
What is Beauty?
Beauty is many things. In one context it is merely a sequence of letters and sounds, that when strung together create a word with a particular meaning attached to it used to describe a thing – also known as an adjective.
In another context it’s also a feeling of love and awe. However, for the most part, and for the purpose of this journal or blog, we’ll use it as a means to describe something that makes us feel good.
Now, I want you to imagine the most beautiful person, place, or thing you’ve ever seen – even if it was created in the Mind. Hold the image in your mind or if you have a picture gaze openly at all the details of it.
The purpose of this journal is really to understand beauty in the context of Light and Darkness. In so many ways do people fear darkness – in the physical and spiritual realms. We associate fear and negativity to our own shadows. We believe that danger awaits us down the hall or around the corner of those places to which we cannot see well.
In the way of light we associate love and happiness, peace and security. We say things like “Light dispels darkness”, “Where I was once in darkness, the Light has now shown me the way!” And though I do believe there is merit to these statements, darkness is still very much a part of light as we know it.
Imagine now, as you bring that image back to mind or hold up that picture you were just looking at, if little by little, the light in the photo got brighter, brighter, brighter, and brighter to the point that the whole image is now white or Light. Would there still be an image?
Marianne Williamson said “it’s not the darkness, but the light that we are most afraid of.” What she means by this statement is that much of the world today is afraid of what they can actually become. However, if we were pure light and no darkness would we still experience the beauties of life as we know them now? Certainly not! Beauty would be a much different experience, if one at all, but how do we know if we’ve never experienced it… or have we?
We understand pure darkness through the stories of those who have been locked up in prison cells, or even spiritually in the dark – phobic, depressed, and malnutritioned. How about those who have embraced the darkness with courage and strength; those who are guided by intuition and clairsentient? How often do we hear of their stories, if ever?
Would the light be as scary as the dark? After all, there would be nothing to see if it weren’t for interference patterns that allow us to distinguish things apart.
Maybe this is the balance in life that philosophers have expressed through time – the Yin and Yang, Up and Down, Breathing In and Out. Lao Tzu acknowledges that there is a time for everything and everything in its time. And so I believe in the darkness, not as a fearful and negative space, but one filled with wonders and even more blessings. I believe the Light to be complimentary, that by experiencing both Light and Darkness is where we experience True Beauty, and not in only one side or the other, but together complete and whole.
Physicists have discovered that all atoms, of which make up all things in life, are 99% empty space. Thus, this is part of the Way of life as we know it today. Within the light there is darkness, and from darkness will there be light! Manifest comes from Unmanifest, and in these spaces exist Infinite Possibility. It is here between the spaces that we are able to Discover, then Use. As the little girl from Bridge to Terabithia once said “Close your eyes and keep your Mind wide open.”
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