So I was thinking randomly about how silver, I’m told, is the next best thing to gold while playing a video game, and it turns into this- what is beauty?
Everything we’ve ever held value in has been sparkly, flashy, glamorous, and beautiful. It appears that it’s all we know to attribute value to. Fancy cars in large overdone houses in beautiful places is our highest standard of living, but why? Why is it women desire to be beautiful objects, and men desire to possess them? Why do they want dazzled trinkets to adorn themselves in? What is our fascination with beauty?
Does it trigger a pleasure receiver in our brains?
I have a theory that it has to do with lighting and how things react accordingly. Colors, shapes, prisms…
I believe your on to something, why are things attracted to the light?
Does light translate beauty? To some, yes, to others darkness is their element. So is “everything” we have ever held in high esteem, flashy, or glamorous, no.
I have been experiencing lately, that what i find to be true, i assume the masses feel that to be true as well, and not only them but i then subject everyone i encounter or observe to “fit” into my framework. Well, now im starting to see, every individual perspective is unique, but with undertones of similarities in truths.
If you read and observe others thought’s you will see many similarities between their’s and your own. May the “sun” light your path and the wind be at your back.
Namaste.
Well, I can give all examples of how light is the only thing we’re attracted to.
We light everything at christmas with colorful bulbs and shiny pretty things on the tree, as it’s sacred and high. We light everything in a church with candles and worship brassy relics. We surround ourselves in certain lights and use them as the centerpiece of attraction.
Movie theatres have special lights (the classics like broadway etc), cities are full of flashy lights, automobiles are shined and waxed, glass windows and mirrors are shiny beautiful things that show us the outside and our self-reflection, both things we find beautiful. And rich people tend to like a lot in their houses.
In medieval times this has been the case, and in ancient places, and around the world. Their palaces and places of worship have been jeweled and shined with marble and the flashiest materials available.
We will go as far as we can to use light reflected things without having to be unpractical, such as with clothing and seating. It’s comfortable made of cloth but that’s not to say they’re not jeweled and sequined to add the lost effect by the rich.
Women will also gloss their hair, lips, and teeth since it’s a sign of good, healthy oils and saliva. It’s also attractive to have sparkly eyes.
I think you’re right about light and vision being the means by which we find that which is most beautiful to us. My sense is that we are attracted to these things because we are primarily a visually oriented species. We depend most on our vision in order to get around in the world and survive. People are most affected by vision. This is why the scientific method is so effective. Tell people a hypothetical theory and they’ll respond with “eh… maybe” … but SHOW them the evidence for it, and they’ll believe hands down. This is also why visually rich advertizements are so effective. Get people’s attention with flashy images and animations, and they’ll pay attention for sure.
no doubt we’re adapted to find certain environments, items and things beautiful as well, along with quests for status, explains a lot of trinket/adornment.
You fat, fat americans.
You hybernating, hoarding american citizens.
Democracy is the hoard. Greedy consumerism and capital is a hoard.
That’s all hoarding instinct. You need le big tits, ass and car, gold bricks, cheese burgers at mc.donald’s,
Golden artificial big tit fried clowns : American beauty.
How can you speak for all? I do believe that some people are attracted to the dark as well, i dont think it goes 100% either way. I have sought out the refuge of darkness many times where everything bright and sparkly becomes to much. But i do believe theres a natural pull towards the light.
My home is dark
I keep it quiet
sleep the day
walk the night…
Whatchoo mean by ‘we’? I, for one, am obviously not included…
“For every Perspective, there is an equal and opposite Perspective.” First Law of Soul Dynamics - Book of Fudd (1:1)
Beauty: the most pleasant state of ‘feelings’ that I know is the feeling of being a ‘very beautiful universe’ (sweet easy warm exquisitely comfortable state of at-One-ment). ‘Beauty’ is called by some, the “highest of all things”, because it is identified with ‘ease’ and ‘comfort’, which is, to ‘some’, the “highest of all things”.
Perhaps ‘beauty’ attracts because what is best for survival, to the ‘ultimate’ extent is what is in our nature to find desirable, and isn’t ‘desirable’ rather synonymous with beauty? Perhaps our whole sense of attraction and aversion is just a survival instinct, decorated all over with ego and glitz?
You don’t think the human tendency towards visual aesthetics is more universal than just the American sphere of life (and I’m speaking as a fellow Albertan).
I don’t call everything I am attracted to beautiful. I can be and am frequently wrong.
In order to keep myself in check, I reference to a definition;
A human body system that must acquire something from the envirnment, process that which it has acquired, for a product that sustains and promotes the life of the body.
Beauty then is the sustaining of life. This means that it is not the things in themselves which are beautiful, but what they do toward that end. The value of a thing is not the thing in itself, but how it can be used to attain to an end.
When I see a beautiful woman, and know nothing about her, I start thinking about a beautiful family–well after the usual preliminary erotics, then she does something to reveal her mind, and her beauty means absolutely nothing. I liken it to a vehical without a motor or transmission-nice to look at, but I am not pushing it to take trips.
Part of mastering the mind is to use emotion to back up reason, instead of tossing out reason–something I am not that good at.
