Wabi-Sabi: The Beauty of Imperfection

By Tai Carmen

“Wabi-Sabi is a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent & incomplete.” ~ Leonard Koren

“Wabi is the beauty that springs from the creative energy that flows in all things, animate or not. It’s a beauty that, like nature itself, can appear with dark and light, sad and joyful, rough and gentle.” ~ Makoto Ueda

“Beauty is radiant and tactile, not airbrushed.” ~ Joe Hefferon 

The term Wabi-Sabi represents a Japanese aesthetic philosophy that embraces authenticity over perfection.

Characterized by asymmetry, irregularity, simplicity, economy, austerity—modesty & intimacy—wabi-sabi values natural objects & processes as emblems of our transitory existence. Rust, woodgrain, freckles—the texture of life.

Developed in the 15th century in reaction to the lavish, ostentatious ornamentation of the aristocracy, wabi-sabi centers around three principals: “nothing is perfect, nothing lasts, and nothing is finished.”

“The initial inspiration for wabi-sabi’s metaphysical, spiritual, and moral principles come from ideas about simplicity, naturalness, and acceptance of reality found in Taoism and Chinese Zen Buddhism,” notes Leonard Koren (“Wabi-Sabi For Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers.“)

Though the concept of wabi-sabi is vast & elusive, most agree the closest Western translation is “rustic.”

“Wabi” refers to stark, transient beauty, while “sabi” denotes the poetry of natural patina & aging, with undertones of yūgen—profound grace and subtlety. Age, damage & natural processes are not seen as flaws, but as deepening & enriching an object’s beauty & profundity.

It is not only natural process that wabi-sabi celebrates, but subtlety & suggestion.

“Wabi-sabi is underplayed and modest,” details Robyn Griggs Lawrence, “the kind of quiet, undeclared beauty that waits patiently to be discovered. It’s a fragmentary glimpse: the branch representing the entire tree …. the moon 90 percent obscured behind a ribbon of cloud. It’s a richly mellow beauty that’s striking but not obvious, that you can imagine having around you for a long, long time…”

Intentionality is key.

“Wabi-sabi is never messy or slovenly,” adds Lawrence. “Worn things take on their magic only in settings where it’s clear they don’t harbor bugs or grime. One senses that they’ve survived to bear the marks of time precisely because they’ve been so well cared for throughout the years.”

To find beauty in imperfection is not intuitive to the Western mind.

Not only have we been raised in a consumeristic culture that values the new & the flawless over the old & the damaged—from objects to people, an obsession fed by airbrush-heavy advertisers—but our entire Western worldview is based on the ancient Greek philosophies of symmetry, proportion & idealized beauty. Not acceptance of what is, but glorification of what could be.

Wabi-sabi finds beauty & value in what is. 

It is, Lawrence notes, “everything that today’s sleek, mass-produced, technology-saturated culture isn’t. It’s flea markets, not shopping malls; aged wood, not swank floor coverings; one single morning glory, not a dozen red roses. Wabi-sabi understands the tender, raw beauty of a gray December landscape and the aching elegance of an abandoned building or shed.

“Wabi-sabi reminds us that we are all transient beings on this planet—that our bodies, as well as the material world around us, are in the process of returning to dust. Nature’s cycles of growth, decay, and erosion are embodied in frayed edges, rust, liver spots. Through wabi-sabi, we learn to embrace both the glory and the melancholy found in these marks of passing time.” (“Wabi-Sabi: The Art of Imperfection.”)

In this modern age we find ourselves increasingly alienated from the real.

The texture of life is more & more digitized. We are programmed to seek newer, sleeker, faster technologies—bombarded with images of younger, smoother, more mannequin-like faces as the height of beauty.

It is a ripe time to recall & explore the ancient wisdom of wabi-sabi.

As Billie Mobayed famously noted: “When the Japanese mend broken objects they aggrandize the damage by filling the cracks with gold. They believe that when something’s suffered damage and has a history it becomes more beautiful.”

In an age when broken things are sooner thrown away than honored for their history we can apply this beautiful concept to ourselves.

Though our hearts may bare metaphorical fractures, in the light of our acceptance & reverence, we fill its fissures with gold. For what is more valuable than experience?

Though classically based in art, architecture & landscaping design, it seems natural to apply wabi-sabi principals to our own & others’ humanity.

Through the wisdom of wabi-sabi we can again begin to appreciate the texture of life—as expressed through human authenticity & natural process.

Perfection has a hallow ring next to the real.

