Beauty and rhythm: essential to human life

Beauty has been and is a profound influence on my life and spiritual journey. I wrote about awakening to Beauty Everywhere and how beauty can be understood through the three journeys. in reading the paragraph below, my intimate understanding and relationship with beauty blossomed into an intimacy that was known, yet not familiar from my history.

The nature of creation is that it is  progressing always towards Beauty. ‘God is beautiful, and he loves Beauty’, says the Qur’an. The nature of the body is to beautify itself; the nature of the mind is to have beautiful thoughts; the longing of the heart is for beautiful feelings. Therefore an infant should grow more beautiful everyday, and ignorance seeks to become intelligence. When the progress is in a contrary direction, it shows that the individual has lost track  of natural progress. There are two forms, the natural and the artificial, the latter being a copy of the former. – The Sufi Message of Hazrat Inayat Khan, Volume II, Part One: The Mysticism of Sound

The beauty of a form turns out to be this
transparency to true nature. – A. H. Almaas

I’ve always wished I could dance and, yet I never took the time to learn. I love music and lyrics, my soul is moved by both and both have contributed to many moments of expansion of consciousness, awareness and embodiment. The sentences below perked me up as it is, of course, the rhythm in music and words that seduces my attention calling it forward in my experience.

Rhythm produces an ecstasy which is inexplicable, and incomparable with any other source of intoxication. This is why the dance has been the most fascinating past time of all people, both civilized and Savage, and has delighted alike Saint and sinner

Sufis, in order to awaken in man that part of his emotional nature which is generally asleep, have a rhythmic practice which sets the whole mechanism of body and mind in rhythm. There exists in all people, either consciously or unconsciously, a tendency toward rhythm.  – The Sufi Message of Hazrat Inayat Khan, Volume II, Part One: The Mysticism of Sound

It seems obvious that beauty and rhythm are fundamental life forces, elements of the real, with significance to human development far deeper than most of us imagine.