After another inspiring and meaningful interaction with a friend, I felt drawn to revisit this essay on the nature of Beauty by Hermetic adept Rawn Clark. It inspires me to go a different direction with my perceptions.

The deeper level of meaning in the statement, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, is revealed through consideration of Paul Case’s Trestleboard statement for #6 (Tiphareth, which means ‘Beauty’ in Hebrew): “In all things, great and small, I see the Beauty of the divine expression.”

Here, Beauty is described as a divine expression. This is the essential meaning which each thing expresses through its form (its thing-ness). When directly perceived through a form, essential meaning has the same affect upon the perceiver as does the mundane perception of Beauty. The direct perception of essential meaning touches you at every level — it uplifts your thoughts and emotions and stimulates the response of appreciation, happiness, etc. Even though it requires emotional detachment, the direct perception of essential meaning is not mere passive observation — it is an experience and you become at one with that quanta of essential meaning.

Yet it is up to the perceiver to directly perceive essential meaning and in that sense, the power to perceive the Beauty that is expressed through all things, lies “in the eye of the beholder.”

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For awhile now I’ve been grasping to discover some way to articulate exactly what I’ve been struggling with in this whole relating-to-the-world theme. It has been a problem for me, not just in terms of communicating with others about my struggles, but also simply in terms of defining the problem for myself.

In the absence of a vocabulary and language to discuss an issue, all I have is this vague feeling of being too sensitive for a big scary world. That has in many ways been the central theme of this blog.

I think I’ve found an author that begins to teach me that kind of vocabulary — the one I’ve been quoting so much recently, Walter Wink. It’s funny, too, because he comes from a decidedly Christian point of view.

I did try other routes from worldviews that I would have expected more to say about the phenomenologically mystical. A few months ago I had tried picking up occultist Dion Fortune’s book Psychic Self-Defense, feeling intuitively that that was a route my thinking needed to go to define the problem. But it wasn’t quite what I was looking for. Ironically, the book’s focus on the actual existence of negative spirits and psychic attacks distracts from some of the deeper dynamics that underlie the interaction of all beings, natural or “supernatural.”

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

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I found a really fascinating and powerful story about the nonviolent path of transforming enemies into friends, in Walter Wink’s book The Powers That Be.

On a Sunday morning in June 1991, Cantor Michael Weisser and his wife, June, were unpacking boxes in their new home, when the phone rang. “You will be sorry you ever moved into 5810 Randolph St., Jew boy,” the voice said, and hung up. Two days later, the Weissers received a manila packet in the mail. “The KKK is watching you, scum,” read the note. Inside were pictures of Adolf Hitler, caricatures of Jews with hooked noses, blacks with gorilla heads, and graphic depictions of dead blacks and Jews. “The Holohoax was nothing compared to what’s going to happen to you,” read one note.

The Weissers called the police, who said it looked like the work of Larry Trapp, the state leader, or “grand dragon,” of the Ku Klux Klan. A Nazi sympathizer, he led a cadre of skinheads and klansmen responsible for terrorizing black, Asian, and Jewish families in Nebraska and nearby Iowa. “He’s dangerous,” the police warned. “We know he makes explosives.” Although confined to a wheelchair because of late-stage diabetes, Trapp, forty-four, was a suspect in firebombings of several African Americans’ homes around Lincoln and was responsible for what he called “Operation Gooks,” the March 1991 bombing of the Indochinese Refugee Assistance Center in Omaha. (He later admitted to these crimes.) And Trapp was planning to blow up the synagogue where Weisser was the spiritual leader.

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Unusually for me, a brief tangential comment on a political action.

I just discovered that a friend of mine, of deep religious persuasion, is enthusiastically in support of California’s Proposition 8, a voter initiative to amend their state constitution essentially to abolish same-sex marriages.

Without attempting to dive into the complex fray of the conflict among religious, social, political, and sexual beliefs, I just wanted to quote two authors who represent my views on sexual orientation.

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More gems from Walter Wink’s Engaging the Powers. This is what I was trying to say in my post on presuppositions invisibly dominating life, except it’s stated much more clearly and coherently.

The world-atmosphere also teaches us what to see. “One can say not only that as individuals we live within a sociocultural organism but also that the sociocultural organism lives within us. Not only are we individual units within an organized society, but organized society is represented and incarnated within our brains.” Whatever the System tells our brains is real is what we are allowed to notice; everything else must be ignored. “We give the system the power to make the known unknown.” Thus we are taught to mistrust our own experiences.

Every observation is a directed observation, that is, an observation for or against a point of view. Every mind is a “contaminated mind,” a mind constructed of a network of suppositions and assumptions. All descriptions are paradigm-conditioned and value-laden. A Skinnerian and a Freudian will not only describe the same behavior in incompatible ways, but their conceptual frameworks actually cause them to see different behaviors. The observed behavior is different in each case. The result of this limitation on what we are allowed to see is a miniaturization of our living world.

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In my search to understand this difficult-to-grasp experience of being pervasively but invisibly oppressed, I return to progressive Christian theologian Walter Wink. In Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination, he describes really well what I feel I’m up against.

It is characteristic of the Powers that, although they are established, staffed, and perpetuated by people, they are beyond merely human control. It was the experience of a total system operating (as it seemed) autonomously and even, at times, malevolently, that gave rise to a perception fo the role played by the Powers in human destiny. “For our struggle is not against enemies fo blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” (Eph. 6:12). The Powers are the structures and institutions, in both their outer and inner manifestations, that embody the Domination System in any historical moment.

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Presuppositions. Suppose someone asks you, “Would you like the red apple or the green apple?” What’s happened is that he’s posed to you an apparent decision. Simple enough, right? But this decision is a deceit: It masks the fact that a decision has already been made for you — namely, that you want an apple. That choice has been presupposed.

Now, in a fairly simple example like that, it’s easy to step back and question, “Hey, I don’t even want an apple.” But take a moment to think, how does it feel to have that question posed? To me, it feels like something has been hidden away from me, something which points at something I can’t quite see.

Then I look around and see so many presuppositions that underlie my life, presuppositions that may happen too quickly to deal with or are at too low a level or too high a quantity, or conversely are too intense or “real” to question.

The decision to turn on a light, what does that presuppose? The understanding that every child six years and older should spend seven hours a day, five days a week, for at least twelve and ideally sixteen or more years sitting in chairs and listening to someone speak, what does that presuppose? The decision to drive to work or school, to pay taxes, to buy something … What do these things presuppose?

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One of the most amazing stories to come out of World War II concerns a church leader in Bulgaria named Metropolitan Kyril. When the Nazis rounded up the Jews in his city and herded them into a barbed wire enclosure, he decided to act.

The train that was supposed to take the Jews to Auschwitz pulled up at the station. The S.S. guards were just about ready to load the Jews into the box cars that would take them to the gas chambers, when suddenly, out of the darkness, Metropolitan Kyril appeared. He was a tall man to start with, but as an Orthodox priest, he wore a miter on his head, which must have made him appear like a giant as he emerged out of the darkness. He was wearing his black robes and his white beard hung over them. Marching behind him were many of the townspeople.

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