     

 

*If you enjoyed this post, you might also like: “Authenticity & The False Self”  

Dreams: Symbolic Keys, Subconscious Communication & Catharsis ~ Part 2

By Tai Carmen

[“Don’t Trash Your Dreams,” by AquaSixio]

All men whilst they are awake are in one common world: but each of them, when he is asleep, is in a world of his own. ~Plutarch

All the things one has forgotten scream for help in dreams. ~Elias Canetti

The general function of dreams is to try to restore our psychological balance by producing dream material that re-establishes, in a subtle way, the total psychic equilibrium. ~ Carl Jung

[CLICK HERE TO READ ~ PART 1]  A fascinating number of scientific discoveries, inventions & creative breakthroughs have been made via dreams. 

Those who dismiss their nocturnal inner journeys as meaningless mental meanderings may not know the extent to which dreams have assisted the progress of humanity, examples that bolster the weight of dream interpretation as a study. 

Influential 19th Century chemist August Kekule, for example, discovered the empirical formula for benzene when, dozing in a chair, his subconscious presented him with an image of a snake biting its own tail. Startled, he jumped up & worked out the mathematics of the molecule—which we now know has a ring rather than a long string structure, as previously thought. 

Dante reported that the entire story of The Divine Comedy was revealed to him in a dream. Even more fascinating, when part of the manuscript was lost after his death, his son Jocoso recovered the manuscript after his father showed him where to look in a dream.

Nobel Prize winning 20th century physicist Neils Bohr developed the model of the atom from a dream. After working on many different designs, which weren’t quite right, he dreamed of sitting on the sun with all the planets whizzing around him. When he woke up, he knew that the sun symbolized the nucleus & the solar system represented the electrons. This was the model for which he had been searching. Further testing proved his hypothesis correct.

Paul McCartney dreamed the melody for “Yesterday.”

Nobel Prize winning medical scientist Frederick G Banting, who discovered the insulin-link with diabetes & developed our modern treatment of the disease, went to sleep frustrated one night, after a long day of working on the problem, & woke up having dreamed the experiment he needed to confirm his theories.

The inventor of the sewing machine, Elias Howe, found the defining concept of his design in a dream that he was being hunted by cannibals & thrown into a pot. He kept trying to climb out, but the natives kept pushing him back in with their sharp spears. When he awoke, terrified, he went back over the dream in his mind & realized that each spear had sported a hole at the tip, just like a long needle. All at once, he saw that this was the solution to his problem. (Lisa Shea, “Famous Inspirational Dreams.”)

“Father of Neuroscience,” Otto Loewi discovered the secret of nerve impulses from not one, but two dreams:

“In the early 20s, [Leowi] was working on how nerves transmit impulses…night and day with little result. Then one night he fell asleep and had a vivid dream. He scrawled down some notes but was unable to read them the next morning. Frustrated, he waited until the next night. Again, he had a vivid dream, showing him the style of experiment that would help him in his nerve transmission work. Sure enough, he went immediately to his lab to try the experiment. It worked, and as a result, Otto Loewi was awarded the 1936 Nobel Prize for Medicine.” (Lisa Shea’s “Famous Dream Inspirations”.)

Clearly there is a level of useable insight to be found in dreams—the implications for the hidden wisdom of the subconscious are huge!

It’s worth noting that all of these “discovery dreams” involve symbolism, decoding & the following of an intuitive hunch regarding interpretation…

Kekule dreamed of an ouroboros & applied the image to his work. Bohrs dreamed of a solar system & applied it to the atom.

Dream theorists agree, there are different levels of dreams in terms of their depth of insight. Often, dreams which carry important messages feel & appear more vivid than your run-of-the-mill nightly jumbles.

They often simply feel significant.

Author & dream scholar Theresa Cheung notes: “Although different types of dreams can blend and merge, modern dream researchers tend to break dream types into one of the following categories.” 

Amplifying dreams put a magnifying lens up to certain life situations or attitudes.

Cathartic Dreams “evoke extremely emotional reactions, when the unconscious is urging us to relieve pent-up feelings we may feel unable to express in waking life. For example, you may find yourself bursting into tears on a packed commuter train in your dream.” (“The Dream Dictionary From A to Z.”)

Daily-Processign Dreams are factual dreams in which you “go over and over things that happened during the day, especially those that were repetitive or forced you to concentrate for long periods. These kinds of dreams don’t tend to be laden with meaning, and most dream theorists think of them as bits and pieces of information your brain is processing.” (“The Dream Dictionary From A to Z.”)

Dreams of Childhood may reflect a childhood dynamic which hasn’t been worked out yet and requires a resolution,” notes Cheung. Although it can also simply represent a touchstone of extreme familiarity; even a place where your inner child lives.

