AUTHENTIC BEAUTY IMBUES PHYSICAL AND SPIRITUAL SENSES
WE wear clothing and jewellery to enhance our visual appearance.
We buy the biggest, most beautiful houses and apartments we can afford.
We decorate our homes with furniture, rugs, prints, and landscape our gardens with flowers and plants.
And when the latest release of a smartphone hits the shops, we marvel at how the packaging excites us and the box itself, just how everything fits neatly within – holding the perfectly proportioned product.
Do you every wonder why, when it comes to objects and “things,” we agree on a few basic principles of beauty.
The reference to “the golden rectangle” often shows up in objects and designs we find beautiful. Why are credit cards, televisions, books and iPods shaped the same way?
They all form a “golden rectangle“– a phenomenon we’ve recognised for millennia.
When we see something beautiful, its symmetry and its simplicity is, most likely, in perfect harmony.
In architecture we find solace in spaces with high ceilings, simple geometric shapes and the beauty of symmetry. At its best our built environment can inspire us. Buildings must fulfil their function, but to inspire us a building must be beautiful.
We’re more comfortable in beautiful environments, we pay more to live in beautiful suburbs and we travel across the world just to experience a beautiful city. Beautiful built environments increase wellbeing.
Therefore, it is natural for the heart and spirit to take pleasure and enjoyment in all things that show forth symmetry, harmony and perfection.
To expand our understanding of our attraction to beauty we need to understand how beauty is linked to joy through our senses – such as a shape, colour, pattern, texture, aroma or sound; viewing harmonious colours; the subtlety of a plant composition, the fragrance of a plant or flower, or the perfect contrasting of textures that might grasp our attention and give us great enjoyment.
Certain patterns also have universal appeal. Natural fractals – irregular, self-similar geometry – occur virtually everywhere in nature: in coastlines and rivers, in snowflakes and leaf veins, even in our own lungs.
Beauty is a precious reality of this world and uses the physical senses that inform the spiritual senses to exalt our mind and enhance the realms of the spirit.
Interestingly, beauty can serve as an attractant as well as an agent of distraction, capable of making us forget all else and transporting us to another frame of mind.
This attraction helps us to appreciate deeply the things around us – things other than ourselves. Perhaps we are responding to the harmony of what we observe, and momentarily reflecting that harmony within ourselves.
Maybe it is for this reason the nature of beauty is one of the most enduring and controversial themes in Western philosophy, and has traditionally been counted among the ultimate values, with goodness, truth, compassion, love, unity and justice.