With the appearance of the Mind, our sensitive and intuitive perception of beauty became governed by the Mind's values. That is perhaps the reason why there is no universally accepted explanation of the nature of beauty and its power.
One way of discovering the nature of beauty is to analyse what we consider ugly.
The main element in ugliness is disharmony, and its manifest forms include excess, violence, deformation, distortion, absurdity and aggressiveness. We find threatening, intimidating and violent behaviour ugly, and our reaction to such behaviour can be aggressive and violent because ugliness increases our existential fears.
In Ancient Rome "cave a signatis" ("beware of those who are deformed") was a popular saying. In Greek mythology, Perseus kills the monster Medusa because of her terrorising ugliness.
We consider beautiful whatever our senses or intuition perceive as harmless or in offensive because it is harmonious, in balance, graceful and benign. Beauty inspires selflessness, which brings us closer to serenity and thus reduces our existential fears. Sleeping humans and animals appear to us more beautiful because 'in repose' they exhibit no anxiety and pose no threat, just like the face of someone who has just had a good laugh and is in good humour. True beauty is objective harmony.
Sensed or intuited beauty gives pleasure because the serenity it conveys to the beholder helps the brain to release dopamine or other pleasure-generating neurotransmitters.
Religions that hold out the promise of Paradise generally describe it as a beautiful place where serenity and happiness reign, whereas their hell is always a place of ugliness and suffering.
The Mind's wishful beliefs, in other words its ethics and ethos, are the main factors in determining its aesthetic standards.The Mind considers beautiful what pleases or suits its beliefs and considers ugly that which contrary to or threatens them.
Whilst the popular saying, 'Beauty is in the eye of the beholder', may apply, in some degree, to beauty experienced through the senses, it is certainly true for the Mind's idea of beauty, which is specific to the Mind of the beholder and varies considerably from individual to individual according to their wishful beliefs. The same holds true for ugliness, but it is only the Mind that perceives anything as being grotesque, a concept that does not exist in Nature.
The Mind's notions of beauty and ugliness are often stronger than the beauty perceived by the senses or intuition.
Being less dominated by her Mind than man woman tends to have less definite aesthetic values and preconceptions of beauty and to respond directly to the beauty she perceives with her senses and intuition.
As contemplating Nature's beauty gives us pleasure, it relaxes us and makes us more at peace with reality, and therefore more serene, which enhances our own beauty and attractiveness. Thus seeing a serene being is as infectious as humour, and perhaps explains 'Le coup de foudre'.
The Mind's conception of beauty is speculative, calculating and utilitarian. Beauty thus becomes an often passionate or violent desire of the Mind. The Mind's insatiable appetite leads it to excessive consumption of anything it desires, and beauty can be consumed to the point of destruction, misery and become ugly. Many people consider that the purpose of the visual arts is to exemplify beauty.
Man's desire to express himself in visual art emanated from the Mind with the development of its imagination. The Mind's imagination makes and stores images of static objects, creating ideal forms of the seas idols in the Mind's culture.
The art genre devoted to inanimate objects is called in French 'nature-morte', literally dead matter, which does not radiate beauty. To be perceived, beauty has to be alive. This may be the reason why the idea of art as the embodiment of beauty has been abandoned.
Today's visual art is often repulsive and intimidating, and intentionally so. An important aim of the artist is to impress the viewers with his Mind's creation and he can do so more easily and effectively with shocking or frightening images. The so-called Stendhal syndrome is evidence of this. Stendhal was the first to observe that sensitive people could be overcome by dizziness and fainting fits whilst looking at paintings in art galleries.
Wealthy people seeking to increase their importance will often pay a vast amount of money for a work of art, not because of its beauty, but because of the artist's fame, rated by the high prices his works fetch in the market. Once acquired, these expensive works of art are often hidden away in a safe and never looked at.
Lovers of the arts insist that exposure to art has an ennobling effect.If this is correct, it is difficult to explain why so many brutal criminals can love art or be artistically creative. Many Nazis were passionate lovers of the arts, and some of them were discriminating art collectors. Hitler was a painter, and Stalin wrote poetry. Historically artists are often arrogant and aggressive people. In fact, there have been periods in history when a great burgeoning of artistic creativity coincided with atrocious crime and violence, for example the 5th century BC in Greece, and the 15th and 16th centuries in Western Christendom. The Spanish Inquisition took place during the golden age of Spanish art. The 19th century and the first half of the 20th century were rich in artistic creativity, but also produced a series of colonial wars, two world wars and countless other persecutions and massacres.
Beauty is generally considered the catalyst for love, but just as our Mind decides what we each consider beautiful, so it influences what and how we love.
We tend to be attracted by whatever or whoever can reduce our Mind's fears, and to love them. We love our parents when they are protecting and nurturing us; we love members of our family or tribe because belonging to a group makes us feel safer; we love our country when it is defending us against hostile foreigners, we love our caring partner, as we feel safer when together.
When our existential fears and anxieties are reduced, we feel more serene, more generous, and well. When we feel well, the brain increases the release of the pleasure-generating neuro-transmitters, which gives rise to contentment.
This state of contentment enables us to develop and perpetuate our loving relationships. When we are not content, we are less loving. When we love, we are more attractive and, more importantly, more loveable.
