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Truth, Love, and Beauty

In a previous blog post, I compared the pursuit of truth to that of immortality, with love offering the reason for it all. 

I have also come to terms with how deeply I feel moved by beauty, particularly nature. I realized that I've been trying to figure out the meaning of life and all of that when it's been in front of me and simple this entire time.

I resisted beauty for a long time because it felt superficial. How could I justify treating something or someone differently just because it was beautiful? But beauty is inescapable, just as suffering is inescapable. Both have the capacity to move us, deeply. And if I could choose just one thing to preserve from this universe, it would be beauty. So when I finally realized that there was nothing "wrong" with me for craving beauty, it hit me. That's what life is about. Life is about truth, love, and beauty. 

Once I had that thought in my mind, I realized that I've heard this before... and not just me, but pretty much every major philosopher and theologian since the times of Plato. Together, these are the Transcendentals. They are considered the properties of being, or things that transcend being. They are a huge part of many religions, including Christianity. They are also threads found in most forms of human existence, from science to the arts. 

How validating it felt when I realized that in my pursuit of the meaning of life, I had hit upon ideas that felt real based on my own experience, and when I looked it up, there it was since 5th century BCE! I have had some experiences of religion and had certainly read about these ideas before, but nothing compares to personal experience. It's not the same to have someone tell you what the meaning of life is, as it is for you to fuck around and find out. 

In this journey I also realized that my loneliness on the journey is because I'm lonely. Yes, that's a tautology. What I mean is that the loneliness I've felt in the pursuit of life philosophy has been the feeling that I've been doing it alone. I don't have the ability to have deep philosophical conversations with friends and family very often. How ironic, when the struggle to find meaning is something so common to all of us. It's just that I had been fortunate enough to be freed from the pursuit of everything else while most of my community is in the cycle of work and sleep.

The closest community of people that I had found to those who wanted to explore TLB with me were yogi's and buddhists, but that wasn't quite what I was looking for either... now that I've finally identified the source of my loneliness, I can maybe finally go seeking. 

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