Friday, June 26, 2015

The painful beauty


I've long had an inner pain associated with especially poignant beauty.
I've not heard anybody else talk or write about it, I think, so it's interesting to find this in L.M. Montgomery's book Anne's House Of Dreams:

Silence and twilight fell over the garden. Far away the sea was lapping gently and monotonously on the bar. The wind of evening in the poplars sounded like some sad, weird, old rune— some broken dream of old memories. A slender shapely young aspen rose up before them against the fine maize and emerald and paling rose of the western sky, which brought out every leaf and twig in dark, tremulous, elfin loveliness. "Isn't that beautiful?" said Owen, pointing to it ... "It's so beautiful that it hurts me," said Anne softly. "Perfect things like that always did hurt me— I remember I called it 'the queer ache' when I was a child. What is the reason that pain like this seems inseparable from perfection? Is it the pain of finality— when we realise that there can be nothing beyond but retrogression?" "Perhaps," said Owen dreamily, "it is the prisoned infinite in us calling out to its kindred infinite as expressed in that visible perfection."


Apart from my belief that the separation is an illusion (and it fits: how can you possibly separate two parts of infinity? If they are both infinite, they'll both be the same. A limited Infinity is of course no infinity.), I think this is just as it is. Beauty connects us to the Infinite, God, Source, but because it's just a tiny connection and we long with all our soul for the full connection which we believe we don't have, it hurts.




Thursday, June 25, 2015

The art mind

I always felt that art had a strong spiritual aspect. (To me it's almost obvious: we have a strong attraction to it, but it's not connected to the survival of the body. What's left? Spiritual communion.)
So I was happy to read this quote in Gary Renard's third book Love has forgotten No one.

PURSAH: That’s right. The people who get spirituality the most have always been the poets and other artists. Rumi, Goethe, people who are capable of grasping these grand, abstract ideas. The Course speaks on a much bigger level than most people realize at first. Yes, the application is done by a seeming individual, but the men and women who get it have to realize that there’s no such thing as an individual, except in a dream. That’s why artists, musicians, writers, or those who would like to be often do well with the Course. Then, as always, there are exceptions. Einstein was a scientist and could think like one. But he also had the mind of an artist. He loved music, and he could think in abstract terms like no other, understanding and communicating them to people who were ready to expand their awareness.

Tuesday, June 23, 2015

Perfection is the enemy of Good


There is much wisdom in the saying "Perfect is the enemy of Good".

Just for one thing, only God/Source is perfect. You can't even made a perfect sphere here in the physical universe, because the moment you look at it with a microscope, you see that the "perfect" surface is indeed as uneven as a patch of barren land.

The strong and continual drive for perfection is an addiction. It's a distraction. Trying to distract yourself from the mistaken idea that we are lost to God. And also surely trying to recover a bit of God by creating something perfect.

It also has very little to do with how good something is. The thing or the person which we love the most is never perfect. Sometimes we think they are, but that is only driven by the faulty belief that the very "best Good" is "Perfect", so regard the imperfections as part of the Perfection, or we manage to not see them at all. Hence, "love makes blind". True love of God, The Universe, and Everything, of course does not, but exclusive love has to.