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descartes
June 2009 
An Ikebana of the Human Spirit
Posted on Sep 3rd, 2008
by 
Little Big O
Little Big O
This weekend I saw Anthony Bourdain’s TV show where he samples some of the finest cuisine in Japan. One episode showed him taking an Ikebana class from a master in the ancient Japanese art of what Westerners might call “flower arrangement” and which the Japanese may see as more of an art of harmonizing humanity with Heaven and Earth rather than about “making flowers look pretty.” Perhaps you’ve seen some of these sparse and stunning compositions.
The ikebana episode was short, less than 5 minutes,, yet its message was profound. The Ikebana master explains to Tony how beginning Ikebana practitioners often try to place the flowers so that the result is “creative, artistic, or pleasing” to the arranger. He then explains that this is not the spirit of Ikebana. The spirit of Ikebana is to place the elements of plants, container, etc., in such a manner that THEY are happy together. In other words, Ikebana is not a form of self-expression; it is an art of facilitating the fulfilled expression of what IS.
As this little lesson was transmitted via the television, it struck me how this lesson truly lies at the heart of coming into relationship with Being:
Themes of “becoming someone,” of achievement & purpose often color our experience as a nagging, doubting, underlying tension that set the tone for our waking hours. How often does this sense of pushing ourselves “beyond” in pursuit of something to quiet this inner hunger color our day to such an extent that it seems that this tension is the ground of our existence? In our social life, the “self” is the “perpetual ephemeral” we are continuously “improving” and putting on display to others, eager for approval. While approval may come, its satisfaction is transient. We are only too aware of the artifice that belies the “self” we present to others.
And so we take another course, workshop, retreat and even hatch up some new “method” for a novel flavor of solace. We seek to improve our “self,” this elusive inner amalgam of all the desires, rules, prohibitions and esthetics that others brought into our existence and that we rework to make our “own.” We try to live “artistically,” so to speak.
Yet we are not this constructed “self” and so often, our experience of the Beingness that we ARE eludes us. We spend our lives like crazed mice running headlong on “Descartes’ Mental Mouse Wheel:” caught in thought!
"I think therefore I am."
We have faith that if we run around that wheel with better thoughts, lighter propositions, more elegant assumptions, more skillful presentations, that somehow the landscape, and our experience, will change. This is the beginner’s Ikebana of the “Self,” the conglomeration of infectious memes which we seek to handle and rework “artistically,” often experiencing frustration when the Being we are doesn’t obey the program we have for it.
Another option remains, the Ikebana of the Human Spirit: Something is here. Something is breathing, writing, thinking, feeling. Though I may have endless ideas about what it is, it is not any of those ideas. It IS. Right here. How do we approach Being with the sensitivity we might approach an extravagant, unknown flower; or an untamed, powerful creature we come face-to-face with in the woods, daring to behold the nature, fragrance and impulse of this Being? How do we come to taste just-this? Not seeking to twist our “selves” into some new-fangled display, but daring to behold our Being with the same reverence we have for the first shoot of corn we planted as its first, round, green leaves emerge through the soil, full of promise, vitality and vulnerability; or the grizzly who emerges from over the lip of some glacial river embankment we were just hiking toward?
How do we come to this Being to court and encourage the fulfillment of its already-here magnificence?
This is the Ikebana of the Human Spirit. Being walks a path that defies notions of ordinary/extraordinary. Its movement is unitive with ants, dragonflies, stones, streams, bull moose, garbage trucks, marauding armies, nuns and airplanes between heaven and earth. The unfolding of Being defies our well-intentioned plans. Heaven and earth are right here. They are not someplace we go to. We are here. We grace this heaven-earth space with our shenanigans. We are neither extravagant nor insignificant. We are. When we cease to divide our experience between plain and superlative, and return with our senses to the Lived sensation and experience of Being, we discover that this adventure which we claim as “ours” is Unknowable by Knowledge and yet Integral to our entire Experience. Our Experience of Being is unavailable to knowledge, yet 100% available to be Experienced. Being can not be dismembered on the dissection table of Knowledge, yet every morsel is made to be savored at the Feast of Experience, every bone licked clean.
Beholding and Savoring, at last, the Magnificent Ordinariness of Being, we slow the spin of Descartes’ Rat Race Insanitorium and return to Delight in the Unfolding Flowering of our Hearts.
Being Is.
Nothing to say.
We Are...
Already...
All Ready...
©2008 Little Big O
The ikebana episode was short, less than 5 minutes,, yet its message was profound. The Ikebana master explains to Tony how beginning Ikebana practitioners often try to place the flowers so that the result is “creative, artistic, or pleasing” to the arranger. He then explains that this is not the spirit of Ikebana. The spirit of Ikebana is to place the elements of plants, container, etc., in such a manner that THEY are happy together. In other words, Ikebana is not a form of self-expression; it is an art of facilitating the fulfilled expression of what IS.
