What is True Beauty?
You may be wondering how a blog about money would have a title about facelifts and how they are related. It certainly isn’t about how to get the cheapest and best facelift. So let’s follow the thread and see where it leads.
Recently, I have had several female friends of a certain age have plastic surgery done on their faces. Last week a friend, who is finding herself reacting to that as much as I am, and I sat down together to try and understand. This friend, Pratima Freeman, has the capacity to bring through a higher wisdom, so it was an enlightening conversation. Where I refer to her guidance directly, I have used quotation marks.
I have spoken many times about the growing disparity between the haves and the have-nots in our money system. The western culture supports “the filling of the coffers of the few”, and even supports “the suffering of the many for the benefit of the few”. What that sets up, is a situation, where the winners in life seem to be the ones who get the most. And our culture cultivates desire in order for this to happen. Just look for yourself at all the advertising we are bombarded with.
But those who spend their lives accumulating “can only ever touch ego satisfaction”; it does not touch or hold their Beingness which is their deeper true nature. This is what I say in my book:
There is richness in the world, but it cannot be had through accumulating things. Acquiring things is the ego’s attempt to expand itself. Even if we could extend ourselves to the end of the universe and appropriate everything in our path, we would be missing the boundlessness of Beingness. In fact, our experience of the underlying emptiness would actually increase, not diminish, because the underlying emptiness would become more apparent. Being cut off from our spiritual nature is the fundamental cause of our sense of scarcity.
So rather than making us fulfilled, accumulating never really fills the hole of not being in touch with our spiritual nature, but rather points to “the many hungers that lie at the bottom of our desires: the desire for perfection, or the sense of deprivation and fear that underlies our need to acquire and consume”. When we accumulate we are attempting to shore up our separate entity hood, our ego nature and fill the hole of deprivation. And where there is ego there is narcissism. Supreme narcissism is when we want to be the best, the most special, the richest, the most beautiful, the most special.
Recent events in the world have affected all of us and have made us more aware of humanity’s interdependence and oneness.
This recognition is a reflection of the spiritual experience of the oneness of Being, or reality. We are beginning to realize we are not disconnected human beings but are members of a greater whole. Yes, we are differentiated as individuals, each one a part of the infinitely diverse manifest mystery of the universe, but we are not separate. The implication is that when we impact others, we impact ourselves. This means that when we hurt others, we hurt ourselves.
“Oneness is the truly immeasurable wealth: where you know love, you know trust, you know God, you know truth”. But when we are identified with ego, as a separate individual we are forgetting our oneness. “So what we are talking about is ignorance. When you find yourself in desire, or compulsion, this too is ignorance. And this is how we each, individually, support a system that nurtures inequality and suffering.”
“We cannot create peace through war, or harmony through opposition. We have to be willing to know ignorance where we see it in ourselves and others, and not be fooled into thinking that those who have more are the winners.
Love is the only answer to all of this. There is no action that will make anything shift other than love. This means that guns, violence, or ignorance all need to be held in love. So if you know someone who is willing to carve their face in order to be acceptable, what they need is compassion, which is a form of love”. They are acting out of ignorance and self-hatred. “We cannot create peace through war, or harmony through opposition. We have to be willing to know ignorance where we see it in ourselves and others, and not be fooled into thinking that this who have more are the winners.” At the bottom of all ego structures is the deficiency and emptiness of not being our true natures. This is what I say in my book:
We cling to our belief that something outside of us will fill the underlying sense of deficiency at the bottom of all our ego structures. And our actions support that belief. Our attention gets riveted on what others have rather than being free to focus on our own situation.
Only love and truth can bring us freedom, but that understanding must be lived to be deeply realized. The more awake we are, the more we are in harmony with the will of Being and the more our hearts will open and radiate love to the world through our actions. It is Beingness, coming through our individual consciousness and through our hearts as love, that is the creativity of the expanding universe.
And this is true beauty.
If you wish to see more of Pratima’s higher consciousness guidance, please check out her website, Gifts of Guidance.