The Beauty of Relevance

I am alone. The desert gales wash my naked chest, and my bare feet burrow into the heat of the earth. I bathe in breathing moonlight. For a moment I can see God moving over the face of the sands. And I see only the desert.

I feel a slight night shiver.

In the bareness of the desert I detach my consciousness and appreciate a reality in which I no longer exist; to forget that there is me. I consider the folly of making the self significant in a widespread sea of nothingness. It is a futile effort. I let go of the ego, and see the world unadultered by human consciousness. Unless an omnipotent deus ex machina arbitrarily dictates what is beautiful, beauty in the objective sense is so ephemeral and un-absolute it might not exist at all, especially if human ego could no longer exist to perceive it. After all, the world doesn’t care what we think is beautiful; we’re mere grains of sand in the desert. The world will keep turning, the desert winds will keep blowing, and time will go on all the same.

So what’s the point? Because the mere miracle of human existence allows us to imagine the what is beautiful to each and every one of us. In the vast diversity of human consciousness, beauty will emerge out of relevance. Although we must share ideas that create an interdependent and collective consciousness of perceiving the world, the core rests in each of our individual experiences that engender infinite possibilities of what is beautiful. Like grains of sand in the desert.

And in this beauty of relevance, we also learn that in the ultimate of the infinite there is no ultimate binary: No ultimate right and wrong, no ultimate black and white. The world never operated on a binary code of 0s and 1s, and neither must we. Some of us may choose to do so in order to devise convenient moral compasses, but the folly is when we impose that binary code — or even our standards of beauty — on others, or worse, the world. It is a futile effort. Especially when in the end, the ego that imposes its values on others must realize that its existence is as fleeting as a single grain of sand in the desert. And the world will keep turning, the desert winds will keep blowing, and time will go on all the same.