modern culture

As is the human body, so is the cosmic body.
As is the human mind, so is the cosmic mind.
As is the microcosm, so is the macrocosm.
As is the atom, so is the universe.
– The Upanishads

photo by Lisa Z. Lindahl This is about true beauty, not mere glamour, which is what has been passing for beauty. True Beauty (capital “B”) is eternal, not a passing phase or fashion. True beauty goes far beyond the form and appearance of things or people.

If all this sounds trite, and you are thinking to yourself “Well, of course,” look around. Glamour – the illusion, the appearance of things, has taken over. As one beauty commentator, John O’Donohue, put it, “It has become the habit of our times to mistake glamour for beauty.”

Glamour is the fast food we feed our souls – all easy flash and poor nourishment, empty calories. True beauty, on the other hand, nourishes us. Upon experiencing it we feel more alive, uplifted,inspired. We are fed.

Because of glamour’s ascendance in place of True Beauty many think beauty trivial, non-essential and consider its pursuit a shallow endeavor. So, sadly in our modern times “beauty” has become caricatured, trivialized and marginalized to an extreme and ridiculous point. The notion of beauty has been relegated to the shallows of the naive, romantic, and the cosmetics counter.

Meanwhile the culture (with the aid of a media that seems obsessed with bathroom humor, dystopian horror series and fear-mongering) elevates and enshrines coarseness, violence, and bad news. And of course glamour. Elegance, kindness, and graciousness are derided or written out, while mediocrity and baseness are somehow socially desirable.

Ironically, the lowest common denominator has become the highest thing to aspire to.

Okay, so what the heck is True Beauty?

True Beauty is marked by those experiences that universally raise one up.Such experiences need not be dependent upon any particular cultural norms, language or education. Think sunlight hitting water. Or just sunlight! The sound of laughter. The harmony of human voices raised in song. These things are beautiful, truly.

And harmony is a key word here. True Beauty is an expression of harmony – any sort of harmony. It is not a matter of style, or taste, or a certain cultural preference.

True Beauty is a paradox that is far more complex – and simple – than (dare I say?) meets the eye. Most significantly, healing our relationship to Beauty will in turn heal much of the pathology that our culture is currently suffering. When talking about this Beauty we are talking cosmology, not cosmetology.

Consider this: polarizing dualities can’t exist and luscious diversity may unashamedly bloom in a Universe where True Beauty is a primary paradigm and one of humankind’s guiding references.

These are some of the reasons why True Beauty matters.

And it is not just a passive notion. Beauty is actionable. Just as we can choose how we nourish our bodies, we can choose how we nourish our souls, our whole selves and those around us as well, for true beauty choices and actions have impact beyond ourselves.

All contemporary crises can be reduced to a crisis about the nature of beauty.

~ John O’Donohue

[The above is excerpted from Lisa’s book “Beauty As Action,”]

How did we get to the point we are at today in our modern western civilization? How did greed, corruption and selfishness become so prevalent? How did our lives get so busy, our frustrations so many, and our sense of contentment and achievement so hard won?

We live in an atmosphere charged with the expectancy of change. We are in a time period which some purport to be the end of the earth’s geological Cenozoic era. Some culture-watchers, cosmologists and theologians believe the era in which we are living needs to be the period for forging a whole new paradigm; that the old operational ideas have outlived their usefulness, en masse, and are now just causing harm. The evidence of this is becoming increasingly apparent.

The shifting consciousness around humanity’s place on the planet and our use of its resources is a prime example of this perceptual shift. Certainly, there have been recent events that support this hypothesis.

When people talk about “shifting the paradigm” I take this to mean changing the “standard operating procedure” as it relates to those cultural norms that have evolved, particularly since the advent of the industrial revolution.

This work can be contributed to by anyone, I believe, through independent, personal action. Creating cultural change through personal responsibility that manifests in ones actions. It is the old “pebble in the water creating ripples” motif. Moving Beauty out of the abstract and back into the realm of the concrete, where it actually resides, is key to a successful cultural and values shift.

To this end I propose evolving a 21^st century applied philosophy of Beauty: “The Way of Beauty.” This Way introduces “The 18 Practices of Beauty.” These are primarily guidelines on what to explore and what to do (practice) to evoke, nurture and support beauty-full choices in the everyday living arts to better heal ourselves and our spiritual and physical environments — and through these individual actions and choices — eventually our very culture.

It has become critical now at this juncture that the term “Beauty” be reclaimed, and its concept be understood at a far deeper, truer level to be embraced and revered by humankind.

We must move from giving only lip-service born of abstract philosophical theory (“Truth, Beauty, and Goodness”) into behavioral practices born of value shifts based in a new, emergent paradigm.

Passageway