.
‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’ that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
— John Keats, “Ode to a Grecian Urn.”
.
Keats is speaking of the perfection found only in the present moment, the Oneness of P-A which contains all of Simple Reality. We all come to this intuitive understanding once we have experienced that insight which leads to that all important shift from the illusion of P-B into the realm of beauty and truth. Einstein also had this experience:
Beauty is the first test. There is no place in the world for ugly mathematics.
— Albert Einstein
In P-B, not many people would consider beauty to be a critical part of the problem-solving process but Buckminster Fuller knew that the beauty found in the present moment was important:
When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it’s wrong.
— Buckminster Fuller
Ultimately, our experience of beauty is something “felt” rather than understood—it is about the heart rather than the head—intuitive rather than intellectual. Without a shift in worldview, beauty is obscured by our illusory identity and the resulting continuous emotional reactions in P-B. “When you forget your carefully assembled fiction of who you are,” says John Tarrant, “you can find natural delight in people, in the planet, the stones, and the trees. There is no observable limit to this beauty, and no one is excluded from it.”[i]
[i] Tarrant, John. “Paradox, Breakthrough, and the Zen Koan.” Shift: At the Frontiers of Consciousness. Petaluma, California: Institute of Noetic Sciences, March-May 2005, p. 26.
