SPIRITUAL SOAP: Weird & Güd - Does Everything Have to Be Horrible All the Time?

A tapas of perspectives

Before we were The Black Sheep, we were a newsletter named Spiritual Soap. Please enjoy this article from our history!

We’re back! Sorry to make you go without the weird and güd, but sometimes surprise newsletters are more fun.

A life well-lived is a life well-examined. A life well-examined has a little weird and güd within it. This newsletter is an examination of our weird and güd world.

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Weird

You wake up. You wake up healthy, with no immediate injuries or illness. You wake up in a safe place, no battles looming on the outskirts of town nor lawless attackers defiling your claim to private space.

You get coffee, though not just any coffee. You have the best version of coffee that’s ever existed—it’s quality-controlled, easily brewed, even mixed with flavors and sweeteners. You search for food, not because food is scarce and requires effort to find, but because you have several options in your kitchen to search through.

You sit in your safe, temperature-controlled home with lights to illuminate your full plate, mostly bored with the monotony of another morning as you eat.

You can fix that monotony, though.

With a single motion and a few clicks, the world is on fire, just the way you like it.

Foreign battles invade the borders of your attention; a minority of your fellow citizens has their insanity—whether in the form of riots, homicidal actions, or plain old opinions—broadcast to all and debated endlessly. The coffee you drink is owned by a company that’s killing the earth, or something like that.

That heavy, silent stillness some weirdos call “peace” can’t creep up on you and your Insta-Doom device. Why wait for naturally-occurring angst when you can self-induce dread in a single scroll?

The hawk’s eye ability to find something wrong (or something that might become wrong) was once the core of our survival strategy. The human that could anticipate harm and overreact to possible threats might’ve been miserable, but they were alive.

So, happy birthday.

You are the blue-ribbon, bright-eyed kin of a long, long line of the most miserable, terrified human beings across history.

By Simon Hanselmann

The news is bleak. Not the news as told by the media, which is always bleak, but the news about your existence. It’s been found that you are the only animal who suffers from a poorly understood but chronic condition: self-awareness. We’re so sorry.

This condition means that, unlike even the most intelligent animals, you are condemned to think about your own existence for the entirety of that existence. Even though dogs and elephants and chimps all feel anxiety, fear, and avoid perceived threats, you have the unique ability to imagine your final moments even in the most serene circumstances.

Perhaps humans coined the word “happiness” only to name what they knew would eternally elude them.

As the super-thinkers that we are, the natural effort at threat-avoidance that every organism makes becomes as grandiose and infinite as everything else we do. The tragic nature of mixing intelligence and consciousness is best encapsulated in what’s called our negativity bias.

A fixture of psychological research for decades, the negativity bias is simply our human preference for paying attention to the negative over the positive. The negativity bias is that one stupid comment you think about for days sandwiched in between a wall of praise you think about for seconds.

It seems strange to treat your mind like anything other than you. Even though your mind is constantly tempting you towards bad habits and pushing you to pay attention to invented future fears, you still treat your mind as if it’s synonymous with you.

Our mind is the most powerful part of us. It’s our mind that makes us so different from every other organism in existence. But like every power, the human mind requires responsibility to wield for good.

I don’t think you are your mind—you are the way you wield your mind.

You are the choice to improve or degenerate your mind. You are the choice to observe or suppress your mind. You are the choice to tolerate an unruly mind or to train a balanced mind.

The dark side of the human mind is how dangerous its power becomes when unmanaged.

Without vigilance, our mind tells us stories about other people and how their inevitable differences are actually intolerable threats. Our mind will warn us that we’re uniquely damaged and particularly hopeless.

Our mind will convince us that a full fridge in our safe home in our war-less land is actually a historically horrible situation. Our mind will convince us that we’re better off not living.

The organ that feels most like “us” is also the organ that most deceives us.

We don’t have to allow our mind to tyrannize, torment, and deceive us any more than we would allow another person to.

The next time you feel that blanket of dread laid upon you—the one that makes the miracles of abundant food, a safe home, and life itself feel unworthy of momentary joy—don’t be deceived.

