06.23.2003
Beauty and Who Am I...
I'm going to use the contrast of beautiful versus ugly realizing that all beauty truely is in the eye of the beholder and there are many forms of beauty and many forms of ugly. So here's the scenario.
There is an ugly woman and a beautiful woman who meet each other. Now the ugly woman looks at the beautiful woman and thinks "my, she is so beautiful and I am so ugly. I wish I were beautiful like her and not ugly like me. She is so lucky. I feel sorry for myself." The beautiful woman looks at the ugly woman and thinks "my she is so ugly and I am so beautiful. I'm so glad that I am beautiful and not ugly like her. She's so unfortunate. I feel sorry for her."
Let's look at that from the framework that every person is a unique perspective of God, and therefore each person truly is every other person that exists, though we may live without that awareness. If the ugly woman were to recognize this attribute of existence, that being that she is, in greater terms, everything that she experiences as outside of herself, then she could see the beautiful woman as but one perspective of the same whole. She could also recognize that the idea that the beautiful woman has something that ugly one does not stems from a very limited conception of how we each define what it is to be "me".
Another way of saying this is that were she to recognize that she, herself, is also everything she sees, then she would sense her own beauty as if she were looking into a mirror. She could then, see the beauty in the world as herself. All beauty, from a greater perspective that we are each experiencing but one perspective of our greater nature, is our beauty.
So ironically, should this ugly woman realize her basic nature, she could revel in the beauty that she sees in the form of all that she comes into contact with. Another way to look at us is by taking a look at the idea of "me". The ugly woman, in her newly acquired enlightened state, could look at the beautiful woman and think to herself "look at the beauty that I am" as she gazes upon the beautiful woman realizing that she is everything. It can also be seen as a matter of what aspect we are considering "our own". Must one feel that we can control beauty in order to appreciate it? And were this ugly woman to find her own appearance to be objectionable, she could think to herself "this poor beautiful woman must gaze upon this ugly form and I am so lucky that I get to gaze upon her beautiful form."
We can see that feeling sorry or fortunate is a matter of our understanding of who we are and our definitions of ourself. So in an ironic twist, the situation would completely reverse as the idea of what it means to be "me" is expanded. The perspective would shift from the notion of who possesses beauty to who gets to witness beauty. Possession would be redefined and expanded such that we each possess all in the bigger picture. We can begin to accomodate such ideas into our own way of thinking. We could emphasize the aspect of witnessing beauty versus possessing beauty, since possession would effectively become meaningless while viewing life from this greater perspective where we are all that is.
And conversely the beautiful woman could have seen things from a far different
perspective as well. She could think to herself "poor me. I have to
look at all these ugly people and they get to look at this beauty when I may
only look at it through the reflection of a mirror." Better yet she
could appreciate that she is also the uglieness that she is witnessing and learn
to understand that this person gives her her beauty for without contrast, beauty
loses some measure of it's impact. It's a matter of perspective.