BEAUTY AND THE BEAST

by Deborah Greenspan

The culture we live in is permeated with ideas of beauty and ugliness. Everything beautiful is good, and everything that is not beautiful is bad. Our movies feature beautiful heroes and heroines, and villains who range from ugly in spirit to physically horrifying. Because ideas of beauty and ugliness are so personal they affect us at primitive and instinctual levels, and are the most difficult of dualities to comprehend and transcend.

When we are not happy we feel “ugly.” When things go wrong, we feel there’s something wrong with us. We love babies because they are beautiful. We fall in love with people we perceive to be beautiful.

On the whole we live our lives in the search for youth, hoping to avoid the pain, decrepitude, and failing senses that we believe are the inevitable result of aging. But there’s more to beauty than youth and innocence and more to ugliness than aging and death.

Within each of us is the archetypical Beauty: the one who is good and pleases others, the one who is giving and altruistic, the one who believes and has faith, the one who shares and is unafraid of what tomorrow will bring. But within each of us also dwells the Beast: the one who is afraid and insecure, who refuses to give, who takes power and uses it against others. The Beast is everything we wish to put away from us, but which despite our best efforts surfaces now and then in fits of temper, insecurity, and despair.

WHAT WE FEAR

Remember the story of Dorian Grey? He kept a picture in his attic, which showed every evil intent or action he ever committed while his actual face and body remained as beautiful and innocent as a child. Dorian Grey had managed to separate the Beast from himself and so he was able to stay young.

But we can’t do that, so we fear that every terrible, frightened, or desperate act we undertake makes its mark upon our bodies. That the lines of aging on our faces reveal our errors and our mistakes as surely as a map shows the world where to look for Disneyland, that the sagging muscles and spreading waistlines demonstrate our laziness and ineptitude, that the aches and pains of aging demonstrate our incapacities and failings.

We know, unequivocally, that you can’t tell a book by its cover, but that doesn’t stop us from judging the book that is ourselves in terms of what it looks like. Although we can see the interior of the book, all the pain and glory within, we know that others cannot, and we fear that they will judge us by the outside alone.

Unfortunately, it’s true that many people do just that. And although we expect it of adolescents, we are not necessarily so mature that we don’t ever do it ourselves—look at others and see only the surface. Because we do it, we know that others do it too. And that’s what makes us want to hide the ugliness we cannot accept in ourselves. The trouble is when we put up a mask to hide the ugliness, we also hide the beauty because what is beauty but truth? What is beauty but authenticity?

HIDING

To hide what we fear is within us, we cover ourselves up with a cloak of falseness that hides everything. And from that point on we live in a world without color where everything is muted: our feelings, our understanding, our connections to the world, and especially our ability to feel love and joy.

We are too fat; we are too short; too tall; our noses are too big; we’re too old; our teeth too crooked. No one is one hundred percent happy with their appearance, even those whom our culture regards as the most beautiful. For instance, I have a daughter who is 5’ 6” tall, weighs 106 pounds, measures 34-24-34, has a terrific sense of humor, and great joy in life. She has huge brown eyes and blond hair and is what most of us would consider a knockout. But do you think she’s happy with her looks? Of course not. Her hair is too curly, she has a pimple, her right pinky has a tiny scar. Give me a break!

What can you do? She believes that she’s not perfect inside, that she is capable of envy, and that she needs to work on being more generous, and these are the aspects of herself that she sees in the mirror. It’s not her hair she’s looking at; it’s her spirit. Or, more to the point, it’s what she believes is her spirit. It’s her fear.

So it is with all of us. Because we see ourselves from the inside, we’re sure that everyone can see how worthless we really are. And it doesn’t matter in the least that we know, intellectually, that this is not so, that we all have faults—bits of the Beast—lurking within. As we judge others, so we judge ourselves.

BELIEVING

It all comes down to belief, doesn’t it? Truth encompasses all aspects of reality. We can as easily see ourselves as beautiful as we can see ourselves as horrible. We can study our faults and find the underlying passions of which they’re constructed, and understand the incorruptible beauty of living that made us what we are in this moment. Or we can hide from that truth and claim it’s opposite—that we live in an imperfect world and are imperfect parts of that reality.