The negativity bias makes our brain put blinders on our perspective. A built-in program has now become a bug in our modern minds.

I don’t recommend waiting for evolution to update it.

Güd

The Japanese don’t mess around when it comes to aesthetics.

Japanese art history is a testament to the role that philosophy plays in the art a culture creates. By understanding a particular Japanese concept, we’ll gain the core of cultural exchange: an expanded way of viewing our world.

There are more ways to understand the world than we realize—“right” and “wrong” is only one.

The western world is still young compared to the ancient histories of Asia. Youth is beautiful and full of potential, but youth is arrogant and reckless in its nativity.

渋い — Shibui is an adjective that’s difficult to define. The word is first found in the Muromachi period of Japan, during 1336–1573, but only had its literal definition at this time (which it still holds in addition to its artistic application): sour. It was in the Edo period from 1615 to 1868, that sour also came to describe a certain kind of aesthetic, from art to music and everyday objects like cups and rooms in a home.

The way a word like sour can go from describing the tart taste of an unripe persimmon to the alluringly humble appearance of a handmade bowl reminds us that slang can be an art in itself.

What is shibui? Before we go into the more subjective understanding of this elusive concept, seven elements noted by philosopher Dr. Soetsu Yanagi (1898-1961) offer a good starting framework:

Simplicity, implicity, modesty, naturalness, everydayness, imperfection, and silence.

Shibui describes the kind of art you might not notice as art without pausing first.

The ordinary vase becomes extraordinary when your eyes begin to notice the satisfying but subtle texture that ripples across its surface. The minimal room fills with a quiet sense of calm as you notice the lack of clutter and the simple, smooth lines of a clear table and bare walls.

Shibui is the kind of art that becomes art through your willingness to see it as such.

As Dr. Yanagi puts it, shibui embodies the kind of art that comes from “objects born, not made.”

The best definitions of shibui border on poetry. It might feel unsatisfying or ineffective to relay a concept in subjective means, but that may be the place where our way of understanding the world begins to fail and another way can take its place. Shibui is that other way of understanding, which partially explains why the concept only appeared in the U.S. during the 1960s and never gained a stronghold.

One of the first mentions of shibui in the U.S. is found in the August ‘60 edition of the magazine House Beautiful, described by editor in chief Elizabeth Gordon:

Shibui describes a profound, unassuming, quiet feeling.

It is unobtrusive and unostentatious. It may have hidden attainments, but they are not paraded or displayed. The form is simple and must have been arrived at with an economy of means.

Shibui is never complicated or contrived… Shibui beauty, as in the beauty of the tea ceremony, is beauty that makes an artist of the viewer.

Shibui seems like the antithesis of the art and aesthetics we see today. Without treading off the mainstream path, you’re accosted by art that demands recognition.

Whether in fashion, music, film, and even design, our contemporary aesthetic bounces erratically between haughty contempt for its own existence and explosive desperation for your acknowledgment.

Sterile, sleek surfaces in new buildings glare light at you like Medusa, gaudy film effects flaunt their existence for the sake of existence, and pushy music belabors naked demands for how you should perceive it.

If shibui makes the viewer an artist, pop culture makes the audience a hostage.

Frank Lloyd Wright understood the idea of shibui, both in words and in his work:

We are no longer truly simple.

We no longer live in simple terms or places. Life is a more complex struggle now.

It is now valiant to be simple: a courageous thing to even want to be simple.

It is a spiritual thing to comprehend what simplicity means.

You don’t have to be an architect or an artist to employ the idea of shibui.

The beauty of many Japanese aesthetic concepts like shibui is in how they transcend mediums. The simple, silent, imperfect, and everyday are part of life. Naturalness, implicity, and modesty are qualities of being.

Shibui is a practice in living just as much as in creating.

There’s a time for different modes of being; sometimes we crave the excitement of something new and challenging, other times we crave the intensity and indulgence of sheer pleasure.

But it’s easy to live only in the extremes, bouncing back and forth. Shibui is where we find the stillness and silence of pure being in a world of extremes.

I hope this makes your week a little weirder and a little güder. Now go forth, be weird, and above all, be güd.

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