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Most of us know what we find visually beautiful: great works of art, lush landscapes, international supermodels, or the joy of a loved one, for example. Auditory beauty is easy too: music that is loved; a voice you'd be content to hear reading a phone book aloud; children's laughter. You know a beautiful smell when you smell it, a beautiful taste when it's in your mouth, even the difference between velvet and sandpaper under your fingers.

Helen Keller once said, "The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart." Exactly what qualities distinguish a beautiful mind from an ugly mind?

It's not intelligence alone. Mensa, the high-IQ society, admits anyone who can score in the top two percent of a goodly number of multiple-choice tests. Members of Mensa would be the first to admit that Mensa has its full and fair share of jerks, fools, and, um, "anal sphincters." It's not creativity alone; one of the stock characters of drama is the great artist who turns out to be selfish, crude, boorish, libertine, or venal.

The movie "A Beautiful Mind" was about a mathematician of extraordinary genius and creativity who happened also to be psychotic. But is the combination of genius and creativity what defines a beautiful mind — even despite madness — or is there something more?

Perhaps the way to an answer is to consider the qualities of an ugly mind. An ugly mind assumes the worst about others: He's a thief, she's a whore, they're [bigoted epithets]. An ugly mind trends toward violence and criminality. Ugliness of mind delights in the pain and degradation of others. Ugly minds are mean-spirited, disrespectful, petty, uncivilized, vindictive, and sadistic.

Beautiful sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and tactile sensations please us, inspire us, evoke feelings of balance and harmony, and resonate with significance. At its most profound, beauty can give us inspiration and a sense of meaning.

A person is said to have inner beauty who has intelligence, charm, graciousness, elegance, kindness, generosity, and compassion. But these qualities could also define a person who has a beautiful character but sharply limited intelligence. Did Forrest Gump have a beautiful mind?

It seems that the movie "A Beautiful Mind" was a step in the right direction, but not the end of the journey. A beautiful mind has intelligence and creativity, yes; often it has high intelligence and enormous creativity. But a beautiful mind is also a loving one, one that assumes the best about others, one that is large-spirited, civilized, forgiving, compassionate, and generous. A beautiful mind comes up with beautiful thoughts that inspire us and that help us find meaning and purpose in our lives.

Best of all, a beautiful mind is attainable in ways that physical beauty is not. You can look like Quasimodo and have a beautiful mind. Practice forgiveness, compassion, and generosity, whether or not you feel the emotions, and in time, with practice, you will become a forgiving, loving, and generous person. "Practice acts of random kindness and senseless beauty," and in time, with practice, you will become kind and beautiful in character.

It's a lifelong process. But in the end, when you die at the age of 114, would you rather be remembered as being as rich as Scrooge, as famous as Hitler, or as powerful as Kim Jong Il? Or would you rather be mourned by everyone who knew you, and to have much weeping and wailing over the loss of such a beautiful mind?

Learn more about this author, Mary W. Matthews.
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