The Recognition of Beauty

You are the beauty you recognize.

Your existence is a single conscious breath. Birth to death. One breath. What we experience as years is, in truth, a fleeting spark. Here and then gone. I was shown this while on the other side during my NDE. Life appeared as nothing more than a spark, a flash of light, hot and red, vanishing almost before it appeared.

And yet within that spark, something extraordinary is available. Something that points directly to what you really are.

The Great Escape

Imagine a yin yang symbol. Let's pretend you are the white swoop. Infinite and loving. The essence of being. But in a moment of clarity, you recognize that you need to experience something that allows you to remember that you are the light. You decide to choose to experience contrast.

So a part of you decides to become heavy, material, dense. That part of you becomes the small black circle within the white swoop. A birth. But that black circle is too heavy and falls below the white swoop becoming the black swoop. With the fall comes the forgetfulness of where you began and of what you really are. You also forget the difference between the black swoop and the white swoop. In fact as the black swoop you forget there are any swoops at all.

But over time, as you experience more of material existence and its circumstances, something of a gift keeps appearing in your black swoop world. Instances of light.

You can't fully recognize them, or put your thumb on them. But somehow, in some unexplained way, you can deeply feel those instances of light within you.

As you progress, these instances of light then begin to take hold. You recognize that something changes when you feel these instances. But you cannot completely understand what it is. Until the day you awaken. And in that moment you realize that you were never the black swoop, but the light. And as the remembrance grows you become the small white circle of light within the dense dark swoop.

Eventually the small white circle rises, transcends, and leaves the black swoop to become the light swoop again. Remembering in full.

One of these instances of light appears within both you and what you witness in the world. It is the recognition of beauty.

The Recognition of Beauty

How is it that you can recognize beauty? You've never been taught how to recognize it. But somehow you can. The sunset at a beach. A light breeze through a flower garden. The look of joy on a child's face eating an ice cream cone. Your dog smiling at you after showing you the stick it found. The song from a bird on a tree branch.

How is it that when centered, you can witness, but mostly feel beauty. You were never taught how to recognize beauty in school. You can't find directions to "recognize beauty" in a book. How is it that you know what beauty is?

It's because the recognition of beauty is innate. It is part of the very fabric of what you really are. The light.

The Beauty Within

You have felt this. Perhaps more times than you have noticed. And in each of those moments, something in you knew what it was.

Using the example of watching a beautiful sunset, you might find yourself in awe. You are captured by the moment. You feel the moment, the sunset. You feel the beauty.

If I asked you to describe the sunset to someone who didn't see it, you might use words like gorgeous, magnificent, orange and pink, beautiful. But there is something missing in the words isn't there? Something gets lost in the translation from you feeling the beauty in the sunset, vs speaking or writing about it.

It's the same reason why descriptions of the experiences from my NDE will never fully translate into words that can evoke similar feelings within you. The sunset and the "Other Side" share that in common. They can be pointed at, but never handed over. The feeling is the thing itself, and the feeling is yours alone to find.

Recognizing and feeling beauty will never be the same as describing beauty. Why?

Because you are the beauty you recognize within the sunset. And it can't be described or defined. It's the very projection of you within a moment of surrender that allows the real you, the light, to step forth. In the moment of feeling the beauty of the sunset, you were not your identity, your age, your sex, your problems, your opinions, etc. In fact, you weren't even human. You were just the recognition of beauty. And that is the real you.

Remember this feeling.

Nature's Role

Beauty can be found anywhere. In a piece of music that stops you mid-thought. In the architecture of a building that takes your breath away. In a painting that holds you longer than you intended to stay. These are real. Don't dismiss them.

But there is a difference between beauty that passes through a human mind before reaching you, and beauty that does not. Art, music, and architecture were presented by someone who, like you, had more than likely forgotten what they were. Even in their most inspired moments, the ego was most likely present, shaping, choosing, designing. What reaches you carries that fingerprint.

Nature has no such fingerprint. A sunset was not designed to impress you. A mountain did not arrange itself for your approval. A bird's song has no agenda. Nature simply is - expressing itself completely, without self-consciousness, without forgetting what it is. In that sense, nature never fell into the black swoop. It remained the light in material form.

This is why nature is the most direct signal available to you. When you stand before something vast and untouched, you are in the presence of the divine expressing itself without interference. And when you are surrendered enough to feel it, what you are really feeling is the light recognizing itself.

Nature is where we begin.

Practice: A Single Conscious Breath

Go to nature. Without a goal, without your phone in hand, without somewhere to be afterward. Just go. Find what moves you: a sunset, the beach, a nature walk, a tree, a field, flowers. You already know what it is. Trust that.

Surrender in the moment. Allowing yourself to recognize and feel something beautiful within.

Bottle the authentic feeling to be reused again. Take a picture, take some notes. Describe the breeze, the smells, the sounds, everything. Shut your eyes and take a breath and take everything in.

The next time you are anxious. Shut your eyes and take a single conscious breath in through the nose, out through the mouth, and during that breath, feel yourself back in the moment where you recognized beauty. The air, the view, all of it in one conscious breath. 

Time and distance is an illusion. Feeling that beauty authentically in one breath is the same as finding it for 10,000 years. Authenticity is what matters, not time spent.

Open your eyes, and carry the feeling with you until it is time to let yourself feel it again.

How often do you need it. Once an hour, 5 times every 10 minutes. 100 times over a day? Find what grants you the peace and connection to the feeling of beauty and allow yourself to experience that authentic feeling daily. Love yourself enough to give it to yourself as a gift. Practice it.

Feel It

You came into this life as a spark of light. Brief, brilliant, and already complete. The practice is not about finding something you lost. It is about remembering something you never stopped being.

The beauty you recognize is the light recognizing itself. And every time you feel it, you are one breath closer to remembering what you really are.