
The contexts in which each of us exists, is not a universal. The rise in nonlocal awareness through senses and the internet has situated the intellectual frame of vision as temporally higher. I say temporally because the body can only be ignored for so long. The rate at which people move through the day and inhabit their personhood has increasingly been forced to choose to adapt to the tolerance for things that are not beautiful, or be dissolved. Therefore if a taboo is opened up, the clandestine is replaced by open air expression. This is why I wonder if we are collectively nearing the return of Beauty in culture, in the afferent senses or perception. Instead of making Beauty a scapegoat, or phenomena to fear, a small but subtle shift to reverence can generate the inner light and deep well as we enjoy our protection built from the forces of nature. Our ability to manipulate the natural world to our benefit means the heirachy of nature as being more beautiful than cities more of a concern for maintenance and care than for the claim of ugliness. If a place has become barren or no longer Beautiful, the spirit of the people may need to be examined. Beauty, while superficially easy to blame the guilt and shame fed by the rise of self-love pumping up the narcissistic society, reveals a false meaning of beauty, a beauty that when confronted with the logic in fold: if ideas are powerful, what if each person was already whole, already spiritual, not in need of more antidotes or self-love?
What if, the idea of universal beauty was not something scary, inviting destructive actions but something that inspired the remembrance of the Beauty within. This kind of wholeness still asks another external being to co-create with. For we are creative in our humanness already, even if not gods. Through Beauty we can be cautious and careful with ideas, deflating and soothing the inflammatory realm of reactivity and nourishing the burnt-out inner and outer landscapes.
When I was growing up, like most kids, my perception was limited to what I had access to feel and see. I did not have to think about getting love: love simply was. I could then, as adults marvel at children, perceive when there was harmony or conflict, and preferred harmony. In that observation, I noticed when people love each other, they do not have to think about loving themselves. The love is contributed. Everything is taken care of. When there was conflict, there would be wounding, and then focus on oneself was inevitable. When there is such a wound, as even propagated by the idea…just keep loving yourself more, life will work out: I have found this to be a myth. Life kept moving forward by giving and wondering. I never once can say I solved something all on my own. Sure I took choices and risks that no one else could force me to, and I not once took the privilege to make those choices for granted…but things happened with people. The self as god complex seems to be more accepted by those who prefer to use of the term “Universe” than the taboo of “God,” which happens to simply mean: Good in Norwegian. That goodness our body and collective memory knows, often through knowing the contrary, we can grow through focus on creating more Beauty.
Elaine Scarry’s book, On Beauty and Being Just, has been a sanity saver for me. Digesting Scarry’s wisdom, Emerson’s distinctions, and meditating on Beauty, my senses has shown me ways I had let others have access to my mind. The mind itself is a sacred space to give anyone acess to and I believe ought to be treated that way. This is why the imaginary realm is one I protect and wish to share, and likely the reason for the imaginary realms to become such a battleground for value.
As for why Beauty still has not healed the minds of people living in truly Beautiful lands, still remains in the realm of mysterious ether to me. Perceptive Beauty remains relative to the orientation of the body. Is the head upright or pointed to the ground? Is the human upright or hung by the feet? If our conscience knows our actions, then I trust in the Beauty that stands as a body of water or forest does regardless if we are here or not, to make way for wrongs to generously correct themselves, through time.
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