Beauty is the spiritual dimension of reality made manifest to our
senses. Through the workings of beauty we can actually see, hear,
touch, taste and smell that there is something deeper, a more profound
level of existence, offering meaning, consolation and hope. In beauty
the veil of our ordinariness and shallowness is for a moment lifted. By
way of the senses we catch a glimpse of a more perfect world beyond.
Beauty also effects our feelings and insights in a transformative way.
After a profound esthetic experience we are not the same anymore. In
this confrontation with beauty our perspective of the world, even our
very self, is altered.
These two aspects of the aesthetic experience, the unraveling of the
spiritual dimension of life, together with its transformation of our
ordinary consciousness to a higher level, are closely linked and
mutually affect each other. Spirituality seems to be beautiful and beauty seems to be spiritual. And as spirituality can be
defined as the science of realizing higher levels of consciousness, we
can deduce that beauty collaborates in this process, beauty being one
of the attributes of Spirit. This might explain why most artists have
an inclination to philosophy and spirituality and also why so many
mystics were creative artists in their lifetime. Art and Spirit seem to
be brothers working together as scientists of higher forms of awareness.
Spirit
exposed to the senses
Spirit is both the unifying and the multifying source of all phenomena.
It is both the beginning (multifying) and the end (unifying) of all
objects. Everything we contact with comes from Spirit and is heading
towards Spirit. But in the process of manifestation the source and the
end of the emanating object become obscured. Its essence hides itself,
like a veil, from our senses and our perceiving knowledge. Our senses
fail to perceive what the object is in its own right. In reality all
objects are objectifications and formations of Spirit. Beauty is the
trace left by Spirit in the object, at sense level, reminding us of its
true nature and origin. This in itself is a great beauty, that we,
already at sense level, can perceive in the objects their final ground
and telos. But to become aware of this spiritual dimension our senses
need to be refined, need to be opened. For not everyone, and not
everyone all the time, is able to sense this innate spiritual quality
of all objects right from the start. This is because of our relative
consciousness also being an object of Spirit, and therefore subjected
to the same obfuscation and oblivion as any other object. So our senses
need to be educated and refined first to perceive the deeper dimension
lying behind their phenomenal appearance. Beauty has the purpose of
introducing us into this dimension and to provide us with this
education. Through the shocking and awakening effect of beauty we sense
that there is something more going on than mere surfaces and
appearances. Through the beauty of an object our senses are magnified
to a higher level, where they can sense the unreality of the one
isolated object and perceive its ramifications in a much wider context.
This is the true beauty of an object, that it takes us away from its
isolation and points to wider connections of beauty. Beauty leads
upward, to the ideation of the object, where it is lifted up from its
particular to its universal meaning. So the beauty of an object (say, a
painting, a woman) is never beautiful in its own right, but because it
points to a relatedness with other beautiful objects, at first with
other objects of its kind (other beautiful paintings etc.), then to all
beautiful objects and finally to Beauty itself. So beauty connects the
beautiful object to its wider network, whence its value is derived. To
perceive this wider network is already abstraction from the senses, is
philosophy and not sensory experience. But in order to value beauty
this abstraction has to occur. We might see, hear etc. beauty, but in
order to derive value from our experience we need to transcend our
senses and integrate our experience at the higher level of mind and,
ultimately, soul.
This explains why we enjoy more when we know and feel more. We are more
able to detect the beauty of an object when we know how to place the
object in such a wider context of relatedness. A painting might to the
highest degree be beautiful in its own right, but its value and our
enjoyment of its value increase when we know something of its history
and of the history of art in general. Through our knowledge of its
wider context, its beauty is not only revealed but also intensified.
This is because of the deepening of the subject in apprehending the
wider ramifications of such embedded beauty. Altering the subject of
perceiving (our awareness of beauty) thus heightens the value of the
object itself. So the quality of an object seems to depend also on the
quality of the subject perceiving it, according to the final unity of
subject and object.
