Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.
Confucius
Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.
Franz Kafka
The highest and most beautiful things in life are not to be heard about, nor read about, nor seen but, if one will, are to be lived.
Soren Kierkegaard
Seeing the beauty in yourself, your Self, and your surroundings is not only seeing it, but showing it. Communicating it. You are getting used to living with eternal, infinite beauty; the beauty of power, the beauty of peace are inside you – they are You. Communicating this beauty is giving it as a gift, often automatically and always without that attitude of ownership that destroys the very thing itself. This is not the beauty you can hoard and keep as a secret stash. It is You, but it is not yours. The more you give it, the more you have it, or indeed are it. And you give just by being. As your consciousness of your Self develops, as the extraordinary contrast between your infinitesimally small Self and your infinitely large supply of peace and power comes ever clearer, you recognize that You are not just a light burning in a void. You are living light, which is to say you can’t exist without giving off your light, your atmosphere, your vibration. Seeing – and being – the beauty of your Self automatically communicates it. Output is inevitable.
The beauty is also to be seen in moments of time, and of course in the external world, which is admittedly a challenge, because our Ecology of the Soul project focuses on the inner Self. See the beauty in the moment, the circumstance, the coincidence, the here and now; remain amazed by the beauty of existence, of awareness, of consciousness; of the physical and the spiritual; of transformation, regeneration and renewal; of creation and re-creation (or just recreation). Let it catch you at any random time; stop you so you take notice.
When you notice it, see it, grasp it, bring it inside, absorb it. Breathe it in. Which gives us a clue to help with the external/internal debate, the way we deal with the physical world and how that can contribute to our spiritual progress. Let’s imagine a sunset, or a sunrise. Observe. Do so minutely, carefully, wholly, giving your complete attention, in a way your whole being, to the phenomenon. Drink it in. This is the physical world: how does it impact on the spiritual? We’re working on the non-physical, right? Seeing the beauty in your surroundings sets the tone for your relationship with the physical world, but also, automatically, your relationship with your Self. If you are turning your face to the beauty at every opportunity, having made that conscious choice, you are reinforcing your own natural beauty. It’s at the shoreline, the undefinable, changing territory between the ocean of spirituality and the land of physicality – one affects the other, actually helps change its nature. Seeing one makes you see the other, strengthening your Self at the intellectual ‘knowledge’ level but also at the level of experience. Beauty and peace are your natural state, not ugliness, aggression and depression. Carry that knowledge – that experience – within you and it will shine out.