Crashingly Beautiful

Have you ever sat very silently, not with your attention fixed on anything,
not making an effort to concentrate, but with the mind very quiet, really still?
Then you hear everything, don’t you?

You hear the far off noises as well as those that are nearer and those that are very close by,
the immediate sounds—which means really that you are listening to everything.
Your mind is not confined to one narrow little channel.
If you can listen in this way, listen with ease, without strain,
you will find an extraordinary change taking place within you,
a change which comes without your volition,
without your asking;

and in that change there is great beauty and depth of insight.

—Jiddu Krishnamurti

With thanks to The Beauty We Love.

“Violinists practicing scales and dancers repeating the same movements over decades are not simply warming up or mechanically training their muscles. they are learning how to attend unswervingly, moment by moment, to themselves and their art; learning to come into steady presence…Yet however it is brought into being, true concentration appears—paradoxically—at the moment willed effort drops away…At such moments, there may be some strong emotion present—a feeling of joy, or even grief—but as often, in deep concentration, the self disappears. We seem to fall utterly into the object of our attention, or else vanish into attentiveness itself. This may explain why the creative is so often descried as impersonal and beyond self, as if inspiration were literally what its etymology implies, something “breathed in”.

***
Great art, we might say, is thought that has been concentrated in just this way: honed and shaped by a silky attention brought to bear on the recalcitrant matter of earth and of life.”

—Jane Hirschfield, from Nine Gates, Entering the Mind of Poetry. With thanks to the exceptional blogger and artist, Deborah Barlow at Slow Muse. 

In France, home of the founders of the Knights Templar, all the major churches built after 1150 were Gothic, and the style quickly spread throughout Europe and the British Isles. It became the West’s quintessential religious architecture, and remains so today.

The reason for its enduring popularity is twofold: The architecture creates a vast interior space that is beautiful, but more importantly, the combination of physical beauty and symbolic elements speaks to the soul. For medieval people the church was more than a building; it was quite literally the dwelling place of God. It incorporated the spirit of God because every aspect of the structure carried a spiritual meaning. And in the Middle Ages, there was no difference between the symbolic and the real; people recognized the sacred reality that lies within physical reality. The divine presence lives in nature, in space and in light, and the cathedrals brought these elements together in such a magnificent way that even today modern man, so cut off from his own divine nature, can still feel them.

Unfortunately, while we can feel the building’s spiritual power, in many cases we no longer understand it. The cathedrals are often referred to as “sermons in stone,” because their sculptures and window-pictures were used to illustrate Bible stories for illiterate peasants who could not read the Bible themselves. But now it is we who are the illiterates, for we have lost the knowledge of symbols that was known and understood by everyone when the churches were built. So we visit the cathedrals as tourists and wander around in a daze, gawking without understanding what it is we are looking it, having the feeling that there’s something hidden beneath the surface, but not knowing what it is …

—Janet Brennan, “The Cathedral Code,” FATE Magazine, December 2006