The Body
What is the truth about this body of ours that simple people mistake for themselves, with which all who are unenlightened identify themselves to some extent?
Take a film-star who owes (his or) her position less to talent than to the fact that great numbers of people regard her as beautiful, i.e. desirable. They travel long distances, wait for hours in the rain, in order to see her in the flesh, cheer themselves hoarse, and treasure her signature.
Alternatively an analytical mind may choose to regard this desirable thing as a complicated arrangement of blood and grease, constantly engaged in assimilating and defaecating living and dead matter, the seat of innumerable colonies of bacteria, exuding waste products through the skin that is intermittently covered with oleaginous hairs, impossible to maintain in a state of even approximate cleanliness.
Wherein lies the truth? Both views are evaluations, devoid of reality; the one is as true and as false as the other; the woman is what she is - not what other people choose to imagine her to be. But the reproduction of the species requires the positive illusion.
To perceive beauty in the form and colour of a film-star has no greater nor less justification than to perceive it in the form and colour of a hippopotamus, a baboon, or a tarantula. To perceive the ugliness in a toad, a hyena, or a scorpion has neither greater nor less justification than to perceive it in a film-star.
The degree of evolution of everyone may not allow him to conceive the external world as a percept of mind, but the minimum allows him to understand that human evaluations must be unreal.
The notion of the 'charm' of human beings is pure vanity, fostered by journalism whose technique is insidious and perpetual flattery of all national and personal illusions.
