The Color of Soul Making

How do we experience and know the beautiful? Is the awareness of the beautiful a biological response built within our nature? Has God so made us that like the swallows long for Capistrano, we long for the beautiful? Or is this awareness learned? Or, is it both? Are we born with an innate sense of the beautiful and yet the nurturing and enhancement of that awareness grown and expanded through proper care of the imagination.

Is the imagination the human capacity to experience wonder and awe? Is creation therefore, a starting point for the growth and care of the imagination? Are we created to feel some sort of connection with nature and if so how do we differ from the animals? Do dogs experience a sunset as something of grandeur? Do mountain goats look down over the hills of the alps and acknowledge their beauty? Yet we know that animals do respond to the beauty of each other as they perceive it.

Much of beauty is acknowledged in how the genders respond to one another. If beauty were unreal then why would making love to a bar maid be any different than making love to a beauty queen. Some would say that this admission of beauty or noticing is actually attributional on the part of the individual and that awareness is not innate in the object of desire but projected by the one viewing. In other words, someone had to tell this person that that was beauty. This perception seems to have some validation as we see how beauty in terms of genders is very different from culture to culture.

Is the honoring of nature in cultures we may consider more ancient another outlook an admission of beauty? Can we expand the idea of beauty to be the true, and the good?
How do we know beauty? How do we know when we are experiencing beauty? What is the sensate and accompanying engagement of the intellect that tell us we are in the presence of the beautiful? Beauty is an experience besides an idea or concept. The experiencing of beauty grounds us in our humanity.

For Christians, beauty takes on an ethical and moral dimension. Our imaginations are informed and constructed in and through our relationship with God. His way of imagining and creating tell us something about the beautiful. Thus, there can be beauty to the eye that may not be beautiful to the heart. Pornography is like that. Attractive people can be involved in behavior that to the heart one finds offensive. This is why the experience and awareness of beauty is not just innate and or natural. We must learn to see and know the beautiful. Our fleshly natures come into this world with an affinity for knowing and sensing the power of the flesh. Thus we know the power of another human on our eyes and even our hearts.

God is a jealous God. He, and He alone is beautiful because He reflects and embodies the fullness of all things. To know Him, to see Him, to experience Him, is to then be able to know the beautiful. Because we have deconstructed beauty and allowed something to be visually beautiful as in the case of Robert Mapplethorpe’s photography, we do not understand that in God’s aesthetic, to gaze upon something that was not intended to be gazed upon is to misunderstand the power of the beautiful.

The human body is beautiful. It was meant to be adored, cherished, touched, embraced and even yearned after. However, the power of this experience was to be tempered in the context of marriage. Why? Because of the power of the beautiful. We are so overcome by the beautiful that we often loose our ability to make sound decisions unless we properly interpret the beautiful. How so? The beautiful are those objects, and experiences and people and places that truly make us noble and more reflective of our spiritual natures and capacities.

This is why beauty is taught. Although sexual intercourse may not need to be taught in the strictest sense of teaching, it is clear that instinctual engagements may not bring ultimate pleasure. We humans have the ability to ponder and enhance the inspirational. We can re present experience out side of real time and then reengage that experience again with the depth of out imaginations (e.g. erotic art). Art is the instinctual re presentation of experience such that its meaning, power, and presence can be heightened and enhanced and repeated..

The Forming of the Imagination

Some believe than imagination is actually the soul. The imagination is the capacity of humans to hold experientially, the depth and breadth of consciousness. Thus, the nurturing and care of the soul are the nurturing and caring of the imagination. There is a difference between what is imaginary and what is imagined. The imaginal is the thoughts and responses one has that accompany consciousness such that time and space and experience appear to be real. The grooming and proper care of the imagination is what soul making is all about. Thus, the poem.

The Color of Soul Making

Blue fire
Slipped into my room last night
Sighed heavily
Illuminated my labored breathing
And the shallow rise and fall of sorrow’s chest
As if both color and flame could speak
Their words came forth
“We are your indigo angels.
In this place most call a desert
Your sister the white Iris blooms
In this dryness the soul flowers
Reverie fills the darkened cobalt horizon
Lovers held in suspension
Melt into each other
And weep with longing
Here imagination burns a cerulean glow
Melancholy marries Kandinsky
And all this pondering rekindles
A thousand years of exile
In the unreflective underworld of black and white.”