As this little lesson was transmitted via the television, it struck me how this lesson truly lies at the heart of coming into relationship with Being:
Themes of “becoming someone,” of achievement & purpose often color our experience as a nagging, doubting, underlying tension that set the tone for our waking hours. How often does this sense of pushing ourselves “beyond” in pursuit of something to quiet this inner hunger color our day to such an extent that it seems that this tension is the ground of our existence? In our social life, the “self” is the “perpetual ephemeral” we are continuously “improving” and putting on display to others, eager for approval. While approval may come, its satisfaction is transient. We are only too aware of the artifice that belies the “self” we present to others.
And so we take another course, workshop, retreat and even hatch up some new “method” for a novel flavor of solace. We seek to improve our “self,” this elusive inner amalgam of all the desires, rules, prohibitions and esthetics that others brought into our existence and that we rework to make our “own.” We try to live “artistically,” so to speak.
Yet we are not this constructed “self” and so often, our experience of the Beingness that we ARE eludes us. We spend our lives like crazed mice running headlong on “Descartes’ Mental Mouse Wheel:” caught in thought!
"I think therefore I am."
We have faith that if we run around that wheel with better thoughts, lighter propositions, more elegant assumptions, more skillful presentations, that somehow the landscape, and our experience, will change. This is the beginner’s Ikebana of the “Self,” the conglomeration of infectious memes which we seek to handle and rework “artistically,” often experiencing frustration when the Being we are doesn’t obey the program we have for it.
Another option remains, the Ikebana of the Human Spirit: Something is here. Something is breathing, writing, thinking, feeling. Though I may have endless ideas about what it is, it is not any of those ideas. It IS. Right here. How do we approach Being with the sensitivity we might approach an extravagant, unknown flower; or an untamed, powerful creature we come face-to-face with in the woods, daring to behold the nature, fragrance and impulse of this Being? How do we come to taste just-this? Not seeking to twist our “selves” into some new-fangled display, but daring to behold our Being with the same reverence we have for the first shoot of corn we planted as its first, round, green leaves emerge through the soil, full of promise, vitality and vulnerability; or the grizzly who emerges from over the lip of some glacial river embankment we were just hiking toward?
How do we come to this Being to court and encourage the fulfillment of its already-here magnificence?
This is the Ikebana of the Human Spirit. Being walks a path that defies notions of ordinary/extraordinary. Its movement is unitive with ants, dragonflies, stones, streams, bull moose, garbage trucks, marauding armies, nuns and airplanes between heaven and earth. The unfolding of Being defies our well-intentioned plans. Heaven and earth are right here. They are not someplace we go to. We are here. We grace this heaven-earth space with our shenanigans. We are neither extravagant nor insignificant. We are. When we cease to divide our experience between plain and superlative, and return with our senses to the Lived sensation and experience of Being, we discover that this adventure which we claim as “ours” is Unknowable by Knowledge and yet Integral to our entire Experience. Our Experience of Being is unavailable to knowledge, yet 100% available to be Experienced. Being can not be dismembered on the dissection table of Knowledge, yet every morsel is made to be savored at the Feast of Experience, every bone licked clean.
Beholding and Savoring, at last, the Magnificent Ordinariness of Being, we slow the spin of Descartes’ Rat Race Insanitorium and return to Delight in the Unfolding Flowering of our Hearts.
Being Is.
Nothing to say.
We Are...
Already...
All Ready...
©2008 Little Big O
Access: Public
That’s what it is like to live on this land. I experience it rather than think it. What’s to think? Sure, I might think, I’ll mow a path here. I’ll move some wood now, or cut a dead tree, or make a fire under the stars tonight. That’s shenanigans. Being is what this land has shown me year after year, and finally sometimes, I am quiet enough to Be it. More and more often that is true.
I embark in a week on a long trip away from the land? Why? All I need is here. Wanderlust. Curiosity. Various pairs of eyes to gaze into after long virtual acquaintance, various arms to fall into, and work. Drawings, conversations, landscapes, ceremonies, loved ones, familiar and new. More shenanigans, and more tasty bones to lick clean.
Too many words when I have nothing to say.
O’s metaphors.
Carla,
Sometimes you are “quiet enough to Be it.” What are you when you're not quiet “enough”? Who is there when you are “quiet enough” and who is there when you are “not quiet enough”?
Can you taste how absurdly hilarious and peaceful the space of this question invites us into is? This is the space that our lives are unfolding in, beyond our ideas of it, our desires for it. Not just the good days, the days when our shit is rankled.
