They say “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” (presumably Shakespeare, but I’m not going to look it up). What we mean by this is that different people find different things and people beautiful.
I would like to suggest another meaning: when we feel beauty, what is happening is that something external to us is reacting to some latent part of our selves. It is like a sympathetic vibration, like when one tuning fork transmits its vibration to another. You have to have that receptive capacity.
I was walking out of the gym the other day, and the sun was shining brilliantly on an autumn yellow’d (why not?) tree, and it struck me that it was falling on some sensitive part of me that was reacting to it.
Would personal growth not consist in some measure in increasing our receptivity to beauty, to finding it often and in small things? Would that not ease problems of access to optimal states?