I was looking at the sky, the other day and someone told me that it was beautiful. So, I looked at it again. Then I got afraid. And here is the reason why I was afraid of the beauty in a little thought experiment.
Duality of the beauty.
Previously I wrote about the beauty of a flower and the beauty of a mind. And boy I was totally positive about it. Now when I read it, it feels inspiring and motivating. Yet, what I did not mention was the beauty hides its own dangers. Beauty does not stand on its own. To understand its dangers let's analyze what goes in our minds when we think about beauty of something.
Why I am afraid of beauty.
You can imagine anything beautiful. It could be a flower, a scene, a movie, a person, a diamond or even peaceful experience you had when meditating. Now, when you think the thought 'Oh that is beautiful' what happens? How does that thought arises? We will have to go back in time. Judging something 'beautiful' is a learned behavior. You would agree that it was not there until certain age strongly. For a baby, warmth of the mother is beautiful, against the coldness that baby feels when mother is not there. So, from time we were born the ability to recognize something nice and not nice had been there. Even without the words ! even without any learning it had been there. We recognize food is tasty, against non tasty things. Later when we learn about the world and make our own information sphere, we would be able to judge something beautiful. Often, we do not talk about against what. But if you learn about how values are formed. Beauty is one such value we give to things. It never stands alone. Beauty always appears when our minds compare two things.
The sky was beautiful, when we compare it to another day which it was not.
A flower is beautiful, when we compare it to the background where it came from.
A movie scene is beautiful, than the other parts of the same movie or other movies, or even real life.
A person is beautiful, when we compare him against his/her past or some other bad person or another day where he was not so beautiful, maybe due to age or disease.
A diamond is beautiful when we compare it to a piece of rock in your garden.
A peaceful experience in meditation is beautiful, when we compare this to the all the chaotic experience we have throughout the day.
From the day we were born fundamentally we try to find beauty in things. Doing this, what we are doing is comparing and dividing things into two dumps. The dump that we like, to keep, to possess and try to collect. And the dump that we like to throw away, trying to avoid and dislike.
We become happy when we have the dump we like, and we become sad when we are in the dump of dislikes all the other times. And the pattern repeats over and over again. So, what is the solution?
Generalizing our thought experiment.
If someone asked me to give a character of a living creature. I would say, ability to like and dislike things. Look at a baby even without words baby could do this. Look at an animal. Grazers in savanna run away from dangers and pain and run towards green pastures. Even if you look at a single cell animal or even a plant you would see this phenomenon of likes and dislikes. A plant will move towards sun and move away from the shade. Even plants are clearly different from animals, through this fundamental characteristic they are same.
Summary Conclusions from our little thought experiment.
Ability to like and dislike is a fundamental characteristic of an any living being.
More advanced form of this is seen in humans, with measuring devices and ability to recognize beauty.
Often, we forget the other side of the equation that beauty does not stand alone.
The problem is when we label something beautiful, fundamentally what we are saying or doing is, dumping it into our like group, but unknowingly we add the opposite to our dislike group.
Often the beauty doesn't last long, as everything is eternally changing, so, when we label we will fall back to the dislike group anyway.
Hence Beauty is dangerous, and I am afraid of it.
Solution is not to label? What are your thoughts on this? would like to know.
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