Ornamenting Being

The Aesthetic Ornamentation of Existential Integrity

This three-part essay describes a base, path, and fruit, a fruit which in itself is a base. It describes an approach which is already-complete from the start, but whose scope of completeness is ever growing.

1. The Base: Existential Integrity in Interaction

2. The Path: Emergent Generative Aesthetics

3. The Fruit: Ornamenting Being with an Aesthetic

The fruit becomes the material for an expanded base: ever-expanding but always-complete.

Existential Integrity in Interaction

As emotions become liberated from fixation, and the value of “negative” emotions becomes gnosis (sorrow realized as motion toward connection, anger toward cutting through, etc.), the final emotion to untangle is out-of-integrity, which could be called dukkha (out-of-alignment) or incongruence, in something like Carl Rogers’ sense. Rogers was observing the goodness-of-fit between the real and ideal self. Here, let us instead note the most subtle existential sensation of fit between actual selfing and fully-feeling-responsive selfing.

“Out-of-integrity” can invite the question of “what is out-of-integrity with what?” The answer: interaction is out-of-integrity with the entire available context. This context encompasses all that is available to your senses, to your conceptual knowledge, to your feelings. It also includes the meta-knowledge and feelings concerning “that which might be a portal to greater context”, such as “I could call my friend and ask about it” or “I could look here”, and the meta-knowledge of one’s evolving estimate of what it might cost in attention and time to discover more details of context.

When interaction with a situation is in integrity with the entire context available to the one who interacts, then no dukkha (existential out-of-alignment) is added to the situation, even if practical imperfections in alignment occur. This does not mean things go well or that unpleasant emotions may not occur.

Someone you love has a medical incident. You act with full integrity. There is grief as a natural process, the body releasing a field of what might have been in the relationship. And there is no feeling other than a tacit “this is the appropriate emotional efflorescence of this moment.” While practical suffering continues, existential suffering has vanished.

Emergent Generative Aesthetics

One way of considering what makes a pattern more abstract or concrete is the variety of cases it can encompass: two hours, two thoughts. ‘Two’ can serve as a simple aesthetic that generates life patterns of ‘twoness’. You could look at your life and ask, “How could I cultivate ‘twoness’ in my life? I will have two cars, two chairs in the living room, always be reading two books at once...”

Perhaps ‘twoness’ is only a weakly attractive aesthetic, but one that could be embraced by nearly every adult.

One way of looking at a spiritual tradition is as an evolved aesthetic seed which generates life patterns; a seed which many have found compelling, having discovered satisfaction with the fruits of that engagement as they allow the aesthetic to permeate their lives as generative force: a generative aesthetic seed of being.

Some popular aesthetic generative seeds in the present age include “Non-Duality”, “Christ’s Love”, “Buddha-Nature”, “Siva-Shakti”, “The Will of God”. While traditions disclose the possibilities of these seeds, when each seed takes root in an individual, it yields a unique texture; even Non-Duality takes on a distinct texture for each person (see “The Legends of the 84 Mahasiddhas”).

Spiritual traditions are evolved cultural possibilities optimized for attractiveness, satisfaction, generality, and self-propagation, which we might collectively refer to as the potency of the tradition. These qualities do not invariably rise together.

Several consequences follow:

• Spiritual traditions can lead to quite distinct places, casting doubt upon the Perennial Philosophy.

• As with artistic traditions in general, there is often a sudden revelation of a novel pattern that becomes the foundation for continued evolution.

• Continuing to evolve a long-existing spiritual tradition is much more likely to be highly potent than making something up from whole cloth, yet at the same time, we depend on a multitude of spiritual revelations to create the possibility of a few seeds that flower into full and potent fruits.

• It is possible to blend together or to engage with multiple distinct spiritualities, simply to the extent that to do so proves fruitful for a particular individual.

• Generality and self-propagation are far more important from the perspective of history’s broad sweep, since these qualities create the conditions under which a tradition may evolve to become ever-more attractive and satisfactory. From our individual perspective, these qualities may be of little import, as we find ourselves occupying only a moment of that historical sweep.

• It is likely for many that the perfect fit of an aesthetic generative seed will not be a strongly orthodox tradition. Orthodoxy is often a sign of optimization for self-propagation at the cost of attractiveness and satisfaction.

• A perfect fit will often be less general, and so the discovery of one’s sublime spiritual aesthetic may prove neither readily communicable nor broadly appealing.

As with many great artists, you won’t get far unless you absorb the traditions, and you won’t get far if you don’t experiment. Find the aesthetic generative seed of being that suits the complex individuality of your incarnation!

Ornamenting Being with an Aesthetic

Reality is a constraint on aesthetics, in the same way a body constrains fashion display. While one can dress in a fashion aesthetic that fits perfectly to someone else, such an aesthetic will rarely fit so perfectly to your own body.

The whole-body is interactive in many dimensions: physically, relationally, cognitively, in tacit perspective, spiritually (i.e., the subtle body), as mere awareness; all this as one interactive complex.

When you have explored the whole-body, low and high and back again, what is left is emergent aesthetic creation.

There is nothing intrinsically better or worse about abiding in pure awareness, or being filled with pure bliss, or engaging in human love, or making money, or watching an AI slop video: what is done in existential integrity dissolves all existential problems. A play of generative aesthetic creativity can emerge from a base of existential integrity; that play can bloom to full aesthetic power.

Existential integrity is a revealed base: the details of what is in existential integrity are progressively revealed as the power of aesthetic play calls for refinement. Existential integrity is ever-evolving. Perhaps always saying “thank you” was in existential integrity; then, one time, “thank you” was post hoc revealed as the wrong thing to say. The action was in existential integrity, but now existential integrity will develop to encompass this new possibility.

The scope of existential integrity can always expand; it is the scope of interaction. From a base of perfect existential integrity, creative and powerful aesthetic interaction can happen, from which the base changes, expands, becomes more stable.

An analogy: writing intelligibly is the base of communication through writing. There is a scope of vocabulary. One can write intelligibly within a scope of vocabulary; one has a perfect base of intelligibility. If then one expands one’s vocabulary significantly, the existing base may be revealed to be weak, and call for expansion.

Consider, then, that celibate monks in a very ritualized situation may have perfect existential integrity, but that the integrity is limited in scope. To throw a monk into a chaotic relational situation, such as a married man with children running a medium-sized business, demands that the integrity’s revealed limits be expanded.

Language can serve as a scaffolding to point to an aesthetic, but the actual aesthetic is found via interacting with the world from that seed aesthetic over years, until one’s personal capability with that aesthetic has flourished.

For example, take the Five Elements (earth, water, fire, air, space). This is an aesthetic tradition; when being is ornamentally dressed in this aesthetic’s display, it can look very different from context to context while still retaining a general sensibility.

Aesthetics are available to ornament being in any situation. The explicit communication of aesthetics is useful, but limited; the full communication requires a craft tradition to communicate tacit aspects; and the individual cannot help but put their own stamp on the aesthetics as they learn them, so each aesthetic is an ever-mutating family of aesthetics, differing not only across people, but across each individual at different times.

Consider this an ornamental display of fashion on a bare mannequin of being, made up of a fabric of view. The particular fashion chosen in any given moment has no rightness outside of aesthetic sense. It is human nature to dress up what is with an ornamental display. Metaphorically, to walk about nude in everyday life is an interactive display in itself. May the aesthetics that emerge from your existential integrity be blessed to bloom prolifically.