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The Writings of Frithjof Schuon
Exploring "Timeless in Time" - a biography of Sri Ramana Maharshi
Science and the Myth of Progress
Who was Charles Eastman (Ohiyesa)?
How can we understand Native American traditions?
Books about Buddhism
World Wisdom's Spiritual Classics series
Noble Faces, Strong Voices: Exploring "The Spirit of Indian Women"
What are the "Foundations of Christian Art?"
Insights into the early Christian Desert Fathers and Mothers
Slideshows
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slide 14 of 17

For Reza Shah-Kazemi not only is beauty itself a Divine archetype but necessarily, the experiencing of beauty must also have its correlative on a transcendent plane.  Thus every experience of beauty is an opportunity, to be fulfilled or lost, for the remembrance of God:
But whereas in the case of formal beauty, participation in the archetype is rigorously objective and unconditional, in the case of aesthetic experience, participation in the archetype is critically dependent on the subjective capacity of the individual to make of his experience a spiritual foretaste of heavenly felicity and thereby a “remembrance of God.”  Beautiful vision on earth should foreshadow the Beatific Vision in Heaven, it should heighten one’s resolution to conform to the requirements of this celestial reward; it should, in other words, lead one to God.  The experience of beauty, far from being a question of merely aesthetic sensibility, is essentially an invitation to union: union with the Divine Principle, which both projects Beauty and attracts by means of Beauty.  One speaks of being entranced, enthralled, enraptured by beauty: these terms clearly indicate the spiritual potential inherent in aesthetic experience, for the individual is not fully himself in the face of a beauty that overwhelms him; indeed, a certain mode of extinction can even be said to have taken place.
The lotus has been an invitation to and an inspiration in spiritual contemplation for millenia.
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