The Quest for Beauty

I’m going to return to the point I was making in my original essay on Creation and Appreciation, as it keeps coming back to me as a point of focus.

What if every moment of your life could be narrowed down to creating the next most perfect experience to have, and then to enjoy it, as well as the creations that already exist in the world?

I suspect that it is. We are pleasure seekers at heart. Every choice that we make is some form of perfecting life – making it more beautiful – so that it can be appreciated.  It could be making the perfect breakfast out of ingredients that are available, within the time constraints that you have and sitting down to enjoy it. It may be that reading the paper while you eat, though it distracts you from the pure enjoyment of the food, is what you prefer to do. Each of these perfection choices tends to be so fast as to appear automated, if they are even noticed. But they are each choices and collectively the end result IS the sum of what you chose. It may also be true that your intent to get to work on time minimizes your full enjoyment of the pleasure of that reading/eating experience, but that intent to be on time is also a choice that is aligned with a larger perspective of what is perfect. Any choices that become repetitive and ordinary, like eating breakfast, tying your shoes or going to work, may drift into habits and eventually, perhaps, into instinct. You will then lose both the recognition that it is a choice, and perhaps the appreciation of that which you manifested as a result of your choice.

Note that your job – a longer term beautification project than tying your shoe – provides income, which allows you access to an array of other options in your life from which you can then make choices that are most perfect for that next moment. All of your choices have energy and are thereby intertwined. They are aspects of a fluid, concentrated chooser with your name on it. It seems to me that recognizing that you are responsible for all of your choices – even those you are no longer conscious of – leaves you knowing that what you are doing is exactly what you want to be doing in a particular moment. When at work you may be saying to yourself that you’d prefer to be somewhere else doing something else, but you are, in fact, doing what you’ve chosen to do right now. The benefit may be less immediately available for appreciation, but it is nonetheless in line with your broader beatification intentions so is working to manifest those intentions.

I’m now thinking that the quest for Beauty is all there is, manifested in everything there is. Everything else is the appreciation of it or a response to its successful or unsuccessful manifestation. The inability to manifest your wildest dreams, your long term goals or your immediate preferences suppresses that beautification intent. It has nowhere to flow. That energy has already been generated so is pent up and in need of a flow path (in a way, we ourselves are an aspect of a flow path). It can be expressed as blame, frustration, despondence, depression, hatred or other “negative” feelings. Isn’t depression a form of hopelessness? Isn’t hopelessness the feeling that something will never turn out as you intended (and imagined)? Couldn’t hate be described as the rejection of something or someone way outside of the perception of that which is in line with your idea of perfection? Other people have intentions too and those may conflict with yours.  Yet you are responsible for making a choice in every moment based on your assessments at that moment, while you are taking into account the impact of their intentions. Their choices are never at fault. They are part of the  environment from which your assessments arise. Then you choose.

It also feels to me that part of pleasure seeking is the very pleasure of sharing, sharing what we’ve created or discovered as pleasurable. So we seek to create the most perfect and beautiful experience and, since we are all playing the same game, then share what we’ve delighted in so to bring that experience of delight to another player in the game. It is a form of contributing to our fellow playmates. Shared pleasure is pleasure magnified, as it re-unites us. Reuniting is a pleasure in itself, which, without our separateness, could not be experienced. That reuniting can be initiated by any kind of mutual experience, painful or joyful. Finding each other, and being found, with our discoveries is, it seems, part of the ecstasy that we created this universe to experience.