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Why are clouds beautiful?
Theswingisyellow
Trying to be open to existenceSamsara Veteran
I was driving home from the store and looked up at the sky, expansive it was, blue etched with white billowy clouds. I found the sight beautiful. Why?
Clouds aren't inherently beautiful. I don't know any clouds, so the there is no personal connection or bias. So why do I find them beautiful?
What makes something beautiful or ugly?
Why is my dog barking annoying and a windchime quite the opposite?
So my senses percieve what in in front of me, be they clouds, a dog barking, windchimes chiming or the laughter or fighting that my children engage in with one another and a feeling arises. Good, bad or indifferent is how I feel in regards to every event.
So it is feeling, how I am made to feel in regards to a situation, that makes me like, dislike or be indifferent.
The event or causitive factor is irrelevant, it is the feeling that matters.
Why does a certain feeling arise and not another?
It is the story we tell ourselves about the situation and all our past associations with similar occurances.
The dog barking (in the past) keeps me awake, disturbs what I am doing, especially if I am reading.
With the clouds I tell myself self stories about the expansiveness of this world, and am reminded of past times where I found the sky and it's objects beautiful.
A dog barking is simply a dog barking, a cloud is simply a cloud.
We tell ourselves stories, generate feelings and make them otherwise.
Clouds aren't inherently beautiful. I don't know any clouds, so the there is no personal connection or bias. So why do I find them beautiful?
What makes something beautiful or ugly?
Why is my dog barking annoying and a windchime quite the opposite?
So my senses percieve what in in front of me, be they clouds, a dog barking, windchimes chiming or the laughter or fighting that my children engage in with one another and a feeling arises. Good, bad or indifferent is how I feel in regards to every event.
So it is feeling, how I am made to feel in regards to a situation, that makes me like, dislike or be indifferent.
The event or causitive factor is irrelevant, it is the feeling that matters.
Why does a certain feeling arise and not another?
It is the story we tell ourselves about the situation and all our past associations with similar occurances.
The dog barking (in the past) keeps me awake, disturbs what I am doing, especially if I am reading.
With the clouds I tell myself self stories about the expansiveness of this world, and am reminded of past times where I found the sky and it's objects beautiful.
A dog barking is simply a dog barking, a cloud is simply a cloud.
We tell ourselves stories, generate feelings and make them otherwise.
0
Comments
I think the clouds are more gentle than a dog bark. My dog is currently barking at a car.
If you examine everything we evaluate as one thing or another, all 'positive' things have a negative side, and all 'negative' things have a positive side.
"There is nothing either bad or good but that thinking makes it so."
said this a few times in the past few days.
Seems to be cropping up a lot, but appropriately so....
but even then, our 'good' is someone else's 'bad' - and vice versa....
I don't know why I thought it would take a year, and I obviously had no idea that clouds were so transitory, changed shape and could disappear as quickly as they had been made.....
it was all academic anyway, because seconds later when I got up to go on the swing, i forgot all about it.... Oh come on! I was only 5 - !!
And Nature's destructive tendencies bear no malice, whereas ours do.
Thanks @federica in your initial reply, that was my intent.
I guess the idea that came up for me was what is the underpinning, what is behind the feelings that arise. The more closely I look at the feelings that come in certain situations, be they good bad or indifferent, I find these feelings often have nothing to do with the actual thing occuring, but tend to center around I me or mine.
All the best,
Todd
http://richardhermanart.blogspot.ca/2008/07/idea-of-divine-beauty.html
Beauty isn't merely arbitrary....