Category Archives: beauty
A Nimbus for All
Unity—An Affirmation
Paradox of Personality Light
The paradox, the yes and no of things is pervasive. It’s not just the transcendent that is intellectually elusive. The child asks, “What is a flower?” How can we answer? How deeply do I know what a flower is? Yet we try to answer.
What is a personality; what is the definition and the limit? We say it is vehicle, that it is a mask, that it’s on the surface of things. Then we say all is one, so the soul and personality are one. But there is time we say, and Saturn’s rule is the root of this separation. Yet we sense that time is an illusion, and for those who love, “time is not.” We find no clear dividing line between spirit and matter, between personality and soul, no place where personality ends and soul begins.
The mask we call personality is deceptive. If the mask speaks of the mask, how could it be other than deceptive? Yet, to the degree that it is integrated with soul, the mask is no longer deceptive. There is no mask in honesty, in wholeness, in unity—and unity is the essence of all. Yet, the most transcendent unified light still uses a form. And if a human form and human symbols are used, a degree of imperfection lingers, an element of deception.
Where then is personality, and where soul? Among actual humans, I do not know if I’ve ever met a personality. I’ve seen faces in degrees of radiance and faces transmuting pain. But in all this alchemy, no personalities like the mental construct. Today, I suggest there is no category of personality rapport and or soul rapport. It may be convenient to speak of them, but they are not what is before our eyes. The existence of personality is factual, but it is not true. Before our eye is an exquisite play of light and shade, a world of gradations in flowing colors and shapes. The persona and its provincial and cosmic matrix are worlds of dancing lights, bits of energy with star-like distance between the points of illusion. The soul is the indefinable light that holds these stars in place and feeds their life.
The shine of personality is attractive. But it is somewhat like a moon, shinning with borrowed light. Its real beauty is not in the form at all, but in the soul shinning through. Personality is love in disguise. Virtually everyone I meet in the normal course of life looks well attired to me. They do not speak the language of personality only, they speak also the language of the soul. They do not always know they speak it, even when they do it very well. We hear the voice behind the voice. They cannot hide it; it is the nature of things. I see where the gleam in the eye comes from, even though they have forgotten to explicitly mention it.
The Defining Moment
In austere beauty, the awakening and defining moment—Light falls from the apex of spirit and rises from the depths. The voice of God kills and resurrects, cutting through darkness with undeniable affirmation.
Someone asked, “What is heaven?”
Well, surely heaven is not what most people think and imagine. It’s not the singing of old church hymns and, if heaven had walls, they would not be decorated with the plump cherubs of old paintings. Of angels I have no doubt there are many, though minus the feathery wings of Earth’s ornithological types. That is the trouble with the way humans picture heaven, it becomes a projection of the earthly imagination. Surely, there are no towering churches or collections of virgins for the would-be resident.
Now that said, there is a consensus in many esoteric works that the mind and emotions, being exceptionally creative, means that all these things are collectively created on a psychical level. So whatever people imagine heaven to be–personally and collectively–that it becomes for the persons who participate in that thought form. So one can easily see how–in the psychical world–crowds of devoted followers gather around their Jesus to hear the repetition of sermons. But all this must be structures, forms of the earthly experiences projected, as it were, into the skies of the the “heaven worlds.” In modern terms, an illusory matrix.
As I have it, all this described is not heaven but a collection of human counterfeits, the very same counterfeits one meets with in the minds of humans generally. How then to elevate the term and concept “heaven” beyond its usual earthly import? “Structures,” which is to say forms and materials, are the stuff of worldly life. But there is something else, something truly spiritual, that casts its luster over, in and through the earthly world. The word I adopt for this is “archetype.” There is a pattern in and through and behind everything an archetypal beauty being the soul of every form. Truly perceived, life in the external world becomes a window through which the real heaven can be seen. It is not structure, but the creative energy behind.
The nearest analog to heaven in the objective world is light, color, sound, and geometry. These suggest the archetypal pattern on which all is based. To put it otherwise, the soul of every truly beautiful thing and experience of life, exists as a living and dynamic archetype in spirit, and that includes all that every individual is in their deepest self. The archetype of thought, emotion, consciousness, nature, and of the entire cosmic expanse, all exist in “heaven.”
“Hell” is in the life hear on Earth, and heaven also, when we can see through to it. That being the case, we need not wait for death to know what heaven is, because it is present now within and about us. It is a living presence in and through us and in and through all things. So then, yes, it is Consciousness–a whole rainbow of consciousness. All that people love and cherish about external life is the shadow of real life, the life called “heaven.” Not one good thing in world—in past, in present, or in future time—not one good thing is ever lost. The good unfolds always in an infinitude of wonder that is life. The heart of all is good beyond dreaming and it lies open before us now and through all the lives and deaths on which our spirit rides.
And about evidence there is this:
The Relativity of Galaxies and Body Heat
The cosmic, the universe, the all beyond yet inclusive of Earth, the vast ocean of energy-matter; the misty turn of galaxies and suns, bright lights and luminous clouds and further on, unfathomable curtain of night; so many well designed flames, so many mysteries of light; and here below we focus small, reduced, microscopic, with body heat no match for stars. Or more, we find it so by our binding in time, by animal nature, by blood, by minute psychologies and small pains, troubles rendered in large illusions, yet not one such visible from Space. But thought of the universe is more magical than time and lights brain with new fires; so then, small links to great and the sunlight spaces of the cosmic worlds are close as love.
Calls to Hidden Realms
All the chains of thought and words, the countless sounds and songs of our inner life, all make calls to hidden realms. Common words reinforce the common bondage, while the higher ones call to freedom and life. In words, these bodies of thought, a secret life and help is woven, and a beautiful magic lives in the spark between word and meaning.
The mediators of mystic potentialities surround us. I believe the most sacred invocations may slip unexpectedly into your voice and the voices of friends. See how a song repeats, how the lyrics come rounded with magic appeal, how the words hide joyous scriptures just beneath… I feel the most secret musical formulas are calls that set lines of light dancing in the air, lines of communion along which run the colors of our love for all that is luminous and beautiful. They thread instantly across mountains and seas, binding the most remote points in creative intimacy. There are voices in the lattice of lights, a vibrant intercourse, a comprehension that is the archetype of speech.
Moment of Beauty
Romance
Naturally, the subtler aspects of “romance” have affinity with intuition, with love, enthusiasm, mystery, the heroic, the beautiful, artistic works, the musical; the transcendental poets in this sense were romantics.
Renunciation
One teaching says that non-attachment is, “freedom from longing for all objects of desire, either earthly or traditional, either here or hereafter.” Yet it may be early for us to idealize the renunciation of all desire, when we’ve not made much progress in supplanting our numerous bad desires with better ones, and it may be we’ve not yet even learned to enjoy taking out the trash.
And if the water is still and clear, we will notice reflected there the awesome beauty of the sky? And if the sky shines in the eye of a friend, likely we will desire to remain with this friend. And shall we also renounce future desires we do not possess? Naturally not, since desire is continuum and evolution of many refinements, and abstract philosophy will not serve as eraser. We must think realistically about desire. Renunciation is a supplanting process, and more of a direction and orientation than a decision.
“The essence is not in renunciation, but in realization of the especially Beautiful.”
— Aum, Helena Roerich
Hyper-Space Flowers
We might think of beauty, in the usual personality way, as a passive perception. But there is another sense of beauty, the spiritual sense, and this is beauty as an active and transformative power.
On a superficial or personality level we may have an emotional response to beauty. In this there is a sense of objective separation where we feel beauty is “out there” and that we are “in here” here looking out. Perhaps there is the sense that perception of beauty is merely a subjective projection or that light or sound has bounced from there to us and stirred some emotion in the brain.
But there is a deeper experience of beauty that is entrance into a world of pure meaning. We walk along a path find a flower. If we look and enjoy it in a personal way, in the usual way, that is fine, but from a spiritual standpoint our perception is without great significance. But now, look again; this flower is the crystallization of the spiritual, as we are, and as all things are. We need not await a prophet to receive the commandments–one small flower will bestow the necessary mandate. This is not “just a flower” before us. It is the life itself. This flower, were we to see it spiritually would change us. This flower is to us nothing less than a messenger of divinity and healer of world problems. To see it is to be seized by its fiery Beauty, to enter a higher world, to be given a command. The flower is our prophet where we become medium for its affirmation; we are then the flower expanded into new and unexpected spaces. It’s coloring radiates from us, expands through us to envelope the world.
Deeper Questions
“I cannot be awake for nothing looks to me as it did before,
Or else I am awake for the first time, and all before has been a mean sleep.”
— Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman
Question, quest: to seek, ask.
The quest is born of fire.
But the sleeping body asks no burning questions.
We search for understanding. Many thoughtful comparisons present themselves, and for the sincere thinker the weighty questions cannot be avoided. Details from diverse fields call attention to the need for grand synthesis. We seek because the motivational force is beautiful. Each facet of the mosaic of life comes to embody a transcendent reflection of startling beauty. So the hard surface of things leads inward toward the profound luminous world of the soul.
