Losing Oneself

Author: serverteam

  • there are no solitary beings

    The Buddhist monk Thích Nhất Hạnh describes that none of us is a separate self, but rather we are interbeings.

    Whatever I am doing, the energy of mindfulness enables me to do it as “us,” through interbeing, not as “me.” When I hold a calligraphy brush, I know I cannot remove my father from my hand. I know I cannot remove my mother or my ancestors from me. They are present in all my cells, in my gestures, in my capacity to draw a beautiful circle. Nor can I remove my spiritual teachers from my hand. They are there in the peace, concentration, and mindfulness I enjoy as I make the circle. We are all drawing the circle together. There is no separate self doing it. While practicing calligraphy, I touch the profound insight of no self. It becomes a deep practice of meditation.

    – Thích Nhất Hạnh, The Insight of Interbeing

    I suspect (but it is only a suspicion) that not being a separate self is different in kind from there being no self. But the difference is drawn together by the phenomenological experience of porous (boundary-less) connection in nondual awareness.

  • immersed, embodied awareness that is entirely fluid

    Here’s Jay Garfield from his book Losing Ourselves:

    … the focused attention of the expert is entirely on the task at hand and on the goals to be accomplished through that task. It is immersed, embodied awareness, and awareness that is entirely fluid, adjusting to the ever-changing demands of the task at hand. Nothing resembling a self is ever present in this kind of consciousness.

    – Jay Garfield (2022) Losing ourselves: learning to live without a self.

    Compare this with meditation teacher and psychotherapist Loch Kelly‘s effort to describe the difference between flow states and selflessness (nonduality):

    I divided [flow] into two […] what I call absorbed flow and panoramic flow. And they’re always talked about as if they’re one thing, but they’re actually two. [In] absorbed flow, you literally are in almost a Jhana absorbed concentration where you are so involved in a task that everything else is gone and you look up and two hours have gone by. And a panoramic is more like an athletic or being in the wood walking in the woods, you feel everything … your time slows down, you’re in the now, you know, you’re not in your ego, your ego is dropped away, you feel connected to everyone and everything around you.

    – Loch Kelly in Kelly, L. and Harris, S. (nodate) Meditation vs. Flow States. [online] available from https://app.wakingup.com/theory/questions-answers/loch-kelly-and-sam-harris#crC81CE1 [10 January 2024]

    Kelly gets a bit bogged down (because he’s talking live as opposed to presenting an edited text), but goes on to make the point that in panoramic flow people do not use metacognition to look back to recognise that this experience is your “natural condition” and that “what you discover is that which you already are that’s here”. In panoramic flow there is the illusion of chasing something — perhaps a ‘state’ — when in reality it is the natural condition of consciousness.

    There’s much more to consider here about the differences and overlap between nonduality and flow but I’m intrigued by Kelly’s effort here to disambiguate two types of flow as if nonduality is one form of flow.