The Sea of Beauty is one of many analogies and similes employed to describe a high vision of reality. Some writers have employed this term upon having arrived at the most mature, the farthest, and the highest stages of the philosophical or mystical search. It is described variously as the Beatific Vision

Beatific vision

The beatific vision - in Christian theology is the ultimate direct self communication of God to the individual person, when she or he reaches, as a member of redeemed humanity in the communion of saints, perfect salvation in its entirety, i.e. heaven...

, enlightenment

Enlightenment (spiritual)

Enlightenment in a secular context often means the "full comprehension of a situation", but in spiritual terms the word alludes to a spiritual revelation or deep insight into the meaning and purpose of all things, communication with or understanding of the mind of God, profound spiritual...

, nirvana

Nirvana

Nirvāṇa ; ) is a central concept in Indian religions. In sramanic thought, it is the state of being free from suffering. In Hindu philosophy, it is the union with the Supreme being through moksha...

, satori

Satori

is a Japanese Buddhist term for enlightenment that literally means "understanding". In the Zen Buddhist tradition, satori refers to a flash of sudden awareness, or individual enlightenment, and is considered a "first step" or embarkation toward nirvana....

, Kensho

Kensho

Kenshō is a Japanese term for enlightenment experiences. It is most commonly referred to in Zen Buddhism.Literally it means "seeing one's nature" or "true self." It generally "refers to the realization of nonduality of subject and object." Frequently used in juxtaposition with satori , there is...

, Bodhi

Bodhi

Bodhi is both a Pāli and Sanskrit word traditionally translated into English with the word "enlightenment", but which means awakened. In Buddhism it is the knowledge possessed by a Buddha into the nature of things...

, awareness, true knowledge, etc.

Those who claim to have had such a high and final vision sometimes report that reality is, at its deepest level, utterly unified, like a vast ocean, and that it is unutterably beautiful, or rather, source of all beauty. Such likenesses are drawn many places, including the mystical poetry of Sufi Jalal'udin Rumi and the writings of Plato.

Rumi, in this unidentified excerpt, writes:

"The shop of Oneness,

The Ocean that has many harbours,

Yet where there is no division

Between man and man, or woman,

But only a unity of souls

In the process of return to their Creator,

Whose breath lives inside each one

An helps to guide us home."

Plato, in his Plato's Symposium

Symposium (Plato)

The Symposium is a philosophical text by Plato dated c. 385–380 BCE. It concerns itself at one level with the genesis, purpose and nature of love....

(210d-e) writes (in the character of the priestess Diotima):

The result is that he will see the beauty of knowledge... the lover is turned to the great sea
of beauty, and gazing upon this, he gives birth to many gloriously beautiful ideas and theories,
in unstinting love of wisdom, until, having grown and been strengthened there, he
catches sight of such knowledge, and it is the knowledge of such beauty...

... The man ... who has beheld beautiful things in the right order and correctly,
is now coming to the goal of Loving: all of a sudden he will catch sight of something
wonderfully beautiful in its nature; that, Socrates, is the reason for all his earlier labors."