“To know Rather consists in opening a way
Whence the imprisoned splendor may escape”
—Robert Browning
If something is merely pretty to us, it means we are yet on the surface of it. When it becomes beautiful–then is the shock of transformation. When our fires burn dimly, the perceived surface sparks only ephemeral curiosity, and the true colors are invisible to our sleep eyes. If the fire of beauty is not yet kindled in us, it means we’ve fallen into sleepwalking. So at each stage we must counteract somnambulism. Let us sense the evolution of knowledge as a limitless ocean of beautiful possibilities.
Search, Question, Quest, Find, Speak
“Here is the efflux of the soul,
The efflux of the soul comes from within through embower’d gates,
ever provoking questions,
These yearnings why are they? these thoughts in the darkness why are
they?
Why are there men and women that while they are nigh me the sunlight
expands my blood?…
Why are there trees I never walk under but large and melodious
thoughts descend upon me?…
What is it I interchange so suddenly with strangers?
What with some driver as I ride on the seat by his side?
What with some fisherman drawing his seine by the shore as I walk by
and pause?
What gives me to be free to a woman’s and man’s good-will? What
gives them to be free to mine?”
— Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman
Flower Templates
Beautiful manifestations in the natural world are fitting templates for our best thoughts and expressions. Flowers, crystals, stars, are patterns for paragraphs. They are precise foci of creative forces–finely ordered, beautiful, simple, clear and colorful.
Giving up and Acquisition
We can view progress as giving up or displacement, or in terms of acquisition. The first is negation and the second affirmation or inclusion.
We relinquish one thing, but obtain something else, in other words, the displacement of the lower by the higher or the supplanting of a lesser thing by a greater. Energy shifts from one thing to another, and lesser things fall away as we become more absorbed in finer ones.
Esoteric “inclusion” is the obverse of denial. We can move forward by denial or inclusion. And though the approaches may differ, inclusions and denial are, in a sense, aspects of one thing. We can express this difficult concept with an example.
Here is flower. Shall we renounce it? My answer is yes and no. We might respond to the flower as a personality in a superficial emotional or sentimental way. But there are other levels of response. The soul is artist and beauty is the essence of spirituality. The flower is symbol and gateway. We may well renounce the flower if our eyes are glancing off it superficially. But the flower is a manifestation of spirit, and hence an instrument of transformation–it can be a portal into which we are ushered into the meaning of life.
Beauty as Transformative Power
“I was lifted high,
In sun-bright healing winds—desiring now
A greater beauty…”
— Marion Wentworth
Usually, people think of beauty as something perceived, something we subjectively attribute to an object or a person. But I find the spiritual meaning of beauty is different. Spiritual beauty is not a passive perception but an active and transformative power. It is the energy of the intuitional world. We commune with such beauty, we enter into it and it enters into us. It is unity and Fire. It is “the world of pure meaning.” This beauty is not our personal response to an object in the world. Rather, beauty is itself a multidimensional world of rainbow archetypes.
In the archetypal world the divine mosaic shines in beauty. We encounter considerable fidelity problems in translating this world of pure meaning into its best correspondences in thought and words. It is a valiant effort, yet the lesser cannot fully include the greater. Still we try to mirror it. Fortunately, the mental mirror is itself in long-term evolutionary motion.
“…beyond the Beauty that is predicated of various forms and relationships, there is a pure Transcendent Beauty, and this is a mode of the very Being of the SELF. This Beauty is not something that is beautiful. It is Self-existent and casts its luster upon all things… Ecstasy is pure Beauty, as well as pure Joy and Knowledge.”
— Pathways Through to Space, Franklin Merrell-Wolff
Shocks of Beauty
Why is the perception of the real world such a shocking experience? Because it is so different, so unusual, being revelatory of both the grandeur that we are, and the littleness we often express. This contrast is shocking. Imagine how the awesome beauty of reality compares to the thoughtless ignorance of our daily life. We may see something so beautiful that it is painful. The beautiful itself is not painful, but the contrast between beauty and our newly revealed ignorance is most painful. Spirit is pure Beauty and it illuminates errors by contrast.
Finding our Work
In the atmosphere there are fire flowers of luminous things. Billions of these flowers hover in the to-be-done regions, waiting for a body. The trick is taking on the ones that truly belong to us, and refraining from appropriating those that do not. There are many wonderful things hovering in the air that are not our work and for which we may not be suited. Many of these are of stunning beauty and have a Siren quality, hence the excitement and the danger, for contact with them tends to inspire action. We must find each days work within a universe of infinite possibilities.
