All of my work is predicated on an aesthetic model, the MythoSelf Process, that I began designing in the early 1990s. Although my experience of what is aesthetically appreciated is often pleasurable for me I think of aesthetics differently than the way most folks speak of it, not in terms of “beauty” in the ordinary sense of “pretty,” “pleasant” or even “pleasurable.”
For me, the aesthetic is about experiencing “form,” noticing the natural patterns when we are open and available to perceive sensorially what is present.
The idea of the aesthetic as I use it goes deeper than the surface value of perception, allowing us to know something about which our senses suggest and point to being there, but remain beyond their direct reach.
These subtle “signals in the system” offer us a chance to adumbrate what is possible or emergent so we may dive below the surface becoming one with what must be true for us to experience what we can and do reach sensorially.
This moves the aesthetic beyond the trivial consideration of basking in beauty alone allowing us to align ourselves with the deep structure of life and the cosmos that contains it … for me this is mythic form, the elemental structure of the narrative of how we perceive reality and make it what it becomes for us.
When we can fully experience, appreciate and acknowledge our relationship to the aesthetic we become the masters of our reality, shaping it as it flows both to us and from us each instant we are living in alignment with the sense of emergent possibility this way of being and doing affords us.
Here’s what a great man had to say about he aesthetic as well:
“I have a friend who’s an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I don’t agree with very well. He’ll hold up a flower and say “look how beautiful it is,” and I’ll agree. Then he says “I as an artist can see how beautiful this is but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing,” and I think that he’s kind of nutty. First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too, I believe. Although I may not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is … I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean it’s not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimeter; there’s also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes. The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts.”
― Richard P. Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman