Monday 3 October 2005

Pic of the day: People who live in a harmonious family, like in this screenshot from the anime Mahoraba ~Heartful Days~, tend to develop a more refined sense of beauty. Why is this? And why is beauty beautiful at all?

Beauty

I was walking home when I saw two children who hurried along the road, enjoying the effortless movement and energy that is their birthright. I was impressed by their beauty and I thought: Is it only instinct that makes them look beautiful to me? No, we also see the beauty in the young of other animals, and in trees and flowers, even the rainbow and the sunset, the snowflake and the drop of dew. As I sometimes say: Biology explains why boys like girls and bees like flowers, but why do girls like flowers?

James Redfield claims that the experience of beauty is a sign that spiritual energy is flowing into you. People who are unable to experience beauty, need to get all their energy from the attention of others, and live a miserable and insecure life. Some will resort to cheating, lying, threats or outright violence to get attention. Meanwhile those who have the right mindset can recharge in a majestic grove or by listening to good music, and then share their energy with other less fortunate wanderers.

I have a more prosaic explanation, although it doesn't directly conflict with the more spiritual view. I think beauty results from an alignment between our brain and the world.

***

OK, technically it is probably patterns in the software rather than the hardware, but the two interact. Over time your habits physically change your brain, as can be seen in Buddhist monks who have meditated for decades. The patterns surely start to change the brain long before that. When something is natural to you, whether it is second nature or first, it influences your sense of beauty. When what you perceive around you matches up with the patterns inside, you experience beauty.

I don't mean the pattern matching of memories. Something can be familiar yet ugly, or strange yet beautiful. This is why I said "brain" rather than "memories". I believe memories, words and thoughts appear on a detailed level, like waves on the sea. But the patterns I talk about are much wider and less specific, like the ocean currents. It is the "shape" of our brain that is reflected in these wider patterns. And when they match up with something outside us, whether by instinct or by the way we have shaped our brain through long experience, then we sense a connection or resonance that we call beauty.

Some beauty is universal or nearly so, because of the way our brain is designed, its basic circuitry so to speak. Certain combinations of colors or geometric shapes or musical notes, in certain mathematic proportions, hardly ever fail to evoke a sense of beauty in most people. We may not take the time to appreciate the beauty, or we may get dulled by repeated exposure and stop noticing it. But by its nature it appeals to us directly, across ages and races and traditions that otherwise keep us apart.

Some beauty seems to appeal to certain temperaments more than others. For instance the kind of people I call "paradise people" are more likely to enjoy classical music, while rap and "metal" music disgusts them. These are the people who enjoy largely conflict-free lives where all their everyday needs are met, and who seek goodness and refinement. Conversely, people who enjoy conflict and who seek pain in themselves or others often have the opposite taste in music. In Britain, some public places pipe beautiful music through protected loudspeakers to make disturbing elements feel out of place and leave peacefully. Likewise it is a safe bet that any locale that plays loud rap or punk music will soon be devoid of Adventists and hand-holding newlywed suburbanites.

***

Beauty is important for our quality of life. In harsher times now past, people lived from hand to mouth. Even the rich lived mostly short and insecure lives compared to us. And yet stunning pieces of art have survived from that time. Beauty is not something to think about as an afterthought when you have nothing else to do. If you seek it out consciously, appreciate it and drink it in, a sense of satisfaction appears on a new level, transcending the physical satisfaction of the full belly. It is a sense that something is right with the world, and that not all is in vain after all.

And for those who are allowed to create some kind of beauty, be it in colors or shapes or melodies or even words, there is a feeling of awesome meaning. As one composer said: When I stand before God and he asks me what I did with my life, I will show him [this work]. (I believe it was an Ave Maria, but it's years since I read it.) Rumor has it that some parents sometimes feel the same way.

Perhaps it really is so that beauty is what unites the spiritual and the material world, or Heaven and Earth. There was a rumor among "Smith's Friends", I can't attest to it myself but I find it likely to be true: During a meeting, an elder Brother stood up and looked over the congregation. "How beautiful you all are!" he said, and died. Now that would be something.