Is beauty static? I mean, is beauty something that is “out there”, like a painting, or a movie? I grew up with the meme, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”. But I always thought that meant that beauty was a subjective, individual thing. Now, when I read it, I hear the emphasis on “in the eye”, like "in my mind". Beauty is all in my mind. Is it? Is beauty real? Or imaginary? Or does beauty inhabit the realm between real and imaginary?
Too often I hear, “they’re beautiful”, or, more often, “they’re ugly”. Judgement. As if my eye was better than theirs. As if I understood beauty, could manifest beauty, better than they could. Is beauty the barrier I build to keep them at bay?
And then there are the hippies. “Everyone is beautiful, in their own way(2)”. As if beauty is defined by the beholder, by the ego. “I am beautiful!”
Is the internet beautiful? Does the internet think of itself as beautiful?
My eye, my beholder, celebrates diversity. The internet is certainly diverse! The internet is whatever I want it to be, a window into myself, my beholder, my eye. By looking out, into the internet, I see in.
I think I’m built that way, to see the outside world as a reflection of what’s in my head. It wasn’t until I was in my 40’s that I learned about projection, the psychological phenomenon of tending to see in others the emotions I was experiencing. And when did I start to believe the neuroscience of, and theory that, my brain is making best-guesses about the world around me, leading me to perceive the world through “my-experience” glasses?(3)
Suddenly, Buddhism makes neurological sense!
What Buddhists called “attachments” were the learned pre-cognition pathways, triggered by an efficient neurological decision-making mechanism, that simplified reality in favor of a best-guess matching algorithm. But the cost of making guesses is I don't see reality. In order to “see” what really is, I must first “unsee”, train my brain to stop making connections, stop pre-imagining what I see.
My brain is like a gambler, betting on the most likely outcome, in hopes of winning. More often than not, if I know my odds, I will guess correctly. But not always. The “here and now”, the “present” of Buddhist meditation, doesn’t play the odds. Instead, nirvana is just what is. And one can experience reality, as if for the first time, without judgement or expectation, without “attachment”.
So what is beauty to a Buddhist? If I let beauty be something that isn’t about me, about the way I see, the way my brain is betting on the world, what is beauty?
Is beauty what others tell me? Advertising is the science of projection, projecting wants and needs. It connects my wants and needs, to their products. If I spend enough time watching, or hear an advertisement enough times, my brain automatically makes the connection. If I’m not careful, the advertisement becomes my projected reality.
So, what is beauty?
In my 20’s, in college, I read Gombrich’s Art and Illusion(4). I thought the lesson was, “there are many definitions of beauty across many cultures”. But now, rereading the book, I hear a deeper message, the one about illusion. “The world is an illusion.” But that doesn’t mean the world doesn’t exist, just that my perception of the world is biased. (Did I disclose that I am a statistician by training?)
So many different ways of looking at things swirl in my head, becoming a vortex, a “synchronicity”. I hear Vonnegut: “so it goes”, “chrono-synclastic infundibula”.
Perhaps I would be happier with a definition of beauty that didn’t depend on my way of thinking, on my perspective. Perhaps a more satisfying definition of beauty would be that beauty is all around me. It is my job to become aware of it, to find and see the beauty.
Love is beautiful!
But I’m just a wanna-be hippie of the ‘60’s, projecting love into all I see, a survivor of the Age of Aquarius.
____________________
(1) This was today's prompt from Collective Journaling led by Peter Limberg, which I was offered through the Internet Real Life sessions from The Dark Forest Collective on Metalabel.
(2) Ray Stevens, "Everything Is Beautiful" (1970) [ https://youtu.be/0a45z_HG3WU?t=48 ].
(3) “Top-down predictions in the cognitive brain” by Kveraga, Ghuman, and Bar [ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2099308/ ].
(4) Gombrich, E. H. (1960). Art and illusion. London: Phaidon.
No comments:
Post a Comment