To seek after beauty as an end, is a
wild goose chase, a will-o'-the-wisp,
because it is to misunderstand the very nature of beauty, which is the normal
condition of a thing as it should be.
because it is to misunderstand the very nature of beauty, which is the normal
condition of a thing as it should be.
Ade Bethune
* * * * *
Today's Meditation:
* * * * *
Today's Meditation:
We all are beautiful. It's just too bad that most of us can't
see the beauty in each other, or in ourselves. We've been trained to look
for flaws, so our personal searches for beauty have become searches for
flawlessness rather than searches for the beautiful. If our goal is to
make ourselves beautiful, we're wasting our time. We're already
beautiful, whether we're willing to admit it or not. We've just put up so
many barriers to our beauty over the years in the form of biases and beliefs and
walls to protect ourselves that our beauty simply isn't the part that's most
obvious--our protective layers are.
Our normal condition is beauty. There really isn't more to it than
that. What we tend to believe about beauty, though, is what our society
deems to be beautiful, some sort of ideal that only a very few reach.
This is a crock, quite simply. Some of the most beautiful people I've
ever met have been those who are completely fine with themselves the way they
are, and they focus on things other than trying to reach that ideal--things
like helping others and nurturing themselves and giving and caring.
Are you seeking beauty in yourself? Well, it's already there, and it's
fabulous. Are you seeking beauty in others? Again, if you're not
seeing it then it's not because it isn't there, because it most certainly is
there. And if you can't see it, then you must ask yourself: are you
seeking beauty, or are you seeking an ideal? Because there's plenty of
the former, yet very little of the latter.
When we misunderstand what beauty is, then we doom ourselves to looking for
something that we'll never find. It's like searching for diamonds, but
not knowing what they look like. We may see many of them, but never
recognize them. When you really do open your mind enough to actually see
the beauty in the people and the world around you, and in yourself, your world
will transform, and you'll find that your life will transform, also.
* * * * *
Questions to consider:
* * * * *
Questions to consider:
From where do we get our ideas of what beauty actually is?
Why do most of us not recognize true beauty when we see it?
How can we go about learning to understand more clearly and accurately just
what beauty is?
* * * * *
For further thought:
* * * * *
For further thought:
The fact that we can't see the beauty in something doesn't suggest
that it's not there. Rather, it suggests that we are not looking carefully
enough or with a broad enough perspective to see it.
that it's not there. Rather, it suggests that we are not looking carefully
enough or with a broad enough perspective to see it.
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