On Beauty

I was at my therapist's office yesterday, patiently waiting to be seen, when I caught a glimpse of a shiny magazine propped up in the rack. I had never come across this magazine, called 'Ode' before, which is pretty amazing seeing how much I love poring through all types of mags. I checked 'em out online tonight, and discovered that the folks running the show are all about promoting positivism - intriguing ideas, discoveries, happy news. What a revelation!

Anyway, I thought I'd share the link with y'all, since it seems like there's some good stuff in there. Kudos to the Dutch!

As I've probably blogged about before, I've been reading (on and off) this book called The Divided Mind by Dr. John Sarno for a while now. I've set it aside for several months, just because I'm reading several non-fiction books at once so it takes me a while to get through them. But I recently recommended this book to a friend and was perusing some of the comments about it on amazon, and one of the commenters included this quotation in his entry:

Deepak Chopra chides modern "science" stating:

So what's the real nature of the world? What's it really like? We can't trust the senses. They give us a very distorted view. They break up that wholeness into a small fragment and we call it reality. We happen to agree about it. We even call it "objective reality" and we have a whole methodology that we call "science" to explore that. But, if you really understand what science is, then science at least until now has not been a method for exploring the truth. Science has been a method for exploring our current map of what we think the truth is.

There is some real truth ("truth?") to this idea... so many of us get caught up in this whirlwind of proof, objectivity, facts, hard SCIENCE. And believe me, I'm one of those people sometimes. But I also like to think of myself as readier to accept nonlinear ideas, because I don't really believe in absolutes. Objectivity is a bit of a myth; it's much more realistic to shoot for objectivity and then describe all the biases and their limitations.

Man, I get so nerdy about some of this stuff. I absolutely love science, and what I love even more is how such non-scientific things (art, religion, etc) are so hand in glove with it. They are seemingly diametrically opposed, yet are such a crucial pairing. I guess that's how it works with polarity; how can you have one without the other?

Anyway, I know there's a lot more to be said about this topic but I don't really want to write it all down. It's a beautiful day outside, and I need to catch some sun.