This brings us to deduce that the subject with the highest quality, the
one connected in sense, mind and soul with Spirit, is the one best able
to detect and value beauty in the world. For, like we said in the
beginning, beauty is Spirit made manifest to the senses. But -this is
important in any theory of aesthetics- the senses themselves are but
mere instruments in the process. They are in their instrumentality
incapable of evaluating and understanding the more hidden aspects of
reality, like beauty. It takes higher levels of awareness to appreciate
these higher (deeper) levels of reality and here it is where the mind
and eventually the soul of the perceiving subject play their role.
Beauty is about the value of the object. It takes a valuing subject to
detect it. So the quality of the subject is of paramount importance.
Is beauty an innate quality of the object itself or is beauty merely
accorded to the object by the perceiving and evaluating subject? Or, to
give an example, will the flower or the woman lose their beauty (cease
being beautiful) once we stop perceiving and admiring them? Now I think
the correct answer to this question cannot be given in the or/or mode,
but is highly non dual: the presence of beauty depends on the object
and the subject. There is the more beauty, both in presence and
perceiving, when both the radiating beauty of the object and the
perceiving beauty of the subject have become one single process; when
the beauty of both object and subject reflect the deeper quality of
both object and subject alike. So it needs a beautiful subject to
disclose this deeper quality of the object. But also the quality of the
object discloses the beauty of the subject. It works both ways.
But since beauty is a value, a hidden meaning, it belongs to the sphere
of (inter)subjective interpretation, hermeneutics and phenomenological
aethetics, to disclose it. These secondary processes are not simply
modes of perceiving. These are modes of mentally and a posteriori
reconstructing the sense experience. So merely perceiving is not enough
to detect beauty. The eye of the intellect must also shine its light on
the object, for beauty can only be detected when the mind chooses to do
so. The mind is the instrument to class opposites in dual columns. As
beauty has ugliness as its counterpart, beauty must first be set aside
from the ugly (the repugnant etc.) by the mind. So something is only
beautiful when the mind has decided it is. Not before.
But this is not the whole story, at least not within an aesthetics that
wants to go beyond a mere rationalism. For such an aesthetics would
easily be critizised for reducing beauty to being merely intellectual,
while in fact beauty is a value that reaches out to levels higher than
the mind, like we all know and feel when confronted with something
deeply beautiful. Beauty in the mind is only half way. We have to go to
Spirit itself to find the true meaning of beauty. It is like Plato
said: the beauty of the phenomenon points to its higher class, the
highest Idea of Beauty, or beyond, to Spirit itself. And Spirit can
only contemplatively be detected by levels higher than the mind. It is
here, in the more subtle levels of our soul, that we can truly
appreciate beauty. Because beauty is more of a felt value. It is more
of the heart than of the mind. Sometimes it can only come to the heart
by way of the mind, but only in the heart is its proper value detected.
This is because Spirit detects Itself in the beautiful. And this can
only be done by the faculty of our being that is the closest to Spirit,
which is the soul.
But here in our soul we have reached the highest levels of beauty.
Let´s go back downwards a bit and first describe what beauty is
like at the lower levels, before climbing all the way up to Spirit. For
even at the lower levels of the material and the first impulses of life
we do find beauty, because of Spirit being immanent to all being. In
everything we can detect the ´vestigium dei´, God´s
footprint, even among rocks and minerals.
