The Beauty in Destruction
Noticing Beauty in Impermanence and Resistance
September 13, 2023
dialogue

The Beauty in Destruction

La belleza en la destrucción

A question about how to be with beauty in the face of destruction, war, and suffering, and what it means to see beauty through what is not beautiful.

The Beauty in Destruction

A question about how to be with beauty in the face of destruction, war, and suffering, and what it means to see beauty through what is not beautiful.

In the meditation, you mentioned noticing what is beautiful and then noticing what is not beautiful. When you said that, lots of things popped into mind: destruction of life, war, and things like that. What would you be pointing to around being with what is beautiful through what is not beautiful?

Yes, that makes a lot of sense. And of course I'm very aware of what the question is pointing to. There are naturally many things I can say. I don't want to be in pain, and I don't want anybody else to be in pain. But I'm pointing to something that is, in a sense, deeper or higher, which doesn't contradict the preference of life over death.

Beauty as love for life in its totality

Beauty is a word that can be understood and used in many ways. I'm pointing to something that is a kind of love for life in its totality. By seeing that death is part of life, because without death there wouldn't be life, there is a deeper sense of beauty in that. For example, if you can see that life is only precious because there is death, or that death is one of the key aspects of why life is so precious, then you see the beauty in death. But it's not a preference. It's not beauty as in "I choose that." It's a beauty in which something can relax around the pushing against it.

I'm not talking about the free choice in our lives to choose what we prefer, what we are drawn to find more beautiful or more loving, what our heart longs for most. At its deepest sense, that longing will be life in service to life, and it will favor life, and stand against war, against pain, against unnecessary suffering.

Fear and pain as the issue at hand

But there is something in our constant functioning, in our psyche, that is rejecting part of our reality constantly. It does that in various ways, for example by saying something is scary. It all has to do with a sense of ending, with death, and the pain we imagine that will bring. So it's about fear and pain. If I were to say that fear and pain disappear from reality and existence, you can imagine there would always be peace and well-being. That really makes it clear that fear and pain is the issue at hand.

What I'm pointing to is that there is something deeper in us that can recognize this beauty in existence. If I were to say it more bluntly, but incorrectly, it is divinity loving its creation. And that includes destruction. But it doesn't negate the process of learning, or the preference to be in service of life and freedom, or the wish not to be in unnecessary pain and suffering.

Destruction as the condition for growth

In fact, if there wasn't destruction, there wouldn't be a process of learning. If there wasn't fear and pain, there wouldn't be a process of exploring how to make life more beautiful and loving. There is a beauty there, in that from the perspective of the creation itself, it is perfectly created so that destruction enables growth. If something wouldn't end, it would lose, in a sense, a deep aspect of its beauty.

The unrepeatable moment

Think of this moment, this moment as it is. It has never happened before, and it will never happen again. You can think of the whole universe and how we are here, and the universe is in the position that it is right now, which includes us here now. It has never been this way before, never exactly in this way, and never will be again. We can be probabilistic and say the chances of it recurring are very low. That makes this moment, to me, incredibly beautiful and precious. But it is because of that nature that at every moment, that moment is dying. It is already gone, never to be experienced, seen, or lived like that again.

I'll speak about something personal. When I see my partner at any moment, say in the morning, and I give her a hug, that instant will never happen again. Even if I hug her every morning, it's not the same. And there is a sense of loss as well, because that moment is gone. For me, it is so magical that this reality is this way.

That's a big one.

It's a big one, and it's also difficult.