I don’t know about you, but sometimes the world gets so dull — and even downright ugly — that I forget that it’s beautiful. The ugliness, I fear, cannot be helped, but the dullness seems wholly manufactured and unnecessary.
It seems to me that there is a certain blindness in the tangle of human consciousness for the vitality of experience. The world is alive, and its vitality is immediate, ubiquitous, and obvious, but it often appears to us as though we are viewing the world on a screen, and I fear this has only grown worse in recent centuries. My sense is that the color of the world is filtered out by physics, metaphysics, economics, statistics, geometry, etc.; a fog of objective models. I love the sciences, especially the hard sciences, but as indispensable as they are, they are mere models that are abstracted from experience. They are not experience itself. Though they shed light on experience, they can also dull it when we fall under the understandable delusion that the model is reality itself.
But modernity is not the only one at fault here. I think the mind, particularly the sophisticated adult mind, blinds itself to beauty by burdening itself with consciousness. This is an old, well-worn subject. Consciousness is tightly bound to notions of self, so we are not far here from the concerns of Siddhartha Gautama. I am also reminded of the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer and his psychological analysis of Will. Schopenhauer was not a happy man, nor was he a good man, but I think this only underscores his genius for uncovering human self-torment.
It is easy to suggest that one toss sophistication aside and see the world with a child’s eye, but really, can we expect to be able to simply unsee the webs of adult and modern sophistication after having been trained on them them over and over again? Well, we can try. We can modestly try. We can go for a walk or weed the yard or prepare dinner or start a conversation with a stranger, and try to experience the world as immediately as we can. But also, I don’t think it hurts to learn to recognize the harm that consciousness and less introspective mental gymnastics can do to suffocate the vitality of experience.
For me, beauty is a key to removing the veil. Beauty runs deep in the world, and yet if we permit it, there it is, right before our eyes. Beauty, like Goodness her twin sister, cannot be quantified. Beauty can be found in numbers and geometries but there will never be a grand unified theory of Beauty. She is too multifaceted, too subjective, too existential, too near.
I’m not going to suggest that one set out to experience things which one expects to be beautiful, but to set out into the mundane and even into the grotesque, hoping to be surprised; hoping that one’s eyes will open to a new beauty. What or whom strikes one as suddenly beautiful might not be pretty at all, but then again, it might be just that. Pretty things are also full of beauty, though I don’t think they surprise us — or edify us — quite as much.
One can accurately call this a mental therapy, an exercise or a discipline, but I prefer to call it worship.1
I was blamed by humanity for loving beauty, and they do not know my aim … By means of it I attained the unbounded.
Ayyúb al-‘Adawí al-Khalwatí (d. 1660 CE)2
You might prefer, like so many Ṣúfí mystics, to conflate beauty with God. Whatever works for you. For me, the thought of God is an image that is overburdened with too many geometries, and even too much self-consciousness, but I wouldn’t want to scold an enraptured Ṣúfí for using a Muslim term for the object of their worship.
I see this as a sort of Mazdayasna, worship of the Good. I don’t presently wish to emphasize this, so I put it here in the footnotes.
Cited by Patricia Crone, The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran: Rural Revolt and Local Zoroastrianism (Cambridge, 2012), pg. 468