The
material
Though the material is the most hidden and condensed form of Brahman,
still the eye trained in beauty can, even here at this rudimentary
level, detect some higher qualities, that at first glance might escape
the eye. These qualities are always of a secondary nature, depending
more on the reflection of Spirit than on Its essence. Because of its
gross nature, Spirit is locked up, as it were, in the material. Only at
the highest level of non-dual awareness can we contemplate its oneness
and equation with Spirit. But here already at sense level secondary
qualities disclose Its presence. First the vastness or plenitude of the
material might strike the eye as beautiful, like when we see enormous
formations of rock, stretching out far beyond our horizon. Or when at
sea we are awed by the sheer immensity of the water lying beneath our
feet. Or the enormous piles of sand we see being whirled around in the
desert. These views of material nature might even be sublime, when they
disclose to the eye of contemplation the greatness and overpowering
enormity of creation. Wanderers in the mountains often report being
overwhelmed by Spirit, because of the greatness of the landscape
and its material nature. In meeting nature the vastness of the material
makes us feel small and great the same time. The huge mountain seems to
be the image of God.
But this is not to say that the enjoyment of nature, or a fortiori
nature mysticism, is provoked by the material in nature. The material
in nature, being on the lowest rung of the ladder, is always some sort
of a disappointment to the eye. The aesthetic eye always looks for life
beyond the mere material and glorifies when it sees one tiny ant
crawling its way among the tons of desert sand beneath our feet, or
discovers remnants of green life among the gray rocks of high altitude.
Landscapes devoid of all life are difficult to bear to the eye. Only
souls accustomed to the emptiness of Spirit are able to detect beauty
in lifeless nature. But still, beauty is there. Because there is no
place (nor time) where (when) Spirit is not.
Reading this one comes to understand why the artist so much wants to
imbue the material, the lifeless, with life and strains his muscles for
months on end to give life to death stone or death metal. For the eye
rejoices in finding life even in the lifeless. Precisely this is the
core activity of the aesthetic prehension, that it searches for the
higher in the lower even at the lowest level, so to reassure itself
that the lower is not devoid of the higher. Before all else, before we
look at the form of a work of art per se, we subconsciously are awed by
the fact that this beauty we see before us is nothing but death
material brought to life. ´Behold! Even dead rocks can be
alive!´, we say to ourselves when looking at the David of
Michelangelo. We feel the artist is consoling us in making us realize
that there is no such thing as dead lifelessness. Even lifelessness can
be brought to life, because, like everything in the universe, it is not
disconnected from Spirit. Thus the primal metaphysical impact of art in
the esthetic experience.
Prana:
emotio-sexual life force (1)
One level higher than the material is the unseen
force of the biological, Bergson´s elan vital,
Schopenhauer´s Will. Here we see lifeless entities suddenly
permeated by mysterious life force, that makes them act, intend, will
and procreate. This is the level of the instincts, the passions,
Freud´s libido and thanatos drives. This prana is something of a
dark force, because of its uncontrollable strength and invincibility.
It is impossible for living creatures to oppose it. Being
objectifications of this life force they are forever subject to its
workings. At this level the organism is fundamentally unfree, being not
an a priori subjectifications but an a posteriori objectivication.
Prana rules the organism and not the other way around.
This is for aesthetics a paradoxical situation, because it makes prana
ugly as well as beautiful at the same time. Prana is ugly because it
tends to devour and deconstruct its individual objectifications, its
life forms, and reduces them once again to the nothingness they
essentially are. For prana is not interested in individual life forms,
but in the continuation of its own energy. Any individual form is disposable to the emotio-sexual force. It lets them grow
old and die. So the ugliness of prana is its tragic nature. Every life
form is a small tragedy performed on a small stage in a small amount of
time. In the wink of an eye the play is over, never to be performed
again. And one is left wondering what´s the meaning of the play
or why this play at all. The destruction eventually bought about by the
life force doesn´t seem to make any sense at all, at least not
from the perspective of the individual life form.
This is the ugly part of prana, perceived with the utmost intensity in
sexuality. There is a great sadness in sexuality, because of its
fundamentally unfree character. The slavery of prana makes us feel
ashamed, repressive of our basic drives, even aggressive at everything
seducing us to it. We feel out of control, subjected to the blind force
playing havoc within our soul. We cannot but give in to this life
force, though it exhausts, depletes us and make us think of death,
because it makes us aware of being mortal. As prana is concerned we are
nothing but a piece of domino about to fall. The stone has to give way
to create the greater picture. But on the verge of toppling over we,
the individuals, feel sick and nauseous.
