What is beauty? Beauty is fundamentally excellence.
To find beauty in the world is to recognize a pure radiating excellence, an uncontaminated innocence; it is the blameless.
What is it to be beyond blame? To be beyond shame? It's not to be wrong. It's not to be right.
It is to be correct, to be correct in your thoughts in how you model reality in your mind such that you are awake enough to manifest the best possible future that "could be" but which is actually simultaneous with the life-timeline on which you currently traveling by choice of your uncountable decisions you make every day.
Every moment is the eternal present. There is notime else other than this moment, now alone.
In this moment now alone is discovered the unfathomable mystery of choice, this incredibly strange capacity to know we can choose between destinies which span a limitless spectrum of possibility. This is not a trivial matter. This fact of our immediate experience is of profound and urgently important significance.
So to be beyond being wrong in some way in thinking, articulation or action is the way to blamelessness.
The blameless are the innocent, and it is the innocent that shine with a radiance that is undeniable and completely obvious to those others that are also blameless. Do not confuse this state of blamelessness with psychopathy or sociopathy. The innocent are the non-guilty. They are not blameless because they are insane and have no conscience. It is precisely because they choose to persist to remain awake in this one and only eternal moment that they wield responsibility to inject meaning and love into the world by committing to the correct, not the wrong, not the right, but devoting themselves to the correct, which is essentially identical with an imperishable love for truth.
What is true is the beautiful. Truth, beauty, innocence, blamelessness, correctness, excellence.
What is beautiful is the correct in truth, the sole worship of the blameless.
You cannot be guilty as long as you are eternally choosing to awaken from the dark dreams of fear that have haunted your soul forever.
There is no end. There is no beginning. There is only choosing in this one eternal moment that simultaneously is unfolding one of an infinite range of possible to manifest destinies so incomprehensibly vast to the mind it can easily be forgotten. All those possible futures are simultaneously existing with the present circumstance in which you find yourself. By instrumentality of choice you select which timeline that currently exists at this only moment which you have to decide or not decide, and choosing not to decide is still deciding anyhow.
Devote yourself as much as you are able, as much as you can, and as much as you are willing to the pursuit of the most true, the most beautiful, and the most good. The only way to become a buddha is not to decide to do so. You just do it.
You will be aware you are choosing at first, but you will learn to choose so well that you won't notice yourself doing it.
That is going beyond trying. There is no try; but do, or do not.
The skill of choosing correctly and naturally is what shines as excellence as it is increasingly mastered.
That is why beauty is fundamentally excellence, because in the excellence is the mastery of having transcended choice and hesitation.
You have regained awareness of Now and have refound the Flow.
No longer is there any doubt as to what is the correct action.
Right seeing, right action. No lack of attention, no wrong action.

Interesting thoughts. In my experience there are many kinds of beauty, but still i think most of us intuitively tend to believe think/believe that there must be one overarching, defining characteristic or principle.

But what would that characteristic or principle be?

Is beauty something that just hits you, is it like an instinct that's being simply triggered by certain stimuli? Like a smell can make you feel hungry or sick? Or is it something that you have to recognize first?
Recognition ofcourse, is something that can happen almost automatically, and may feel just like a triggered instinct. Like we recognize faces instantly, or spoken or written words.

I tend to believe that it has to be a bit of both. I think that the aesthetic experience cannot exist without the most primal instincts, but not without the involvement of cognition at some level, either.

Or at least, that most certainly must be the case in the apreciation of music, poetry, or other forms of literature.

But is it also the case in visual aesthetics? Or the beauty of nature?

I don't know.

Thanks, I enjoy your thoughts as well!
When I am considering what is the beautiful, I cannot help but think back to the visions I had on mushroom trips; visions that I can never forget, so impressed was I by them I have become a disciple devoted to the beautiful.
The beautiful is absolutely everywhere. I just could not believe what I was seeing. I was astonished. My friend on the same trip was terrified, but I was seeing nothing less than what for me was the plain obvious fact that the world and my self inseparable with it is impossibly and divinely beautiful, it is perfection, it is excellence, it is elegance, it is grace.
That's what reality is.
I really believe that psilocybin upregulates neuropsychologically perception of and hence inevitable appreciation of the divine geometry of existence. And perhaps there exist other methodologies of reaching the same awareness.
That's what I'm thinking of when I'm thinking of the beautiful.
Intelligence is of course necessary to recognize what you're looking at as yourself.
Because what you do not see as yourself you are alienated from and hence afraid of what you cannot possibly understand by alienation of that thing from yourself.

Yeah, i know what you mean. I so often have experienced what i could only describe as pure beauty, on psychedelics. I don't know if that is a different kind of beauty, or just beauty, enhanced and more intensely experienced by the unfiltered openness of the mind, at these moments.

Maybe experiencing beauty is a way to unite the cognitive and more primitive, deeper, animalistic parts of the human mind. A way to experience unity. Unity with yourself, and therefore, with nature.
I would say that is indeed a kind of excellence.

Well said.
In birth and death we are one with nature.
Who is it that carries this corpse around.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I wish in this moment, that moar of the world could see through your eye. Beautiful words that ring true for me! Thanks for sharing this!