You cannot become a true beauty seeker while purposely inviting unnecessary ugliness into your life. Think about how important it is to eat quality food. As an organism there is nothing more relevant or sacred than what you put into your body. There is nothing more metaphysical, in a literal sense, than food. Food is the ultimate sacrament. Food is a part of our contract with life. As creatures with a body, we should all be especially concerned about the quality of air, water and food we allow into our bodily vehicle. But we consume more than food. Life is a constant consumption of our environment through our senses. We consume sights, food, conversations, products, touches, sounds, air and time. Should we not feed our consciousness well? Ugliness comes in many forms, from materialism to the things we eat, and many of the things we consume with our senses. Many psychological and spiritual problems are really just forms of consumption illness. Through unwholesome consumption, the beauty within begins to diminish as we are consumed by what we feed on. When we feed on knowledge without conscience, intelligence can become arrogance, which leads to apathy and a loss of compassion. One such example of this is how our unwholesome meditations on violent entertainment can slowly erode our sensitivity and warp our spiritual palate as we acquire a taste for the perverse. All of these appetites can become vices, which create tragic imbalances in our lives that are not easily detected or quantifiable.