Though elaborate Romantic philosophies have been composed to glorify
the unrelenting force of the emotio-sexual, as if it were God itself,
it is a sad conclusion that we cannot but feel disappointed and
unsatisfied when life is lived at this level only. Though emotions do
need to have there right place -it is extremely dangerous to suppress
them- our heart yearns for a transcendence. We search the quiet and the
silence that we may avoid the stimuli of emotional life, to find
relieve from the wearisome, forever ongoing workings of biological
time.
Duality
Here a word needs to be inserted about the fundamental dual character
of all levels of being below Spirit. As we already saw when discussing
the esthetics of the material, every level of being can be considered
to be both ugly and beautiful, both in itself and in its valuation,
depending on which side of the coin we wish to highlight. In our first
discussion the material appeared as ugly in its lifelessness, but as
beautiful as well, in its reflection of life, aye, even as sublime when
it was seen, in its vastness and enormity, as a direct manifestation of
Spirit. Such dual characteristics we will meet all the way up to the
subtle level of being. Any theory of esthetics dealing not sufficiently
with both the ugly and the beautiful aspects of all phenomena will
therefore be incomplete in itself. At a superficial glance this might
seem to be self-contradictory -how can something be ugly as well as
beautiful?- but we must never forget that everything in life comes in
pairs and that in all things beautiful there is something of the
repulsive, like there is some attraction in the abhorrent also.
Prana:
emotio-sexual life force (2)
This being said it will not strike the reader as odd when we describe
the pranic life force as very beautiful at the same time, not only
because it is, like everything else in creation, a manifestation of
Spirit, but also because it has merits and satisfactions of its own.
For this play of life and death, of blooming and withering, of
production and depletion, cannot fail to move the heart of the
observer, when she sees the joy, the energy and the ecstasy Spirit has
bestowed on the world with this Its pranic force. It would be
platitudinous to describe life in its springtime and mature versions as
beautiful. For who does not feel the shivers of emotion in his heart
when holding young life in his hand or when walking through the lavish
green of a springtime forest? But let´s notice the fact that life
in decay has beauty of its own also. Autumn also delights the heart.
There are beautiful dimensions in the sadness of grief and death also.
The sensitive heart knows that there is beauty in holding a lifeless
corpse to its bosom, though it might seem repulsive at first glance.
Who has not felt the joy of religious feelings and enlightenment when
attending the bed of the dying? For death is nothing but the approach
of Spirit. And eventually all life passes away into this emptiness of
Love, where it is for ever redeemed in the katharsis of its own
nothingness. So the decline of life can be just as beautiful as its
ascent.
The biological life force stirs up all kinds of emotions, instinctual,
perceptual or reflective. These emotions are closely linked to the
drives and the demands of the individual organism. They are its way to
cope with the environment and to preserve itself in the face of dangers
and threats. Emotions are biologically necessary. If you would not be
emotional, you would not manage to stay alive. This is the beauty of
emotions, that they are very apt in protecting and securing all
individual life. But this is its ugliness at the same time. For prana
is, despite its own glory, still a low level of life, calling for a
transcendence, despite the satisfaction it may give. In pranic emotions
Spirit is confined to the individuality of the one single organism. At
this level life is always self centered. This puts emotional values at
a lower range in the hierarchy, lower than eg. mental values or soul
values. They are necessary but limited. When life is lived only at the
emotional level of prana, self-actualization and self-transcendence
tend to be excluded.
