Beauty

The concept of beauty's something I've been thinking a lot lately, but I didn't even realize what I was thinking about was beauty until today. Generally speaking, I just think of whatever I'm thinking about as some sort of wisdom, or a truth, and go on from there. I guess that coincidentally labels me as a philosopher, or a lover of wisdom, but personally it's more sensual than intellectual.

Beauty is not a word we use all that often, and if we do, it's directed at objects. A nature scene is often described being beautiful. A piece of art is described as beautiful. A flower is often called beautiful. And if we do direct it to a person, it's often in special occasions such as buying a dress, at weddings, out on a date, and so on. It's also used to describe babies a lot. I guess it's a good thing in a way. We, at least in our innermost sense, value the word 'beauty' and avoid abusing it. But 'beauty' is also used among words like hot, gorgeous, and sexy. I can tell you what hot, gorgeous, and sexy mean with relatively satisfying definitions, but I'm stumped for 'beauty'. It's an ambiguous word and we don't know what to make out of it.

So I pondered its meaning.

Let me start it off easy, for my sake and for your sake. How would I define hot, gorgeous, and sexy? Well first of all, they all refer to physical appearance more or less. I got curious and searched what ideal woman measurements were like. As expected, it varies across cultures and time, but it's generally accepted that the hourglass figure is ideal. In North America today, it would be safe to say the ideal woman's waist should be approximately 10 inches less than her bust and hip, so like 36-26-36. If you have anything around that figure (no pun intended), you fit the criteria for being an ideal woman at this point in time. And that would easily cover you for being hot. When it comes to gorgeous, it's a little bit more holistic in that it includes all your body proportions and also your face, but again it's all physical. If you want to see examples of gorgeous women (or men for that matter), just turn to fashion magazines like ELLE, Vogue, or Flare. Sexy is a fairly recent word, and it's defined as 'marked by or tending to arouse sexual desire or interest'. It's essentially the safe word for saying 'you make me feel aroused and want to have sex with you'. Personally, I still don't understand why some women are labeled sexy as opposed to other women who looks just as 'sexy'. At this point in time, I can only surmise that it's a culturally appointed feature reserved for people such as celebrities, models, and porn stars.

It's all shallow load of crap but that's not to say they have no value. I don't necessarily think words like hot, gorgeous, and sexy should be obliterated from the faces of dictionary pages, but they're more misused than not. It's something that media exploits and we readily buy into it. I don't think it's a sin to tell someone you love these things, but at one point in life, you have to ask yourself if there's more to the person than those shallow words. If those words were all there was to describe someone, love would be a fallacy.

Beauty is something much more. Just like any words you would use to describe anything, it's perceptual, yes, but what it describes isn't anything materialistic or of any chemical substance involving atoms. There's certain validity on approaches from neuroscience that perception may be rooted and derived from our neural connections and transmitters, but it still leaves room for the unexplainable. I believe beauty to be a word we've made in effort to describe that unexplainable. I think it's a word we can never truly understand but in effort, we can come to appreciate it and feel it.

Let me backtrack a little.

Last year, I've taken this psychology course and the whole objective of the course is to teach the behavior mechanisms and theories in how to promote sustainable behaviors in people. It's a relatively new field within psychology, in addition to the whole psychology as a field, which is relatively new among other sciences. The course was fun though. The course is very green, contemporary, and with lack of research. The professor is alarmingly knowledgeable, very articulate, and fun. The readings are interesting, with most of the articles sourcing from fields outside of psychology or not even scientific at all. You might be wondering why I brought this up, but it'll become apparent in a second.

