...Silence the judge and the critic within and you will see Beauty abundantly... Mother Nature never forgets this Law. Seek and find Beauty in all you think, say and do....
Cynthia F. Davidson, excerpted from the Wisdom Wheel Beauty Law card
What if Beauty was a Law? Could it reduce the amount of ugliness, sickness and violence in our world? It is not the glossy made-up magazine type Beauty I mean, but the kind that needs no airbrushing or faking. The Beauty which radiates from within, no matter what the age of the person, place or thing. Not just visual Beauty, but a quality you can sense and feel, emanating as you approach, a sacredness and holiness.
Since ancient times the Navajo people, aka Diné or Naabeehó from the Southwestern USA, have based their way of life upon this Law. They call it the Beauty Way and seek to maintain harmony, goodness, normality, success, well-being,
blessedness, and happiness via this philosophy, which includes the ideals of prettiness, pleasantness and worthiness. The Navajo are the largest federally recognized tribe with over 300,000 enrolled members. Even today, when one is ill, they seek the help of a medicine person, to conduct a healing ceremony, to re-establish Balance and Beauty in their life so they can return to wellness. Here is an English adaptation of one of the prayers.
Today may I walk in beauty.
With beauty may I walk.
With beauty before me, may I walk.
With beauty behind me, may I walk.
With beauty above me, may I walk.
With beauty below me, may I walk.
With beauty around me, may I walk.
It is finished in beauty.
It is finished in beauty.
Repeat this at least once a day, for the next ten days, and see what happens. Listen to the Navajo musician R. Carlos Nakai's transporting flute music. Bring up the subject of Beauty often. Ask others what they believe about it. Many are cynical about Beauty because it has been commercialized, and exploited, to sell everything from lingerie to cars. Let go of any sarcasm you might have, about your own capacity for Beauty, and try to appreciate it instead for the coming days.
Here are a few nuggets of wisdom about Beauty.
Beauty is the ideal of perfect harmony which is in the universal
being; truth the perfect comprehension of the universal mind. We individuals
approach it through our own mistakes and blunders, through our accumulated
experience, through our illumined consciousness - how, otherwise, can we know
truth? Beauty is truth's smile when she beholds her own face in
a perfect mirror… By plucking
her petals, you do not gather the beauty of the flower.
Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) sobriquet Gurudev, a Bengali polymath; poet, novelist,
musician, and playwright, won 1913 Nobel Prize in Literature, the first
Asian Nobel laureate
We
ascribe beauty to that which is simple; which has no superfluous parts; which
exactly answers its end; which stands related to all things; which is the mean
of many extremes… Things may be
pretty, graceful, rich, elegant, handsome, but, until they speak to the
imagination, not yet beautiful…. Though we travel the world
over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
When I
am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to
solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful,
I know it is wrong.
Buckminster Fuller
(1895-1983)
Beauty
is indeed the sphere of unfettered contemplation and reflection; beauty conducts
us into the world of ideas, without taking us from the world of sense…By beauty
the sensuous man is brought back to matter and restored to the world of sense.
Friedrich von
Schiller
Science will never be able to reduce the value
of a sunset to arithmetic. Nor can it reduce friendship to formula. Laughter
and love, pain and loneliness, the challenge of beauty and truth: these will
always surpass the scientific mastery of nature.
Louis Orr in 1960
speech to the American Medical Association
Beauty is
an experience, nothing else. It is not a fixed pattern or an arrangement of
features. It is something felt, a glow or a communicated sense of fineness.
What ails us is that our sense of beauty is so bruised and blunted, we miss all
the best.
D. H. Lawrence, English novelist
The soul's
beauty is harder to see than the beauty of the body. The beauty that addresses
itself to the eyes is only the spell of the moment; the eye of the body is not
always that of the soul.
George Sand aka Amantine Aurore Lucile Dupin, (1804 – 1876), became Baroness Dudevant, first
female French novelist to gain a major reputation
All that one loves becomes beautiful. Beauty is nothing but the
expression of the fact that something is being loved.
Robert Musil (1880 - 1942) Austrian novelist, books include The
Man Without Qualities.
…beauty is simply reality seen with the eyes of love.
Evelyn Underhill (1875-1941) English theologian and mystic
When we
meet a person who’s beautiful, we say they ‘lit up the room’… transcendent beauty
is an inner beacon, brilliantly lit and brimming with bliss. Learn how to
attract light while calming the ego— when the mind abides by the soul, the
body, in turn, is connected to this knowingness, and transcendent beauty
follows. Such people live in harmony—their health is abundant, their bodies are
agile and fit, and their minds are vibrant and inspired. People talk about
attractiveness but that is merely physical, while true beauty comes from the
soul.
Crystal Andrus author of Transcendent Beauty
For beauty is the cause of
harmony, of sympathy, of community. Beauty unites all things and is the source
of all things. It is the great creating cause which bestirs the world and holds
al things in existence by the longing inside them to have beauty. And there it
is ahead of all as…the Beloved…toward which all things move, since it is the
longing for beauty which actually brings them into being.
Pseudo-Dionysius in The
Divine Names
They who
manifest the Beauty of My thinking in the orderliness of Universal Law(s)…are
already in My house. The doors of My kingdom are opened to them…
Walter Russell (1871–1963),
controversial American artist and author, books include The Universal One
and The Book of Beauty
Beauty is how the gods attract us into life.
James Hillman
Our hearts yearn for beauty. In the Kabbalah, beauty, called tiferet, is where spirit and form
meet and the human and divine are in balance. Linked to compassion and harmony,
beauty is at the very center of the Tree of Life.
J. Ruth Gendler in her book Notes on the Need for Beauty
Because we have so disastrously neglected the
Beautiful, we find ourselves in such terrible crisis…In the experience of
beauty we awaken and surrender in the same act. Beauty brings a sense of
completion and sureness. Without any of the usual calculation, we can slip into
the Beautiful with the same ease as we slip into the seamless embrace of water;
something ancient within us already trusts that this embrace will hold us.
John
O’Donohue in The Invisible Embrace of
Beauty
In ten days, I'll post the 14th Law of the Eternal Present. Until then, enjoy your inherent Beauty, and the universal Beauty all around you in Nature.
Here's a poem about Beauty, (atypical I know)
ReplyDeleteBeauty
Hidden beneath the pile of mulch is a worm
or two, I imagine, maybe more
They do their work unbidden of man
turning leaves and leftovers into nourishment
for the gardens and the greens
Oft times a bird comes calling
and no more worm
in form we can understand
fed from earth bound treat
bird flies high riding currents
we cannot see, painting shapes on canvas
framed by our own imagination
then down to ground
for building nest
cardinal red, crow black and starling
all compete to
keep the cycle going
beautiful nature, worm and earth
bird and sky
you and me.
Malcolm Davidson 4/14/2004