No B.S Friday: You are much more beautiful, and beauty-driven, than you think.
Most people live their life on a leash.
They live their lives confined to a little yard that they’ve built for themselves out of concepts like right and wrong and appropriate and manners.
It’s such a shame.
I mean they do make for great citizens. They do the right thing. They don’t make trouble. They rarely say inappropriate things.
They’re very “nice” people.
But they’re missing out on their own lives. They’re missing out on knowing what it’s like to show up authentically in the world.
And why?
Because somewhere along the way they picked up the idea that their animal can’t be trusted.
(It’s tempting to blame institutionalised religion here, but I think religion just formalised an idea that’s existed for millennia – that the human animal is dirty and disgusting, and only through strict fence-building and negative self-talk can we ever hope to offer the world a person that’s “appropriate”.)
Such. Complete. Nonsense.
Scratch the surface and they say things like, “I can’t just ‘let myself be free.’ What would happen? I would say inappropriate things. I would do disgusting stuff. People would hate me. It’d be a mess.”
At the heart of it is a conception of the ‘animal’ that these people think they are saving us from.
But the conception is way off.
The human animal is not – NEWS FLASH – inherently bad or disgusting. Or even selfish and self-centred. It’s beautiful. It’s motivated by beauty. Just like every other animal.
And I think it’s a bit of a tragedy that we don’t spend more time around animals. Because I think they give us an amazing reflection of how ‘intelligent’ and ‘beautiful’ animal natures actually are.
I mean, think of a dog. A dog has no filters. It has no construct of ‘appropriate’. Now imagine that you could level up that dog’s intelligence, without imposing the fences of appropriate that we impose on ourselves.
What would happen?
Would it be a ‘disaster’?
Of course not. You would say to the dog, “please don’t jump up on the couch”. And the dog would be like, “OMG I just love you so much, of course I won’t jump on the couch, I just love you so much. I want to be best friends forever. Are you going to finish that sausage?”
The dog’s fundamental nature is loving and generous. That nature expresses itself through beauty.
Just as your fundamental nature is loving and generous, and just as your nature expresses itself through creating beauty all around you.
There is an incredibly toxic idea at the heart of modern society. That animal = dirty.
And it’s an idea that keeps us locked up in prisons of our own making.
But it’s time to stop.
It’s time to let yourself off the leash.
It’s time to be free.
JG.