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

I think that, between the young people in this country and in others who are not going to sign their lives away as slaves to a murderous global empire, and the countless veterans who went to Iraq believing the American apple pie bullshit - and came home having paid the price of the lie, and are now facing a governmental apparatus that extols soldiers' "sacrifice" for propaganda purposes, while leaving wounded veterans to suffer agony alone - this empire is rotting from the inside. 

What do we DO?  I think that we can begin to examine how a paradigm of obedience, asking permission of others to do what only concerns us, of denial, of suppressed despair, and recovered joy, creativity and orgasmicity inhabits us at the feeling level.  This empire is playing itself out.  And I'm not just talking about Iraq, DC, Denver, Minneapolis, and the thousands of U.S. military bases around the world:  I'm talking about how we as human beings relate to other human beings imperially.  Perhaps the emergence of a culture that truly recognizes that human beings are NOT the property of other human beings will emerge out of this, that our person and the fruits of our labors are NOT up for a vote.  That there is no justice in a culture that condones plunder at the ballot box.  Perhaps we need another 8 years of Bush's equivalent to push us even further into the logical, lived conclusions of our cultural premises.  And then people we see "democracy" for the farce that it is: the notion that a majority. of 50%+1 of those who buy into the voting scam, has a right to plunder, imprison, punish and murder other individuals in their person and property for whatever the hell they'd like. 

More and more people in the world are no longer asking for permission to speak their peace.  People like Gorki Águila, in Cuba, whose hard-edge metal rock and caustic lyrics expose the hypocrisy of Fidel and Raúl Castro's 50+ year dictatorship and enslavement of the Cuban people. As Gorki says, and I paraphrase, "what does it matter if they send me to prison when our entire society is a prison whether we're inside or outside of those prison walls,"  in a society that imprisons people for "social dangerousness."  Go to http://www.democracynow.org/2008/9/4/eight_members_of_rnc_activist_group and read about the young people arrested BEFORE the Republican National Convention and charged as TERRORISTS for disrupting the RNC and the "criminal act, in this case at least a felony, that’s designed to influence or coerce public opinion or to disrupt a public assembly." 

Same as Cuba.  Try to influence public opinion, speak up in a public gathering, exercise your right to free speech, assembly, petition for grievances or the right of the press to document what public officials are doing, and you could be jailed, tortured, and even executed as a "terrorist."

May you be inspired!






http://iwitnessvideo.info/blog/108.htmlhttp://washingtontimes.com/news/2008/sep/04/st-paul-minn-8212-fearing-demonstrations-from-ron-/

http://www.dailynewscaster.com/2008/09/04/secret-service-confiscates-books-button-from-ron-paul-delegates/

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080915/kors

http://www.lewrockwell.com/rozeff/rozeff217.html

http://www.lewrockwell.com/engelhardt/engelhardt352.html

http://carlosmiller.com/2008/08/05/deputy-threatened-to-arrest-12-year-old-daughter-with-unlawful-photography/

http://codepinkdc.blogspot.com/2007/04/codepink-supports-peace-coalition.html

http://www.bobbarr2008.com/files/lettertosos.pdf

If you've ever wondered how the IMF (International Monetary Fund) and World Bank work, and the repercussions of a global, debt-based monetary system, coupled with corporatism (where taxpayers subsidize a few, select corporations who then fund the major political competitors), this documentary on Jamaica is pure gold.  One of the things that I found profound about it is the very clear tie-in between the sociocultural manifestations of an underlying economic reality.  In this case, Jamaica, caricaturized by the Rastaman smoking a spleef, which is yet another caricature of country people with local, productive culture who are having all of their self-owned avenues of sustenance cut off, and having all of their avenues of worship illegalized.

Then, of course, there are the all-inclusive resorts, where people with money can go to Jamaica and enjoy what the local Jamaicans can't. 

Though one can perhaps distance oneself from the plights of Jamaicans, perhaps we do well to bear in mind that the U.S. today is also the exporter of one primary commodity: debt.  Our plight is not so different, it's just that our credit accounts are being further and further extended by the rest of the world.  The day that they decide to face the reality of our bankruptcy (economic, cultural, legal, political), then the entire world will pay and we, too, will be called, once again, to pony up.  I don't think that day is so far away, but that's me thinking.

Anyways, this is beautifully done and is 1h20 long, so you might want to cook up some popcorn for this one:

http://freedocumentaries.org/theatre.php?filmid=91&id=798&wh=1000x720

and, by the way, if you seek to understand how the world is working at a deep level, there are a number of other documentaries available to us at

http://freedocumentaries.org/

As you watch the Jamaica documentary, please notice how the so-called "free market system" promoted by the New World Order is anything but:  they prohibit the Jamaican government from subsidizing or even giving low-priced loans to their farmers, while obliging them to open THEIR markets to SUBSIDIZED agricultural products from the U.S. and from U.S.-controlled corporations in Latin America. 

What we are seeing around the world is a sophisticated form of slavery and the question that lies before us in the political realm is not whether you support government-funded warfare, or if you'd rather have it fund government-education, healthcare, and social programs (which essentially amount to domestic cultural warfare under the guise of so-called "welfare"). 

The question is much more fundamental than that: 

WHOSE PROPERTY ARE YOU?

Are you YOUR INDIVIDUAL property, or the property of other groups, gangs and governments of individuals?  For an individual to be the property of other individuals, singly or as a group, IS slavery!  Period! 

Our current political conundrum arises from a number of factors, but essential to it all is the fact that very few people have a coherent Philosophy of Liberty.   You can use this link to share an understanding of Liberty with others.

