Awakening to Beauty

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Sadly, whether from resentment, fear, or blindness, beauty is often refused, repudiated, or cut down to the size of our timid perceptions. The tragedy is that what we refuse to attend to cannot reach us. In turning away from beauty, we turn away from all that is wholesome and true, and deliver ourselves into an exile where the vulgar and artificial dull and deaden the human spirit. In their vicinity we are unable to feel or think with any refinement. They cannot truly engage us because of their emptiness; they pound our minds and feelings because they lack the coherence to embrace the inner form of the soul. They are not a presence but rather an absence that evicts and vacates.

A CULTURE IS a complex network of tradition, convention, radiance, memory, dream, and darkness. In our times, travel and especially technology have transformed the boundaries of culture to bring us closer together. Yet the world was never more threatened by raging conflicts of inequality, hatred, and terrorism. It is the ultimate paradox of our times. Why does emerging global unification have such a sinister underside? Perhaps because the engine of unification has been economics and it has no destination other than acquisition; consequently, it has squandered the privileges and duties of encounter for the sake of economic and industrial connection.

But connection is not encounter. This is precisely where the neglect and repression of beauty lead to disaster. The heart of beauty is loyalty to wholeness and symmetry, and the effect is illumination and radiance. This is always evident in the simplicity and complexity of human encounter. Two humans can meet at an obvious conscious level, but the subconscious of each is always in play and sublimely alert. If this powerful unknown domain between two individuals is not attended to but pushed aside, their encounter will lack depth and often unwittingly activate unexpected negativity and destructiveness between them. Our global unification has been raging on but merely at a superficial, conscious level. As with an individual, a culture has a subconscious too. We need to acknowledge the subtle yet powerful subconscious of different cultures. A culture's subconscious must be given space and patience in order that it can show itself and guide us in our duties of care, attention, and encounter.

The origin, evolution, and definition of a culture is always an incredible narrative. As well as being a social creation, at its heart a culture is primarily a creation of imagination and spirit. We cannot encounter the heart of a culture unless we attend to its inner creative impulse whose vision and intention is ultimately the Beautiful. A culture that denies beauty sows the seeds of its own destruction. Within every culture there are huge archives and fountains of beauty. The 'royal road' to true cultural encounter brings us to its fountain of beauty. When we are admitted there, we stand on universal ground, on a level where conscious and subconscious are in harmonious tension; this is the depth below fear, threat, and otherness.

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