5.4 How beauty can be quantified  (Page 6/6)

Why would someone’s intellectual mind override their natural feelings about something? There must be some strong fear of the natural feeling. You would know if you have a fear about something if when you pause to think about it, you feel a slight (or large) sense of fear. Even a slight sense of fear about something might cause you to avoid the real feeling, because at a glance that slight fear is tiny, but if you paused over the fear it would become very large. So then it wouldn’t be a tiny fear, but a large one. So that person simply isn’t confronting their fear over the issue. To avoid the slight amount of fear they get over looking at something, they simply replace it with a larger emotion (something like, I’m ugly) which is worse then the actual sensation of just the feeling! They need to let that natural pause take place when the slight fear comes in, allowing them to experience the full fear. Then they can logically analyze it and see if that fear is actually rational.

So, basically, you need to confront your fear in order to figure out if you are blocking any sensations. In any event, at least don’t associate a wrong sensation or emotion to what you are actually looking at.

We can further analyze how things look and therefore how they make us feel. So we figured out that flat surfaces make us feel good because they are peaceful, like the lake. If you pause and stare intently at any flat surface you get a sense of peace and happiness. The size of the flat surface changes the happy or sad emotions you are experiencing as well, if it was a very very large flat surface, like a plain outside in the wilderness, you would get a sense of awe because your eye can wander in any direction and you wouldn’t have to stop your eye, and that would be even more peaceful in a way. Or something like a soda can has a small flat surface that is easy to look at because it is small so it isn’t a lot to process, so it’s fun to look at because it causes pleasure but doesn’t overwhelm your eye by being too much to see. Something like the flat surface of a desk causes a little more pleasure (because of the larger flat surface) but it isn’t as fun because your eye doesn’t get to jump around as much due to the larger space, it would jump around more slowly. Now you are starting to get an idea of how you can take anything in your environment, or everything in your environment, put it all together, and get a general sense of how vision effects your emotions and how you are feeling at any given time.

So when you’re in an office with mostly a desk you feel at peace because of the large flat surface of the desk which is separated by the floor by a large distance that makes the flat surface stand out so you notice it more and get more pleasure by looking at it. A flat surface on a wall causes some pleasure but not as much as the desk because it doesn’t stand out as much. The floor of the room causes some pleasure, less than the desk and more than the walls, cause there is probably some pattern on it or it has a more appealing color/shininess than the walls. Like a stone, wood, or carpeted floor would have more shine to it than the ordinarily dull walls, that shine naturally draws in our eye which makes it easier to see, and, therefore, more pleasurable. Objects on the floor also stand out a lot because they are in three dimensions and very much unlike the walls and floor, and even the desk because the objects are small and stick out a lot like little towers. The desk your eye can’t isolate because it is too big, and it doesn’t have a pattern on it. The carpet on the floor would be more pleasing to look at than the desk because it has a pattern on it. The desk just isn’t as much detail, but on the other hand the desk is probably more peaceful, the fact that it stands out more than the wall (because it is more 3d) makes you pay more attention to that flat, peaceful surface so it’s a flat, peaceful surface that you are drawn into. The fact that you are drawn into it makes it more pleasing because you don’t have to put as much effort into trying to analyze it as deeply. So now we have all the major aspects of the room analyzed and quantified for beauty.

Something like the sun causes peace and wonder because it is a large ball surrounded by a huge emptiness, the sky. The sky causes wonder and is a little daunting because it is so big and intimidating, it seems to even have a depth to it so your eye can wander through it at any level and you’d be wondering what is in there.

Looking at grass is like looking at a pincushion, there are multiple sharp points which your eye clearly focuses on, so it’s like jumping around from one thing to another very fast, almost being traumatic to look at that takes so much effort to do. A mirror would be more pleasurable to look at because of its flat surface than a closed curtain, which is very wavy. That flat surface causes peace because your eye can stop and pause, but with the curvy surface you can’t pause. It is interesting to see what happens to your feelings when you take your eye and go over objects slowly.