There is no need to muster up the examples of hate, jealousy, ambition
and all other kinds of negative emotions of self-preservation to back
up this theory. They speak for themselves. But also the more positive
emotions, like the drive to procreate, romantic love or the merriments
of the bed, lend evidence to the claim that pranic emotions are ugly in
the sense that they represent lower values. For these pranic emotions
serve to preserve the species. But to do so they must create a hoax:
the individual organism must be beguiled into thinking that he has
these emotions in the service of himself, while they in fact serve the
purpose of dispensing him. The needs of the species lay a heavy claim
on the self of the individual. And a lot of time and energy has to be
spent with the nerve wrecking task of rearing and taking care of
offspring. This explains for the disappointed looks in the face of
parents, pregnant women and newly wed grooms. Deep down in their soul
they have the feeling that this is somehow a trick that is being played
on them, something beyond their control that they have been lured into.
Of all the repressed emotions this existential disappointment about the
rewards and happiness of procreation is the most fundamental and
therefore the last one that is admitted to the self. Prana does not
want these doubts to enter consciousness. This is one of the thickest
veils covering up Pure Consciousness.
The same can be said of other positive emotions like the thrills of
winning, success and achievement. Here the individual is hoaxed into
thinking that he can for ever escape the dualities of life by putting
his finger on one side of the coin and forcefully clinging to it. But
every success is followed by its shadow and relatively happy periods
are followed by sad ones, according to the oscillating ground movement
of all pranic life. Everything sooner or later will turn into its own
opposite. So the sensitive and aesthetic observer sees something ugly
in the jolly cheering of the crowds, knowing that these same emotions
have the potentiality to flip over into hate, aggression and
destructiveness. For all pranic emotions are caught up in endless
dualities and the one cannot go without the other. Here the emotions
create all kinds of sorrow and distress, though they started off with
the good prospect of hope.
The
mental
No, the emotions definitely call for a transcendence, for the true
beauty of life is not given its fullest scope when remaining stuck at
pranic level. So life moves onward, up towards its highest goal, which
is the unification with and of Spirit. To reach these highest levels of
human development, an abstraction, a distance, even some sort of an
overcoming is necessary. This does not mean that we have to give up on
life, or be done with it, no, the higher, more beautiful life starts
when we begin to look at life, as if some essential part of our self
were not involved in it. For Spirit is essentially observant pure
consciousness, the Witness of all life. When happiness and beauty are
defined as qualities of approaching Spirit, then it follows that our
relative consciousness has to adopt this observant, onlooking quality
in order to become beautiful and happy. This is the reason that almost
all religions have propagated techniques for training the observant
quality of our consciousness (like eg. the vipassana of Buddhism).
Now this observant, onlooking quality starts at the mental level. Here
consciousness begins to think about life, starts to form theories,
abstracts from the data of perception by replacing them with signs and
symbols and lays down rules, however tentative, to explain ´how
it works´. The data are subsumed into higher classes, which makes
it more possible for consciousness to operate on them. All these mental operations are nothing but a stepping back of
consciousness from the gross level of existence. This brings
consciousness closer to its source, because such onlooking, such
theorizing, such abstraction of the concrete into the symbolic, makes
consciousness more pure, which makes the way for Pure Consciousness
itself. The beauty mental operations is leaving things out, till
finally by a process of trimming and subsuming the oneness of all
things is perceived in the beatific vision, which is the experience of
Beauty itself.
So the scientific level of being -the mental- is essentially
characterized by a retreat of consciousness. Bit by bit consciousness
steps back from its immanent involvement into the world and starts
looking, first to ´the facts out there´, then to ´the
facts in here´ and finally to the workings of consciousness
itself and its first emanations into the mind. So the higher levels
of being and consciousness are always an abstraction, enabling
consciousness to operate on the world from a distance. This abstraction
enables consciousness to predict, control and create the lower levels
of the biological and the material. And this is precisely the thing
science does: it procures lordship over everything below the mental.
For every transcendence of a certain level is a control over the lower
levels also.
