[Exploring Life] The subtleties of suffering and loss that now seem pervasive in modern life is intimately connected with a loss of beauty. While the world remains rich in beauty, it is our ability to sense and appreciate it has fallen victim to the vagaries of culture and progress. There is no vibrant culture in the absence of beauty; nor is there any real progress in the absence of beauty.
The Poetics of Beauty
Modern society tends to commercialize the idea of beauty into ideal forms and confuses it with fashion and glamor. All too often, beauty is assumed to be something visual. However, beauty cannot be confined by tradition or cultural influence, even though we may lose our sense of its presence around us. In Beauty: The Invisible Embrace, John O’Donohue offers sensitive insight into an eternal quality that lies at the very root of experience. He explores the Beautiful as an independent autonomous phenomenon that originates in nature and exists as eternal energy. In this sense, beauty is an life force and a “profound illumination of presence” that unifies the real and the ideal.
The human soul is hungry for beauty… As Frederick Turner puts it, “Beauty is the highest integrative level of understanding and the most comprehensive capacity for effective action.” …the Beautiful is the true priestess of individuation… Our deepest self-knowledge unfolds as we are embraced by Beauty… Beauty does not linger, it only visits… beauty invests the aura of a person or infuses a landscape with an unexpected intimacy that satisfies our longing… ultimately beauty is a profound illumination of presence… When Beauty touches our lives, the moment becomes luminous. (O’Donohue 2004)
Beauty as a spiritual essence that energizes the body, clarifies the mind, calms the spirit, intimately connects us to the natural world, and provides direction for experience. In this sense, beauty is an integral idea that invokes a higher level of consciousness and represents a higher level of development in human evolution. In O’Donohue’s view, to perceive the Beautiful is to be in communion with the presence of Life itself.
To behold beauty dignifies your life; it heals you and calls you out beyond the smallness of your own self-limitation to experience new horizons. To experience beauty is to have your life enlarged.(O’Donohue 2004)
Beauty is a form of communion and fellowship with life. The word communion is derived from Latin communio meaning sharing in common. The corresponding term in Greek is often translated as fellowship. Both communion and fellowship are terms that frequent religious beliefs and often point toward defined patterns of practice associated. However, in a spiritual sense, communion and fellowship are a uniquely personal sense of felt-meaning that originate within an individual. Communion and fellowship with the Beautiful are open relationships that do not impose a specific religious perspective or practice.
Beauty and Modern Civilization
The background to O’Donohue’s fantasia on the theme of beauty is the assumption of a modern society that has gone horribly wrong. He views the trappings of civilization as a test of “struggle and endurance” that permeates our existence with anxiety and uncertainty.
Politics, religion and economics and the institutions of family and community, all have become abruptly unsure… it is because we have so disastrously neglected the Beautiful that we now find ourselves in such a terrible crisis… Though we have become more helpless and hopeless, we have grown keenly aware of the need for positive change. We grow increasingly deaf to the worn platitudes of staid authority. Their forced, didactic tones no longer reach our need. Now we want the experience itself, not the analysis or the membership card to some new syndrome. Notions of self-improvement have become banal and wearisome. (O’Donohue 2004)
Beauty promotes self-awareness and healing, and allows us a space to reconsider the facade of material progress and consumption that degenerate our sensibilities and degrade the Earth. O’Donohue is particularly harsh on media that serve to “generate relentless images of mediocrity and ugliness in talk shows, tapestries of smothered language and frenetic gratification.” Though his statements on modern civilization are condemning it is extremely difficult to find fault with his criticisms, and it is not too harsh to characterize the media sphere as a medium for the mass dissemination of ugliness, superficiality, and degradation.
O’Donohue presents beauty as a means to elevate society from the “inestimable energies of the mechanical mind.” (O’Donohue 2004) My interpretation of the mechanical mind is one that follows the status quo without knowing it is doing so. This means that a mechanical mind is lacking in self-awareness and the influences that confine that awareness, and therefore lacking in awareness of the deeper innate experiences in life. Beauty, in this sense, is a source of contemplation and action.
A Reverence of Approach
The word reverence refers to the intuitive perception of being in communion with a profound presence. Rather than being a form of thought, reverence is a deep sense of awareness in which we are fully present and undisturbed.
Yet what you encounter, recognize or discover depends to a large degree on the quality of your approach… we have lost reverence of approach… We become more interested in “connection” rather than communion… A reverence of approach awakens depth and enables us to be truly present where we are. When we approach with reverence great things decide to approach us. (O’Donohue 2004)
The idea of calming the mind through the development of awareness, mindfulness, or meditation is a universal element of spiritual practice. The Buddhists refer to an agitated mind as being a “monkey mind” characterizing thoughts as behaving like monkeys swinging haphazardly from tree to tree. An agitated or monkey mind engaged compulsive thought blocks the possibility of reverence or communion. Throughout Beauty, O’Donohue makes regular reference to the essential importance of calming the mind and reducing habitual thought patterns that only offer distraction.
Beauty in Life
The central presupposition of O’Donohue’s ideas is that beauty has an autonomous existence that is separate and distinct from our own, yet desires communion with us.
This book presumes the existence and the autonomy of the Beautiful as a threshold which holds the real and the ideal in connection and conversation with each other… The Beautiful unifies feeling, thought and dream… Beauty is an endless and illusive theme. (O’Donohue 2004)
Whether we believe this to be true or not, it is unlikely that anyone has not had an intuitive sense of beauty at times in their life when they were presented with a distinct sense of felt-meaning that seemed to appear from beyond.[2] While the power of human thought is significant, it is not the only way we experience the world. There are times in our lives when we are intuitively grasped by a sense of presence that seems to originate in the shadows of mystery, from a place that is not within ourselves.
Footnotes
1. John O’Donohue’s website contains a variety of interesting material. I find myself quoting an author far more than usual. I am allowing myself this indulgence as I find his ideas and expression both evocative and compelling.
2. Historical overview: Theories of Beauty to the Mid-Nineteenth Century.