Your OP reminded me of the following, which may be of use to you:
“Men have spent enormous amounts of time, energy and money on the finding, mining and cutting of coloured pebbles. Why? The utilitarian can offer no explanation for such fantastic behaviour. But as soon as we take into account the facts of visionary experience, everything becomes clear. In vision, men perceive a profusion of what Ezekiel calls ‘stones of fire,’ of what Weir Mitchell describes as ‘transparent fruit.’ These things are self-luminous, exhibit a praeternatural brilliance of colour and possess a praeternatural significance. The material objects which most nearly resemble these sources of visionary illumination are gem-stones. To acquire such a stone is to acquire something whose preciousness is guaranteed by the fact that it exists in the Other World.
… precious stones are precious because they bear a faint resemblance to the glowing marvels seen with the inner eye of the visionary. … Gems, for example, come from the soul’s visionary heaven; but they also lead the soul back to that heaven. Contemplating them, men find themselves (as the saying goes) transported – carried away towards that Other Earth of the Platonic dialogue, the magical place where every pebble is a precious stone. …
Indeed, we may risk a generalization and say that whatever, in nature or in a work of art, resembles one of those intensely significant, inwardly glowing objects encountered at the mind’s antipodes, is capable of inducing, if only in a partial and attenuated form, the visionary experience. … Shiny objects may remind our unconscious of what it enjoys at the mind’s antipodes, and these obscure imitations of life in the Other World are so fascinating that we pay less attention to this world and so become capable of experiencing consciously something of that which, unconsciously, is always with us.”
[Aldous Huxley, Heaven and Hell (the sequel to The Doors of Perception).]
This last sentence may serve to link this view, to which I was subscribed for years, to my current, Nietzschean view: by way of the following.
“The joy of the infinite is ever with us, but we do not know this truth. We are like the beggar in the story who had been begging all his life in the same place. He wanted to be rich, but he died poor. When he died they found a treasure of gold buried just under the place where he had been begging. If he had only known how easy it was to be rich! True knowledge of the Self does not lead to salvation: it is salvation.”
[Juan Mascaro, The Bhagavad Gita, Introduction.]
When a man sees a beautiful woman (which is subjective, of course), he is reminded of his higher self.
“The Father who has slain himself in the womb of the Mother finds himself again, with her, and transfigured, in the Son. This Son acts as a new Father; and it is thus that the Self is constantly aggrandized”.
[Crowley, Little Essays Toward Truth, Love.]
“Nothing is more conditional – or, let us say, narrower – than our feeling for beauty. Whoever would think of it apart from man’s joy in man would immediately lose any foothold. “Beautiful in itself” is a mere phrase, not even a concept. In the beautiful, man posits himself as the measure of perfection; in special cases he worships himself in it. A species cannot do otherwise but thus affirm itself alone. Its lowest instinct, that of self-preservation and self-expansion, still radiates in such sublimities. Man believes the world itself to be overloaded with beauty – and he forgets himself as the cause of this. He alone has presented the world with beauty – alas! only with a very human, all-too-human beauty… At bottom, man mirrors himself in things; he considers everything beautiful that reflects his own image: the judgment “beautiful” is the vanity of his species…”
[Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 'Skirmishes of an Untimely Man, section 19.]
“Nothing is beautiful, except man alone: all aesthetics rests upon this naïveté, which is its first truth. Let us immediately add the second: nothing is ugly [hässlich, “hateful”] except the degenerating man – and with this the realm of aesthetic judgment is circumscribed. – Physiologically, everything ugly weakens and saddens man. It reminds him of decay, danger, impotence; it actually deprives him of strength. One can measure the effect of the ugly with a dynamometer. Wherever man is depressed at all, he senses the proximity of something “ugly.” His feeling of power, his will to power, his courage, his pride – all fall with the ugly and rise with the beautiful… In both cases we draw an inference: the premises for it are piled up in the greatest abundance in instinct. The ugly is understood as a sign and symptom of degeneration: whatever reminds us in the least of degeneration causes in us the judgment of “ugly.” Every suggestion of exhaustion, of heaviness, of age, of weariness; every kind of lack of freedom, such as cramps, such as paralysis; and above all, the smell, the color, the form of dissolution, of decomposition – even in the ultimate attenuation into a symbol – all evoke the same reaction, the value judgment, “ugly.” A hatred is aroused – but whom does man hate then? There is no doubt: the decline of his type. Here he hates out of the deepest instinct of the species; in this hatred there is a shudder, caution, depth, farsightedness – it is the deepest hatred there is. It is because of this that art is deep…”
[ibid., section 20, entire.]
Qualitatively, a beautiful car reminds a man no less of his “higher self” – that is, of the ascent of his type – than a beautiful woman. Quantitatively, however, a beautiful woman reminds him even more of it, of course. To a man, a beautiful woman is the most precious gem there is. And of what does she really remind him?
The Child archetype is a form of the Self archetype, even as the child is a form of the human being. A beautiful woman “reminds” a man of the child he could have with her. The smooth skin, the innocent-looking eyes…
“she looks beautiful like a child”
[Underworld, ‘Cowgirl’.]
, good stuff.