I keep thinking of the alien in the movie of the same name, the most horrifically ugly creature ever conceived as far as I’m concerned, and I keep coming back to this: someone created that creature and made it so ugly that it became beautiful to its creator. Beautiful in its completeness, its thoroughness, its perfect dedication to the ideal of ugliness. Someone loved that creation and owned it and worried that it was not good enough and added detail upon detail until it breathed ugliness like we breathe air.

From this perspective, beauty doesn’t really have anything to do with appearances. It has to do with being finished, completed, faithful to an ideal, real, unmasked, vulnerable. It has to do with being singular, unique, owning up to our differences and being unafraid to show who we are.

Ugliness is quitting short of those qualities. It is stopping with half a smile instead of a whole one. It is hiding the self under masks of false behavior. It is being uncomfortable in our own bodies, unable to open ourselves up and be vulnerable and open. That’s why babies are beautiful—their spirits are exposed. They hold nothing back. And it’s also why many old people are ugly—from a lifetime of holding everything back.

EMBRACING YOUR FEAR

When I was in the midst of a divorce, I had a dream. In it, I was in a house and the walls were covered with blood. Someone in that house wanted to kill me; I could hear him ranting in the other rooms. So I flew from the house and into the air, trying to get away as fast as I could and turned to see a great black monster following me. Howling with anger it pursued me as I flew across the sky and the world below me erupted into flame.

I was terrified as it gained on me and thought I would die, and then I heard a small voice within me saying, “Even the devil needs love.” I couldn’t escape, so I turned and embraced the horror, pulling it toward me and kissing it. And then suddenly, I was on a quiet beach with the moon and stars overhead, and the devil had turned into a little boy. I held his hand and we were at peace.

For a long time, I didn’t know what this dream meant. I thought the monster was my ex-husband. I painted a picture of it chasing me, and when he saw it, he even thought it was him. But I see now, that the Beast was part of me, the part that judged me and saw that I had failed, that I had failed miserably. And it wanted to kill me. By embracing it, I set myself on the road to healing.

THE FACE OF THE STRANGER

One more story. I knew a man once who was the Chief of the Seminole Indians. I had been hired to create a video for a woman named Betty Mae Jumper. She was the tribal storyteller and the video was to recreate their ancient stories on tape. I thought Betty Mae was an incredibly unattractive woman. She must have weighed three hundred pounds and she was so old!

So when I was speaking Chief Billy about the video and he said we must dress her in tribal dress so we could bring out her beauty, I was momentarily taken aback. Then I realized that he saw her with eyes of love, as the woman who had rescued him from death as a child, as a woman he’d grown up with and known forever. He could see her beauty where, I'm ashamed to say, I could only see her fat. We’re all beautiful to someone, and it has nothing to do with what we look like. It has to do with who we are.

Beauty and ugliness—the most difficult of dualities—are just two ways of looking at the same exact thing. And they have to do with belief, with acceptance of what is without making judgments. When we see with our left-brain only, we see only surfaces. People are strangers, and we can perceive ugliness. But when we look with our complete selves we see that there is no such thing. We see that everything is just exactly what it is. No more and no less.

It’s with our fear that we judge. But if we go a step further and look with our hearts, we see that all-that-is is more than it looks like: neither ugly nor beautiful. It’s just...there, existing. When we go the rest of the way and look with our souls we can see that it’s Life. And life, with all its ins and outs, ups and downs, goods and evils is Truth. This is beauty that transcends the physical, and transports us to a higher place.

THIS ARTICLE CAN BE REPRINTED AS LONG AS THE FOLLOWING INFORMATION IS INCLUDED:

*Deborah Greenspan is a professional writer and publisher of Llumina Press. Spirals, The Connection, a book inspired by a mystical vision is available in the Llumina bookstore: www.llumina.com/store/spirals.htm. Filled with what one reviewer called "wonderful, wonderful ideas," Spirals takes a holistic view of life that will leave you breathless.