Friday, February 5, 2010
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
Seeing is believing - or is it?
When it comes to events in our lives, we have learned to interpret them as 'positive' or 'negative'. If this were just words, then that would be fine, but the words also come with a value attached to them or to put it another way, they have meaning - a whole schemata that we then react to emotionally.
However, Art can provide us with a different way of looking at the world, and in particular about how we think about events in our lives.
For instance, when you are drawing there are two main ways to draw ... either you can draw the shape of, for example, a tree or you can draw the shapes that you see around the tree which will leave you with the outline of the tree itself.
Now to extrapolate to the issue above - if we draw a tree based on the shapes that we see around the tree itself, this is known as the 'negative space' in a painting. And from here we can see that labelling 'negative' as a 'bad' thing is non-sensical. The negative space in a painting enables us to see the outline of our tree, without the negative space, there would be no tree.
I have read previously that Buddha would call something like pain an illusion. I have always found this difficult to understand because the sensation of pain is certainly not an illusion and is something can that can be proven empirically. However, if we use the understanding that art provides, we can say that pain [whether physical from an injury or disease, or emotional from grief] is like the negative space in the 'drawing' of our lives.
I don't want to be didactic and say that I only know of wellbeing because I experience pain. But using the negative space from art analogy, my pain can help me to 'see' my wellbeing - therefore in one sense I can say that pain is an illusion.
However, Art can provide us with a different way of looking at the world, and in particular about how we think about events in our lives.
For instance, when you are drawing there are two main ways to draw ... either you can draw the shape of, for example, a tree or you can draw the shapes that you see around the tree which will leave you with the outline of the tree itself.
Now to extrapolate to the issue above - if we draw a tree based on the shapes that we see around the tree itself, this is known as the 'negative space' in a painting. And from here we can see that labelling 'negative' as a 'bad' thing is non-sensical. The negative space in a painting enables us to see the outline of our tree, without the negative space, there would be no tree.
I have read previously that Buddha would call something like pain an illusion. I have always found this difficult to understand because the sensation of pain is certainly not an illusion and is something can that can be proven empirically. However, if we use the understanding that art provides, we can say that pain [whether physical from an injury or disease, or emotional from grief] is like the negative space in the 'drawing' of our lives.
I don't want to be didactic and say that I only know of wellbeing because I experience pain. But using the negative space from art analogy, my pain can help me to 'see' my wellbeing - therefore in one sense I can say that pain is an illusion.
Monday, January 4, 2010
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