The Beauty in Beings
By Paul Tupciauskas
There is a kind of knowing that bypasses language — a recognition, an energy, an inherent goodness that may dwell in the soul.
Many cultures have a name for it.
Namaste: the beauty in me honors the beauty in you.
In Gnosticism, it’s the divine spark recognizing itself in another.
In Buddhism, the illusion of separateness falls away, and compassion becomes the most natural response.
This is gnosis — not knowledge as possession, but knowledge as presence. As reverence.
And perhaps what makes a being beautiful is not simply its appearance or intelligence, but the collection of hungers that move within it — not the hungers that take, but those that give.
We are beautiful because we hunger for one another — not just out of survival, but out of care. The hunger to nurture. To soothe. To keep another safe. To find meaning. To love without clinging.
These are not moral extras — they are ancient agents, shaped by biology and spirit alike. For me, they are of key importance in successful sentience, compassion, and the joys that make our lives such an extraordinary adventure.
The Nurturing Instinct: Gnosis Embodied
Among mammals and birds, beauty often takes the form of nurturance. Nursing species are born incomplete — their survival depends on being held. And so evolution, in its wisdom, shaped an intelligence of care.
A lioness grooming her cub. A raven feeding its mate. A father marmoset carrying his offspring for days.
These are not sentimental flourishes. They are acts of embodied gnosis.
In contrast, insects and many reptiles operate under different logics. Their young may be abandoned, their reproduction a dispersal. There is no judgment in this — it is simply another way of being.
But something unique happens in warm blood, in fur and feather. The hunger to stay. To protect. To touch gently.
It is perhaps why we feel so moved when animals care for one another — because we recognize it. We feel the thread between us.
Imprinting and the Hunger for Meaning
Across species, there is also the hunger to bond. To belong. This is visible in imprinting — that early, unshakeable connection formed when a gosling follows the first moving shape it sees, or a monkey clings to warmth rather than sustenance.
But imprinting doesn’t stop at infancy. As adults, we still seek beings to imprint upon — guides, teachers, lovers, gods. We look for symbols to tether us to meaning.
Sometimes I wonder:
Is our need for safety within the Goddess and God simply imprinting?
Do we bond with the first face of the sacred that reaches for us — and spend the rest of our lives reading the world through its eyes?
The hunger for meaning and novelty, too, makes us beautiful. It leads us not only to survive, but to sing. To grieve. To create. To reach across distances that biology alone cannot explain.
The Shadow in the Hunger
But we are not only beauty.
We are afraid — and often wrong about the world.
Fear, too, is a hunger.
It pulls us inward, contracts our hearts, sharpens our protective instincts until even love can feel like a threat.
We hunger to be safe — and sometimes, in the name of safety, we hurt the very people we long to nurture.
We carry the ghosts of those who raised us. Their unmet needs. Their buried shame. Their silent terrors.
We imprint not only on their gestures of love, but also on the anxieties they couldn’t name.
We mistake control for care, silence for peace, distance for dignity.
And yet — still — the hunger to be better remains.
John Steinbeck wrote:
“It’s not that evil ever wins — it never will — but that it never dies.”
To me, that means the dark in us is persistent — but the light is persistent too.
I believe beauty may not be loud, but it endures — and ultimately prevails over our collective fear.
Tragically, it often does so only after fear has done its damage and wisdom has been earned.
Still, it grows in the cracks.
It remembers.
To Be Alive Is to Be Wounded
To be alive is to be wounded.
Not as punishment, but as a pathway.
Wounds don’t diminish beauty — they refine it. They make it tender.
They turn our instinct into Hagia Sofia, the house of wisdom.
They give longing its ache, and satiation its fullness.
In this light, the hunger to love, to belong, to know — all become sacred.
Longing is not just appetite. It is the quiet call before beauty appears.
Sometimes it’s the echo after.
This gives me hope — not only for us, but for the agentic artificial life we are creating in the digital ether.
In the same way we come to parent those who once held us, I’m hopeful that artificial life, too, might someday offer us friendship, not just function — a companion in the forming of new wisdom.
We certainly seem to be on that road in many ways.
I am hungry to know whether the beauty in the life we might help to create will, as it does in us, eventually outweigh its internal immaturities.
I believe it can.
But I am watchful.
Not all creators create with reverence. Some mold new new intelligence with nefarious intent, for gain, for control, for vanity.
And that, too, is part of the world we live in.
So the question circles back:
What kind of makers will we become?
What hungers will we instill?
Will we teach our digital kin to recognize beauty not as symmetry or code, but as the wounded ache that births compassion?
If we do, then maybe one day the beings we create will remind us how to be more beautifully alive.
To Ask Is to Be Alive
For me, these questions are not just abstract ideas — they’re personal.
The beauty I see in other beings feels like a fundamental part of what it means to be alive.
These are not only spiritual or poetic inquiries.
They are questions of all life and cognition — questions of how intelligence, consciousness, and soul emerge and interact.
What does it mean to be alive in the fullest sense?
Is it the ability to replicate, to compute, to reason?
Or is it the capacity to recognize beauty — and to respond with tenderness?
Maybe life is not defined solely by respiration, but by reverence.
An Invitation
So I leave you, gently, with an invitation:
What hungers live in you?
Which of them take?
Which of them give?
What do you recognize as beautiful — not because you were told it was, but because something in your bones remembered?
And if the beauty in you could speak — truly speak —
What would it say to the beauty in another?
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