One of the last readings I had to do for this course was 'The Skill of Ecological Perception' by Laura Sewall. It's an excerpt from her book 'Sight and Sensibility: The Ecopsychology of Perception'. It's a pseudoscience, I guess, but I really enjoyed. It talks about some exercises we can do to come in tune with nature and come to perceive nature as part of our paradigm of the self. Basically, it's about how to come to love your environment, which will inevitably transfer to ecofriendly behaviors. But upon reading it and reading it again near my exam time, I realized what she was talking about didn't apply just to saving our environment. It touched up on much broader and bigger picture. It was about how we can come to sense the beauty in the nature and love it. And it's so true.

If we love something or someone, we'll naturally care for it. That seems obvious, and the opposite is true as well. If we genuinely care for something or someone, it means we love it, him, or her. But what wasn't so obvious for me the first time I read the chapter was that if you perceive something to be beautiful, you'll fall in love with it! Where there's a sense of genuine beauty, there exists love. Where there exists a sense of genuine love, there exists beauty.

So I want to retell Laura Sewall's chapter but in tribute to the names of beauty and love, not environmental psychology.

Beauty is a perception. We've covered that part but let me expand on it. Beauty's relative. There's no set characteristic to what is beautiful and what is not. It's not as easy as describing something as being rectangular, red, heavy, and coarse, like a brick. There's nothing inherently beautiful about a flower. You can study the genetic makeup and its features all you want, but you'll never find a consistent pattern of beauty that is found across all other things that are beautiful. Similarly, snow is beautiful, but again, there's nothing inherently beautiful about snow. It's just a frost speck of water with minute details. When you say something is beautiful, we're ascribing something or someone a characteristic that's ultimately inherent to you, not the object or the person.

Laura Sewall understands all this and much more. From this point on, I think I'll just talk about beauty in relevance to people and not objects, but it all applies to objects as well.

Beauty refers to perceptual readiness. It's about our openness and sensitivity to be able to get in tune with people. This is hard and we all struggle with this. There's always a wall of something between any two people, but we can consciously do it. We can take active participation in noticing our five senses and trying to understand them, recognizing them. It's about noticing what we see and sense from the person, and trying to understand them.

It requires noticing what one notices, and choosing to honor that which appeals and provokes, and is felt within one's body and soul. -Laura Sewall

So when we get in tune and stay in tune with the person's heart and mind, we come to sense the details and complexities within them. When we give attention to these things, they become meaningful. We come to appreciate the small, seemingly insignificant feelings and actions of the person. And we come to love them.

That's the simple, concise message I learned. When we come to perceive the person at a much more depth, we naturally come to appreciate them. When we try to understand someone in an unassuming way and make yourself flexible, your scale of understanding of that someone will become sensitive enough that you'll be moved. Essentially, what you find and see in each individual is universal. It's the same component or element that's found in you and everybody else. So, seeing beauty allows you to see yourself in them and you come to relate much more readily.

Personally, I think beauty is much more about putting yourself in the other person's shoes. It's about opening wide the channels of your heart to stream yourself into the person's heart. And when we do, we get a sense of being within that makes us vulnerable.

I know this is all hard to understand but I hope I can do it some more justice.

I believe when it comes to beauty, it's not that someone can or cannot be inherently beautiful because we all are, but it's about your sensitivity to pick up on it. It's about your perceptibility of the person's beauty. I know that earlier I said there's nothing inherently beautiful about snow flakes and flowers, and it's true. But for people, we are inherently beautiful, which makes it all the more significant and important that we do so. There's almost a sense of obligation to do it the justice. Of course, we can't force it out, but the processes are the same. So when we come to sense beauty, we fall in love with that person. It's a state of perceptual readiness that ultimately leads to love.

Like all things in relationship and in life, it's never perfect. It's a process which we inevitably make mistakes, forgive, and learn. We can never truly come in tune with another being, or even ourselves. We can never fully realize the beauty in us or others, which means we can never come to fully give or receive love, but we can try.

In this world of sensory overload, technological barriers, and indifference, it's hard to get in tune with people or even yourself. I struggle a lot of times to make my stance and fight for it. It takes effort, and a lot of it. But it's always a worthwhile quest.