However, with its never-ending aspirations and pretensions, due to its never-ending uncertainty, the Mind is attracted and seduced by whatever or whoever can advance its wishful aspirations and desires.Thus,the Mind produced self-love, which is calculated and exploitive. While loving brings feelings of serenity, our Mind's self-love, which we call romantic, idealised or fantastic love, is our way of escaping from reality and surrendering ourselves to highly charged emotions and infatuations. When we are in this state our Mind's self-love is capable of extreme irrationality, forming an attachment, often passionate, to an ideal person created by the Mind, or to transcendental beliefs. Lost in this surreal world, the Mind is able to achieve a state of ecstasy or exaltation.
The Mind's self-loves can be stronger than any of our biological or rational needs, and they sometimes assume more importance for us than our very lives.
One of the Mind's most important self-loves is its love of God. Man's Mind invented an omnipotent and omnipresent loving God, whom we love and worship in order to be protected by him.
The Mind's self-love is a selfish, self-centred, utilitarian and opportunistic love.
Being a wishful creation of the Mind, the Mind's self-love is of an aggressive nature. This aggression manifests itself in the Mind's ultimate aims, which are the conquest, possession, domination and enslavement or exploitation of whatever or whom ever is the object of the Mind's self-love, including god.
The aggressiveness of the Mind's self-love is most clearly seen in the Mind's reaction when itslove is rejected by the object of its love. The Mind's rejected love easily turns to hatred, anger and contempt or defamation, all of which are aggression by another name.
Jealousy can drive a person in the grip of the Mind's self-love to such extremes as beating, harming or even killing the loved one, or killing themselves. Rejection of the Mind's self-love by the loved one often deeply offends the Mind, causing disillusions, and this can lead to depression. The tragedy of depression is that it creates a craving to be loved, but a depressed person is frightening and unlovable.
Many young people find escape and excitement in the Mind's self-love and the emotional arousal it induces. In their effort to regain that state, many of them use alcohol, music or drugs, which enhance the Mind's imaginings, its fantasies and its dreams.
The Mind's self-love and its excitements are far removed from the natural love inspired by true beauty, the love that makes a person calm, serene, content and giving.
The difference between man's Mind's self-love, which is associated with his desire for importance, power, and conquest or success, and woman's intuitive or sensitive love is reflected in what each looks for in their sexual partner.
Man is usually prepared to have sex if it seems likely to gratify his Mind's desires and satisfy the needs of his ego.This is proven in the fact that man is quite willing and able to have sex with a woman he does not find physically attractive, if her status and material wealth match his Mind's desires and the demands of his ego.
A woman tends to be sexually attracted by beauty and beautiful behaviour in a man, beautiful behaviour consisting of kindness, generosity, understanding and appreciation. Beauty and beautiful behaviour reduce woman 's fears, anxieties, worries and tension, helping her to be more responsive to sex. The tension produced by fears, anxieties and worries can inhibit her sexual responsiveness to the point of frigidity.
A sense of humour is an important stimulator of a woman's sexual responsiveness. The playfulness arising out of being in a good humour creates a closer togetherness, which is protective. The feeling of togetherness is important for woman who is naturally more socially oriented than man is.
However, during the confusing state of adolescence, the sexual activity of girls frequently resembles that of males rather than females.
In many languages we find the expression 'making love', which is a phrase that can only have been invented by man's Mind. 'Making' implies performing, creating,or developing, activities motivated by some want or aim, rather than being an expression of feeling.
The sex-enhancing pill Viagra is effective in helping men to perform the physical aspects of sex but does not work for women, as their sexual responsiveness is driven by their feelings.
Couples who come together because of a calculated desire of their Minds are more prone to stress and aggression and stress related diseases, than those who unite through a genuine love of one another. The aggressiveness of the former becomes obvious during litigation to divorce or separate.
Couples brought together by genuine love bring out the best of each other's nature. The woman becomes more maternal, and the man responds to this by becoming more sharing, protecting, caring, helpfulness and willing to sacrifice.
This does not seem to apply to some couples united by arranged marriages. Here the acceptance of a tradition within a close community seems to provide a less stressful and anxious atmosphere where respect, if not love, flourishes, and can be very satisfying.
We also use the word love to express another experience, pity.
Our Mind has put a name to our condition of uncertainty and anxiety-suffering. In being aware of our own suffering, we can recognise the suffering of others. We have also discovered that by concentrating on the suffering of others, by pitying them, we are distracted from our own pain. We can therefore become enamoured with the emotion of pity and attracted to the pitiful.
In the tradition of our Western belief systems we achieve a sense of righteousness in doing good, and a sense of well-being when there are those around us who are more pitiful than we are. We know they are more pitiful because we are the ones in a position to help them.
We are also drawn to the pitiful because it gives us a sense of being needed, a role to play, a space to fill, it gives us purpose and pretension -- we are needed, therefore we justify our existence, therefore we are important. Those that provoke these emotions can become objects of love, and because of the nature of this 'love' demands giving and sacrifice, it can satisfy our desire for the superfluous and excessive.
Our appetite for this kind of relationship is so great that we have created a vast population of dependent pets whose very existence relies on our love for the pitiful. Apart from animals, we also make pets out of men, women and children.
However, we can mistakenly assume pity is valid when faced with different cultures seemingly ignorant or dismissive of our own. We pity their lack of knowledge as if their particular perception of life was without merit, without first fully understanding the way they think and why. Great damage has been done to a vast number of communities around the world in the name of love, but in reality, this has been out of the love for pity.
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