Ever since our mother's first frown we have strived to be “quiet enough.” We want the tender corn shoot of ourselves pushing up through the earth, AND we refuse the unpredictable grizzly that inhabits us, the one that might kill a black bear in a rage and rip its claws into a tree, or a person, or sit contentedly eating goose berries while it scratches its crotch.
Who is there when we are “not quiet enough” and still spinning on the Rat Race Insanitorium?
Who is it that becomes this and that, beyond all our efforts at becoming?
Daring to taste this “Who?” is the invitation back into the experience that Being is having right here.
It solves nothing. It improves nothing. It just is as-it-is.
I absolutely loved this post O!!!
Deepest Bow!
I am guilty of efforting artistic flower arragements and too many workshops or self-improvement activities. However, the itch I attempt to scratch in connecting to ”being” is described beautifully in this post.
I am convinced with the latest learnings about the conscious and subconscious mind that what lies in the conscioius mind in terms of thoughts, beliefs, words isn't necessarily so at the subconscious level.
This is to say, attending a workshop to shape myself a particular way may have some, little, or no impact in the subconscious. In fact surface level activities and practices adhered to with great discipline may not be believed at all underneath it all. If one believes that Applied Kinesiology has any value at all, there are fundamentalist Christians of great fervor who do not believe these things deep down in when tested. Interesting…
If one does not believe in AK, then a simple story suffices. A son of a long line of Baptist preachers and adherents who has siblings that are deacons, pastors, and great advocates of the church decides to break away and follow Islam (True Story). In conscious belief system style consistent with their beliefs, he is headed straight for hell after the body dies.
What actually happened? After much discussion, upset, and time, the family decided to love and support his decision and he remained at some level of good standing (not the best, but good) with the family. This is in direct conflict with conscious, hell fire and brimstome beliefs.
I am seeing this for myself recently. That is why I loved this part especially:
“When we cease to divide our experience between plain and superlative, and return with our senses to the Lived sensation and experience of Being, we discover that this adventure which we claim as “ours” is Unknowable by Knowledge and yet Integral to our entire Experience. Our Experience of Being is unavailable to knowledge, yet 100% available to be Experienced. ”
I don't know who is running on the wheel, but I am betting it is a brew mixed from memory, desire, judgments, beliefs, and sensory input downloaded on to the blank slate over time. Much of this may be unconscious. So here is my question. Is the experience of “being” influenced by these things? I am guessing the sensations are. Being seems to be more of the clear and transparent aliveness a.k.a source.
What do you think?
z
Dear Zen,
Yes, who is the wheel runner? Where did s/he come from?
Yes, conscious mind, subconscious mind are not the same. Okay. But underlying subconscious and conscious mind are other textures of experience. Our English language is astonishingly poor in its appreciation for these distinctions. But they are right here in our flesh, inviting us beyond language. Something is here. It thinks consciously. It thinks subconsciously. It eats, drinks, sleeps, defecates, has sex, and launches itself into three-dimensional reality in pursuit of its next “mission.” But if this thing that is, right-here, just stays right-here, just breathing, just sitting, is there any other terrain for awareness to play in than discursive thinking? What is the felt-texture of this Being now? and now? and now? and now?
This is not a remedy, it's simply an invitation. There are dimensions of our Being that we already are that are way more curious, sensual, engaging and delicious than cognition. Nothing wrong with cognition: but if you've got a superlative radio, why ONLY leave it parked between channels where there's only static?
Star systems gone supernova gaze out from the eyes of our “I” - and we mope around like orphans hoping for a miracle.
So Beautiful!
Love is Curious,
O
hahahaha O
You are as sly as Nut Butterfly in catching my conditioned language! Enough? Should? Bah!
Just now mowing, I make a lot of noise, but am as quiet as can be, present to the disturbance, the fragrance, the critters, the up above, the down below. The shift in energy when the curves of the land are revealed, and spaces opened up. The bees are still feeding on the fall flowers so that's enough mowing for now. What's in the woods! Blackberries! Time gather more! And some stones for the sweat lodge.
The Land is so beautiful today, all of life is, I want everyone to have it. Just come, bring a bottle of water and some food, work gloves, a blanket, a book, a sketch pad. Just come and be here. It is so sweet.
The extent of my philosophy today is sweat running down my back and cockles burrs stuck to my socks, and a blackberry seed in my teeth.
When are you coming?
I just heard another apple drop from the tree and bounce once on the ground. I am going to go get it.
Thank you Carla! You are so beautiful!
Indeed O! And Thank you so much for pointing it out. Truly inspiring it was!
Blissings!
Ben
Thank you for the Zenness of your Benness!
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
You guys are very beautiful… All Ways…
love
Soul-Sistah!
It takes One to Be One.
hahahahahaha
…rolling on the ceiling laughing….
(Wanna schnorkle-cavorkle!?)
Hahahahahahahaha!