Wich is the sense of beauty?

[JimmyRJump]

Well, awareness is something you're not always aware of, so to speak, because the mind takes cerain things for granted, like an autopilot for the brain. Everything you ever experienced is stocked somewhere in the brain, in some sort of library that is accessed every time you have a new experience, to compare with past experiences and to eventually alter or add to previous experiences.

 

A good example of this autopilot thing is the way you see people you've never actually met, like when sitting on a café's terrace having a coffee watching the women pass by in their summer dresses (provided you like women and that it's summertime). When seeing a person you like or even find beautiful, your mind automatically adds a self-concocted blueprint personality to the face you see. Now, you are aware of the person you are looking at and you're aware that you like how that person looks, but, you are NOT aware that part of the reason you like this person is because your mind added this pre-fabricated personality to what you see, because people you don't know are in fact walking pictures without a personality attached to them. So, your mind fills-in the blanks. But you are not aware of that.

 

This is why people who have "met" on the internet but have never seen one-another or spoken to each other besides a chat-box, often go "wow, you're not the person I imagined you to be" when they actually do meet. They don't realise they "imagined" the personality behind the person because the mind does that for you in the background.

 

It's also one of the reasons when you have met someone and like the personality that comes with the outer beauty (again talking about women here) that you can no longer distinguish between the inner and outer beauty, because they form one whole. When asked if you think that person's outer shell is beautiful, you're in fact no longer able to answer the question in a proper fashion.

 

I once sat in a pub in Antwerp and in walks the most beautiful girl I'd ever seen up to then. Her appearance had such an impact on me that I was concocting all kinds of scenarios to get her attention because I absolutely needed to talk to her. Something that seldom happens to me. She walked up to the other corner of the bar where she saw some friends. And then she started to talk. Oh boy. I mean, she used the most flat, ugly dialect possible, spoke way too loud and used words and sentences that would never make it into any kind of dictionary or work of prose. The way she spoke and talked was utterly appalling and as I looked and listened on, mouth agape in disbelief, after a few seconds I realised I no longer found her beautiful.

 

She literally went from the most stunning girl I'd ever laid eyes on and with whom I desperately wanted to have at least twelve kids, to someone I wouldn't want to be seen with, in thirty seconds flat.

 

But back to the awarenes thing. Personally I see our mind like a music equaliser, with hundreds of vertical bands of different wavelengths that are attuned in harmony with that library I spoke of earlier. It is only when you are confronted with something that is in complete accord with your equaliser that you truly find something beautiful, because when in complete accord, your subconscious doesn't need to fill-in blanks and thus doesn't fool you into believing that what you see is beautiful, but it actually IS beautiful.