"The way you treat your environment is the way you treat your mind."
Not quite the same, this has also been said: if your environment is messy, so is your mind.
I really admire, adore, would like to live in a space that reflects clarity and aesthetics - and then there is: a ratio of work to do and stuff to store and organize/to available space, time and energy in which to accomplish this. As with all things, there is keeping with appropriateness to time, place and people.
I would like to recount a little episode, or a mental vignette for you if you will, that was brought to my attention the other day. Before I do this, here are a couple of background considerations on beauty and the desire or impulse to be beautiful, pleasing in appearance and also have your surroundings be like that. The question here is: what is the motive for being beautiful and/or keeping your space aesthetic and clean? Here is how I understood the places this desire and associated actions can come from if one uses a simple 3 level scheme.
- You do yourself up to be as beautiful as you can be just for your own narcissistic need - whether you are actually saying that or not - this is egocentric motivation.
- You do yourself up for a relationship, your lover, friend, family, your tribe - this is called ethnocentric in it's motivation.
- You are being beautiful as a gift and the pleasure it brings to everyone around you - all sentient beings.
Aesthetic and harmony, being that which is pleasing, are part of your life and expression of being. Everything that is arising is part of the perfect manifestation of the great perfection. It's just not yourself, it also is your environment. Here beauty and aesthetic is an alignment. All you are doing - is honoring the beauty of the great perfection. Objects that are arising that are around you are ornaments of that perfection. A simple aesthetic, balanced and harmonious, is an indication of alignment with a certain purity.
So then:
A small group was gathered in a fairly large space for a previously scheduled 45 minute special type of movement energetics class. It is a new class being worked out. Things are going well.
Then someone not part of the class, with great intent of making a proprietary part of this workspace clean, starts vacuuming in another part of the space - with increases dust, but mostly is very loud, making it somewhat difficult to hear the instructor. This goes on off and on the rest of the class. Generally the cleaner desires and is able to maintain a fairly aesthetic looking space.
So here are few questions:
1- In light of above considerations of motivation - in which of those 3 levels was the motivation likely centered for the cleaning action at that time?
2- In general, can, in the same act, be the motivation double, ie: egocentric as well as be aligned with the higher, balanced, perfect aesthetic?
3- Where does this leave a messy creative chaos?
4- Are we back to: beauty is in the eye of the beholder - or is there something objective about real beauty?
(See my previous post)
5- Is (or was, not sure if same is true of the younger generation) Japanese cultural plus enforced by necessity order in cramped quarters out of a sheer lack of space an expression of higher level of consciousness?
6- Is a degree of messiness and disorderliness out of sheer lack of manpower and energy to get all the work done as well as simultaneously maintaining a high level of certain aesthetic space reflective of a lower level of consciousness?
I have not read all that much about these things, ....just wondering.
One of the things I am juggling at the moment is: how to get all the work done as well as establish and be able to maintain an aesthetically pleasing workspace. Sheer time and space constraints seem to say: impossible.
It could be that energy for more work gets liberated having handled a certain degree of "inevitable" messiness.
7- If maintaining a highly aesthetic space and personal appearance out of any motivation comes at a cost to others in the same group and their work, how can it be justified? Can it be justified?
So much for now.
Given the general Gestalt of what is happening - answers will manifest themselves.
In closing for this post, here is something I heard today in regards to our planetary condition and all the investigations into consciousness:
"This is the time to DO consciousness....".
The Blessing Well
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