Black Bucket Essays
Volume 1, Issue 2
Normalize difference until there is no space between self and other.
Leah Cooper
Do we see what we expect to see? Are our conclusions based on automatic, unconscious assumptions? Do we encounter what we expect to encounter and thus never truly discover?
As we move through the physical world we are in an unremitting state of receiving observable facts via the five senses. Yet do these objective facts, recorded by the brain, lead directly to knowledge of our surroundings? Or is knowledge of the physical world a construct of human experience and perception? If all facts are recorded but much of what we ‘see’ goes unnoticed, does this mean we are extremely efficient editing machines? Is what we experience more a result of what we have edited out? Would life be more vibrant if we assigned attention to the details that we have excised? Thereupon recognizing the perception of ‘self’ as being interdependent with the concept of ‘other’?
According to the teaching of Mahayana Buddhism, “…beings and things have no intrinsic existence in themselves. All phenomena come into being because of conditions created by other phenomena. Thus, they have no existence of their own and are empty of a permanent self. There is neither reality nor not-reality; only relativity.”(1)
Awareness can be measured in differentials. Cold, the dearth of warmth; silence, the absence of noise; dusk less the arrival of a dark night sky, but more the departure of light; intervals between notes giving structure to music; and the power of a Fred Sandback sculpture; not in the line created by yarn, but the ‘empty space’ it gives form to.
Or as artist Robert Irwin suggests…”everything true of the mark is equally true of (the) empty space surrounding it.” (2)
1. Barbara O’Brien, A Buddhist Glossary, Shunyata
2. Robert Irwin, ‘Notes towards a Conditional Art’, (Getty Publications, 2011)
Volume 1, Issue 2
Normalize difference until there is no space between self and other.
Leah Cooper
Do we see what we expect to see? Are our conclusions based on automatic, unconscious assumptions? Do we encounter what we expect to encounter and thus never truly discover?
As we move through the physical world we are in an unremitting state of receiving observable facts via the five senses. Yet do these objective facts, recorded by the brain, lead directly to knowledge of our surroundings? Or is knowledge of the physical world a construct of human experience and perception? If all facts are recorded but much of what we ‘see’ goes unnoticed, does this mean we are extremely efficient editing machines? Is what we experience more a result of what we have edited out? Would life be more vibrant if we assigned attention to the details that we have excised? Thereupon recognizing the perception of ‘self’ as being interdependent with the concept of ‘other’?
According to the teaching of Mahayana Buddhism, “…beings and things have no intrinsic existence in themselves. All phenomena come into being because of conditions created by other phenomena. Thus, they have no existence of their own and are empty of a permanent self. There is neither reality nor not-reality; only relativity.”(1)
Awareness can be measured in differentials. Cold, the dearth of warmth; silence, the absence of noise; dusk less the arrival of a dark night sky, but more the departure of light; intervals between notes giving structure to music; and the power of a Fred Sandback sculpture; not in the line created by yarn, but the ‘empty space’ it gives form to.
Or as artist Robert Irwin suggests…”everything true of the mark is equally true of (the) empty space surrounding it.” (2)
1. Barbara O’Brien, A Buddhist Glossary, Shunyata
2. Robert Irwin, ‘Notes towards a Conditional Art’, (Getty Publications, 2011)
