Over generations, beauty meant slender physique, toned skin, sharp jawline, angular nose, designer apparel, and cosmetics. These have always enhanced beauty, be it in the Victorian era or the 21st century. Symmetry and order in nature seem normal to us. And we then term it as beautiful.
The human obsession with looks, color, physique amounts to a society-wide psychological illness. Wrong societal beliefs and perceptions have intensified this unhealthy obsession. These unhealthy beliefs are the root of racism, discrimination, body shaming, inferiority complex, and other social stigmas.
Beauty has been codified and commercialized. The Society via culture, education, and marketing have warped your perceptions of your own body, undermining self-worth and self-identity.
Your emotional energy is drained out when what you see in the mirror is labeled as not beautiful. It becomes hard for you to see other aspects of your life beyond your ugly appearance. Worrying about how you look takes your time, your attention, and your emotional resources away from things that are worth spending those resources on.
Businesses are making money out of your insecurities and obsession. They sell unreal beauty standards and you buy them.
What you deem beautiful or ugly is a reflection of your values, beliefs, and predilections. There is no real concept of beauty as such. You stare longer at the things that appeal to you than those that do not. This doesn’t necessarily make the other thing ugly. It is wrong to do the judgment of someone or something on the aesthetic scale.
It is all cultural how you perceive something. What one community admires may leave another group of people cold or repulsed. What one individual finds irresistible may look disgusting to another. Beauty is a highly subjective concept.
But, it’s also universal. How?
Beauty isn’t something you discover or define. It’s just there to experience. The whole existence and all its expressions are beautiful in their own way. Be it the animal kingdom, plant kingdom, human beings, or the cosmos. The way nature operates is beautiful because all its elements are in complete harmony with each other. Human emotions are beautiful, the intrinsic values are beautiful.
Everything and everyone is beautiful in the context of reality. Standards of beauty created in your mind cannot label anything as ugly.
Ugliness is not a natural phenomenon. It is a result of unfounded beliefs about the self, others, and existence. It is born in the mind or learned through the insecurities. You are taught that what doesn’t fit in these criteria is ugly. Racism, discrimination, etc. are non-existent in Kindergarten. Only when you grow and learn social norms, are you able to label things as beautiful or ugly?
The experience of beauty is influenced by your predilections. An unhealthy obsession with beauty develops when you are told that you are not enough, regarding your physical appearance. If not made to feel ugly, everyone feels beautiful in their own skin.
It is human nature to feel secure and resolved. To be content and satiated. You are naturally inclined towards justness, equality, and harmony. This flawed concept of beauty is against human nature. The proof being the ever-changing concept and parameters of beauty. What is real and existentially true never changes.
Exclusive to inclusive is a natural and inevitable progression for humankind. Humans will come back to their true nature and harmonious coexistence no matter what.
Human beings are inherently good and not evil. If a human being does act badly, it is the result of wrong societal conditioning through culture and education. Humans do things as per their understanding of the subjects and in their own best interests. Other human beings are not enemies, it is all because of wrong beliefs resulting from incorrect cultural conditioning. Once you have a holistic view of life and existence, you will not find it painful. To do that you need to align your perception with existential reality.
Check all your beliefs and preconceptions and verify and validate them. Once all your false beliefs have been done away with, you will be able to observe and experience life in its totality.
Takeaway ~
Current belief ~ Looks determine beauty.
In popular culture ~ Kostas Farmakis in his article The Unfair Advantages of Good-Looking People in the business talk about how people who look good have an edge over others. The article puts forth logical arguments but it is based on the premise that there are two kinds of people.
As per the philosophy of coexistence, each and every expression of nature is beautiful because it’s harmonious, perfect, and blissful. The existence functions in order and disorder and confusion exist only in the human world. Every element in the existence be it atoms, molecules or life forms such as plants and animals are behaving uniformly and in order. Human beings have the tool of imagination. They can create beauty and harmony in coexistence. They can connect to the beauty within as well as beauty outside.
