Beauty is elusive. So don't expect science, or even yoga, to capture its essence.
Beauty is not a thing, something fixed or rigid or that can be possessed
or held onto. Rather, I've come to think that beauty is a process,
an interaction between a unique object and a unique perceiver that evokes a
special kind of delight. This delight – which yogis call rasa
– does not depend on any practical end, but instead seems to reach beyond
our ordinary world into a realm of intrinsic worth and meaning.
Hiking one day through newly green grass
in the hills along the coast of California, I came upon a strangely
beautiful rock, full of curves and hollows, and surprisingly narrow
ridges that blended with each other in a delightful way. It slowly
dawned on me that what I was looking at was a large block of salt
that innumerable cows had patiently licked, gradually transforming
it from something simple and plain into a beautiful sculpture.
In wondering how cows could create beauty, it occurred to me that it might
emerge out of a process of iteration in which the groove left by the tongue
of one cow serves to subtly guide and modify the lick of the next cow. The cows
had created a coherent pattern of interconnection in the emerging surface, in
which the shape of every part depended on the shape of every other part. A similar
kind of coherence can be seen in rocks sculpted by the wind or in the beautiful
interplay of ripples in a pond after an initially jagged splash has had a chance
to reverberate many times. Even a simple mathematical operation – such
as taking the square of a complex number and adding a constant – when
repeated over and over,gives rise to the infinitely intricate and interconnected
whirls and spirals of the Mandelbrot Set
