Perception, Beauty & Reality

Loving my life again has produced many fruits, one of which is ongoing anointed love with my girlfriend. Often times, I struggle to put into words the depth of kindness, creativity and passion that she exudes and exemplifies. One word I have been doing some thinking on that might capture the heart of her spirit would be: beautiful.

My views on beauty are inspired by Paul Tillich; beauty is our experiencing of God through perception. What I love about this view / definition of beauty is that it means that beauty is not necessarily about aesthetic standards or about outward decorativeness or about the prettiness of an early Spring twilight or the gorgeousness of ones self. Beauty of course does not preclude those from being present, but beauty is not reducible to them either. Beauty is about divine reality being expressed through some thing or someone that participates in that divine reality. Beauty is the infinite and Almighty being expressed through something finite and temporary.

Perception is ‘the psychological and neurological process of gathering, organizing, and interpreting sensory information to make sense of the world and our place in it’. I have done some nascent exploration of thermoception, interoception, proprioception and vestibularity as complex forms of human perception systems. One way to view perception is that perception is your life interface- perception is the medium through which our lives are capable of being in reality.

Often we hear the maxim that ‘perception is reality’. But we might correct this and say that perception is not reality, perception is what allows us to deal with reality. The reality is…. reality is incomprehensible, dazzling, inescapable, delicate, ferocious and ultimately: benign. Our perception allows us to deal with the benign reality as it is.

Anointed love with my girlfriend has reminded me that my own life, too, is incomprehensible, dazzling, inescapable, delicate, ferocious and benign.

And yup- I’d say that’s beautiful.