This is the beauty of the mental: the mental is able to create a
beautiful order in the chaotic complexities of material and biological
emanations and by doing so it creates order in itself also. Here beauty
is a certain elegance in the correspondence between fact and theory.
The more elegance and validation a theory offers, the truer it is. This
is the order that puts our mind at rest and makes our thinking clear
and alert. Like with beauty at pranic sense level the mind is elated
when it sees correlations, correspondences, mutual proportions and
similarities between the different parts of a given theory and between
different theories. Here, like with esthetic perception, the mind
searches for a way to bring different parts under one heading. When it
succeeds in doing so it has brought about a simplification of life,
which is the main purpose of its working. For the purpose of all life
is to come back to more simple oneness.
But the mental is not the omega point of life. It is not the aim that
life is seeking. The mind is only a tool in finding the aim and
reaching out for it. It is a higher level, but it is not the highest
level. So things can go wrong, pathologies may occur, when the mental
is seen as the highest level of beauty in life. True beauty cannot be
found by the mind (alone). When we try to do so and do not employ
higher faculties in finding beauty, we will never find the most
beautiful thing that is to be found in life, which is Spirit.
For like we said, everything below the causal is caught up in endless
dualities and the beauty of the one moment may be the ugliness of the
next. So instead of reducing the complexities of life we often find
mind augmenting them, by creating extra complexities. The mind may
create problems of its own, besides the problems life already has to
offer. The worries, the fears and the irrationalities of pranic life
may be redoubled by wrong mental attitudes and by the reading of
maladapted ´mental scripts´ that offer an unhealthy and
false interpretation of life. Here the mind creates psychological time.
It runs wild and breaks loose, like a wild untamed horse. Instead of
falling back into the ground of its own emptiness the mind may create a
life of its own, no more under our control. Instead of being a
beautiful instrument for higher purposes, it may become an ugly
distrophic tyrant in our heads.
The
soul
This happens when psychological development is
thwarted and the mind is not transcended by the next higher level: the
soul. For the soul can detect more beauty in life than the mind is ever
able the find. For the mind is the logical instrument we have at our
disposal to sift the right from the false. The mind can discover truth.
But the soul is more essential still, because it is even more closer to
Spirit. It is so closely connected to the first attributive emanations
of Spirit, that it can do a lot more than just discern right from
false. It can find essential and existential meaning. With our soul we
search for what is worthwhile and what is worthless in our lives. This
we cannot find out with our mind alone. We somehow have to find a
meaning that goes beyond mere rational understanding. This meaning is
more of an intuition than a deduction or an inference from data.
This intuition of the soul is also our guide in matters concerning
ethics. Here at this level our moral conscience is located. The soul is
one of the first emanations of Spirit and is very close to the first
Forms. Being so highly ranked in the chain of Being it is very near to
Justice and Goodness itself and can more easily discover its
characteristics. So goodness and righteousness are first felt with the
heart (our soul), before our mind becomes aware of it. Our heart knows
already what the right thing is to do. So a highly developed and mature
human being, well grounded in soul and with a loving and open heart,
knows already by intuition what course she is to follow. This she
already intuits in her own deepest nature, way before becoming aware of
it.
Here at this high transrational level of soul our esthetic intuitions
are also to be found. For discerning the beautiful from the ugly
is also something we cannot achieve with the mind (alone), though the
mind can surely be an aid in the process. But as with ethics: the
person in touch with her heart and soul knows by intuition what is
beautiful. She doesn´t need the mind to tell her so. Beautiful
things must in one way or another reflect the order, the depth and the
meaning of this transrational level to be beautiful. So esthetics is
more of a comparison. It compares with closed eyes the beauty of a
thing with the beauty spotted inside. If there is correspondence, we
say that something is beautiful. When there is no correspondence, we
call it ugly (or not beautiful yet). So esthetics is like ethics
grounded in our soul. Here we intuit its truths.
