Everyone holds the key to beauty but only a few can find it.
7 Steps That Will Help You Recognize The Beauty Around You
The world is nothing but a mirror that reflects your inner world.
What do you see in the world around you?
I wanted to write this story as a response to the daily challenge from Timothy Key. Because many of us somehow do not recognize the everlasting beauty surrounding us in every breath.
I want you to understand the next paragraph very clearly, my friend, as I will try to unveil the psychological reason why you judge, criticize, classify, and generalize. This process prevents you from seeing the beauty in the world. So you better understand it, if you want to become a free butterfly.
1. TRUTH vs. REALITY
Let us start by describing two concepts — truth and reality. The universe and everything in life is neutral, meaning they are as they are. Until you assign a meaning to them because of your personal and cultural lenses, the phenomenon is neither good nor evil, right or wrong, beautiful or ugly.
2. EGO DEVELOPMENT PROCESS
The external stimuli reach your brain through the five senses. The brain creates a meaning that triggers your emotions and the hormonal system in the limbic brain.
The brain automatically creates a meaning based on your mental programming, also called the paradigms or the mind map.
Your mental programming is nothing but a record of the childhood messages you received, the impressions you developed in light of the bombardment of childhood messages, and childhood decisions you came up with mostly in your early childhood. This process yields to the formation of your defense and coping mechanisms, values, thinking patterns, and attitudes, shaping your personality.
In short, your environment affects your personality development, and you react to external factors according to your genetic heritage and temperament. This is called the ego development process.
3. AUTO-PILOT MODE
The process I explained above is carved in the subconscious, which drives 94% of your actions. If the subconscious is like a CD, the childhood experiences are written on it by emotions. It is first written on the short term memory and later in the long term memory, depending on the frequency and the magnitude of your childhood messages.
When external stimuli trigger any emotional patterns, you retrieve similar emotional images from your past and attach them to whatever is happening in that moment. The stronger the emotional attachment is, the more obsessed you become to your reactions.
Unless you use your free will to examine this internal process and make conscious choices, you will act like a robot on autopilot. Unfortunately, most of the people on Earth live on autopilot. Gurdjieff, the founder of 4th way, used to call people automats for this reason.
If you do not believe, remember the last time you got angry with someone. What happened? Do you know why it happened? What caused it to happen this way? How did you respond? Who did you honestly feel? Did you act as strong as you felt, or did you lesson the magnitude of your emotions and reacted softer? Did you react, or did you respond? Was it the right thing to act that way? Did you regret what you did? If yes, why? What drove you to behave that way? In what other similar situations do you behave that way? How would you react differently if you had one more chance to be in that moment again?
Look inside yourself and answer honestly.
If there is an obsession for your in life, ask these questions, and find your answers? There is no such answer as — I am fully conscious. You cannot be fully aware, so you better hold a mirror to yourself as quickly as possible.
4. EGO and CONSCIOUSNESS
Let`s make one thing clear first.
Ego is not a bad thing, unlike how this word is used in daily conversations. It is the mechanism that enables you to experience the physical world. Freud used to call it, the reality principle. Humans cannot survive without the ego mechanism.
However, the ego is biased. It lives in the shadows of the id, superego, temperament, consciousness level, and personality. Imagine it like a ball under the sun.
You have both masculine and feminine elements in your ego. Carl Jung called them, anima and animus. The enlightened part of your ego ball is the part above facing the sun while your ego’s dark side is the one without the light.
The only way to shed light on your dark sides is to live by virtues. That is why philosophers since Pythagoras, Socrates, Aristotle, Platon, Epicurus, Xenon, Marcus Aurelius, and others emphasized the importance of arete, that is wisdom. Wisdom is nothing but the by-product of awakening to your higher-self, represented by the sun in this example here.
Once you wake up from the trance of personality masks and recognize the autopilot mode of reactions, the journey to freedom starts. It is an endless journey with so much to offer besides its challenges.
Your consciousness is like a ladder with lower and higher levels, the highest level named as the higher-self.
5. JUDGMENT
This process in autopilot mode ends up with everyone reacting to external stimuli. You exhibit what you possess inside you. The lower the consciousness level is, the more judgmental a person is.
Low consciousness shows itself as a lack of tolerance to diversity. It is a state of inflexibility with so much rigidity. Resistance and stubbornness for change, lack of acceptance, living by fear, anger, anxiety, are some of the traits.
6. YOU SEE THE WORLD AS YOU ARE
The world around you is as it is. It is neutral, neither good nor bad.
Everything in life has its purpose and serves for the whole or the greater good.
If God lets this duality exist in dynamic balance and harmony, all is good, and all is for a good reason.
Everyone, even the bad people as we call them, are doing the best they can with their limited knowledge and capabilities. If they had known to do and be better, they would have done so. Then, why judge others? Why judge what life brings us instead of seeing them as blessing aimed to open our eyes to a better reality.
Keep in mind that you learn when you leave your comfort zones, and no one leaves their comfort zones without a shock. Shocks are both disguised as good and evil. A good shock could be a wise person that changes the way look at life, while a negative shock could be a traumatizing experience causing suffering.
7. YOU HAVE CONTROL OVER YOUR THOUGHTS AND EMOTIONS IF YOU DEVELOP HIGHER LEVELS OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Pain is a reality, but suffering is an option. Your mindset and heartset define the way you perceive the world around you.
Your inner state of emotions creates meaning and attach it as a label to people, events, and conditions in life. You can either be a slave of your emotional attachments or free yourself and look at the world around you with the eyes of gratitude and appreciation.
You have a choice.
Only when you understand the autopilot and how it works, you will be free to open your winds and fly. You were a caterpillar, but now you are a free butterfly. Make sure you leave behind the caterpillar mindset and stop crawling if you want to fly like a colorful and joyous butterfly.
All you have to do is to remember. You are a droplet in the cosmic ocean that possesses the potential of an ocean. Remember your potential and act accordingly. Live bravely.
If everyone around you is different droplets of the same ocean in different cups, why don’t you love them? Is accepting them as they are and being a silent witness of their cosmic dance that hard? Are they not the actors and actresses of the same divine theater without recognizing the role they play? Accept and embrace them with compassion.
We are surrounded by beauty wherever we look. It requires just the right heartset to see the real beauty behind this cosmic scene. So, use your heart to see what your mind cannot see.
Cheers,
Kenan