Post five of seven, in section Hard Truths
Beauty is one of the things that is at the heart of a lot of people’s deepest personal and spiritual desires.
In our culture, beauty often involves people objectifying what they find beautiful and wanting to own or control it. It can also be used to create false ideals around perfection.
This is painful for everyone involved and can be particularly oppressive towards women, who are expected to be beautiful to be accepted. In our culture, beauty is often considered synonymous with attractive women.
Beauty is incredibly powerful, and most people recognise this on some level, but it’s rarely respected in the same way that intelligence is, for example. Historically, beautiful women and artefacts are something to fight over, to try and own. The difference is subtle, but beauty easily becomes about attracting the attention of the powerful rather than being respected for being powerful in its own right.
When the power of beauty is deeply respected, then it holds immense capacity to transform people’s experience and behaviour. When the power of beauty is recognised, something doesn’t even need to be that pretty or attractive to have this effect.
That power is about the ability to evoke strong emotions in people in a way that feels compelling and engaging – to be able to turn experience into something that feels like it has flavours of artistry to it.
A better word for this than beauty, perhaps, is evocativeness.
“Something can be incredibly evocative without being beautiful. And something can be quite beautiful without being evocative.”
River Kenna
This sense of life being beautiful, evocative, emotionally moving, or artistic in some way is a lot of what makes it meaningful and worth living. This is why it makes sense to cultivate these things through spiritual practice.
In order for the engagement with beauty to be wholehearted and meaningful, you want to focus on the parts of beauty that help you deepen emotional connection, that inspire creativity, and that connect you more fully with all aspects of yourself and life.
It’s important to recognise the difference between a beauty that focuses on surface-level prettiness, status, and consumption and a beauty that is more about wholehearted evocativeness. It’s like the difference between a designer handbag and a dramatic landscape full of nature’s natural imperfections.
If you can learn to appreciate and seek for the more wholehearted evocativeness, you can create more space for flaws in both yourself and others, and it becomes easier to love more of life more fully.
This is perhaps the deepest power of beauty or evocativeness – it creates a way for you to love things that otherwise would be hard to engage with or connect with.
I have written a practical guide for using imagery for awakening here, which describes how you can use the way of being that art allows to connect with new parts of yourself and others in a shared practice.
Connection to Beauty
I went on a day-long mission to explore my connection to beauty and evocativeness in all its experiential depths. I found a lot. I photographed some of it.
Here are the photographs and a running commentary of what I noticed during the day.
A Day of Beauty
While doing this, I noticed a few things about beauty and evocativeness. Here are my freeform reflections in the order in which they emerged throughout the day.
There is an art form in trusting what you find evocative. If you start second-guessing and trying to find the things that are “objectively” beautiful, you lose the emotional connection that it’s there to create.
Finding what is evocative for you requires a level of sincerity – an emotional openness combined with a sharp discernment that comes from being intimately in touch with yourself and your inner world.
I noticed that the evocativeness in absurdity or darkness can be more compelling to me than pure light beauty, but that it is also harder to capture.
I thought about how this relates to sexuality.
It felt important to recognise that not objectifying sexual beauty isn’t about crushing your sexuality but about learning how to be with this in a spacious way.
I realised that going looking for beautiful absurdity in dark humour becomes a bit of a twisted, black hole – one that I am very familiar with.
Throughout my life, I’ve taken a lot of photographs, designed a wide variety of things, and collected a lot of imagery that I appreciate. This has given me knowledge of some basic design principles and a clear understanding of my aesthetic preferences, which help me get in touch with what I find beautiful.
I know that I’m drawn towards practical beauty that has a purpose. And well-worn beauty that feels real and inclusive.
In doing this exercise, I noticed that I find beauty in small ways all the time. In the world and in others.
I noticed that every time I’m sitting on a stony beach, I make a small piece of temporary art out of interesting stones and objects that I find within arm’s reach.
I noticed that I’m very tactile. That the textures and movement of things were inextricably part of their beauty and evocativeness. And that if they weren’t practical, it was nice if beautiful things were in some way interactive.
During the day I had a WhatsApp conversation with a friend where he shared some difficulties with me. Part of the conversation became about describing what the challenge would be like if it were art (somewhere between a Dali painting & Mount Doom).
“Imaginal practice is the transformation of something painful into something beautiful”
I noticed that even if something was not exactly my aesthetic, I’d be more likely to find it beautiful if I felt it was chosen with care rather than to be showy.
Chatting with a stranger in a graveyard, I noticed that there are subtle and subconscious boundary negotiations that have to happen before you can relax into appreciating the beauty of an interaction. I also noticed that I can find this negotiation process beautiful in and of itself.
I recognised that seeing beauty requires some sharpness and clarity, balanced with a gentleness and a soft focus.
I noticed that beauty is incredibly simple. But that doesn’t make it easy to achieve.
I noticed that experiencing a sense of beauty comes from not needing anything or trying to get anything from the world. It arises when you are in appreciation mode rather than productivity mode.
Society
There is an element to connecting with more beauty that comes from redefining what we consider beautiful, learning to focus more on the already present beauty in life, and cultivating the skills to do this.
But also, in order to appreciate beauty, people need time and space in their lives.
When I wrote this, I was taking some time off work. People are generally tired and overworked and don’t necessarily have space to relax into appreciation mode.
I live in a very beautiful place, and it happened to be a sunny day – this would have been a lot more difficult in a lot of human environments.
For people to be able to appreciate beauty, they need to be somewhat resourced and free from trauma. They need to be relatively safe and free from oppressive or toxic structures that define their worth and exert pressure on them.
They need to be able to recognise and appreciate their own inherent beauty. This needs to include men and be about people feeling beautiful on the inside, rather than people just being perceived as meeting some ideal beauty standard; it’s about recognising the things about people that are beautiful, whether that’s how they look or their personality traits.
Until people are able to connect with their own inner beauty, they will spend their lives grasping at external beauty.
People also need to be in environments that are designed with human wellbeing and beauty in mind.
From this place, there is space for people to learn to connect with what is meaningful, beautiful, and purposeful in life for them.
Inspiration
Beauty is both inspirational and inherently desirable. It is something that we want to experience in and of itself, and it can also inspire you to be your best self – to be kinder and gentler to others, to work harder, or to give more towards something you care about.
For these reasons, it is worth reflecting on the role of beauty in our lives and in our culture; I hope this inspires people to do that.