When we call intuitions the ground of all our judgments, be they
scientific, moral or esthetic, we point to the fact that our soul, as
the source of all our intuitions, is the dominant controller of the
mental level. For being a higher transcendence it is, like all lower
levels, able to operate on the next lower level in the hierarchy. So
intuitions are operations of transmental consciousness upon mental
consciousness. They are the determinants of our reason. The mental has
to work them out to make them understandable and transparent to us. But
they are the great instigators of reasoning and judgment. As such their
being and becoming are something of a mystery. We feel these intuitions
to emanate from Spirit, but how exactly we do not know. It is part of
´how life works´.
Spirit
All things are essentially - and are finally brought
back to- Oneness of Spirit. Here at the highest level of being the
greatest beauty in life is to be found. Below this level something is
still missing. Below Spirit beauty still has its shortcomings, its
flaws, its contradictions and can only be detected in dualistic
opposition to ugliness. But here at this highest, non dual level,
beauty is seen as the interconnectedness of all things, including
ugliness and evil. Beauty is here the transcendence of all things into
their final ground of Oneness. The highest esthetic pleasure and satisfaction
can only be found when consciousness finally reaches these highest
levels. This is the level of no-judgment, of choiceless awareness. Here
everything is seen as tathata,
as ´the way things are´. Here nothing is secluded from the
scope of beauty. Here Spirit looks at creation and ´sees that all
is good´. When the wings of our soul have finally soared up to
the peak of this mountain, only peace and satisfaction remain. Life and
death here are extremely and ultimately beautiful.
This transcendence is not only a transcendence but an immanence also.
It is not only the peak. It is the whole mountain and the valleys
below. The peak cannot be separated from the mountain and its
surroundings. There is no ultimate beauty without the lower levels of
ugliness, duality, suffering and failing being one way or the other
included into it. This would be a great misconception and has been the
major flaw in the history of religion and spirituality, the idea that
beauty could only be realized in transcending and separating ourselves
from the lower. Perhaps this conception is necessary when still on a
dual level of development -in order to make a transcendence possible-
but when the transcendence is finally realized, this conception proves
itself to be ultimately false. For beauty is everywhere. It is the very
fabric this universe is made of.
Then all words cease. At this level only enjoyment and deep ecstasy
remain.
beauty seems to be spiritual. And as spirituality can be
defined as the science of realizing higher levels of consciousness, we
can deduce that beauty collaborates in this process, beauty being one
of the attributes of Spirit. This might explain why most artists have
an inclination to philosophy and spirituality and also why so many
mystics were creative artists in their lifetime. Art and Spirit seem to
be brothers working together as scientists of higher forms of awareness.
disposable to the emotio-sexual force. It lets them grow
old and die. So the ugliness of prana is its tragic nature. Every life
form is a small tragedy performed on a small stage in a small amount of
time. In the wink of an eye the play is over, never to be performed
again. And one is left wondering what´s the meaning of the play
or why this play at all. The destruction eventually bought about by the
life force doesn´t seem to make any sense at all, at least not
from the perspective of the individual life form. 
mental operations are nothing but a stepping back of
consciousness from the gross level of existence. This brings
consciousness closer to its source, because such onlooking, such
theorizing, such abstraction of the concrete into the symbolic, makes
consciousness more pure, which makes the way for Pure Consciousness
itself. The beauty mental operations is leaving things out, till
finally by a process of trimming and subsuming the oneness of all
things is perceived in the beatific vision, which is the experience of
Beauty itself.
Oneness. The highest esthetic pleasure and satisfaction
can only be found when consciousness finally reaches these highest
levels. This is the level of no-judgment, of choiceless awareness. Here
everything is seen as tathata,
as ´the way things are´. Here nothing is secluded from the
scope of beauty. Here Spirit looks at creation and ´sees that all
is good´. When the wings of our soul have finally soared up to
the peak of this mountain, only peace and satisfaction remain. Life and
death here are extremely and ultimately beautiful. 
