175. The Beauty Of Existence

We seek beauty because it seems to promise something beyond what we have already seen and what we already are. We seek beauty everywhere we can find it — in art, in literature, in the clouds and stars, in flowers and animals. But perhaps most significantly, we seek beauty in our fellow human beings.

Every human being contains a unique world created by the mere existence of a living, growing, reflective consciousness. We want to see these other worlds, we want to experience the beauty of them — a beauty that is different from the world we ourselves contain and inhabit.

We seek out others, we try to know them, we try to understand their essence and uncover their secret worlds. Seeking the other is the domain of the erotic, it is the hope for the transcendence of the self through unity with the other.

This unity is achieved through love, which is not just a feeling but a kind of action. It is through the act of loving that we come to grasp the other, that we surrender our own self to them and everything they are. If we are lucky, our love is reciprocated and transcendence becomes possible.

To love is to see everything in the other that is beautiful, to value it, and to act in care and support of it. It is to give the other the importance and consideration we give to ourselves. It is to cherish their inner world as much as we cherish our own inner world, which means we do not see it as merely imaginary but as real and meaningful. It is to feel sorrow when they feel sorrow and joy when they feel joy. It is to become together a greater being than the two individuals that form the union.

As this greater being, we move slightly closer to the eternal, slightly closer to the truth of our existence. We cannot go all the way, as total transcendence would require total unity — a union with all others, all people, all of life. Such a thing would require us to love without limit, to act with endless compassion for all living beings, and to appreciate the infinite beauty of all that exists.