Kind Regards,

O

If you find these videos on different economies, health systems, and other parameters of human life, check out the amazing tools at www.gapminder.org

Here is some pure, H.L. Mencken acerbic wit.  My favorite writer from the U.S., Inc.  Which is YOUR favorite quote?

No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.

Freedom of press is limited to those who own one.

Those who can -- do. Those who can't -- teach.

Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable.

Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.

Bachelors know more about women than married men; if they didn't they'd be married too.

Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who would want to live in an institution.

Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.

Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.

Hanging one scoundrel, it appears, does not deter the next. Well, what of it? The first one is at least disposed of.

Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.

It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.

Capitalism undoubtedly has certain boils and blotches upon it, but has it as many as government? Has it as many as marriage? Has it as many as religion? I doubt it. It is the only basic institution of modern man that shows any genuine health and vigor.

Jury - A group of 12 people, who, having lied to the judge about their health, hearing, and business engagements, have failed to fool him.

...the great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom respectable. No virtuous man--that is, virtuous in the Y.M.C.A. sense--has ever painted a picture worth looking at, or written a symphony worth hearing, or a book worth reading...

The trouble with Communism is the Communists, just as the trouble with Christianity is the Christians.

The cosmos is a gigantic flywheel making 10,000 revolutions per minute. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it.

Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.

A man full of faith is simply one who has lost (or never had) the capacity for clear and realistic thought. He is not a mere ass; he is actually ill. Worse, he is incurable.

In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for. As for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.

Liberals have many tails and chase them all.

Remorse--Regret that one waited so long to do it.

...school teachers, taking them by and large, are probably the most ignorant and stupid class of men in the whole group of menial workers.

Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of Jackals by Jackasses.

One seldom discovers a true believer that is worth knowing.

Suppose two-thirds of the members of the national House of Representatives were dumped into the Washington garbage incinerator tomorrow, what would we lose to offset our gain of their salaries and the salaries of their parasites?

We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.

A man may be a fool and not know it -- but not if he is married.

Truth would quickly cease to become stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it.

Democracy is the art of running the circus from the monkey cage.

The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore.

Creator - A comedian whose audience is afraid to laugh.

A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.

It is the fundamental theory of all the more recent American law...that the average citizen is half-witted, and hence not to be trusted to either his own devices or his own thoughts.

A celebrity is one who is known by many people he is glad he doesn't know.

A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.

The New Deal began, like the Salvation Army, by promising to save humanity. It ended, again like the Salvation Army, by running flop-houses and disturbing the peace.

For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.

Lawyer: One who protects us against robbery by taking away the temptation.

Judge: A law student who marks his own papers.

Misogynist - A man who hates women as much as women hate one another.

It is inaccurate to say I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office.

Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.

Tis more blessed to give than to receive; for example, wedding presents.

A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.

A politician is an animal which can sit on a fence and yet keep both ears to the ground.

Demagogue: One who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.

Time is the great legalizer, even in the field of morals.

Immorality: The morality of those who are having a better time.

Jealousy: The theory that some other fellow has just as little taste.

Self-respect: The secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious.

Sunday: A day given over by Americans to wishing that they themselves were dead and in Heaven, and that their neighbors were dead and in Hell.

Sunday School: A prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.

The argument that capital punishment degrades the state is moonshine, for if that were true then it would degrade the state to send men to war... The state, in truth, is degraded in its very nature: a few butcheries cannot do it any further damage.

The most common of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.

A professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many compromises and submit to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a streetwalker.

Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.

Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends.

Firmness in decision is often merely a form of stupidity. It indicates an inability to think the same thing out twice.

Truth - Something somehow discreditable to someone.

Philosophy consists very largely of one philosopher arguing that all other philosophers are jackasses. He usually proves it, and I should add that he also usually proves that he is one himself.

Life may not be exactly pleasant, but it is at least not dull. Heave yourself into Hell today, and you may miss, tomorrow or next day, another Scopes trial, or another War to End War, or perchance a rich and buxom widow with all her first husband's clothes. There are always more Hardings hatching. I advocate hanging on as long as possible.

The fact that I have no remedy for all the sorrows of the world is no reason for my accepting yours. It simply supports the strong probability that yours is a fake.

It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods. If such a board actually exists it operates precisely like the board of a corporation that is losing money.

The believing mind is externally impervious to evidence. The most that can be accomplished with it is to induce it to substitute one delusion for another. It rejects all overt evidence as wicked...

Why assume so glibly that the God who presumably created the universe is still running it? It is certainly perfectly conceivable that He may have finished it and then turned it over to lesser gods to operate. In the same way many human institutions are turned over to grossly inferior men. This is true, for example, of most universities, and of all great newspapers.

The Christian church, in its attitude toward science, shows the mind of a more or less enlightened man of the Thirteenth Century. It no longer believes that the earth is flat, but it is still convinced that prayer can cure after medicine fails.

Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule--and both commonly succeed, and are right... The United States has never developed an aristocracy really disinterested or an intelligentsia really intelligent. Its history is simply a record of vacillations between two gangs of frauds.

The theory seems to be that so long as a man is a failure he is one of God's chillun, but that as soon as he succeeds he is taken over by the Devil.

It is often argued that religion is valuable because it makes men good, but even if this were true it would not be a proof that religion is true. That would be an extension of pragmatism beyond endurance. Santa Claus makes children good in precisely the same way, and yet no one would argue seriously that the fact proves his existence. The defense of religion is full of such logical imbecilities.

Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

 

Great interview of Walter Block on the Non-Aggression Principle.

And to accompany that, The Philosophy of Liberty the clearest presentation I have seen of what constitutes liberty and the practice of liberty.