Creating Beauty

By Laara Lindo

“I shall see beauty and goodness in all things.

From all that is unlovely shall my vision be immune.”

—Walter Russell

The Message of the Divine Iliad

These words from The Message of the Divine Iliad are an open invitation to creating a life of happiness.  On the surface, the words tell us to look for beauty and goodness in whatever we see around us—to focus our attention on the lovely rather than the unlovely. This may or may not be easy, depending on where we are and what our circumstances may be. Even when we live in comfortable and harmonious surroundings, our very homes are invaded by the ugliness and even atrocities that leap into our living rooms and lives through newspapers, television, radio, and even the neighborhood gossip. What a challenge, then, these simple words become: “I shall see beauty and goodness in all things. From all that is unlovely shall my vision be immune.”

Given the fact we are bombarded by much that is ugly, disharmonious, distorted, violent and unbalanced, finding beauty and goodness must become a conscious focus—must be made an art.

If we closely examine the statement “I shall see beauty and goodness in all things,” a deeper layer of meaning emerges. The statement comes as a command, as though from the Self to the self. The “I am” of our inner desire and our purposeful intention is directing the “me” of daily living in the world of action not to “hope” to see beauty and goodness in all things, or “possibly” see goodness and beauty in all things; the command is “thou shalt!” I shall see beauty and goodness in all things. The statement is a pledge to deliberately take action to live in a world of beauty and goodness.  We are engaging in a creative process—we are making a definite choice and commitment.

Now, if we are to make an art and a science of living—which this commitment demands that we do—it is essential for us to analyze what comprises that commitment. What is it that constitutes “beauty and goodness?”  Looking out to the world in an effort to sort out what comes to us through our senses, we find ourselves engaged with a potpourri of those things and actions we are able to call “beautiful and good,” along with a garbage dumpster or two of the sensational, gross, criminal, cruel and ugly.  How can we possibly, immunize ourselves from the sordid and ugly?

We can in no way deny the existence of those conditions we do not want to be part of our lives. Therefore, it is necessary to adopt a scientific method of dealing with them.  We do not choose those things for ourselves.  Today, when we understand the thought-wave nature of the universe, we recognize that we may choose between the many “channels” to which we can tune our lives —the 500 available in the television realm perhaps being but a fraction of those levels of thought available for us to choose from in our moving picture of life.  So we must recognize the fact that our very choices actually put us in the dimension of life which flows naturally from our thinking.  Therefore, we can be safe in surmising that the reason for the conditions of war, crime, sordidness and ugliness is that those who have created those conditions with their thinking are condemned through lack of true knowledge of the “thought-nature” of life to endure them.  In other words, a certain type of thinking has created a certain karma in which the condition will remain until transformed thought followed by step-by-step action for the better leads those involved into happier circumstances.  On the other hand, if we choose instead to practice karuna—the alleviation of suffering—and to create the beautiful and good in our lives, we are on the path to happiness in our lives, and creating beauty and happiness in the lives of others.

What comprises beauty?  Our first response to beauty is “love.”  Not only do we experience love for the beautiful, but we are inspired and uplifted by the warmth and joy of a general sense of love.  This natural current of love sets the law of “rhythmic balanced interchange” into action, for love always longs to share, to return love to that which is loved and to extend itself outward to recreate beauty and harmony.  Thus love creates beauty and goodness.  However, in order to ensure that love is wisely in balance, the creation of beauty, goodness and harmony requires that the extension of love includes the element of balance we name “truth,”—the fundamental truth which lies at the core of knowing.  By the way, there is an interesting esoteric message in this combination in terms of color symbology:  traditionally “red” is symbolic of “love” and “blue” is symbolic of “truth.”  Mixed together, these two primary colors create “purple,” traditionally the color symbol of “wisdom.”  The third primary color, “yellow,” is traditionally symbolic of the life energy of the sun, or of “life” itself.  The creation of beauty, then, in terms of color symbology, includes the elements of love, truth and life energy.

To see goodness and beauty in all things does not mean that we do not deeply experience those elements of sorrow and loss that come to all.  It does mean, however, that by conscious choice we view everything in life from the perspective of love, truth and life energy: that we become conscious creators of beauty.