Theos-Talk Archives (December 1996 Message tl00171)

At 06:25 AM 07/12/96 -0500, you wrote:
>---------- Forwarded Message ----------
>
>From:	Milton L. Dawes, 102362,1465
>
>>And whose definition of "idea", or 'egoist', or  '
>>pornography' , or 'truth' , justice, 'beauty' , etc., is the 'right'
one? And
>>how do we decide what we mean by  ''right''? As mentioned, there seems to
be no
>>theoretical  end to these puzzles.
>
>Implied in all of these questions is at least the belief that there is an
>objective truth, justice, and beauty.  One extreme is to equate one's own
>perception with reality, which is my definition of arrogance, but the other
>is to not believe there is any reality to perceive, which is my definition
>of insanity.  That "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" is only half the
>story, the other half being that objective beauty must exist in order to be
>perceived.
>
I am inclined to think that beauty is in the eyes of the beholder as the
concept of what is beautiful changes with cultures. I understand that
Reality is energy vibrating at many different frequencies and our senses
convert the frequencies of differentiated Reality into the objective world
(maya). We then lay our values upon these frequencies and give them labels
and call them 'things' or 'objects out there'. If it is our values as seen
through our own unique psychological nature that say to us that something is
beautiful and if my values are different from yours then we may not agree
that some'thing' is beautiful but we may agree that there is a concept of
beauty but we just do not agree on what constitutes beauty. It seems to me
at this stage of my thinking that we can only know Reality as an individual
thing for ourselves as we cannot know how Reality really is for another.
Maybe at some much more refined energy level there is Truth, Justice etc but
we have not the faculties to touch that level so it is still relative to our
own individual knowing. Some find beauty in spiritual things and others see
beauty in Nature only and so we argue about it and yet it is all a construct
that our minds have evolved to deal with a world that appears objective. If
in fact it is not, then we argue about labels, words, that do not represent
anything. That is what g-s talks about and they agree that there is an
unspeakable world of energy and as long as we talk about it and know we are
only using symbols and labels to do so then we are true to the way Reality
works. It is the problem of identifying the labels with the objective world
we abstract from the unspeakable, that causes maya. Seems an interesting way
of looking at it. All this suggests to me that beauty is in the eyes of the
beholder.
Cheers.
>
>
>
Bee Brown
Member Theosophy NZ, TI.

I don't have a solution but
I admire the problem.