Publicado : 2012-6-26
Beauty is an idealized mirror. We see beauty in what we believe we lack, in what complements our inner or outer features.
Beauty is a feeling. A feeling towards wholeness, completude. For example, beautiful, short, black haired young boys love to be with tall, blond, plain, blue-eyed boys. The same happens with girls. By having the other close by, they relax, flow and act as one.
One step further is the acquisition of objects, like artworks, but not only, which mirror to us what we would like to see in us, the feminine, the gracious, the strong, the spiritual.
Man is eternally in quest for identity. In his search for himself he acquires or projects what he feels he needs and lacks. Great collections or the acquisition and accumulation of goods are always a secret sign of dissatisfaction at certain aspects of oneself, a search for completion or perfection.
As life is a continuous negotiation between inner and outer and a sequence of outer and inner adaptation and response, people seem to get richer as their life advances. They had the lovers, the natural and man-made sceneries, the houses, the cars and the objects which reflected to them and pacified their longing for completeness, harmony and beauty.
If, one by one, we observe the persons, places and objects which have peopled our lives we will see in each one of them specific characteristics and in several of them certain common patterns that reveal to us what we believe we lack: colors, shapes, textures, energies, ways of being, attitudes.
What we lack we project. What we reintegrate we can then forget.
The issue of the shadow is a complex one, for the shadow is positive and negative, destructive and creative. Whatever we project and still touches or disturbs us is a shadow. And in that sense we do indeed live in a world of shadows. It is from the cavern of our hearts that we see those elusive images of beautiful girls and boys, those Monnets and Picassos, those mountains and cathedrals.
For we can only recognize what we have in us. And a cow is not able to admire a palace, nor do swine appreciate pearls.
It would seem risky to say that only a dancer loves dance or a painter appreciates a painting, mainly in a world where 99% of us are just audience. But we only relate to the type of dance or painting that mirrors our sense of harmony, the red car that awakens a certain attitude in us. We cannot have what we do not already have. It is always an ecstatic wedding of an inner essence with an outer element.
Even more daring can be the suggestion that the shadow, the ego and the pain body are the same. Both in the collective as well as in the individual versions. In fact they are the repetitive patterns, the lines of least resistance, the programs, which the Hindu calls karma. In the end they are a necessary mechanism for self-knowledge.
The ego is the mirror of what we see. In the precise and intricate way in which reality is being manifested every outer corresponds to an inner detail, even though seen in different locations and times.
Indeed there is only One expressing itself through unique points of view. If we are able to rise beyond scales, if we relax somewhat about the borders between inner and outer, and if we open to the collective, there emerges a point where the search for identity through beauty recedes.
The outer still reflects us, but we smile at the mirror.
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