Tuesday, May 27, 2014

What is beauty?

I always thought beauty was something to do with ideal forms created by some kind of laws - like symmetry, golden ratio (1:1.618), or from the principles of art: movement, unity, harmony, variety, balance, rhythm, emphasis, contrast, proportion, and pattern.
But the qualities above implied that beauty can be only felt in a gradient or hierarchical scale. In other words, the highest perception of beauty is dependent upon the objects/perceptions fulfilling those qualities which are rare in nature. But as I implored and probed the thought further, I felt beauty was a perception transcendent of even the qualities I mentioned above.
In a sense, even all those qualities I described above is a sort of deep cultural conditioning. Reading about different cultures and their perceptions of beauty really opened my mind up to the relativity of what we call beauty. For example ladies from a tribe in Thailand would wear rings on their neck to elongate it and the lady with the longest neck was considered most beautiful. There are umpteen such strange practices such as foot binding to make the feet small, tongue and body piercings, scars etc. which were done to in an effort to be more beautiful. We may dismiss such phenomenon as outliers but actually they are not. Even within the western culture there are so many different perceptions on what is considered beautiful. What is beauty then?

Are even the most abstract art principles we uphold a sort of deeper cultural belief based prison?
Then I probed into this further and then suddenly this epiphany hit me that "Seeing reality and things as they are, in their full openness and vulnerability is what is truly beautiful". Vulnerability generally has a negative connotation. So I could use the word 'Openness, tenderness, gentleness'. Now we are looking at the world through the goggles of our perceptual lens. So the first step is allowing your lens to be as it is in its full psychic openness and effortlessness with 0 resistance. Then allowing all of the perceived contents through this lens be seen with the same 100% allowing, effortless, tenderness, gentleness and full openness with 0 avoidance, 0 resistance and fearlessness. And finally just staying with this whole screen of experience and completely letting it be as it is in its true nature with no effort to distort or control what is perceived. Immediately there is a sense of free falling, effortlessness, vulnerability and a sense of beauty rushes through. It involves a profound act of letting go of the moment completely and simply staying with bare effortless observation.

Sunday, May 18, 2014

Love as a relationship vs. an object

Love is an experience of a relationship, it is not an 'experience object' by itself. Like when you have a rare pleasurable experience, the projected relationship towards this 'Pleasurable experience object' is love. Love is a projection from you towards the manifest experience. It is the highest projection you are capable of towards the manifest. It is the highest vibration your reality could vibrate in. It is something projected by you towards the manifest object. So the source of love cannot be anything other than you since it is you who projects it onto 'experience objects'.
Conventional love:
Conventionally, our belief structures filter what can allow you to open this projection onto the manifest. Such a case, would be conditional love. So when the 'experienced object' is passed through your belief filter, and is deemed worthy of the experience of love, then you shine/project love on to the 'experience object'.
For example, a teenager who is extremely eager to try alcohol for the first time in his life comes with very high expectation. If the right amount of alcohol is given to him, he would shine projected love towards that inebriated experience. Whereas, a devout christian who is deeply against the concept of alcohol may process this experience in an extremely negative way. So we conditionally open and close our love projection based on the interpretation of our belief matrix and whether or not it interprets the present experience to be worthy of such a lofty projection.

In such a case, the love is dependent on the existence of the 'experience object' and is also dependent on the belief structures interpreting the stimulus as worthy of love. So if either of them changes, the 'experience object' or your 'reality input interpretation/belief structures', your projection would change into something else (not love anymore). Then your vibration may lower into other states and once again there would be a need to seek a manifest object that would pass through the filter and allow you to experience this love again.

About the belief filter and the fleetingness of conventional love:
This 'belief filter' that conditions your projection potentials is the prison. Also since both the 'unconscious belief matrix' and the 'manifest experience' are continuously changing, the experience of love is inevitably fleeting. The freedom lies in transcending this matrix and shining the light of awareness on all gross and subtle beliefs that form this matrix like prison.
About transcendent love:
Now, I've used words like prison, matrix, unconsciousness, fleeting, inebriated, dependence, lower vibration whose connotations point to negative phenomena. I've also used words like highest, transcendence, freedom, light, awareness where the connotations point to something very positive. The transcendent love however includes all of the above including the negative phenomena. In fact negative/positive distinctions are only based on the interpretative framework and duality. The transcendent love is for all interpretative frameworks, all of manifest experience, all its potentials etc. There is 'Nothing' literally that is not embraced by transcendent love.

Qualities of a diamond mapped to experience

The ideal +ve experience is where the mind is like an infinitely large diamond that is clear, does not hold anything but yet, reflects/refr...