Is there anything we can call “real;” a Truth bigger than our awareness, objective and completely free from perception?
The moment I see or know something—anything—it’s not real anymore. It is my perception of what is real; my version of reality, filtered through my unique sensibility which in itself is a construct of my limited experiences and knowledge. Something can come into existence in our consciousness and be recognized as real only after it has been discovered or perceived by someone who is then able to share his perception with another.
That is, the only way to prove something is “real” is to make it “perceived” (and thus not real anymore!)
I’m not the first to grapple with this idea of perception and reality. I’m only applying to the study of communication, the age old concepts of our ancestors—this world is maya. What we see is perception and therefore unreal, coloured by our rationality, our limited understanding of the universe and our animal desires.
What we cannot conceive of, what lies beyond our rationality, what is outside our selves is the only Truth worth attaining and striving for.
The Ancient Greeks had a similar conception in the Platonic Ideal. Our world, the reality we inhabit is a poor, defective shadow; a distorted reflection of the other—an imagined perfection—that the Greeks called Utopia.
Beauty is perception, not reality.
It is personal.
It has no fixed and codified self, no permanent design.
It is a kaleidoscope; a shifting composite of little, fragmented, brilliantly coloured pieces of all my experiences, all the cities I have inhabited; all the diverse lives I have lived.
Beauty is in the I of the beholder.
It is in the Aye of the beholder.
It is in the Eye of the beholder.
Beauty is a process, not an existence. It is becoming not being.
All forms of being, however nanoscopic, are whole and universal in themselves and at the same time, they are all constantly caught in a continuous process of change--of "becoming" something else.
Each becoming whole is an integral and organic part of some other, bigger and becoming whole and so on, past the becoming universe. The universes are intelligent, living, expanding and forever becoming as are the stars, planets and we who inhabit them, bacteria, viruses, algae et al.
Only in becoming true to ourselves, can we be truly beautiful.
It is our duty every moment to desire to find our changing roles in the changing universes and discharge those roles to the best of our capacity as long as they last.
If we are cancerous cells in the kidney of our universe and it is our role for this moment to cause renal failure in order that a nephritic cure might evolve for other universes, then we must fulfill that potential to be truly, really beautiful.
Satyam. Shivam. Sundaram.