Magic Resonance
“Never did eye see the sun unless it had first become sun-like, and never can the soul have vision of the First Beauty unless itself be beautiful”
— Plotinus
How to make our minds as sane and clear as the Sun? We can choose to focus mainly on what is beautiful, good, creative, uplifting; at the same time, to clearly know the obstacles but without making these our main focus.
Otherwise put, the key is resonance. If consciousness is occupied with the innermost beauty of things, a magical resonance is created that floods the space of the mind and surrounding space. Then the mind becomes a door into light. Right resonance in the mind and heart leads toward transcendence of the limited. We ponder the beauty of the candle and the star, and find they are not simply hot spots or opposites of ice. Rather, a door swings open, a door into fire, of which these luminous points are the messengers. The grandeur of this beautiful fire is enunciated by the morning light at the dawn of each new day.
Synchronization or resonance is a way of talking about vibration or frequency. We resonate with that which relates to our own nature. The phrase “sympathetic vibration” also expresses this. Emerson wisely said, “The secrets of life are not shown except to sympathy and likeness.”
Strings of a musical instrument vibrate together, even though they are not entirely alike, yet the similarity of their nature makes the resonance possible. So, to know the higher, we must become like it. We must sound the notes in our mind, body, and emotion that are resonant with their correspondences on transcendent levels. Each thought, emotion, or action that resonates with the higher is magical. Magic is the applied truth of the heart, the power to manifest and uplift.
Basic Physics—Basic Metaphysics
Decreasing the density of the material, increases the intensity of the radiation getting through.
Most Like God
God creates and man creates, and man creating well is most like God. We give ourselves to creation, finding there the true, most beautifully rendered forms. In this is sacred life, divine reflections finely drawn as well befits a soul remembering home. Not in music or in paint alone, but more in mind and in the spaces of the heart where all live who dream of times more like the thought of Gods.
Like the Best Morning of Life
We would like perpetual renewal of life and vitality. We would like to feel that dawn is coming with a rush of new benevolent energy. We would like to be in spirit like the best morning of our life, to find in the light of new day the best actions and words.
About words, today, I reiterate a bit of transpersonal semantics conducive to renewal: a word is, or might be, sacred. I do not fancy myself religious in any conventional sense, but there is a good idea in the religious of the world, that of “sacred word.” I do not say it is in bibles or churches. But it might be in you. And if we were to meet, I would listen for it. You might not even know you spoke it, but I fancy that I would hear and know.
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Dream Radiance
The spiritual universe expresses in radiant centers of fire and light, and the physical universe follows. The grandeur of the day and night sky mirrors this principle; the tiniest particles of matter mirror it, and the human aura also radiates according to the growth of spirit. Spirituality is correspondent with the color and quality of beautiful radiation. In humanity, radiation is love and giving. The eyes show this light, and the voice shows it. Every word and act radiates according to quality of character. Meditation is radiation and the measure of a life well lived shows in a unifying radiance.
Awakening to unity means no clear boundary between within and without. The light in sky, the light of the atom, the light of aura, the light of thought–all merge in mystic perception.
Picture an explosion of light. Does the image evoke human invention, a star, a man, an angel, a thought? Sensitivity to light varies, but our eyes read by and through light. And we read not just by the eyes but by interior resources correspondence with inner light. Each of us reads by virtue of what we are, and of what we are, we know as yet only the smallest part. Our imaginations do not comprehend the full radiance of the future.
Having experience, we wait with confidence on the sunrise. For the coming of more subtle lights we will need to reach deep into the future blue of intuitive spaces. Looking toward the future, we find a spirited fullness and gladness in anticipation of great things, as if we have seen the future light in a dream. Perhaps we have.
Sacred Ethereal Pressures
Thought is poised between dimensions, dropping easily toward earth and more rarely deep into luminous reflections of other worlds. In thought is an opening door, a world of rainbow silences lovely as light, where then, when the veil wears thin, thoughts come with the lighting edge of fire.
Where then, when the veil wears thin, the gleaming surfaces of objects dissolve to exquisite meanings. And in ready moments, mind glides quietly into the blue and into landscape of distant worlds, where with all drawn close to the eyes, the way is clear. And for company in and through all the glowing silences of lost spaces, are true friends, and love in the air all surrounding.
And more sure than fine sun of cloudless day, interior radiance proves spirit well. So clear, pure, tremendous, the ethereal pressures of sacred things to be, mount within us, and mysterious shadows of ancient days crowd round us in night and day. See then the Life laid out, a clear and certain path, even to the most distant stars and times. And Life as something far beyond our reach, proves illusion, for distances dissolve and real life fills the creative fires of each happy day.
