21 levels of Self-Deception: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

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‘…the body has feeling and it alone can experience pleasure, joy and ecstasy. It alone has beauty and grace, for apart from the body these terms are meaningless. Try to define beauty without referring to the body and you will see how impossible it is.’

Alexander Lowen — Pleasure

Marsilio Ficino defined love as ‘the desire for beauty’ whilst Stendhal says, ‘beauty is the promise of happiness.’ Gandhi described his motivation as creating beauty. ‘Real beauty is my aim,’ he said. Richard Jefferies says: ‘The hours when the mind is absorbed by beauty are the only hours when we are truly alive.’ Whilst poet Robinson Jeffres says: ‘… Integrity is wholeness, the greatest beauty is Organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty of the universe. We are not simply passive spectators — far less consumers — of beauty. We are part of the beauty of the world.

But beauty is not simply pleasure and pleasant sensations — it has its darker side — reflective of the paradox of human nature and the wildness of the natural world. There is a sense in which a beautiful object or experience is not an enclosed sentiment. There is the possibility of danger, unpredictability and chaos lurking on the boundaries of the object or experience of beauty and this seems to accord much more with the experience of life. Beauty can drive us too far. An obsession with a particular aspect of beauty can lead to destructiveness and violence. Whilst it is beauty that inspires us toward creativity, that creativity can it seems also be destructive. Then of course it ceases to be

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