When you experience those moments of presence, you likely didn’t realise that you were briefly in a state of no mind. This is because the gap between that state and the influx of thought was to narrow. Your satori may only have lasted for a few seconds before the mind came in, but it was there; otherwise, you would don’t have experienced the beauty. Mind can neither recognise nor create beauty. Only for a few seconds, while you were completely present, was that beauty or that sacredness there. Because of the narrowness of that gap and a lack of vigilance and alter ness on your part, you were probably unable to see the fundamental difference between the perception, the thoughtless awareness of beauty, and the naming and interpreting of it as thought : The time gap was so small that is seemed to be a single process. The truth is, however, that the moment thought came in, all you had was a memory of it.

The wider the time gap between perception and thought, the more depth there is to you as a human being, which is to say the more conscious you are. Many people are so imprisoned in their mind that the beauty of nature does not really exist for them. They might say, “What a pretty flower,” but that’s just a mechanical mental labelling. Because they are not still, not present, they don’t truly see the flower, don’t feel its essence, its holiness, just as they don’t know themselves, don’t feel their own essence, their own holiness.

Because we live in such a mind dominated culture, most modern art, architecture, music, and literature are devoid of beauty, if inner essence, with very few exceptions. The reason is that the people who create those things cannot even for a moment free themselves from their mind. So they are never in touch with that place within where true creativity and beauty arise. The mind left to itself creates monstrosities, and not only in art galleries.

Reference : The Power of Now. Eckhart Tolle.