False Awakening Dreams occur when you dream you’ve woken up, but in fact are still dreaming—particularly trippy from a philosophical standpoint.

If you can appear to wake while still dreaming, it’s logical to assume there is the possibility that even now, when you think you exist in waking reality, further states of awakened awareness might yet exist.

“It is thought,” details Thereasa Cheung, “that many reported sightings of ghosts are caused by false awakening, which occurs when you are actually asleep but are convinced in your dream state that you are awake.”

This bleeds into the so-called “old hag syndrome,” characterized by one’s mental awareness coming out of the sleep state before one’s physical body has fully woken up, creating physical paralysis (and sometimes a pressure on the chest) often attributed to ghosts and alien abductions. Though sleep researchers have identified it as a physiological phenomenon.

Inspirational Dreams contain creative seeds and ideas for the dreamer. Many great works of music, literature and art have been conceived in the dream state. William Blake reportedly found much inspiration for his visionary epic poems in dreams. Mary Shelley dreamed the premise for Frankenstein.

Lucid Dreams, perhaps the most exciting category, describe the circumstance of realizing you are dreaming while you are dreaming. Once you become aware that you are dreaming, you can start to determine the course of your dream with your mental focus. Whenever I realize I am dreaming, I try to fly. It usually works with a few jumps and some active willing of my dreamself off the ground.  

Methods vary for increasing lucid dream activity. One way, which has worked for me at times, is to periodically ask yourself throughout your waking day if you are dreaming; this sets the pattern up in your mind to ask the question, and eventually your subconscious will ask it of your dreaming self.

In The Art of Dreaming the Yaqui seer Don Juan instructs Carlos Castaneda that when you can look at your own hands in a dream, then you will realize you are dreaming and be able to control the course of your dream’s content.

I have not personally had luck with the hand method.

The best way to increase one’s likelihood of lucid dreaming, in my experience, is to simply focus on your dream life. By spending the first few minutes of your morning mentally going over dream recall, and jotting a few notes in a dream journal, you will start a process of increased awareness surrounding your dreams, which, in my experience, often culminates in lucid dreaming.

Nightmares, of course, are dreams which cause us extreme distress. It is not uncommon to dream of being chased or pursued by a malevolent person or being…While nightmares typically reflect an anxiety or sense of helplessness in waking life, they are also a natural and healthy way for our minds to process and explore fears without actually jeopardizing our safety.   

Night Terrors are nightmares which occur during the deepest level of sleep (stage four) from which we awaken without memory of the dream’s content, yet having a lingering feeling of dread.

Physiological Dreams reflect the state of your body, from the simple pursuit of water in a dream when you are, in real life, thirsty, to the more profound reflection of physical needs or conditions. Problem Solving Dreams occur sometimes when we are mulling over a problem and receive the solution presented in some form during ensuing sleep, as did our previously sited great inventors

Wish Fulfillment Dreams are simply an expression of one’s desires…usually the ones not given full expression in waking life.

Sexual Dreams of course are common, sometimes a source of embarrassment. But sex can be symbolic of intimacy in dreams…according to dream analysts, dreaming of sex with an unlikely partner can often be read symbolically as a desire to be closer with the person, or to integrate ideas they represent into your life. Cheung notes that sometimes a certain person will show up in a sexual context in one’s dreams simply to get our attention.

Precognitive dreams, as one might expect, reveal glimpses into future potentials, only confirmable after the fact. These do, indeed, seem to occur, if rarely. President Lincoln had a precognitive dream foretelling his own assassination.

In Lincoln’s own words: “…There seemed to be a death-like stillness about me. Then I heard subdued sobs, as if a number of people were weeping. I thought I left my bed and wandered downstairs. There the silence was broken by the same pitiful sobbing […] I kept on until I arrived at the East Room, which I entered. There I met with a sickening surprise. Before me was a catafalque, on which rested a corpse wrapped in funeral vestments. Around it were stationed soldiers who were acting as guards; and there was a throng of people, some gazing mournfully upon the corpse whose face was covered, others weeping pitifully…

“‘Who is dead in the White House?’ I demanded of one of the soldiers “The President” was his answer; “he was killed by an assassin!” Then came a loud burst of grief form the crowd, which awoke me from my dream.” (Famous Dreams.)

This was apparently a recurring dream for Lincoln, one he had again the night before he was assasinated.

In conclusion, when attempting to decode a dream, it is best to ask yourself: how does this situation make me feel? What does this person, animal, place or action represent to me? 

Does it seem to be a simple processing dream, or did it have a deeper charge, worth examining?

Part 3 will explore the concept of aboriginal dreamtime as well as further explore the phenomenon of lucid dreaming!