Category: blog-post
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the starlings and the sun
Maria Popova has been blogging a long long time. Her site is called The Marginalian and it’s quite the treasure trove of ideas and connections. In her post on the work of Richard Jeffries she writes: This is the great paradox: that human life, lived between the time of starlings and the time of stars,…
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embodiment isn’t a match with experience
Here’s a quote from Tim Ingold’s Making that describes how Maxine Sheets-Johnstone questions the synergies between embodiment and experience: Comparison of the two pieces vividly demonstrates how 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,…
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nonduality meditation
I thought I’d post this transcription of a meditation by Sam Harris (from his Waking Up app called The feeling of awareness. It quite clearly diambiguates awareness/consciousness from the feeling of a self or a ‘you’. The original meditation is at https://dynamic.wakingup.com/daily/DA07B1E and I post the transcript below without permission. Okay just sit comfortably and…
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becoming the passenger
Yesterday I blogged about Jon Kabat-Zinn’s term awareness-ing and how awareness is inseparable from experience. Going through the transcripts of my post-dancing conversations with Katye Coe, I note that I was starting to use this term. In this extract below I am trying to describe two things. First is the shift from the feeling of…
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selfing and awareness-ing
Back in February on this blog I quoted Sam Harris re selfing one’s experience. Now here’s Jon Kabat-Zinn on awareness-ing: The real practice is life itself. And coming to all of those senses in hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting, touching, and also we could say minding. Which is another way of saying awareness-ing. Selfing. Awareness-ing. Here’s…
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the paradox of the body
In What are we calling the self? Joseph Goldstein maps out just how easy it is to identify with our body. The paradox of the body is experienced as the lucid concreteness of direct experiences in the body (temperature, movement, tingling, pressure, etc), set against how we concatenate and identify these direct experiences as belonging…
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the poetics of presence
Maria Popova’s blog called The Marginalian is widely known and harks back to what the internet promised before advertising, social media and enshittification took over (another is Jason Kottke’s site). This is Popova’s post on time and self-transcendence and the work of Richard Jeffries, but as is her style, it covers a lot of ground…
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default mode network
If you start reading about consciousness, the brain and mindfulness practices you will come across the term Default Mode Network or DMN. It refers to network of brain structures responsible for the “inattentive wandering of our minds” (Williams, 2014) that was first described by Marcus Raichle in 2001. The term is relevant in Losing Oneself…
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paying attention is ceasing to do something
It seems generally hard to get a handle on words like perception, attention and sensation, and especially so in nonduality: When paying attention who is the subject doing the attending, and what is the object that is being attended to? Here’s Sam Harris from his Waking Up app on how choice happens: When we focus…
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shimmer duet (video)
Some more video but this time two separate video streams (one of Katye Coe, one of me (Simon Ellis)) placed side by side on the canvas. Two notes: i) I made no effort to match them or shift them in time; ii) the video is not slowed down at all.