Losing Oneself

Category: blog-post

  • becoming the passenger

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    by

    Simon Ellis
    in

    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…

  • selfing and awareness-ing

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    by

    Simon Ellis
    in

    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…

  • the paradox of the body

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    by

    Simon Ellis
    in

    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…

  • the poetics of presence

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    Simon Ellis
    in

    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…

  • default mode network

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    Simon Ellis
    in

    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…

  • paying attention is ceasing to do something

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    Simon Ellis
    in

    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…

  • shimmer duet (video)

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    Simon Ellis
    in

    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.

  • shimmer again (video)

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    by

    Simon Ellis
    in

    My colleague Heinrich Escano has been playing a bit more with using motion extraction from the simple footage taken from a still video camera (although in this clip there are some still images as well). In this sample there are three different things to look at: 1) you can see what happens when there is…

  • the conviction that we are selves

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    Simon Ellis
    in

    Here’s a bit more from Jay Garfield’s Losing Ourselves: The ninth-century Indian philosopher Śāntideva argues in How to Lead an Awakened Life (Bodhicāryāvatāra) that our conviction that we are selves arises from a primal fear of death, and that we construct the idea of a self as a bulwark against that fear. Śāntideva also argues…

  • the thing itself

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    by

    Simon Ellis
    in

    In work like this that explores complex first-person experiences of and through the body, you inevitably bump into the issue of the thing or experience itself versus our description of it. Years ago I had a go at discussing this long-standing issue in dance and performance in a presentation called Hands that don’t want anything.…