Losing Oneself

Author: Simon Ellis

  • low fidelity documentation

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    Simon Ellis
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    I’ve written and presented in another context about documenting complex, rich, high fidelity human experiences with low fidelity (or resolution) forms of documentation. When we point any kind of camera at a human being improvising there is vast difference between the internal experience of the improviser and what is visible. In Losing Oneself Katye Coe…

  • non dual awareness can co-occur with any content

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    Simon Ellis
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    Zoran Josipovic is a cognitive and affective neuroscientist who founded the Nonduality Institute with Judith Blackstone. Here’s Josipovic with Vladimir Miskovic: NDA [non dual awareness] can co-occur with any content, whether perceptual, affective, or cognitive, which appears in it, so to speak, like an image in a mirror. – Josipovic, Z. and Miskovic, V. (2020)…

  • me doing into it doing itself

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    Simon Ellis
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    One of the things that Katye Coe and I have been focused on in the studio is the remarkably subtle shift that happens between a very expansive and open awareness that is the consequence of attention, and the feeling that a similarly open awareness is happening of its own accord. Katye beautifully captures this distinction…

  • self vs person

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    Simon Ellis
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    One of the key themes in Jay Garfield’s book Losing Ourselves is the distinction he makes between a self and a person (built on the thinking of Candrakīrti and Hume). Garfield describes how the idea of a transcendent self: should convince us that we are talking about the self because it perfectly captures that idea…

  • interpretations of sensory signals

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    Simon Ellis
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    Anil Seth is a cognitive neuroscientist who thinks and writes about consciousness. He is known for describing perception as a form of controlled hallucination. The third and most important ingredient in the controlled hallucination view is the claim that perceptual experience – in this case the subjective experience of ‘seeing a coffee cup’ – is…

  • experience and consciousness

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    Simon Ellis
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    Wherever there is experience, there is phenomenology; and wherever there is phenomenology, there is consciousness. – Anil Seth (2021) Being You: A New Science of Consciousness. London: Faber & Faber

  • the body and related signals

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    Simon Ellis
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    Because mindfulness interventions are concerned with the idea of being present in the moment, focusing on the body and related signals in a non-judgmental way, such methods are of high interest in research on interoception. – Fischer, D., Messner, M., and Pollatos, O. (2017) ‘Improvement of Interoceptive Processes after an 8-Week Body Scan Intervention’. Frontiers…

  • the body tends to efface itself

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    Simon Ellis
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    Normally, the body tends to efface itself in our world-directed activity. However, it appears as an object of conscious attention, particularly when it is inadequate for a task to be performed, be it by a lack of capacity, fatigue, illness or numbness, and whenever it becomes an object for others to whom I feel exposed.…

  • selfing your experience

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    Simon Ellis
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    This is from Sam Harris’s app called Waking Up and is a brief commentary about ego and illusion: … your mental experience of the world is a process. It is not a static something. So the experience of being a self, an ego, in the middle of all of these changing neurophysiological states, it too…

  • embodiment is not apposite

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    Simon Ellis
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    Here’s Tim Ingold from his 2013 book Making citing Maxine Sheets-Johnstone (who has long been critical of how we in dance use the term embodiment): … animacy and embodiment pull in opposite directions: where the former is a movement of opening, the latter is bent on closure. For the living, animate beings we are, argues…