Infinite Divinations
Runes, cards, I Ching, sticks, books, leaves, hands, stars, numbers, words, symbols, forms–all the same face, giving nothing or everything. Every pattern, every symbol system, the waves on the sand, the child’s face, every language, the same; the whole universe divined by I-evoking magic. Does it matter where we turn for the answers? I divine there is little virtue in the pattern, in the form itself; most virtue being in the reader or in the reader’s magic relation with “out there.” The sky and the earth are as full of Runes as is any man women or child.
The Eyes of a Lost Love
The mysterious life force circulates within, but is not marked as miraculous; once born to Maya, we forget. So we go to nature, as if to better commune with creative forces. Natural beauty provokes deep memory, for down the ages we saw the same moon and the same clouds, and the wind in the trees whispered the same secrets as now. We come to nature as to a sacred meeting place, finding there an old friend. We look then upon nature, as into the eyes of a long lost love, and remember.
Love of Forms
I’ve never been a great lover of forms, that is most made by man’s mind. Not religions, philosophies, and psychologies, nor even much that passes as arts and sciences. There is a hidden meaning in all of them, and this I love. Yet the ways these take through human agencies and arts often fails to resonate. There are, thankfully, beautiful exceptions yet excellent things remain rare.
The forms of nature are different–these I love. A crystal, a rainbow, faces, skies and clouds, or scintillating dance of light on water–these argue well in speaking direct to the soul.
That said, if I am with a religionist I may find something there to love. If with a philosopher, I may find some light behind. Often though I find in voice or eye some gleam or note that reads better than philosophy or religion. Perhaps it is that we are in essence better than our playthings.
A Nimbus for All
Human imagination paints light, by tradition, as a nimbus glorifying the head of saints and saviors. Yet scriptures and mystics have affirmed the omnipresence of the light of Deity. Where then to justly locate such gold? Let us paint broadly according to omnipresence. Let us assign light lavishly to myriads of heads. Best even to leave out no one, not a single head without its nimbus of gold-colored light. Let our prophecy be this, that we affirm the glories that surround us in people and in things. Assign then a nimbus to all, and even to the long stretch of faces through history and on to far horizons of future worlds.
And if we find those who have forgotten their glory, let them see at least the memory of it reflected in the clairvoyance of optimistic eyes. And for those who seem lost and faded to dark—regard them with realistic gaze, but also through the seed of future light, for it may be that patient angels–who plan for all time and all worlds–will have their way with them at last.
Silver Shadows
A reflection on darkness and light , the nature of life, illusions, and meaning.
The Gift without Name
They come to you, unifying, communicating, manifesting in sound. We might say they use “music” or “notes,” as that is an analog the brain understands. They play the power through each center, ringing changes through the ascending body-of-light-sound that seems “I.”
They show something of what and why you are in the deep infinite of life, and something of what they are, and something of what all life is. They radiate pure meaning that comes as chords of music.
The waves are infinite in variety and beauty; each strand of musical-meaning sparkles with countless seeds of future life, your life and all life. The essence of the future is there, and worlds of instruction live in each chord. With all perceptions altered, brightened immeasurably, you are grounded at last in reality. Your subsequent life, in so far as it is meaningful, shall be nothing but the translation into action of this music.
The sounds continue in the background of your best thoughts. In greatly muted from they weave their magic through all the days of your life—thank heavens for the muted notes, for fully sustained they would burn your body to ashes. You see now where the obscurations are, where the notes failed to penetrate. But it is only a matter of time before the gift without name redeems everything.
Fire on Water: Timlessness in Spiritual Perception
Small and Great
How to distinguish the small and the great?
Beautiful small drop of ocean is great, but small talk is not great unless love disguised. The tiny star in space, radiant light beyond our reach, is great to our eyes. Space includes all and is great. The blind eye is not great but the eye that apprehends stars in space is great, for there is love in the deep of space and in the star and in the tiny eye that sees.
Light of Stars
Have you seen the white faces, the stars on wall of night? Calm they seem, and cold, cold as Arctic light; hot they seem, burning bright into my eyes. New fires bloom there, and stars that lived and died long before an eye could capture light. Behind my prison sight, the sky seems phantom cold, spatial void unbridgeable. But there is more fire than prison eyes can see. Have you seen the cold sky warm to luminous shadows, patterns of things to be? Have you heard the cold clear call, the songs of distant stars? Behind this bloom of lights, voices sing and whispered stories come of deeps beyond, and futures holy light.
The Wind from Space
Mystic Muse 